Our good friend and development manager Prasad Kodur and his wife Kamakshi are due to have their first baby on the 13th of December. Somehow or another it was decided to have a baby shower for Prasad. Laura Tommasi graciously handled all of the arrangements -- a good thing since if it had just been left to the rest of us it wouldn't have been anywhere this nice ("Here's an ice cream cake. We were supposed to bring gifts?"). We contributed money for the presents and Laura bought the gifts and arranged for the cool cake.

So the surprise part was to get Prasad to the video conference room at 12:30 on Wednesday. Pickering came up with a Cisco Video Conference that he couldn't attend so he detailed Prasad and Simon to be there in his place. Of course, Prasad being a diligent employee, he tried to get more information about this meeting. Mike Atkinson says that he had to put off Prasad's inquiries by being vague and not answering emails.

As if that wasn't enough of a clue, we also have a regular group lunch on Wednesdays. Boy, that would make it hard for most of us to get to the video conference room before Prasad. I suggested that Simon "accidentally" hit all of the buttons on the elevator, giving the rest of us enough time to get there first. Instead we decided to just not show up, except for Sonali and Sirisha to make it look like *some* people still cared about the meeting. And apparently Prasad is so used to us flaking that he didn't comment on the lack of people :-).

Somehow everything turned out fine. Everybody got there early. We got a video conference set up with the East Coast people so they could sort of join in (we'll mail you some cake later guys...). When Prasad arrived he was pleasantly surprised. The cake was good and the presents were quite nice and we all had fun. Prasad claimed that telling us the baby's name was bad luck. I think he was covering up the fact that he hadn't even thought about it :-).

Click on a picture for a 640 x 480 blowup. I had to brighten more than half of the pictures because I wasn't using flash. Click on [Full] to see the 2048 x 1536 untampered original.