Tag: Me

Myself and I

How I Got PTCL to Upgrade my Bandwidth

Sohaib Athar10 Comments

I, the good cop, mailed a long rant to the PTCL Broadband manager, Mr. Ali Raza Baloch, last week, after getting his email from the helpline.

He forwarded my complaint to a couple of relevant people, asking them to help me out, but that didn't happen.

Meanwhile, a friend, the bad cop, sent a written complaint to PTA – the PTA people wrote a letter to PTCL, and PTCL called my friend, and promised they will upgrade 'tomorrow' – which happened to be a local holiday, so 'tomorrow' never came.

Today, my friend went in person to the Broadband office, spent two hours there, met Ali Raza face-to-face and explained the situation to him. Ali Raza contacted his team, found out that my friend's upgrade was stuck in Islamabad somehow, and got the wheels in motion for him. My friend did manage to get my connection upgraded in the process though – so when I woke up today, I found my modem connected at 510kbps.

So, for anyone who is desperate to get the promised upgrade, you can be proactive and follow the same route instead of waiting for something that PTCL owes you but is reluctant to provide. I'm getting about an 80% throughput – 410kbps or so, which is good enough for jerk-free Youtube, and the upload speed of 300kbps is helping me save a lot of time as well. 20$ for 512kbps is still about 6 times more expensive than the 50$ for 6mbps that my American friends enjoy, but I hope we will get there eventually. Thank god for competition.

On throughput, quality and quantity of blog posts

Sohaib Athar

It has been 10 months since I started this blog. At 50 posts, its about a post a week (a post per weekend is what I aim for in fact) – not a lot by any standards but who cares.

I have estimated that I have spend around 20 minutes on writing an average sized post, out of which, half the time is spent on rereading and correcting spelling, grammatical and structural mistakes in an attempt to make it more coherent. In a brief moment of insight (2 minutes ago), I have decided to do away with those extra 10 minutes, which should double the quantity (though perhaps decreasing the quality, but I can live with that) of posts. This means no more using arrow keys and copy/cut/pastes after I am done writing – I will still use the arrow keys to insert new words where they belong, but no more rereading and editing. I feel liberated already.

Interview at PakSpectator

ReallyVirtual

The Pakistani Spectator interviewed me last week, you can find the interview here [link]. Though I repeatedly denied being a blogger of the interviewable sort, they wouldn’t listen. Thanks for interviewing me TPS and Ghazala, you made me actually think about things – my brain can use whatever exercise it can get.

The word ‘spectator’ reminds me, I am spectacularly spectacled again. I kept hoping the headaches and blurred vision was somehow Microsoft’s fault (the Visual Studio default font does suck, and the Microsoft Reader font isn’t much better either, ClearType and all) but the ‘bug’ was at my end. I and got myself a new pair of eyeglasses today. Unlike Seth Godin, I just went out and bought the first frame that looked half-decent to me.