Down with jaundice and malaria … Been advised two weeks bed rest. Its going to be a long two weeks!!
Month: September 2012
Jinx’s awesome service
I have always been a fan of Diablo, and even better cool Diablo T-shirts that I can wear at work. Jinx, is one of the few online e-commerce fronts which provides such products. This is the story of their service, and what makes this entire event worth mentioning!
Prelude
It was the 6th of June, and my family wanted to gift me some clothes for my birthday which was in the next month (9th July). So after great deliberation and going through their broad choice of shirts, I finally decided to purchase 4 shirts and opted to ship them to India using the basic shipping method, that’s USPS.
Now, for those of you who have not shipping anything from abroad, keep in mind that USPS is the US equivalent of the Indian Post Office (I certainly was not!!). What this means, is that they are as efficient as their Indian counterparts!
Eternal Wait
I ordered the goods, and the expected date of delivery was after 20 odd days. Great, no problem. After a good 20 days, the dispatch was yet to arrive. So I started tracking the dispatch. Turns out that USPS does not provide tracking of the dispatch once it leaves the American shores. That means, its pretty much lost in the darkness!!
Thus, started my period of eternal wait. Everyday I would try following up with different agencies – USPS customer center (as bad if not worse than their Indian counterpart), Indian Customs Office (try find their number online, even Google fails!), Indian Postal Office (who keep directing you to different numbers).
Re-Shipped!
With the d-day close, I got in touch with the folks at Jinx and informed them about the lack of tracking. The support was understanding and they immediately shipped a second shipment. This was due to arrive in India by the end of July. The shipping was still the same, USPS, which meant that I would face the same problem tracking the shipment. As expected, tracking shipment was an impossible task (we visited the GPO, the local PO, the Customs Office), no luck.
Now I was getting pissed off, and quite disappointed, two shipments dispatched and not one was being tracked. I gave up hope and did not follow-up for another month.
And there shall be Light!
Finally, in the month of August (near 25th or so), I dropped the support person a mail, and asked what can be done regarding this issue. This time around, they verified my shipping address and informed me that they would be using the premium shipping method … whew, I was glad to be rid of USPS service!! Or so I thought, the premium service used USPS in the backend as well! Contacting them was even more futile and I had more or less given up all hope of those 100 dollars that I had spent 3 months back.
It was the first week of September, when I received a call from my wife, and she informed me that a shipment had indeend arrived and it was from Jinx! I was elated .. finally the package had arrived!!
Thank you Jinx!
Not only was this service patient and understanding, but also they were willing to go the extra mile and provide me outstanding service. The package delivery was not exactly their problem, however, they owned the delivery and ensured that it finally was delivered. Good show on you folks!
Bollywood doesnt know finance
In case if you have seen any of the following movies then you will agree with me that almost all the protagonists in Bollywood do not know what are the different debt instruments available in the market these days.
Take the movie Om Jai Jagdish, or Hum Hain Rahi Pyaar Ke … or any movie where in the villain somehow coaxes either the hero’s family or woe be gone, the hero himself into an unsecured loan. Then when the hero is near bankruptcy, forces the hero to sell all family heirlooms and property in the classic filmy neelami. Fortunately, since all bollywood movies need a happy ending, the hero somehow pulls through by sheer dumb luck or hard work (or a script writer’s blessing).
But in real life this is vastly different. Yes, there are people who take unsecured loans, and yes there are people who declare financial bankruptcy. But there are easier debt solutions out there than doing an all out public auction or going bankrupt!
Here is one – an individual voluntary arrangement (IVT). An IVT is a solution wherein the repayments can be lowered, the interest rates can be kept constant and it can more importantly stop the creditors from chasing our hero. Now all he has to do is click for an individual voluntary arrangement. He has to fill in some simple forms and within a few months, his bankruptcy problems will atleast be averted. This form of debt management has been around for some time now, and is making headway in the UK. In the past year or so, BBC reports suggest that many individuals are opting to go this way instead of simply declaring bankruptcy.
You can find more about IVT, simply google for it or find the wiki on this. Now if only our Indian heroes were that smart and could keep up with the times! Not only would it save so much heartburn for their family, but would also save so many reels of trashy melodramatic cinema!
Installing WordPress on localhost
WordPress is a fantastic Content Management System, it can be a very simple application to learn for newbies, and it can still deliver the high level of customization that pros typically require. The level of help available across the interwebs for this is also high and it has a thriving developer community. I thought that I would add to the helpful howto’s on WordPress so that a complete newbie can install WordPress on his own machine to give it a whirl.
Here’s a step by step guide on how to install WordPress on your machine –
- First ensure you have all the right resources (XAMPP) – This is to ensure that you have a webserver with a MySQL server setup on your machine. Download the setup and install it. It will typically create a folder C:\xampp. Within this folder, make a note of the htdocs folder (this becomes your document root for your local web server). To check whether this has been properly done or not, simply open a browser and type in localhost and see whether you get a welcome page or not!
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After setting up your own webserver, you need the WordPress scripts. Download and extract this in your htdocs folder (it should default to a wordpress folder)
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Now simply type in this URL in your browser (http://localhost/wordpress). If you are setting it up for the first time, then you will be prompted to create a configuration file.
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Now remember, for the next step you need to have created the database for WordPress. This is pretty straightforward. Open another link in your browser (http://localhost/phpmyadmin). This will be installed by default if you are using XAMPP. I am creating a database by the name of wp2, here’s how it looks
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Now go to the previous browser window and click on the “Create a Configuration File” and proceed to the next step. Enter the following details, (Database – wp2, Username – root, leave the password blank since the default MySQL password for XAMPP is empty! Click on Submit.
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All right! You are all set to run the install (a confirmation for this is the Run the Install button!).
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The next screen is simple, what do you want to call your site (Site Title – I would always name it test since its on my local machine), username is admin and password also admin. NOTE – On a live webserver, the usernames and passwords will HAVE to be different.
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In the end, I always check off the Allow Search Engines to index this site. Its on my local host and I do not want to do unnecessary indexing and pinging to the search engines.
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That’s it, now you login with your username and password (in this case it was admin, admin). You should see the Dashboard of WordPress. Congratulations! You have setup WordPress on your localhost successfully!
I hope you found this helpful! In case if you got stuck anywhere in the steps outlined, do let me know, I shall be more than happy to help you out!
The Office-less Organization
As someone who has been working on the web for the past decade or so, I have always dreamt of my ideal organization as the one which does not have any offices (read that as a work from home). Obviously, I have heard of many IT organizations working on this model viz., Accenture, IBM to name a few.
However, my idea was not just that. I thought it could be possible to have an organization which does not have any offices! All the employees will be operating independently on their own. This utopian organization seemed a dream and I had more or less dismissed the thought … until today!
An excerpt from Wall Street Journal
The Web-services company Automattic Inc. has 123 employees working in 26 countries, 94 cities and 28 U.S. states. Its offices? Workers’ homes.
At Automattic, which hosts the servers for the blogging platform WordPress.com, work gets done wherever employees choose, and virtual meetings are conducted on Skype or over Internet chat.
The company has a San Francisco office for occasional use, but project management, brainstorming and water-cooler chatter take place on internal blogs. If necessary, team members fly around the world to meet each other face to face. And if people have sensitive questions, they pick up the phone.
How freakin’ awesome is that!
I decided to dive further, and learn more about this organization.
Guess what, they are awesome –
Being the makers of some of the web products that I have come to love and cherish – WordPress, Vaultpress, Akismet, Jetpack, CodePoet … damn, their lis goes on. Google cannot be a dream company, this should be the dream company for all of us WordPress tinkerers!