1. You contact Company X about Product Y.
2. The sales rep. of the company does a good job convincing you of buying the product. You decide to go ahead and buy it.
3. The sales rep. promises delivery of Product Y the next day. An experienced fake conner will realize this could raise suspicion and promises delivery in 48 hours or something to that effect.
4. The intended date of delivery swings around and there’s no sign of delivery.
5. You get in touch with the sales rep. in the afternoon, after lunch. He promises delivery in the evening.
6. Evening turns into night but there’s no sign of delivery.
7. You get in touch with the sales rep. in the late evening, just before dinner. He promises delivery the next morning.
8. You give the sales rep. a piece of your mind, but you were expecting some sort of delay in delivery (this is India after all).
9. The next day, you repeat steps 5-7. You are now getting annoyed.
10. The day after, the sales rep. phone appears to be out of service. In reality, the sales rep. is just ignoring your calls.
11. You try calling customer service but of course they have no record of your application for Product Y. In fact, you have to call several different customer service centers and give a lot of information. The standard response is that they will tell you to wait another period of the initial waiting period (for example, 48 hours).

This is how it is so far. There are now two paths you can follow. If you happen to know someone senior level in Company X, you get in touch with them. Power hierarchy works as good as it always does and:

12. You get delivery of the product that day.

Your saga thus ends. You never hear back from the original sales representative. He has clearly been humbled. However, not everyone has the benefit of this situation so what probably happens is:

12. You make more calls, more complaints.
13. You finally realize the hopelessness of your situation and give up trying.
14. You get delivery of the product a few days later.

As you can see, it feels like you are getting swindled the whole way, but what is actually happening is that the level of service is extremely poor. The product and company are legitimate, it is just that the sales team is too disconnected from the delivery/engineering team and in general they are just too lazy. There is no respect for a customer’s time and no guaranteed response time.

Most recently, this happened with us with TATA, whose high-speed internet service plan we were trying to get so that I could VPN effectively. Just a few days prior to that, a similar thing happened to my cousin when he was trying to buy a car. It’s happened for ages and I have no doubt it’ll happen for ages more. There just seems to be no semblance of professionalism and accountability in some customer-facing industries in India.

So, I was flown in to Chicago on Monday morning as part of this effort. On Monday I met one of our customers in the Chicago area, DMC, and had an opportunity to see what sorts of things they are working on. I also gave a short presentation and demo of the feature I’ve been working on, which is basically the ability to add third party licensing & activation to users developing extensions to LabVIEW.

Tuesday was the first developer education day, in Chicago, hosted at Harper College. Harper is a community college but it had a pretty large campus. In fact, they even had a lake! Their convention center was very slick, and had an amphitheater. Anyhow, the developer day itself went pretty well. In the morning, I presented Graphical Scripting, which is a LabVIEW feature that allows users to generate LabVIEW code from LabVIEW programs. This may not make a lot of sense, and unfortunately I cannot think of any analogies outside of the programming domain. Think of it as similar to writing Java code that generates Java code. This basically allows you to automate certain repetitive code patterns.

The afternoon session that I presented was on Advanced Control and PID. I will confess that this is not a topic that I am very familiar with, but the presentation gave me the opportunity to learn about the topic. As software engineers (especially a new one like myself), I don’t really have the opportunity of seeing a real world usage of LabVIEW. The control presentation and a few chats with the attendees afterwards showed me how LabVIEW users use the various parts of the LabVIEW system in their work. It was pretty cool.

After the event on Tuesday, we packed up and shipped our presentation materials to Milwaukee. Ended up having dinner at an Asian restaurant near our hotel (I think it was called Big Bowl or something like that). Since there was nothing else to really do, we ended up catching a movie at a nearby theater–She’s Out Of My League. It was a pretty funny movie… not on the level of The Hangover or Hot Tub Time Machine, though!

On Wednesday, unfortunately the customer visit I had scheduled got cancelled. In the morning I went with the Chicago sales engineers to a company called EcoloCap, which has apparently been developing a high-efficiency, low-cost, environmentally-friendly fuel called “M-Fuel”. They have a bunch of information published, if anyone wants to read more about it. In the afternoon, I visited the public section of Fermi Particle Acceleration Lab. Fermi can be considered as the precursor to CERN. It was a pretty interesting outlook, and gave me an idea as to how NI technology can be used in big physics. Unfortunately, we had no visits scheduled there so I couldn’t get a deeper understanding of how everything worked.

We then drove to Milwaukee (or maybe it was a place called Waukesha… I don’t know) where our Wisconsin Dev Day was going to be held. Luckily we could set up at any time (at Chicago we had to set up at 6:30am on the day of the conference). After checking into our rooms, we waited for all the sales engineers to arrive before setting up. It did not take that long to set up, luckily. We rounded the day off by having dinner at a nearby seafood grill. The food was quite delicious!

Thursday followed much of the same schedule as the Tuesday Developer Day. The turnout was a bit smaller, but higher than the normal Milwaukee Dev Day, I was told. Nothing spectacular/unique to report on that day. After the event we packed up, said good bye to the Chicago sales engineers and relaxed for most of the rest of the evening (except for dinner, of course).

Friday, the last day of my trip, featured three customer visits. I visited Dyne Systems in the morning, FasTek over lunch and Soliton after lunch. Each of the three customers gave me an idea of what they did with their products and with NI technology and then I gave them a short presentation and demo of how the feature I was working on could help them make some moolah. After all that was done, I was dropped off at the Milwaukee General airport (MKE), where I took the shortest flight of my life.

The flight was between Milwaukee and Chicago O’Hare. Our plane left the ground at 4:07pm and touched down at O’Hare at 4:25pm. An 18 minute flight. I don’t want to think about how much that cost! Unfortunately, the wait at Chicago was a little more than 3 hours. I spent the time in one of the restaurants where I had a leisurely-paced dinner with a couple of beers while watching some baseball. Probably the only baseball I’ll watch all year!

I touched down in Austin at around 10:30pm and got a SuperShuttle pretty quickly (which is weird, kinda, usually the wait is around 20 minutes). Got back home at around 11:15pm and was very tired but ended up watching the Tuesday episode of Lost. Still have to catch up with HIMYM, Modern Family and 24, though.

Anyways, after two back-to-back 9-hour sleeping nights, I feel good again! Unfortunately for my health, the NBA Playoffs began this weekend which means 20 hours of basketball (a quadruple-header each day)!

Any other app I opened did not work either. Just boot up and shut down immediately. I did a reboot on the system a couple of times and there was no improvement. Finally, I got the chance this weekend to try and figure out what the problem was. When I plugged the iPod in, it told me I needed to update my software. When trying to update my software, it said that it could not backup my profile. I had all my music on my computer and all my apps are on my iPhone now so I thought, what the hell, let’s just do a full-scale restore operation. Restore failed. A couple of times.

Luckily I was watching TV at the time (I think Modern Family or The Office or maybe even an NBA game or something) so I had the patience to keep trying. Finally, the restore went through. However, it then promptly hung when I tried to name my iPod (configuring it as a brand new device). I quit iTunes forcefully and upon restarting, it gave me the “Cannot Sync” message, forcing me to restore it again. I had to do about 2-3 clean restores before I was finally able to configure the device to work (I think). Once I finally managed to name my iPod (going with the generic sohum’s iPod instead of something as exciting as sohummm or maybe even iSohum) I decided that I had had enough of iTunes.

Fortunately for me, I had stumbled upon an article a couple of weeks ago about how an iPod user wanted to divorce iTunes. If you recall my “iTunes kills the iPhone experience” blog, you will note that I was in much the same position (except that I would never be able to overlook iTunes’ many flaws to ever marry it in the first place). One of the alternatives was MediaMonkey, which I promptly downloaded, installed and fired up. While the interface isn’t as clean-cut as iTunes, it is infinitely more performant. It took me about 25-30 minutes to set up my sync list and then I clicked one button and it was ready to go, quietly doing its stuff in the background. The last time I tried to use iTunes to set up a new iPod with my music (my iPhone, in that case), I had to live through about 2 hours of iTunes trying to figure out whether each song in my library should be included on the “gapless” playback list before my computer was usable.

I don’t change my music all that often–just add new tunes here and there, so it seems MediaMonkey is the perfect hands-off tool for me to sync my iPod without having to deal with the crapware that is iTunes. I’m not interested in buying crippled, low bitrate music from iTunes and even if I did, I would do it directly through my iPod (if that’s possible).

Anyways, that’s the technology part of this blog. Tomorrow will be a test of whether my iPod is truly fixed or whether it was just pretending to do so.

The other thing I wanted to touch upon was taxes. Yep, tax season is coming up! While at Rice, the international student office kindly set us up with a license of the CINTAX (hilarious name, yes?) software to help us crunch the numbers. It had always seemed like such a painful and tedious process? Doing it on my own this year showed that it is actually not that complicated, especially if you have a simple financial situation, as I do. First of all, since I’m still technically a non-resident (in fact, an NR student, to be precise) I don’t really qualify for any extra deductions/exemptions. The tax treaty with India (Article 21(2) to be exact) allows me to get the standard deduction ($5,700) and my lowly income allows me to get the standard exemption ($3,650). However, this may be the final year that I will have such a simple process since next year I will be in H-1B status for part of the year, meaning that I may need to split my taxes or do something exciting like that. I will probably need to consult professional help at that point in time, but for now I am rejoicing in having solved one of those annoying life problems.

Anyways, I got a lot of information from a website called VisaTaxes.com, if any of you are international students and have stumbled upon this blog because of tax season. Here are a few more keywords to hook you into this blog (is this unethical?): 1040NR, 1040NR-EZ, Form 8843. Grin.

C’est tout!

A few weeks ago I complained about ridiculous blackout restrictions that prevented me from watching the Rockets here in Austin, just about 200 miles away. Since people had been complaining for ages without the NBA or anyone who could do anything giving a shit, I decided to stifle my voice and instead purchase a pricey NBA League Pass package. I bought the cheapest one available–that allows me to watch games that are not blacked out by regional restrictions for any 7 teams. It came out to something like $90 for regular season, which isn’t all that bad since that’s equivalent approximately a month and a half of cable for me (which I’ll be downgrading as soon as I can, since the only reason I bought this, more expensive, package is because it has the regional Fox Sports channels, which I found out later they blackout for NBA).

My experience with League Pass has been decent. I’ve been annoyed at the fact that they use a proprietary Flash player which means that I cannot do anything to change the ratio (they output 4:3 whereas my TV is a widescreen 16:9), the scores that take up about half the screen and the fact that they don’t show actual half-time shows. These issues I can understand because (a) they wouldn’t want to provide free advertising to the half-time show sponsors and (b) the entire system was designed by UI dimwits.

What I cannot accept, though, is the fact that sometimes games will just not show. And the reason is that whoever is behind their intricate UI setting up the streams has messed up what channel outputs what game. I had this occur sometime a few weeks back when the Rockets were playing a no-name team. That didn’t matter so much. Tonight, we’re playing the Cavs and were playing them pretty well. Of course, League Pass decided to output the Hornets-Timberwolves game. It went down to the last second–but I don’t give a crap about either of those teams. I was hopeful that the problem would be fixed after the Hornets game was finished and the pivotal fourth quarter began in the Rockets game, but now I have a blank screen staring at me that says “NBA League Pass Broadband Channel 1″. Googling a few forums, I found that the Rockets game is actually playing on the Spurs-Kings channel (who knows what channel that game is being played on?). Of course, the awesome part about this is since Austin is in the Spurs’ hometown sphere of influence, its blacked out on my League Pass. So my options for watching the game are basically down to one: watch an illegal stream from some site (justin.tv, ustream.tv, myp2p.eu pop into mind immediately).

Argh.

But wait, there’s more! The last time, in my frustration, I sent the folks at League Pass an angry email. I got a response about a week later saying sorry because of technical difficulties. Today their chat line happened to be open so I logged in to that. After waiting for about half an hour and posing my query, the representative, “Rebecca” told me that it was a technical issue that they had been notified of and that they couldn’t do anything. I guess their chat line is open for far more pressing issues such as “OMG I can’t install Flash”, which can be solved by using the great Google.

Thank god myp2p pointed me to a Chinese stream. Too bad I can’t understand the commentary…

So the subject of this post is, quite simply, “rant”. A number of things have annoyed me in the last few days so I have decided that instead of keeping them all in my head, I will transfer them over to teh interwebs where they will stay published forever (or until a server crashes, or I delete it, or something). Without further ado, let the bashing begin!

1. Satellite TV in general, DirecTV in particular

I know satellite TV is still this kinda new thing (yeah, right) and I was excited to see all the discounts I could get on a new DirecTV installation. So, last week, I finally decided to take the plunge on getting TV in my apartment and signed up for a DirecTV account. I think it was actually around 10 days ago. I was able to get about $21 off on their “new user” discounts in addition to a $10 discount for using a referral code from someone at NI. So I was saving a sweet $31 a month for 12 months, and getting TV at about $40/month. Or rather, going to get all this. Of the several appointment days available, I decided to choose the Saturday 8am-12pm slot, since I was gonna be at work the rest of the time.

My first mistake, perhaps? Turns out Saturday is a super-busy day (who woulda thunk it?). So naturally, DirecTV’s local field office should have been a little bit better staffed, right? Wrong. Pity me, who woke up at 8am, excited for the smell of new TV. It wasn’t until 12.15pm that I felt miffed enough to call and when I called, I was told I would be called within 20 minutes. I received a call from the local office to confirm that a technician was present. I told them quite curtly that there was no technician present, while reminding her that it was already 30 minutes past my rather-large-time-range appointment. She said she’d call back in 20 minutes but only a fool’d believe her. I was a fool.

Luckily I was able to get a lot of stuff done in the mean time, such as getting a “permission form” signed from Riata that allowed me to get a satellite in my patio, as well as getting some batteries from the Food Mart nearby and figuring out a rent check error with Riata. I also figured out rent/expenses issues with Hubert at that point.

Still nothing. I called DirecTV again at around 1.30pm and asked them, in kinder terms, “What the hell?” They told me they’d get in touch with their local office again (with whom their only method of communication happens to be, wait for it, …. email). This time the local office called me, apologetically, saying that the technician was late (no, shit!) and that he’d be there in 35 minutes. I got some other errands done and finally the technician arrived.

And after waiting for more than 5 hours for him, our meeting lasted less than 5 minutes. Apparently the satellites are located in the “southern sky” whereas our patio can only see satellites in, well, the rest of the freaking sky. So, no DirecTV. I called and cancelled and checked Dish Network’s availability. Looks like they used to be in the “northern sky”, which would have been perfect, but they are now operating in the “southeastern sky” area. So no Dish. So… no satellite. Humph. I have sold my soul to AT&T (see next gripe).

2. AT&T U-Verse: An arm and a leg for TV

After my failure with satellite and my ever-growing appetite for television (in particular, trash TV) I decided to look at my options. Basically it was down to the two “cable”-esque providers: Time Warner Cable and AT&T. I wasn’t looking forward to the prospect of dealing with either of them, to be honest. I have heard very bad things about TWC and I have experienced very unprofessional behaviour from AT&T. I don’t think I ever disclosed the shenanigans that took place when I first moved to Austin and tried to get my own Internet.

Basically, to save some time, I decided to order my AT&T internet from Houston a few days before I reached Austin. That way, I hypothesized, I would minimize the amount of non-Internet time. As it happened, AT&T’s dysfunctional website decided to eat my apartment number and hence the modem+router never got delivered. When I tried to call them to ask them to call FedEx and have it redelivered, I found out that their phone department and internet department is not connected. This is absolutely ridiculous, in my opinion. What’s the point of having a tech support line for online orders, then?

Once I got all that cleared out and billing time came around, I received two bills–one for the account that was never created and one for the fixed account. To make matters worse, the second account took me for a business and hence charged me nearly double. A long phone call later, everything seemed to be figured out, but I’ll be keeping an eye on my next few billing cycles.

Anyways, I finally brought the wallet out for AT&T U-Verse and went with a pretty expensive plan that is supposed to give me $200 cashback after I activate. At this point, you are probably asking me why I fell for the AT&T trick again, and I have no valid response. I am hoping that somehow the stars will align and everything will miraculously work. Unfortunately, there has already been a slight issue, since right after I placed my order, the confirmation page said, “If you have an AT&T DSL service at that location, that account will be cancelled.” I immediately opened up a tech support chat window to figure out what’s up.

Turns out AT&T has TWO SEPARATE INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDERS. It’s as if they are purposely inventing stuff to confuse the consumer further. I have an AT&T High Speed Internet account, whereas since I’m going with AT&T U-Verse for TV, supposedly my account will be transferred to an AT&T U-Verse Internet account. I foresee further issues.

–

That’s it. I grew tired after those two rants, but I was planning to rant on the Indian cricket team. Then I realized that I never really cared about the ICC Champions Trophy, so I didn’t care that India got knocked out early. I am a little unhappy, though, that I will miss out on the opportunity to watch/DVR the Twenty20 Champions League or India-Australia ODI series later this year. Oh well, I guess Dish/DirecTV are saving me some money, after all.

—

The Bathroom

There are two places where my mind is idle and completely open to ideas—in the bed while I am dreaming and in the bathroom while I am…doing the obvious. The latter does require some state of non-constipation to ensure that my mental energy is being used somewhat efficiently. It is an unfortunate by-product of life that one cannot remember dreams for a long enough time to record them—but with a pen and some paper, miracles can occur in (or on) a toilet. Anyhow, let me progress with the evidence for my shifty argument, lest I waste too many of my precious words on this introduction.

As I have mentioned above, if I can successfully channel my mental energies into areas of creativity, in the bathroom of course, great things can happen. When in a toilet, there is nothing much to grab my attention and thus my mind begins to wander. Ideas begin to formulate, develop and disappear and for a second it seems that I am but day-dreaming. How can I capture my ingenious thoughts? This is when the writing stationary and my consciousness comes in—I can now record my ideas and make sense of them afterwards!

I can interact with my thoughts in a way that was previously impossible—I can tinker with them and put them into proper words. What sets bathroom free-write apart from the post-write of dreams is the fact that the writer is already awake and ready to write. There is no risk of forgetting ideas or running out of time with them (unless you are in a particular hurry) and as a result, there is a progression of sorts. It is important to remember, however, that one must not force the development of ideas whilst actually in a bathroom. Everything must drop into place naturally.

Apart from being a great place to communicate with my brain, the bathroom is also an exemplary demonstration of the great human skill of multi-tasking. One can cleanse bodily systems and get work done—at the very same time! This is especially true if you are an unorganized worker, procrastinator or just a person with dirty habits. I, of course, am none of the three; I am a enlightened person who understands the true potential of a bathroom. It is almost derogatory to call such a mentally stimulating place a restroom—it is a place where the mind is extremely active.

Before I climb out, soaking, of this essay on a seemingly disastrous subject, I would like to helpfully point out my tasteful choice of subject and of course my honesty in the execution of this essay. I am sure this essay was…different, and I am hoping that that was for positive reasons. I sincerely do hope that this essay provides me with an opportunity to exhibit my creativity, my superb skills in writing and of course my modesty.

So that’s what’s coming up. Maybe a few cricket-related things here and there, but don’t hold your breath. Don’t hold your breath, generally speaking, unless you’re swimming underwater or something.

Once we reached, at the top was our technology head at the time I was at ASB: Dr. Bennett. Quite a character that man. Apparently people were beelining to the top floor because they all wanted to install Windows 7 RC on their computers. And there was a mass Windows 7 RC guided session about to take place in one of the rooms up there (I think the formerly ESL room). After everyone was in the room I stopped Dr. Bennett outside to chat about my problem: which was a fictional error message I was encountering in Windows 7 RC (fictional in real life, real in dream life, of course).

So geeky are my dreams that I dreamt I was encountering an error message in Windows 7 RC. So much more geeky am I that in my dreams I actually “Googled” the solution and found it was a problem with the update manager. I had to click some non-existent buttons (something like enable updates and then disable updates) and then the problem disappeared. The exact nature of the problem eludes me at the moment, but I am fascinated of how this happened and also a little worried that I may be spending a little too much time on my computer even in my dreams, perhaps.

I don’t remember how that one ended, but next in my dreams I was somehow in Bhubaneshwar, at my grandmother’s house, with Dr. Bennett in tow. Not sure how I got there, but there was an aching pain in my left eye. I couldn’t close it properly. When I took a look at it, it appeared that I had a black eye of some sort. I tried to clean it up with water from the bathroom (where, incidentally, there was a scorpion-like creature treading water in a bucket). I was surprised at how much it hurt, even in the dream. I have examined my eye thereafter and it is perfectly normal.

The next part of the dream is kind of hazy but apparently I had flashbacks to the reason that my eye was hurting, and it was because someone had stuck a sword down it. Yeah… kind of completely wacky, huh? Sword in eye is definitely worse than black eye, but I guess my brain relieved me from the necessity of feeling that pain. Phew. Anyways… I just wanted to document that before it was lost forever. Dreams are really weird. I’m still fascinated by how all the senses are part of a dream. It makes me question sometimes how real real life is (not really, but just to sound philosophical, I guess).

Cheerios.

• Sohum eats mangoes
• Sohum watches 99 with his mom
• Sohum learns to cook Indian-style chicken curry
• Sohum watches Aa Dekhen Zara on DVD
• Sohum gets batteries and a film-roll for an old-school Canon EOS 3000QD
• Sohum thinks about the ICC World Twenty20 event a bit more

So that’s what’s coming up. I may just have to wake up early tomorrow and get all this done as if it were some sort of paper. Naah….

First and foremost, I want to give a shout out to the gym here at my parent’s new apartment. It is quite possibly better than the gym at Rice, though probably containing a fewer number of equipment. This is probably because the gym just opened and hence all the equipment is in mint condition! Anyhow, what this means is that I’m working out pretty much 4-5 days a week (the gym is closed on Mondays). What this also means is that I’m waking up at an unreasonable hour for a vacation (between 8.30am and 9.30am). Oops. Need to work on that and maybe workout in the evening.

I also played basketball at school last Tuesday, and am planning to go tomorrow, as well. ASB has changed a hell of a lot, but my performance in the MPH was torrid as usual. I don’t think I scoerd a single point on offense, although I did have the most number of layup opportunities (and I missed all of them). My jump shooting was poor. I’m hoping it’ll have improved by tomorrow! Not only was I playing basketball after a couple of weeks, but the conditions were alien as well (shut up, Shulmith!). Hopefully I’ll cab it tomorrow so I can stay later.

Another thing I have been doing the last few days is trying to get a decent grounding on the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). One of those summer-projects of mine is a cricket simulator for an online cricket community I’m a part of, and I’m trying to work the UI through WPF instead of WinForms, since I have limited knowledge of both. It has been a steep learning curve, especially compared to the fun world of web UI programming. I’ve managed to find a few solid resources, though, so hopefully I should have a first version of the UI up later this week.

Our family went through the 2 dozen mangoes we purchased in little under a week, and we then purchased something like 2-3 dozen more. So there are a plethora of mangoes available for efficient consumption from the fridge. I’ve taken a few photos, but the camera and all the supportive cabling is too far away so that’ll have to wait for another day. Meanwhile, you can just trust me for telling you that the mangoes are, indeed, deliciously tasty.

Oh, I also watched a lot of the Indian Premier League (IPL) including the semifinals and finals. I didn’t really support any team after the Mumbai Indians crashed out, but I didn’t mind the Deccan Chargers, the eventual winners of the tournament. The thing that concerned me, though, is the fact that throughout the finals weekend, it was evident that the teams/players haven’t adjusted to playing after losing early wickets, yet. In all three games, the team batting first lost a few early wickets and then went into their shell and set substandard targets. In the semis, Deccan and Bangalore made short work of the targets set by their superior opponents, but in the final, Deccan managed to defend a small target thanks to a bit of luck. In the second semifinal, MS Dhoni was the key culprit after slowing down the scoring in the middle overs and being unable to accelerate towards the end. The man will have to do some thinking before going into the Twenty20 World Cup in a couple of weeks.

Also, a note on the NBA Playoffs–what the hell is going on? The commisioner must be in a frenzy as his Kobe-LeBron championship appears to be in jeopardy at the moment as the Magic have stepped it up. Although the Cavs still have homecourt advantage, the Magic look pretty good. Of course, the NBA Eastern Conference finals are not important enough to be screened on ESPN/Star here. The Western Conference games are shown… live. Go figure? Sure the Eastern Conference is usually boring thanks to teams like Detroit (=P) but still… Kobe and the Lakers have wrested back homecourt advantage after the Nuggets stole one in L.A. Game 4 is tomorrow and I’m contemplating waking up at 7AM to watch it.

I think that’s all for now. I’m just going to go back to my WPF self-training. Cheerios.