RutSum

Archive for the ‘Me me and me’ Category

Before I go ahead, I’d like to tell you guys that I had got a rank of 6512 in the IIT JEE 2008, and therefore got a call for the counseling. However, the seat allotment results were declared on 30th June, 2008, and luckily enough, I wasn’t allotted any seat as per my preference sheet.

The counseling was on 21st June, 2008 at the IIT Delhi campus. The venue was Dogra Hall. I arrived at the venue at around 9 am, and on entering Dogra Hall, I was given 4 documents/sheets.

• A sticker sheet with 4 stickers for address slips.
• A foil for the draft of Rs. 15,000 that I had to deposit at the accounts section.
• A brochure for the newly inaugurated IIT Hyderabad.
• A white sheet with instructions printed on one side, and a rank vs. table matrix printed on the other side

We filled up the forms, and took a seat inside the already packed Dogra Hall.

A guy on the stage started babbling the instructions for the counseling. The one hour speech he gave boils down to this -

When your rank is called out, move your ass along with your documents to the stage. After that, move your silly ass to the seminar hall downstairs.

If you still don’t believe me, then you can read the instructions for yourself.

After that, all was simple. I went on the stage where a grumpy old IIT professor checked my original documents. He me asked me to sign somewhere, and then gave me a slip. I took the slip and moved to the seminar hall.

At the seminar hall, we were given 2 print-out copies of our preference choice sheet, along with the original, which we had earlier submitted upstairs. We had to check if the print out was correct or not. After that, we had to sign them and give it back to them. They took the choice sheets, stamped them, and returned one of the copies to us as a counterfoil of our application submission. We were then asked to go home, relax, and wait for the result to be put up online on the website.

After getting a rank of 5499 in the AIEEE 2008, I was confident that I would get a seat at Thapar University, Patiala. The counseling for my rank was on 17th June, 2008, in the Thapar campus itself.

Because of the possibility of rains, we ditched the idea of driving to Patiala and chose to reach there a night before, by bus. Also, Patiala is a relatively less developed and small city, with limited options for stay. Due to the heavy rush of admission seekers at Thapar, it was expected that the few hotels that Patiala houses, would already be full/overloaded. Because of this, we decided to stay my Dad’s friend’s house, which is situated in Bahadurgarh, 15 Kms away from Patiala.

The counseling for my rank was to start at 10:00 a.m., so we started early at 9 to be on the safer side, and reached there by 9:40 a.m. We were told to sit in the waiting hall and look out for updates on the projection screen, which was displaying a dynamic HTML page which updated itself twice every second, in Internet Explorer.

As you can clearly see (in this not so clear photo) that the seats being allotted in each branch and each category were being subtracted from the total count in this table as soon as they were updated in the auditorium (where the counseling was taking place). When I arrived, about 6 seats of Computer Engineering, 1 from Electronics and Communication Engineering, and 1 from Mechanical Engineering had already been allotted (in the Outside Punjab category). The numbers kept on rolling, and the seats kept on decreasing. People with ranks that were too far off started to get up and walk away from the Waiting Hall.

Though our counseling time was to be 10:00 am, it started at 11:30 am, which means we had to wait for 1 and half hour in the waiting room, watching the dumb screen with ’seat status’. This was, however, nothing if compared to what guys with ranks from 7000 - 8000 had to face. They were called at 11 am, and on arrival were told that their counseling would be after lunch, i.e. 3:30 p.m.

When our counseling started at 11:30 am, we moved to the auditorium. We were asked to take our seats and fill up forms for payments through cash or demand draft. There were around 20 people from the Thapar staff on the stage, with laptops, printers, and other electronic equipment such as currency bill counters and fax machines. A guy on the podium started calling out roll number ranges, like 5000-5100, and people who had their roll numbers in this range were asked to come to the right side of the stage where there documents were verified.

After the document and AIEEE rank verification, we moved ahead in line to the person who was allocating various branches of engineering according to availability and the choices we had filled in our preference sheets, which we had submitted at the previous counter. When it came to my turn, I got quite nervous because only 4 seats in Computer Engineering were left. Dad, who was sitting in the auditorium was keeping a close eye on the number of seats left (which was being displayed constantly on a screen inside the auditorium) and kept updating me by raising the appropriate number of fingers.

So I got the 4th last seat (out of 40) in Computer Engineering. After getting a confirmatory slip, I had to proceed to the next table where they took a photograph of me and then printed an admission letter which was a confirmation of my admission. After getting this letter we paid the fees through a DD at the payment table, and got a receipt for it. The amount for the DD was Rs. 92,420 (including hostel fees) and Rs. 3500 for Mess (Caution Money + Amenities Fund), which adds up to a total of Rs. 95,920.

We can withdraw admission from Thapar before 17th July, 2008. In that case, they will keep Rs. 1500 and return the balance (Rs. 94420) to us. Considering the CEE rank that I have secured (644), I am giving NSIT/DCE a higher preference than Thapar. The main problem is the date of counseling for CEE - 22nd July, 2008, which is 5 days after the last date of withdrawal of money from Thapar. Lets see if I can come up with a solution.

It’s been over two and a half years since I bought my current system, without any major hardware problems. A little hiccups with the Sony DVD Writer, that’s all. But now is the time that I start regretting buying an LG monitor over a Viewsonic one.

I have to admit that when I bought this PC, I was not really tech savvy, at least not as much as I am today. But I still had spent a lot of time and had done a lot of market research before buying it. Because of budget reasons, I chose to get a cheap 17″ LG monitor, dumping the idea of getting a Viewsonic.

A few days ago, we had some voltage fluctuations at our place after which the display on my monitor started flickering (even after the voltage fluctuation was over). This was inspite of the fact that the monitor was connected to my UPS. The flickering gradually increased and eventually led to a complete blackout the day before yesterday. So the monitor is stuck in this position - with the power light on steadily, but the display flickering. By trial, I found out that I could somewhat fix this problem by banging the monitor on its sides. So I used for another 2-3 hours by banging it every 5 minutes when the display went out. To avoid my frustrations from blowing off beyond my tolerance levels, I decided to finally shut the machine down and call the LG customer care.

This was when the real problems started. Finding a working number for the LG customer care without access to the internet (my monitor isn’t working, remember?) was a nightmare. I had the warranty card for the monitor, but all the numbers given on it were useless. None of them worked - most of them gave a ‘does not exist’ tape, others ended up in people from some remote village picking up the call and saying, “Wrong numberva lagaye ho aap“. A particular number (39010909) redirected me to a tape which asked me put an STD code for Gurgaon to reach a call center for Delhi!

When I finally got hold of the new toll free number for LG, which is 1800 180 9999, I booked a complaint for my monitor and the executive told me that an engineer would contact me within 2 hours.

As expected, nothing happened after two hours, three hours. I decided to call again. Another executive picked up this time and told me that he had reforwarded my request as ‘urgent’. This time I got a call after 10 minutes, but the guy over there told me that all the engineers alloted to the area where I reside had gone for training that day! I mean how convenient an excuse! He told me that an engineer would call me tomorrow at 10 am and would visit me soon thereafter.

You guessed right, nobody called at 10 am. So at around 11, I called back at the number from which I recieved the call. The same dude picked up and said that the engineer is on-route and will contact me soon.

Another 3 hours pass away. Nothing. I call that dude again. This time he tells me to hold the line and calls the engineer, who is supposedly ‘on-route’. He speaks loudly enough so that I can hear him, and tells him to go to my place ASAP as my job was urgent. The guy said that he could be at my place earliest at 6 pm. This time, my fuse just blew off. I told him that I had been frustrated again and again by the customer care guys, whom I had clearly told that my work was urgent. He apologised for the ‘inconvenience’ caused and said that he would be there at 6 pm.

Aha. This is customer care. Things don’t have a happy ending here. Nobody showed up at 6 pm. I called the same dude again. This time he chose not to pick up the phone at all. I called twice, thrice but he did not pick up the phone. I called the toll free number, and surprisingly, they had somehow blocked my number from there too! My call got automatically disconnected once the tape on the toll free number ended.

After retrying the number without success, I called the guy from whom I had originally bought my PC. He gave me a direct number to an LG dude, who in turn gave me the number of the engineer who was ‘on-route’ to my place. I called the engineer, and boy what he said was really shocking and funny at the same time. He said that he was very ill and was just walking out of a hospital. He then said that he would reach my place by 9 pm.

So well here I am, writing this post using a flickering monitor, waiting for the clock to strike 9, and then waiting to pick the phone and start again, the chain of calls.

UPDATE : The engineer came to my place (point to note : he did look sick, and took a pill as soon as he arrived at my place. He looked like a pedophile, something else to be noted too) and fixed my monitor within 5 minutes. He just opened up the thing, and renewed a few connections using a soldering iron. He then gave me a feedback form to fill in which I put out what I have written in this post, in about 4 lines.

I’ve recently noticed that a lot of ads from one.com, a popular webhost, are appearing on RutSum. The ads said that they promised a 1 year free account along with the domain. Now when you read on a page by, lets say, Google, that it provides a free service, you know for sure that you won’t have to yield a single penny from your pocket, neither would you have to provide them with your credit card number.

But one.com chose to fool their customers by using fine print, using a small asterisk and putting this text, below, in a font about 60% smaller than the rest of the font on the page.

* Setup fee USD 13.80. All prices are without VAT. 1 year free domain + hosting offer is only valid for companies and individuals in India.

Now this was very very disappointing, and to clear things out I clicked a button that said “Click here for live help”. A customer support executive called Arjun popped up.

Arjun: Thank you for using One.com 24/7 Interactive Online Support. How may I assist you?
you: Your homepage lists that you would provide a domain and hosting for free, for 1 year.
Arjun: Hi
Arjun: Yes we do
Arjun: for the 1GB package
you: But there is a “setup fee” of USD 13.80
Arjun: Yes that is only the setup fee being charged, the domain and hosting is entirely free of cost
you: How is it free if you are charging me 13.8 dollars?
you: I do not know what this money is for
Arjun: This is charged because we need to setup your webspace, assign your IP address, register your domain, etc
you: Of course!
you: I know that takes money
you: I can go and buy it elsewhere
you: But how is it free if you are charging me for it?
Arjun: fine
Arjun: the domain and hosting is entirely free of cost
you: That is absurd
Arjun: Is there anything else I could assist you with?
you: You can use the word “free” only if the person can avail an entire service, in whole, without weilding a penny from his pcket
you: pocket*
Arjun: alright
Arjun: Is there anything else I could assist you with?
you: Yes. I would like you to forward a request to a senior at your company, to please remove the word “free” from your advertisements, as it is misleading, and instead, put a banner that says, “1 GB free hosting with domain for one year in $13.80 flat”. That would indeed get you more customers.
Arjun: Thank you for chatting. Good-bye.

I thought that companies cared about customers. I hope that with this post, you lose at least 10 of your potential Indian customers. With this, I am also banning you from advertising on my blog. I don’t care if I lose revenue from you. I do not believe in misleading people who visit my blog. I provide information, clear and open.

UPDATE : After I published this post, I went back to one.com and asked another live support executive to read this post and forward the matter to a senior at his company. When he opened the link, my amung.us logged the visit and the map over there told me that this executive was located in UAE (United Arab Emirates).

About an hour later, I get a comment from a guy called Akki, who says this -

Anyway, when u find out its not free just leave the damn company dont bargain !

This comment came from the IP address 80.227.44.122, a quick look up on which reveals that this IP too, belongs to Dubai, UAE. Of course it isn’t a coincidence.

That’s right. He called his own company damned.

I was talking to The Uncool Shitty yesterday, when he told me about a really cool phenomenon related to wave mechanics. He told me that if you put two different sound waves with similar frequencies (with a difference less than 30 hertz) into each of your ears, your brain interprets them as beats, instead of two plain sounds. These beats are supposedly called Binaural Beats, and a bit of digging around on the web told me that just about everybody on this planet knows about binaural beats, except of course, ignorant little me.

Wikipedia had a sample music file (ogg), but the prerequisite was a stereo headphone set, so that the audio channels were split, and different frequencies could be directed to each of my ears.

Unluckily, my pair of Intex Stereo Headphones, the super cheap ones, for a 120 bucks (Indian Rupees), had broken down recently. Not completely, just one of the speakers seems to have gone mute. This happened when it accidentally fell down during a fight. Even though the headphones were cheap, I quite surprisingly got a 6 month warranty on it, which had convieniently expired just 2 weeks before ‘the accident’.

Now I flunked open my old drawer, dug in my hands and pulled out an old pair of earphones, which had clearly been smuggled from a Kingfisher airplane. The cord was so small that I couldn’t even sit upright while wearing them, so I got a crank in my neck from bending over. I finally got to experience binaural beats, and I tell you, this clip is 30 minutes of pure bliss. You can get high by just listening to it.

The main point which I wanted to stress here was the sad departure of my headphones, which are a real big friend if you have your board exams going on and you get tired of your books. You just plug ‘em in, put on your favorite playlist on Amarok, and fall asleep. The best way to relax.