BigShoeBazaar is a zappos ripoff concept arbitrage, and i liked the site when i saw it the first time. I wanted a new pair of sneakers so thought why not? This is what I found today. Astounding. If you ran a retail store would you let your cashier or accountant piss on the door? This is the same thing, and a big part of what drives me nuts about how badly many Indian sites are done. How difficult would it be to just put up a simple under maintenance page?

Perfect

Partly, it is because Mini-Me follows the Dr Evil formula so completely that he does not realise that times have changed and so have the rules. A platform that worked in the 1960s and 1970s has no relevance in the 21st century.

I think this is the jump readers need to make to really enjoy this series.  They can’t get so attached to Rand, Mat, Egwene, and Perrin that they aren’t willing to experience the powerful characterizations of other people in the world.  Those who can’t make this jump tend to complain about the series loosing focus.  Those who do make the jump get a story with more complexity and depth than you find in some of the other fantasy series, which stick to the more traditional plot structures and characterizations.

Brandon Sanderson Blog: WOT Read Through: THE SHADOW RISING

As a huge wheel of time fan who hasnt had a chance to read Brandon Sanderson yet(The books are in the mail) this entry makes me so happy. This nails what Ive always thought is the dividing line between people who think WOT is the best thing ever, versus people who cant stand it.

’twas an abaonded anchor that cut all those Middle East undersea Internet cables. The 5.5 ton (!) anchor is owned by one of the companies (FLAG Telecom) whose cables were cut. No one knows exactly how the anchor cut the cables—have you seen how complicated those things are?—but FLAG is repairing its broken ones now, a process that should be finished by Sunday.

via CrunchGear

So turns out it was Reliance Communications  owned FLAG that was responsible for the internet outages. If you thought the earlier conspiracy theories were nuts, imagine the theories now that a Reliance connection has been found.

Saw American Gangster a few days ago. This line from Roger Ebert sums up the movie beautifully:

The film ends not with a “Scarface“-style shootout, but with Frank and Richie sitting down for a long, intelligent conversation, written by Zaillian to show two smart men who both know the score. As I hinted above: less “Godfather” than “Wall Street,” although for that matter a movie named “American Gangster” could have been made about Kenneth Lay.

I highly recommend this movie.

I like using the net to do things. It makes my life easy for the most part and I appreciate that. The sad fact however is that as of today the internet is a second or third or fourth or non existent part of a companies strategy. That this is the case with established brands is understandable(if short sighted). But new companies, even so called internet companies, have some terrible service standards. I dont want to pick on one particular company, but its a company that serves a need close to my heart, and I really hoped for more when I joined.

Seventymm is an online video rental company. Modeled after Netflix, for a monthly charge, you can get either 4 DVD’s a month or an unlimited number of DVDs a month. There are no late fees, when your done, ask them to collect what you have at home, and they’ll send you the next movies in your queue. The queue can be setup on their website.

Though I love the concept( I remember one year when I ran through a 500 movie rental subscription, I rented maybe a 100 movies, but lost 400 in late charges)

This weekend I got the movie Heyy Babyy but the DVD was defective. That happens sometimes, not much anyone can do about it and I dont blame seventymm at all for that. The problem is what happened afterwards. One gets 2 movies at a time, and i hadnt seen the other movie(The Fifth Element if your interested) that was sent. But seventymm policy is that they wont send just one movie, even to replace a defective disc. This strikes me as foolish.

Another problem I had, was I tried to watch Lost. They sent me the first 2 dvd’s no problem I asked for a pickup. They sent me Lost DVD5 and some other random dvd. I called, but once again nothing can be done. Seems like it should be a simple enough fix.

Its annoying when a service that really has potential craps out on issues like these. They should have better processes in place to handle it.

I wish there were some more features on their website, though with the recent changes its become tolerable, a couple of months ago it was unusable.

All in all a pretty good service with some service issues they need to get under control. Especially this one movie at a time thing.