As part of the ongoing developments and enhancements to the Internet services, we would like to inform you that we will be upgrading some major elements of the Internet platform. As a result, the DSL Internet services might not be available for short period on Sunday 30th September 2007 between 3.30 a.m. through 6.30 a.m.
Please accept our sincere apologies for any inconveniences caused by this important outage and thank you for your understanding and support.
For further information, please do not hesitate to contact our 24 Hours call center on 804444.
Best regards,
Customer Services - Qualitynet
We really need more of that kind of service. Planned outage is a must. Transparency with the customer is nice and builds trust.
I’ve always been impressed and WOW my friends with the new Google Images show face only feature, which you can achieve by adding &imgtype=face at the end of the url. See how it improves results for Bush, Ronaldinho, and Bill Gates. Pretty impressive right? The funny thing is, see it applied to Google founder Sergey Brin, once you go to the second page you start getting different people images. Now do the same search for Larry Page, the other Google founder, and you will see that on the first page there are different people images showing, including one for Sergey Bring alone! Click on Image below for large view :).
I wouldn’t bet on it if I haven’t seen it. I’ve had one big order with Amazon recently, and thanks to the deteriorating shipping quality of Amazon the order got split into 3 separate orders at least! Alas, I am sending the shipments to my courier forwarding company in the US, Aramex, who have a very lousy customer service them selves. As a matter of fact, I would go to the extent of saying they don’t have one (Read Below update). Especially when they owe you money. Today however I received an SMS of the first part of my shipment, which was way too light. This is the message:
Notice something strange? The shipping cost is below the minimum 2.5 KD ($10 approx), and is actually below 1 KD. Not only that. It has 4 digits after the decimal! Kuwait small currency is fils, consist of 3 digits only. There was absolutely something wrong, but there was also a hope of price adjustment. Later on they delivered the small light package for 0.750 KD! I was surprised and happy to see even a slight hope of price revision from their side, as it’s really expensive for 0.25 lb item. I’m not sure what happened exactly, but I have another shipment that arrived with that one but was delayed for delivery (Kuwait wonders). Maybe they will sum up the charge when they ship the second item. I will update tomorrow when I get it.
NOTE: Contrary to what the message says and what you might think, the item is an iPod accessory and not decoration! Just to clarify I don’t go to the extreme of ordering decorative stuff from the net. I hardly take the time to buy my own clothes, let alone decoration.
UPDATE: As I promised I will update you on the outcome. It turns out the 0.750 fils was a breakdown for part of the shipment, and the second part with rest of the bill is coming today. I have stroke out the part about Aramex customer service existance as I have to say, I was shocked today I received a call from Aramex Shop & Ship manager wanting to understand the problem better and offer any help he can give. Just when I was seriously seeking an alternative to Aramex, the guy was so kind and listened to the whole list of items I had on Aramex, biggest was the case which cost me around 100 KD. It’s really nice to see some people taking the action them selves and calling the customer offering all the help they can give. We still have to wait for changes, but for now, I take my hat off for this guy.
I don’t think I’ll be wrong in saying, every vampire movie I’ve seen I’ve hated. (Monkey Island fans would go “If you don’t count all the ones you’ve attended!). Anyhow, I don’t hate the dracula theme, but the implementation it self always manages to frustrate me. This time however, the horror has a taste of comedy. Vampyres are written with a y. They are computer animated 3D pictures, and they are the result of years of work from non other than Bill Tiller, the leading background artist of last worthy monkey island sequel, Curse of Monkey Island. He also took the same role in Dig the game. Later on he left Lucasarts, probably disappointed, and started to work with one or two others on his dream game, The Vampyre Story. For long time things were disappointing, and he was lacking any publishers. I remember he vowed to release it even at his own cost. Now, the game is named most anticipated and a trailer is finally there for us to watch. Enjoy.
I am playing with some new Amazon Associates widgets that I came across today. These are the new ones to me:
Unbox Video: Lists some videos to play from. Nice feature, but it’s too wide to fit into a blog, and there isn’t large variety of videos. For example, I chose documentaries and biographies, but ended up having only movie films showing. Why? Simply, no variety or it’s still buggy. Both ways I can’t risk showing any type of video on my site.
Slideshow: I love this kind of interactive ad. You can fade in from one item to another. Again, minimum size is 336×280. Not suitable for a blog.
Product Cloud: The typical cloud of words, bigger is most popular. I don’t like that type of ad very much.
My Favorites: This is what I used to list down another list of What I’m Reading. So far, I prefer the old links as they are faster to load and take less space. What do you think?
Wish List: If you want everyone to know your wish list. Not that it’s very different than my Favorite list, but I just don’t feel like letting people in. Ofcourse my wife sneaks on my list from my PC I can do nothing about it :(.
Quick Linker: This might be interesting for some. Installing the widget on your blog/site will enable you to use custom HTML tags for quick associate linking to Amazon like this:
<a type=”amzn” >Harry Potter</a> –> Links to Amazon.com search results page for “Harry Potter”
<a type=”amzn” search=”Harry Potter”>My favorite hero</a> –> The link reads “My favorite hero” and points to a search results page for the phrase”Harry Potter”.
Search: On the fly AJAX based search results. Width can fit sidebar of a blog.
As to how is the overall experience with Amazon conversions? Not so great at all. I just have it there become it doesn’t harm for one, plus I want to list my recommended items and guide the site visitors to buying it. What do you think?
This could be real with the Hydroelectric footwear patent that utilizes the movement of the human foot as he walks to generate power. The inventor assumes the power generated would be enough to power any portable device. As you walk, power is generated, and an output socket is there to connect to your portable device. The patent was first filed in 1999 by Robert Komarechka, and several recent patents are referring to it as can be seen from the Google Patent page of it.
While I still haven’t seen any real application of it, but with the increased number of portable devices, this could be just the time for such application. Ofcourse care have to be considered not to make the connection with the portable device of any disturbance. iPod was just an example though the patent has nothing to do with Apple (and neither Microsoft before they jump on the screen!). You can read more about it on HowStuffWorks. I’ll have to thank Ben who comment on previous post and indirectly guided me to this :).
Earlier today at 3 AM, Q8igg was born at last. A Pligg site, juts like Digg, for the Kuwait community. The idea is to give Kuwait submitted news more focus and chance to get high votes. As with Digg, most likely your Kuwait related posts will not make it to the Published News, unlike if you are posting it to a Kuwait only community, which is Q8igg. Another thing that separates it from other community sites is the revenue sharing model. We have enabled revenue sharing with our users. For the news that you submit, if you have provided your Google AdSense ID, the Google Ads shown on that news page are all yours. So if you help the site grow, we think it’s only logic that we share the profit with you. Keeping in mind that spamming with low quality posts will only cause your posts to be ignored. Unlike if you contribute with high quality content, in which case you can make it to the Top Users list. If you want more details, read more about it on Q8Ba7th blog, or go to Q8igg Help page.
On the personal level, it’s only been a month since I left my job and I managed to learn quite a lot. I escaped the low working mentality that was surrounding the work environment, and now I can happily enjoy programming again. For the past two years, programming was not fun for me anymore, and fun is what drives me in this game. I gave away a lot to earn this FREE time for now. To take a rest, have some quality family time, and do what I like to do. Keep learning new stuff all the time. Knowledge is impossible to measure. And thank God within that month I managed to get this small thing live, along with some other stuff I’m still working on, and I have a lot more up my mind. Hopefully I will keep up the pace.
Why did I leave my job when I was getting good payment? What is that I want? It can be summarized in this quote I usually say:
“All your biggest dreams will remain so unless you act on them, or live without them”
It’s not free of risks, but what’s life without risks? And what kind of dream is achievable without risk and sacrifice?
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