I had the misfortune of calling both the Citibank and the Bank Alfalah help lines today (took me around 1 hour and my cell ran out of credit) to resolve some minor (yet presistant) issues with my (not so) new address, and found out a funny thing. Read more “Bank Alfalah, Fix Your IVR”
Tag: Rants
Bad Bad Bad
Pakistan’s Haier Edukation Instillations, Kwality Ashorance and PTCL Broadband
I read about HEC's discounted rates for the PTCL broadband for people affiliated with their institutes, and was going to ask my younger brother (who teaches at NUCES) to get me a connection, but it turned out that their ONLINE subscription form link is dead. Sad irony. Stripping down the port :88 from the URL takes you to a page with no information besides a login form, but since I'm not a subscriber, so its a Catch-22 situation.
Read more “Pakistan’s Haier Edukation Instillations, Kwality Ashorance and PTCL Broadband”
WordPress Image Gallery Woes
Why is it so hard to have a photo album integrated into WP?!
I have thousands of pictures on my harddisk taken over the last 10 years or so that I want to upload, Flickr doesn’t give the control that I want. This week, I took out my rusty Canon G6 (well, not rusty but it might as well be) after one year to teach my son how to take pictures, and thought I might as well set up a photo album here.
So I’ve spent the last 2 hours searching for WP plugins (not standalone albums) and thought I found a good one – Word Press Photo Album , uploaded it, configured it as required… but it just won’t work!
Its not letting me create a default album, and shows no errors. After some debugging (PHP is not my language), it seems that the form variables are not getting through, and the relevant function wppa_add_album is not called… so I entered the record manually in the database just to get started… the album showed up but now adding images shows the same behavior 🙁
Maybe its the WordPress version, maybe its my host, maybe its something else… but I’m giving up now. I guess I’ll wait for a future WP version that has a built-in album.
Here’s my son, trying to give a ‘big smile’
If you know of an easy to install integrated album for WP, please let me know.
Book Sequels Suck
I stopped watching TV more than 5 years ago, and never had a regret. A combination of DVDs, RSS Feeds and books gives a much better value-for-money (assuming time is money) than surfing 100+ cable channels, and (mostly) no ads.
I have one complaint though, the life cycle of a good scifi series or saga is much longer than a TV show. The Dark Tower (Stephen King) finally ended (in a recursion) last year, and Harry Potter will finally end this month. That still leaves me waiting for
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A Song of Ice and Fire (George R. R. Martin)
Wheel of Time (Robert Jordan)
Ender (Orson Scott Card)
Alvin Maker (Orson Scott Card)
Harry Potter (J. K. Rowling)
Miles Vorkosigan (Lois McMaster Bujold)
Saga of Seven Suns (Kevin J. Anderson)
Now, when I pick up a (fiction) book, I make sure it is either a stand-alone novel, or a complete set of novels. I installed the Facebook Visual Bookshelf application last week, and wasted an hour trying to remember the books I read last year. Shelfari and LibraryThing are other similar Web2.0 sites that I have to check out after I finish Robert J. Sawyer’s award-winning novels. With the spare time that I have these days, I’m averaging about a book per two days, so if you have any recommendations, do let me know : )
Age is not just a number
Reorganizing my online presence is one of the items on my agenda this month. It includes updating my profiles on the 100+ websites that I have become a member of in the last 10 years or so.
Today, I started with editing my Yahoo profile, and here’s what I had in the ‘age’ field:
Now I know that they have my birthday in their database somewhere, so I can’t seem to comprehend why my age is not automatically updated. It may look like a small thing, but if a few million Yahoo subscribers have to update their ages each year, and if each such update takes a few seconds, that translates into many man-months of wasted time, when it should have taken the developer a few hours to add and test this small feature! Isn’t saving the users from redundant tasks the whole point of software in the first place?
Next I went to the MSN live website to see what needs to be updated there, and here’s their version:
Atleast their programmers know the limits of a ‘short’, if not the human lifespan.
Microsoft also has my birthday recorded. Here’s how they get it:
So they are letting newborns create an account, but require them to grow up to the age of 18 before they can have a profile… hmm
Naturally, I went to google to see how those guys are handling things, and guess what … I couldn’t find any form field that required my age OR birthday (correct me if I am wrong please). Don’t they have to profile me for ad targeting?! The closest thing I could find was on Orkut:
Very nice! They are restricting the newborns from registering AND enforcing the 18-ish year limit all using the simple combobox. They are also using my birthday to figure out my age.
Since this post was supposed to test the image upload capabilities of BlogDesk (yes, it works!), so I will end it here.
I don’t know how many people get frustrated by these things, but I strongly believe that getting such small features just right plays a major role in creating a positive brand image.