Vodafone wants me to be a cricket geek

"Please.. One last chance... If it doesnt work out, I will personally call you up... " says an honest sounding female on the Vodafone customer service. It is pretty difficult to get me worked up, this was one of those difficult times :). I say "OK.. But this would be the last... The next time I call.. I would not be listening to anything but the way.. and I will make sure that this is fixed and a few people screwed even if it translates to taking a week long off from work".. and I hang up.

It was some two weeks back that I had called the Vodafone customer care to find out about something and after talking to the customer care representative, I SMSd a feedback to the Vodafone when instead of the regular reply I get back a message stating that I have been subscribed and that it will take 24 hrs for "it" to be activated. I called the customer care again to find out what "it" was and how to de-activate whatever it was, to know that it was some cricket info!!!!!!!!!

Now, I have never been a great fan of cricket (or for that matter any sport). I ask the guy to take my request to de-activate the service. Turns out that it would not be possible, the service has to be un-subscribed by the user, he tells me the process which was.. "SMS DCT CKT to 56789". I thank him and promptly send the SMS, reply "Invalid response code".... I am like... WHAT?? Even an embedded device would throw up a more meaningful message. Calling the customer care again tells me that I cannot de-activate it till it is activated. So I will have to wait till the evening. I am like OK..

Evening... "Invalid response code".... Customer Care... "Oo sorry... please SMS DCT CKT99 to 56789" OK.... "Invalid response code"... Customer Care... "Oo sorry... please SMS DCT CKT to 567889"... This was a great difference over the previous attempts.... I got back a message which went like... "Thanks... To activate Caller tunes ACT CT... For Shaer-o-Shaeri ACT SS.. For Jokes ACT JK.... blah blah blah blah... " I was like... Ok... done... By the way... What the hell makes Vodafone think that I have a lot of time to get Jokes and stuff on my phone... Anyways.... So I am having my dinner... ting-tong-ting.... SMS... I read it... Ganguly hits a six... blah blah blah... uuooo its not fixed yet.... Customer Care... by this time I am pissed... I tell the person that I am not able to de-activate it.... sir it has to be de-activated at your end... we cannot do that... please SMS CKT99 to 1111.... Obviously with no help... I had started keeping my phone mute.. everyone in the office found it funny.... I get SMS not only of the international cricket... there are SMSs of local cricket some chunnu team playing munnu team sorts... there are jokes running around the office about my phone... somebody would say... "So whats up with basketball these days..." then someone woud say... "Ask Fasih... He might be getting a few updates here and there about those" somebody else would chip in... "No... Vodafone is busy teaching him cricket... One sport at a time"

Finally I get a call from the Vodafone guys on what my problem was.... he talks to me and tells me that it would be addressed soon. I get an SMS a while later, "Issue addressed. Sorry for the inconvenience caused" I heave a breathe of relief, unmute my phone, get to my seat... ting-tong-ting... I take the phone.... Bombay rapids meet bengal tigers (or some such animals) today... This time I am totally pissed.... My ex-boss pitied me and narrated a similar torture to which all he did was to call them up and ask them how to escalate the issue. I decided to do that...

This lady takes the call... "Sir, why do you want to de-activate the serivice" I never liked cricket... Now I hate it because of Vodafone... Is that a reason enough? Or did she want something in writing too? Thinking back I might have been a bit rude... But the escalating stint really fixed it. She said I had to send.... "I am not going to do a SINGLE thing... do you get it? Just tell me how to escalate this..." That was it... She asked for a last chance... Which I grudgingly granted (Guess because I had already shouted so much...) And I have not got an SMS from them till now... except for the "Your bill dated 15-Dec-07 has been dispatched...." a while back which triggered me to write this account... :)

Hey there Delilah

PG tells me about this song that she has been listening to lately, "Hey there Delilah". I ask my office folks if they have the song and a few others that I had been looking for since a past few days. Nobody seems to have these [Either I have an obscure taste or the office folks >:) ]. However, one of the more philanthropic types came to my seat to tell me about this site eSnips.com which she claimed has about every song that I might be interested in listening to. Soon enough I found that to be true, it really has a good collection of Hindi as well as English songs.

Happy with the discovery, I come back home and spend the next few hours in finding the songs I had been looking for since ages now. Make a playlist, all set to go... But... the playlist wont play... !!!! Googling around seemed futile after killing a lot of time.. I guessed that it was time to do some scripting :) Skip the dinner and now I have this script which downloads the songs in the playlist :) Thought it might be of some use to someone out there.

esnips-playlist-save
******************

#!/bin/sh
if [ $# -lt 3 ]
then
   echo "Usage: $0   "
   exit 1
fi

EMAIL="$1"
PASSWD="$2"
PLAYLIST="$3"

ESNIPS='http://www.esnips.com'
LOGIN_URL=$ESNIPS'/UserSignInAction.ns?action=signin'
PLAYLIST_ID=`echo $PLAYLIST | sed 's/.*\///g'`
PLAYLIST_URL=$ESNIPS'/plxml/'$PLAYLIST_ID


# Log in to the server.
rm -f cookies.txt
echo "Logging in to eSnips"
wget --keep-session-cookies --save-cookies cookies.txt \
    --post-data "ns_EventTarget=&ns_EventArgument=&referrer=&rememberMe=off&email=$EMAIL&password=$PASSWD" \
    --output-document 'junk.html' \
    -q \
    -p $LOGIN_URL

# Now grab the page or pages we care about.
echo "Loading the playlist"
wget --load-cookies cookies.txt \
    --output-document 'playlist.xml' \
    -q \
    -p $PLAYLIST_URL

# Get the commands for downloading the files
mkdir -p downloads
xsltproc --nodtdattr esnips.xslt playlist.xml | grep -v "

cat esnips.xslt
**************

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
   <xsl:template match="/playlist/trackList">
       <xsl:for-each select="track">
echo "Downloading <xsl:value-of select="title"/>";ext=`wget -O '<xsl:value-of select="title"/>' --load-cookies cookies.txt <xsl:value-of select="location"/> <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes"> 2>&1| grep audio | sed 's/.*audio\///;s/]//'`;mv '</xsl:text><xsl:value-of select="title"/>' downloads/'<xsl:value-of select="title"/>'.$ext
</xsl:for-each>
   </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

I am impressed with myself... As I usually am..

Economics for dummies - Part I (Interest Rates)

Of the many articles I read trying to understand the meaning of various terms and their correlation, I found the article by Warren Buffet most illustrative and useful. What follows is an inspiration from the same.

In a world far far away are a bunch of people, living on islands. We start by looking at two of these islands, Squanderville and Thriftsville, the prime occupation of both the islands is farming and mining. Thrifts are hardworking people who believe in postponing life for later [;)] and work very hard ending up in producing more food than they need, Squanders on the other hand work just enough to eat what they produce and spend the rest of the time playing golf. Thrifts figure this out and start selling their surplus food to Squanders who are more than willing to buy it and save time to play more golf. Now the problem is that the Squanders trade in Squander-bucks which Thrifts cannot use in Thriftsville, they have to buy something in Squanderville to make use of the money. They start off by buying bonds issued by Squander-guv. Bond is a promise that the issuer will pay back the money with some interest later. Everyone is happy. Is it?

Lets look at Thrifts again. Thrifts are getting richer, they export more and import less (this is called a trade surplus). Now since they are getting richer, it means that there is more money in the market chasing the same amount of goods. This makes the commodities more expensive (as there is more demand and supply is the same), there is an inflation. The guv. figures that if this is to continue things will become too expensive and not all the people will be able to buy stuff. So what the guv. does is, it sucks out excess money from the market. There are a few ways to do it:

Raise the interest rates

Simple, aint it, people fall for it and tend to deposit more money in the banks as they are getting more returns in the form of interest

Sell the guv. bonds

This translates to buying the money

Increase the bank deposit ratio

Mandates the banks to store more money with the Central bank thereby making it more difficult for banks to lend out money.


Lets take a look at Squanderville now, squanders are happy playing golf, they have no motive to work harder [;)] Now the guv. wants them to work more so that the country makes money. What it does is, it makes money cheap, i.e. it makes the squanders money more easily so that they can make some good use of it. The squanders realize that this is a good opportunity to make money, they borrow money from the bank and start doing business with it. On the way they create more employment, the mines which were once too expensive to explore are now worth it as they now have easy cash that can be used to dig mines. The guv. by decreasing the rates has thus stimulated the economy. However as a side effect, the squander-bucks have become cheaper. This means that to manufacture some stuff in Squanderville has become cheaper than to import it from Thriftsville. Squanderville exporters now have an economic edge over other islands. A falling currency is better for exporters and bad for importers. Well, at least that's what it looks like.

Economics for dummies - Introduction

I have always been fascinated with my uncle who claims ( and I totally believe it ) that over years he has squeezed the stock market to make money from it. He is a CA by profession and I once I took it for granted given his education background and I thought it best to stay away from it. However last year my company's finance advisor initiated me to investments and I have been hooked ever since.

I guess it is because of my educational background as an engineer (who, as Scott Adams rightly points out, are infected with finding out hwo things work :)

that I got really curious how the whole thing works. After a lot of Googling, I collected a few things, and I thought it might be of interest to someone on a similiar conquest :)

Please note that what follows is EXTREMELY rudimentary view of the system, and from the eyes of someone who is still in the quest of the complete picture. I would be more than happy if you could spot and point out any inaccuracies.

Firefox IS Out of the Box

Computers have come a long way from the text based consoles but we are still a long way from the smart machines which would understand what we are trying to do as opposed to having to explain what exactly we want to do with it. Recently I noticed Firefox doing something really awesome, to get to a site you don't need to remember obscure names just type in what you remember about the site, Firefox will take you there!!!!!
Well.. This is no exaggeration... try it out yourself.. To get to the Times Of India website you dont have to remember http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/, just type in times of india in the address bar, press enter.. and there you go... Now it is obvious it is doing a smart search behind the scenes and also obvious is the fact that Google is helping it out big time, turns out that it is doing a "I am feeling Lucky" on Google however, the fact that really surprised me was that if the string in the address bar is not a very good search string... For e.g. Entering "india strategy" does not take you to indiastrategy.com instead takes you to the Google search page for india strategy!!!! Now that is what I call Out of the Box thinking >:)

What a wonderful world

I once used to be an optimist, a hard core optimist who found a bright side to everything and a silver lining surrounding the darkest and largest of clouds... I found the world so beautiful... With time however I realized that not all is as rosy, there is a lot of pain around us... And as NB once very rightly said... ignorance is bliss and with knowledge comes the pain and the bitter truths... and as GB keeps saying that everything changes... and that the world is not as rosy as I think it is... it was almost like I had started believing that pain outshines joy when PG sent me this song... this was a song that I have practically asked everyone who knows me about... I still dont know where I heard it.. the one I heard was in Hindi... And it went like... "Socha ye dil... kaisa sundar ye jahaan..." And here is PG sending the original English song (and I owe her a BIGG treat for this)... The world is indeed beautiful...

Sacrificing the gift

Every now and then one hears various views about how to live, one hears about success and failures, about love and pain, of friends and foes. One of the most common beliefs is that one should know what one wants to do in life. I find that very difficult to grasp, I find it difficult to believe that we can find what we want to do in life, the way I see it is, life is like a series of events some of which effect us and some don't; our responsibility is to do the best we can of that passing moment, of the immensely large number of things that we are capable of doing every moment pick the one thing that we like to do.. Do it with all the passion and love... not as one more thing that has to be done... It is only when we find that true love can we say that we have "used" that moment and fulfilled our duty.... Recently I read this Chinese proverb somewhere "If you are not putting in your best... You are sacrificing the Gift"...

Lets not sacrifice the gift...