T-Mobile and me

I go to a T-Mobile store to buy a prepaid SIM card.  I look at the options they have, and choose a plan that only gives data connectivity with no voice calls or text messages.  A few days later, I need to make voice calls.  I look around their web site, but there's no way to add voice support on the phone.  So I go to the store again and ask them to add voice support to my phone.  "Oh that's not possible.  Do you want to buy a new SIM?"

Annoyed, but left with no other option, I buy a new SIM with $10 credit for voice calls.  When I put the SIM on the phone, it won't connect to the Internet.  The storekeeper had said that I can get a "day pass" data connectivity by paying around a dollar and a half.  I have already paid $10, so they should deduct from that credit for the day pass, right?  Turns out they won't do that either.  I have to buy it separately.

So I open T-Mobile's web site, and there's no link or option that would let me buy that damned day pass.  I would have to go to the shop again tomorrow to buy it.

I'm glad I don't live in the US.

There are certain things you learn over time.  You start accepting things you once couldn't.  I have been hoping for a while that I will be able to not get upset when I see people making fun of ignorance.  Or religious beliefs.  A man had a heart attack because of his religious beliefs and people have to LOL at him publicly.  One part of me says that people are different and I should learn to accept them as they are.  But I just can't not react when I read those news.  Even when I was an atheist, I hated most atheists I knew.  Now I hate them even more.

Mordacs FTW

I hate incompetence.  Interacting with incompetent people pisses me off.  United Health Care provides medical insurance for my company, and the expense incurred on the lenses of my spectacles is covered.  This year I got a new pair of glasses with a 50% discount on the frame.  The bill clearly says the lenses were sold at the actual price and the frame at a discounted price.  Either UHC reads bills like reading post-modern literature, or they have limited comprehension ability.  They applied the 50% discount on the lens price and said they'd reimburse only half of the incurred expense.

I went ahead and filed a dispute.  I was pleasantly surprised when they called me the very next day.  The person on the phone listened to me patiently and she said she'd do what she can.  Later, I got a mail saying they will investigate and pay me after 2 months!  (I'm amazed at this efficient process!)  In a few days I forgot the whole thing.

A couple days back the same person called me again and said they looked into my case and they would pay me a little more than the original offer, but not the actual expense incurred.  I had forgotten the whole thing, and I wasn't interested in asking her why.  Today, I get a mail saying they will pay me about a 1000 rupees lesser than the original offer.  WTF?!  I again filled up their feedback form, but this time with a more liberal choice of words.

Even more pissing off was their feedback form.  You cannot use hyphens, exclamation marks, or quotes in the feedback text.  It means you cannot write "don't", instead you write "do not".  (Slightly better than these people, but still they are Mordacs.)

I have an ask for you, the reader.  If you do come across a Mordac in real life, please ask them to learn how to prevent SQL injection without spoiling the user experience.  Please do that, you're not doing me a favour, you're doing a favour to the entire web!

What does this mean?

It was an accident.  For the 3rd time in Hyderabad, someone rear-ended my bike.  This time the scene was a little messier.  My bike hit the car ahead of me after it was rear-ended.  A glass piece broke in the car.

The deal here is that I fell on the ground so it was obvious to the car guy that I must have been the one who hit him.  The guy who helped me get up was the one who hit me, it seems.  I knew it only after he told me that.  He helped me get off the road so I'm pretty sure he didn't lose his balance after he hit me.

Now, the car guy says I and the other motorcyclist should pay him for the damage.  He was asking us a few thousand rupees, which neither of us were willing to pay.  So we went to the police, who made me pay him 1500.  (I don't know how much the other guy paid.)
When I handed my share to the car guy, he started arguing with me that I was paying a lot lesser than I owe.  He started telling me how generous he has been: "You both together pay me 4.8k, and I, who doesn't have to take any responsibility whatsoever, will pay the remaining 1k from my pocket."

My opinion is that since this is an accident everyone takes equal responsibility, like grown ups.  So I told him he has as much responsibility as I do.  He didn't like that.  Anyway, I digress.

The other biker told the police officer that he is earning only 6k per month so he cannot pay pretty much anything for the loss.  I thought about it.  What if the biker had decided to take off after the accident?  I would have told this car guy that it wasn't my fault, but being the dumb thing unreasonable man he is he wouldn't have believed me.  I would have thrown the money on his face and walked away.

The biker, like a responsible adult stayed on the accident spot even though he could have simply gone off and no one would have known anything.  He was harassed by the police and he had to pay money for the loss.  Why did he do that?  Police, who should have filed a case and made the insurance companies pay for the loss threatened this guy and made him pay from his pocket.  I didn't have the balls to talk to the police and tell them to involve insurance companies in the scene.

Maybe life is not a courtroom.  Maybe you cannot accuse only one party for what happens.  Maybe there's no point in talking about right and wrong.  But what does the incident today mean?  What am I to write on my notebook about this incident?  Only thing I can say is that it was not very pleasant.

Hyderabad... it gets on my nerves again

This post is a rant.

I spend about an hour in Hyderabad traffic almost everyday.  That ensures that I keep disliking this city.  People here don't seem to understand right of way, and that pisses me off.  My mind goes "dude, why don't you just let me go?"  From the little I have seen, they are just ignorant of right of way and it all becomes someone else's problem.  The traffic is equally bad, if not worse, when it's raining or dark.

And the traffic cops... oh my goodness!  They don't even care if someone is driving on the wrong side of the road.  Several times they have encouraged me to go past a junction when the signal is red!  One thing they do well is sit on your pillion, direct you to the close by ATM to get some bribe because you are not wearing a helmet or your bike doesn't have an AP registration number.  (Oh sure, you can drive with a TG number plate.)  Disgusting is the word!

U turn

I saw an alien today.  An alien that looks and speaks exactly like humans.  An alien that can ride motorbikes that we humans use.  Don't believe it?  Read this flashback:

The traffic signal turns red and no one would stop.  The cop "regulating" the traffic shows stop sign to them all, but only the inflow of traffic from the other side could stop people.

There's just enough space for one bike in the right extreme of the road, besides a Hero Honda Splendor, and I stop my bike there.  As soon as I stop I hear a honk from behind me.  Without caring much, I switch off the engine.  The honks won't stop and the Splendor guy next to me gives in and moves his bike aside to let the impatient bike move along.

Some fat dude on a measly Yamaha R15[*] comes near me and stops.  I look at the R15's dash and it looks quite nice with its white back-lit display.  "Horn suntha hi nahin kya?" (or something along those lines), he asks me.  I give a blank stare and turn my face again to the signal light.

"Are you not hearing my horn sound?" he persists on getting an answer from me.

"It's red."

"I want to go this side.  I am taking a U turn."

"You are not supposed to take a U turn when it's red."

"Who said you cannot?  Go and read the traffic rules!"

Awestruck, I am at loss for words.  The signal soon turns green and I leave the place.

Only after a few minutes I realise that I had been talking to someone who is driving in this planet following traffic rules of some other planet!  I didn't even ask him/her which planet he/she from.  Damn!

[*] I call the R15 measly because it's small in physical size.  I know it has a powerful engine, designed for race track and all that.

A cop with a heart

I just got to work.  On my way, this traffic cop stopped me.  He wanted to check my papers.  I don't like stopping for showing the papers.  Well, who likes it all anyway?

He beckons me to park the bike on the side of the road and quite annoyed, I give full throttle, the bikes moves with a loud vrooooom, and I stop it near the edge.  The cop, being a good man he is, sees my impatience and asks me if I am in a hurry to reach office.  I don't answer him, but I am busy taking the papers out of the bag.  He asks me again, this time a little louder, "Are you getting late for work?  Are you in a hurry?"  I still don't want to answer him; but I have to.  I say "Yes" and nod my head.  He says "If you are in a hurry, why don't you just say that?  Go, go".  And he sends me off without seeing my papers.  This really pissed me off.

I mean, what the hell?  This cop here, he was doing his job.  Asking people to show their papers is part of his job.  What's the big deal if I am in a hurry?  And he'd just let me go just because I overslept and I'm running late?  grumble grumble!

Rant: Buggy buggy Flash

Flash is probably a textbook example for how bad a software program's quality can get.  On the other hand, Flash is a good candidate for a business case study on how a terrible product can still be successful.

PS: If Flash you gives you headache too, try FlashBlock Chrome or Firefox extension.

Vista's awesome Program Compatibility Assistant

I have a Windoze machine at my workplace.  It's running Vista, which brings wow experience to your computers.  Today I upgraded my VLC player to the latest version and when I open VLC, Windoze decided to save me from falling off earth into nowhere:

Windoze expects me to decide and tell if the installation went fine before even opening the app.  Before going mad, I saw the help link in the bottom that read "What settings are applied?"  Ah good, now it's gonna show me the settings used by the new app and I can tell if it's correct or not.  So I click on the link and this is all I see:

Oh well.  Using Windoze is like being handicapped.  You just get used to it over time.  If you manage to successfully move away from it, you pray you never have to go back again. 

PS: FWIW, A quick Google search seems to suggest that not a lot of people like this feature:

Captchas should go away, seriously

Facebook very often reminds me of Mordac.  What am I supposed to tell those stupid servers to prove that I am human? :-/

Internet Explorer woes

I wrote sometime back that I was trying out IE8 Beta .  Well, I've paid the price of doing such a stupid thing, I guess.  I have some adware installed on my machine which does a lot of things, including promoting some Yoog search engine.  Like a sane Windoze user, now I am saying adios again to IE in favour of sexy Chrome :)

Gmail invisible mode

Gmail has introduced a new feature that I *hate*. Gmail chat now has an invisible mode, which means people can stay online without others knowing it. I haven't used Yahoo messenger much; but I know of people who always stay invisible in Yahoo messenger. And I still remember how pissing off it was when some invisible friend said a "hi". Invisible mode is, in my opinion, technical solution to a social problem. A company that I love for their well thought-out products trying to solve social problem technically makes me sad. Please please Google, don't do this again; remember that you are not another Yahoo!

Shitibank login process

Login process for Gmail: 1. Open http://mail.google.com/ Since Gmail remembers my user name and password, it goes directly to my Inbox. Sweet. All Google sites use single sign on, which means I don't have to type my password at all. I like it this way. Login process for Yahoo mail: 1. Open http://mail.yahoo.com/ 2. Enter your password, although Yahoo might remember your user name. 3. Click on "Inbox" link to see mails. Not a very good user experience. But I use a Chickenfoot script to enter my password automatically. I can hear you saying that's not a good idea. I don't care. After all, I use Yahoo mail only for reading low-priority, almost useless mails. Login process for Shitibank: 1. Open http://citibank.co.in/ 2. Click on a "Go" image. 3. If you use Windoze, bear with the monster sized not-resizeable popup window and curse yourself for choosing Shitibank. If you use Linux or some other system that will allow you to resize the browser window, resize the window to a civilized size. 4. Click on one of the dozen "click here" links that says "login using keyboard". 5. Type in your debit card number and a "supposedly strong" password. 6. Move your mouse and click on another "Go" image. (Yes, pressing Enter will not work, for some half-assed programmer thought this is the way it should be.) I have been following the 6-step login process for quite some time now, and today I finally said "Enough is enough" and wrote a Chickenfoot script for automatically clicking on the links. Due to the Super-Secure^TM popup of Shitibank, it requires writing two triggers. Here's the first one:

// ==UserScript==
// @name openLoginPage
// @when Pages Match
// @includes https://www.citibank.co.in/
// ==/UserScript==

click('GO');

This trigger clicks on the "GO" button automatically when the browser URL matches "https://www.citibank.co.in/". This will open an ugly popup window. The following trigger applies to that popup.

// ==UserScript==
// @name gotoKeyboardLogin
// @when Pages Match
// @includes https://www.citibank.co.in/ibank/login/loginpage_newdipp1.jsp
// ==/UserScript==

// resize the window to human size
window.innerWidth = 800;
window.innerHeight = 600;

// select human style login
go('https://www.citibank.co.in/ibank/login/guesthpin1.jsp');
enter('Enter Your Card Number', '1234567890987654');

This kinda makes things a bit easier (though it still remains ugly).

Grumble Day

Today I was griping^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hblogging about the paranoia of Shitibank's web site. I actually faced this problem when I was trying to transfer some money from my Shitibank account to my ICICI account. In my experience, ICICI is a much better bank than Shiti. I can use any Visa ATM in the country without having to pay a special service charge. And, I am not paranoid enough to protect my debit card purchases with a PIN number. Every month, I transfer almost all of my salary to my ICICI account and spend money from there. Today, after writing about the paranoia of Shitibank web site, I logged into their site to transfer money to my beloved ICICI account. I was greeted by this announcement ("RBI has withdrawn the EFT facility with effect from 31st Jan 2008"): Now I am left with the option of withdrawing money from ATM and depositing it manually in the bank. Why would RBI make such a stupid (IMO) decision? I tried searching the news archive, but couldn't find anything. Maybe today is my grumble day?

Work around paranoia

I like to call my bank Shitibank (commonly it's known as Citibank). Of course, they do a few things well. But I always like to complain about what someone is not doing correctly :) Let's get started. In this post, I will tell you how I handle Shitibank web site's paranoia. Sometimes, their web site will think that you are evil and will not allow you to login. After you type in your username[*] and password, you will be shown the following error message: If you use a decent browser like Firefox[**], it means you have to close *all open browser windows* to get rid of this error message. I find it to be a horrible user experience. It's equally annoying as Windoze telling you "Microsoft just fixed a few more bugs. Now close all your applications and I will restart myself". If you are like me, you would also say "damn!" whenever some stupid program tells you to stop your work and start again a little while later. In this particular case, authentication to Shitibank website failed for some reason. So to try to login again, you must have a clean session. (I know, it's crazy to think like this. But you know, when you're paranoid it's very hard to come up with sane ideas.) But how does Shitibank know if your login attempt already failed or not? Because your browser sends some cookies to identify the existing session. Removing those session identification cookies will make your further login attempts look like new attempts. In Firefox, open Privacy tab of the Preferences window. Click on "Show Cookies" button. Type "citibank" in the Search box. This will show all the cookies set by Shitibank site. Select all the cookies and remove them all[***]. After removing the cookies, you should be able to log in. Don't forget to thank Shitibank, for they are helping you learn how web application sessions work ;-) * You have to type in a 16-digit number to log in. Their "remember this number" feature is horribly broken and never worked correctly on my browser. ** If you use Internet Explorer 6, you can just open a new browser window, and you will get a new session. Note however that you should start a new IE instance by clicking on its icon on desktop/quick launch bar/start menu. Selecting File > New Window menu will not start a new browser instance. *** If the "remember my card number" feature works on your browser, removing all the cookies will make their site "forget" your card number. Only remove the cookies that you see on this screenshot to keep your card number saved.

Blogger Annoyances

A few minor annoyances with Blogger (aka BlogSpot).

• Preview: Blog preview is really bad. Unless your blog's background colour is white (or some bright colour), you have no clue how different colours of text actually look on the page. It would be nice if Blogger uses the blog's template to show the preview.
• Default country: Can you guess how many Blogger users are there in Afghanistan? Blogger says there are 221,000 Afghan users. By default Blogger sets your country to Afghanistan, and many people don't bother to change it or somehow ignore it.
• Private profiles: I know Blogger does it for privacy concerns of people. But I hate when I see a page like this:

Have I become allergic to governments?

Crap! What are these people doing? A few months ago I had to pay 1000 rupees for all my flight tickets in the name of tax. Air Deccan sold tickets for 150 rupees onwards and the government took a whopping 1000 rupees. Now the tax is increased to 1500 rupees. I come in the "rich people" category of the Indian government and I don't have any of that "IT-exemptible savings" so I end up paying 30% of my salary in the name of Income Tax. Whatever I spend the remaining 70% for, I have to pay taxes (again). For petrol I buy, more than 70% of the price is nothing but tax. Wherever I go I pay 12.5% VAT. All this for what? For these idiots to stop me on the road and make me bribe them for not wearing a helmet. And, these laws are for the benefit of me (i.e. the people). I don't understand one thing -- who are they to decide what's good for me and what's not?

Don't attach those Windoze Media format files, puhlease...

<rant> It's been more than two and a half years since YouTube was launched. It's the most famous video sharing service on the Internet today. I know a lot of people know about it. But the problem is they don't use it. Very often I get emails with a zip files attached to it. The zip file contains one single WMV file. Instead of taking all the pain to zip a WMV file (which results in almost no file size difference; but a hell lot of annoyance), if at all they upload it to YouTube or some other fancy video sharing program they like, it would be a pleasant experience for us to watch it. </rant>

Web Development 101

They say a picture is worth 1000 words. So a video should worth more than a picture. Definitely a hands on experience is worth much more than a video. All you starting web developers: here is your most important lesson. I'll tell you what I did to learn this lesson. If you follow what I did, hopefully you will also learn :-) Steps to follow:

1. Think of a very good Tamil song that you don't have right now, but would love to add it to your music collection.
2. Google for it and most likely you will get a link for that song in Raaga.com. (If not pick another song; in this particular exercise, we are gonna learn from Raaga.com.)
3. Click on the link in Google results and if you are lucky, you can listen to the song in their site. If you run any non-Windoze OS you're doomed.
4. Then you decide: alright, I really like this song and I'm gonna download. Click on "Download" button. You will be politely informed (with a JavaScript alert) that you got to log in if you want to download.
5. So, you click on Register link. And you know the rest: I am too lazy to type all that now.
6. You will have to activate your account, this, that, and all other bullshit.
7. After you have downloaded that song, sit back and think "do I want my site to be as brain-damaged as Raaga.com?"

If you are really unfortunate (like me) you will end up visiting their site often and curse them every time. See my shopping cart now: I have no idea how item 2 and 3 differ. Worse, I cannot find that out at all. That's all for now. Now you're free to dream about your cool web site.

No peace yet :(

Nowadays every single day I am reminded of Tamil Nadu politics wherein there are effectively only two parties and people have no idea which one to vote for. Because both are equally bad. I switched from Windows to Linux because Windows was buggy and it could not stand my usage for more than 2 or 3 days. It kept crashing all the time and "Click OK to restart your computer" dialogue boxes were freaking me out. Now my Kubuntu installation is good by itself; but the awfully f***ed up Flash Player for Firefox makes Firefox unusually and intolerably slow, unresponsive, and whatnot. Jeez.. when are we going to get a good computer with software written by responsible human beings who could empathize with the real users. I know, this is how life is; but it just sucks :-(