Well recently I ordered a PS3 from amazon.com during the promotional 50$ amazon.com credit period which could be used towards any electronics purchase.

After playing around with Ps3 I realized its not a good fit for my internet streaming content and decided to go with Roku which was offering more content that I liked. So when I bought the Roku XDS (99$ – 50 = 49$) from amazon.com  again and the ps3 50$ promotional credit applied itself and there was no way for me to remove it.

In a few days I returned the ps3 as well and I got back the full amount of 299$ credited towards my CC to my surprise since according to their promotional offer for ps3 if I return the product then the 50$ credit would be charged to my credit card.

So I thought may be its a different work flow process and eventually they would charge me . After like 10 days and me checking my credit card statement every day I got really frustrated and sent a mail to customer service asking why Amazon.com hasn’t yet charged the remaining balance for Roku XDS order.

To my surprise when I checked my mails just during the snooze sleep time, an customer service agent replied that they will not be able to charge the 50$ to my account and keep it as a compliment.I ignored it assuming I was dreaming and went back to my snooze cycle. So I finally opened my mail in the evening to check my mails and saw I wasn’t dreaming but the mail was true.

Eventually I didn’t feel comfortable getting 50$ as a compliment so I transferred it to American Red Cross for the Japan earth quake relief through amazon.com.

I’m quiet impressed with Amazon.com service and I will surely use their business more. I just can’t wait for amazon.com to get more streaming content.

Below is the email communication.

Hello,

I understand that you’ve returned the PS3 but still the promotion of $50.00 was applied to this order.

I also understand from your e-mail message that you need to remove the $50.00 promotions and charged to your Credit card.

I’m sorry it is not possible to remove the $50.00 promotions once it has been applied.

As our compliment, you can keep this $50.00 promotions.

Please accept this our compliment.

Thanks for your understanding.

Thank you for your recent inquiry. Did I solve your problem?

If yes, please click here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/survey

If no, please click here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/survey

Best regards,

Jerline J.
Amazon.com
Your feedback is helping us build Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company.

—- Original message: —-

—————
Your Name:A AL
Order Id:
Other info:PS3 promotional disc not yet removed from this order.
Comments:I placed this order and the promotional 50$ discount which I got through PS3 was applied. But I have returned the PS3 and amazon has credited the full amounts to my Credit card and gift card. I was wondering when will this 50$ promotional will be removed from my order and charged to my Credit card.
Looks like some where along the return process Amazon forgot to charge me 50$ and it won’t be fair of me to accept it as well.

Thx
AL
—————

Yep true when my laptop was good when all was new but typical to Windows after a year I’m really hating it.I have about 4GB of memory and still my system is running crazy slow and I don’t even have any of my development tools running.

The last patches that Microsoft pushed has literally screwed up my Wireless network connection since after every time I  hibernate and restart it just wouldn’t connect, either I will have to restart the system or the router to get it working.

BTW I do have a Iphone4 and it works perfectly without any issues..I have never experienced a lost wireless connection with that phone, but still ATT sucks.

I’m seriously considering buying a MAC for home use because of this if I can get rid of this laptop.

Today morning I went in for H1b stamping @ Chennai,India US consulate and the consular asked me Are u a computer scientist? I was quiet taken back,perplexed, short of answer and was wondering am I really a computer scientist because I can program.

After a while of my thought process; I totally had to deny it and say I’m an web application developer.

But I’m still wondering why was that question asked and what was going on in consular mind?

What would you have answered if the same question was asked to u?

Yep I’m in India on a long vacation.

Yesterday  I watched the Inception and it is one of the best movies that I have seen in a while with all those jumps between multiple dream states and keeping track of the flow of the movie  engages your mind constantly. It’s quiet possible that people won’t follow the movie even if they miss a few minutes of the movie.

It was like trying to figure out a bug in a 5 year old Spaghetti coded application. If you miss a few steps then you have to start from the beginning.

If you like the movies like Matrix, Identity and Memento then you would certainly enjoy it.

Waiting to buy the DVD during Thanksgiving

Today I watched Ravanan and my verdict is that it’s a Santosh Sivan movie which should be clearly enjoyed in a big screen not @ home.  Santosh Sivan’s cinematography is @ it’s best and has captured nature @ its best.

I have already mentioned it’s a cinematographers movie and the story line purely based on Ramayana with a little twist for the current age, lets get to the story. Although it’s a know story line and trying to repackage it is quiet hard, but Mani Ratnam has already did this kind of repackaging in a successful way for movies like Thalapathi, Iruvar but this time it wasn’t up to the mark.

Pros:

1. Cinematography.
2. Supporting Cast, be it Karthik, Prabhu, Munna, Prithiviraj and Priyamani do their limited roles perfectly.
3. ARR BGM’s.
4. Vikram’s acting, not his best though, reminds me of pithamagan.
5. locations.

Cons:

1. The most important, you jump in to the movie @ the beginning itself , there is no concept of building up the story. Unless you have the patience to watch the second half, you will be wondering why the hell I came to this movie and wondering if there is any story in the movie.
2. Suhasini’s dialogues. Sujatha is really missed in this department, he could have pulled off the movie.
3. Zero comedy, this movie is a total drama. So most people looking for a masala flick, should really stay away.
4. ARR songs, as if he was sleeping while composing some songs.

The first Con I believe is the reason for all the bad reviews and spreading a bad review about the movie.

Don’t expect a Mani Ratnam movie, then you can enjoy it in theater.

BTW my friends who watched the previous show mentioned it was worst than Aasal movie (all time crap), so I went in to watch a movie worst than Aasal. May be that’s why I liked the movie

Remit2India.com has started these annoying marketing campaigns bombarding me

1. by calling me and asking me to send more money back to India @ odd times pretty much every week , even though I send money back pretty much every month to pay my EMI. I wish I can send a million dollars a month back to India to keep u guys happy but I don’t make that much.
2. Email blasts reminding me that the US dollar conversion rate has gone up.  I can live with 1 email blast not with 8 of them which is called spamming ur users.

remit2India.com I really appreciate ur service and concern to notify me about higher rates but keep it to a simple email blast or a phone call, not both of them @ same time.

It would be nice if u guys provide some kind of option in the site for the marketing preference and I would happily say no to email/phone campaigns. Me and my friends will be happy,if you can get this done and don’t bombard with marketing campaigns.

If there was any other better service provider to transfer money to India, I would happily switch over to them, but not so I’m stuck with you guys.

BTW if some one doesn’t pick ur calls after 2 or 3 times it clearly means they don’t want to talk to you and Yes I have added ur number to my block list (+2230833100).

Please Google  ur above number and see it for urself how much people are annoyed @ ur campaigns.

Update on May 22, 3;55 PM:

I finally picked up the phone from this number again to complain again after listening to their music for like 5 minutes.

Who calls you and puts up a music and asks us to wait for them?

Long story I tell the CSR that plz stop calling me with marketing and she mentions it was just a reminder call and I still insist that I don’t want them and out of no where she hung up the phone.

remit2India ur customer care sucks but ur service is free, so until its free I will use you guys and also act like a jerk like you guys do.

I really wish I didn’t do this mistake of trying to save 2$ milk carton from falling down and dropping my N85 in to my cup of milk when I was preparing my coffee while I was talking to my bro at the same time.

I did the usual stuff that I usually do when my equipments has water damage like completely dismantle it and let it dry for a day and try it back again. Most of the time it has worked for me and since the phone is from Nokia, the percentage of survival is little higher then other manufactures.

Multitasking has its share of failures like this, may be that’s why apple decided not to include Multitasking in ipad.

Until then I will try to resurrect my old HTC SDA phone which had suffered its own 30 feet drops, water damage and living in freezer for an hour and btw it worked all the time without issues. I decided to replace it only when its charger connection got loose which made it harder for me to charge the device.

I hope the N85 can also survive all the sufferings as good as HTC SDA has suffered in my hands. It has gone through a 20 feet drop and made out alive so lets see if it can survive the water damage.

Now I will have to wait for another 24 hrs to figure out if my phone can be revived or not.

Please email/im me if you need to contact me before that.

Yet another quake as I write this post. It shud be easily a 4 and we got after shocks.

-Updated April 4, 2010 @ 7.46PM

Well the phone is working perfectly as of this moment without issue. Thank you Nokia.

Carton of Milk – 2$, Nokia N85 – 300$, the joy when the phone works after dropping the N85 in milk – priceless

Well the news is out the Govt. of India is derecognizing 44 so called deemed universities in India due to lack of infrastructure facilities. Finally some one in the Education department recognized it and blew the whistle.

Although I didn’t study in any of these universities but I have visited some of them during my UG time and they weren’t gr8 even then so I’m gonna assume world didn’t become flat in last 5 years.

An example for the so called deemed university standard is when some universities awarded doctorates to some south indian actors just like a freebie (Google it).

So will these actors return the so call doctorates since these universities are no more universities?

I hope at least from now on people think twice before accepting any kind of doctorates just for the fun of it. I’m sure actors work hard as well but Please don’t mix academics and acting it doesn’t go well keep them separate.

Oscar looks good with A.R.Rahman than with Dr.A.P.J Abdul Kalam. Doesn’t it?

I recently got a new laptop Lenovo ideapad Y550 which was supposed to come with Windows 7 but came with Vista instead but I already decided that I would use Ubuntu 9.10 to avoid all windows nightmare and started using Kubuntu 9.10 (KDE graphic environment of Ubuntu). I can do a whole podcast on the lenovo issue but I have made my peace.

Setting up an running Kubuntu was the easy part since the installation was seemeless and every thing ran out of the box except

1. Nvidia GT240m graphics card for which I found the drivers from Nvidia site and spend like another 2 days figuring out how to install them during which I crashed the ubuntu when I removed some packages.
2. My Audio isn’t audible as vista and my HDMI port doesn’t output audio in Kubuntu which works fine in Vista. Looks like a driver problem.

I have searched through out the net for the audio issue and no one seems to have the right answer that would resolve my issue so I’m actually considering moving to Windows 7 even though I haven’t gotten my hands dirty with it.

I pretty much use this laptop as my home entertainment system which would need the HDMI audio function. I still have 3 more weeks before Lenovo sends me Windows 7 disk to figure out the issue. If not then I guess I will be back to Windows world once again until then I will switch between Vista/Kubuntu.

Believe me Ubuntu is a monster once tamed it’s a pretty good dog and I like it a lot.

BTW Vista sucks pretty bad how the hell can I kill a process from task manager? I’m not even sure how people worked with vista.

I’m a novice in the linux world so if any one has better ideas to fix this issue it would be gr8.

CNET news reported that the International Telecommunication Union a branch of UN has decided to go for universal mobile phone chargers.

In a world where each mobile phone from same manufacture have different chargers working this is a welcoming sign.

I also hope ITU gets in to and standardize the chargers for all portable devices as well. I’m tired of carrying individual chargers for my mobile, Blue Tooth headset and mp3 player. If we can standardize the laptop chargers that will be awesome too..

The only reason I’m worried is it wont happen soon enough. Since this is something driven by a branch of UN and we all know how long it would take for all countries to accept these protocols. Lets hope all the manufactures fall in line and accept it soon…

At least I’m happy that some where in distant future that there will less chargers lying around in my house.