Archive for November, 2005
Freedom with a Contract
Free enterprise in America does not necessarily entitle the customers with same level of freedom to choose. It is certainly becoming evident with wireless companies. I have been looking for a while to buy a new cell phone for my wife. I looked at all major operators and there are very few or no plans without a contract. I have to sign atleast a 1year contract to get a postpaid plan. And prepaid plans are very expensive. I thought prices will go down as markets and technology improve. But comparing with prices/features to a year back, it is required to pay atleast $10 for the same features, even after signing a contract. This is not the case in the other part of the world. The prices are going down and feature set is on the rise in other markets, while in US prices are on a steep rise.
Wireless Number Portability has been mandated (which allows to change the wireless carrier while keeping your old number), to provide more choice and freedom to customers to chose from. While all carriers agreed and provided the facility, they found a new way to prevent it from happenning in reality. They introduced contracts system, so that a subscriber is stuck with the same carrier atleast for 1 year. Most carriers have 2 years contracts for most of the plans. In effect, Wireless number portability becomes useless. So far, this feature has only provided more money to equipment vendors to support the feature and cost the subscriber a little more in terms of a regulatory fee to provide the feature. This is ridiculous.
While most of these 2 year contracts offers a free phone, I am not sure if it is still worth of the freedom one looses. You can not change the carrier. Period. Technically, you can. But will be paying around $200 as early termination fee, which does not make sense to most subscribers. So, they will end up using the same service, however deeply they hate it.
High Speed Internet via DSL – 1 Year Contract
Apartment Lease – 1 Year Contract
Satelite Dish – 1 Year Contract
Job – oops, you can be fired before you finish reading this posting.
Migrated to Wordpress
Successfully imported all my posts on blogger to wordpress. Thanks to Andy Skelton’s tool [ http://www.skeltoac.com/2005/03/12/from-blogger-to-wordpress-2/trackback/ ] and excellent tutorial at http://catsutorials.catsudon.org/?p=15. The tutorial has step by step instructions to import the content from blogger. Thank you very much Andy.
USPS is Spamming my mail box
Spamming is very well known word in the online world. Everybody in the world who has an email account suffered due to Email Spamming. Wikipedia describes spamming as “Spamming is the use of any electronic communications medium to send unsolicited messages to someone in bulk. While its definition is usually limited to indiscriminate bulk mailing and not any targeted marketing, the term “spam” can refer to any commercially oriented, unsolicited bulk mailing perceived as being excessive and undesired”. And there are so many laws around it to protect innocent victims.
Well, in the plain old world, USPS, the United States Postal Service does a lot of this by dumping so many advertisements and booklets like Valpak coupon books each and everyday. Every day, every american served by USPS has to suffer because of this spamming. Why this spamming of your mail boxes is allowed?
Is there any way, I can prevent this from happenning? Any help?
India In News
“India in News” is a news feed digest that provides latest news about India, has been added to this blog. So whenever you visit this blog, you can also see latest news about India right on this page, after the blog items. Scroll down if you don’t see news digest in your window. An rss feed is also available for the news digest in the blogrolls section.
The news search is provided by Google via RSS and multiple such searches are digested and made in to one RSS feed, thanks to http://www.feeddigest.com for such a handy feature.
Photos from Disney Magic Kingdom trip
Photos from my Orlando trip.
