. : : Marc Sez : : .

This Is Not The Airtel Site, You Morons!

An hour ago, I received the following email from the contact form on my blog.

b. anuradha
change the plan reg

Okay so what does that mean? I suspected that it was another moron who thought my site was the official Airtel site even though there is nothing on my blog to suggest that. But the sentence made so little sense that I was curious.

So I replied to that email and this is the conversation that follows.

Marc
Why did you mail me using the contact form in my blog (http://marcvz.net/blog)?

b. anuradha
change the plan in my airtel connection -reg

My Phone No is 43559xxx we have change the plan for 747 scheme

(I’ve edited out the last three digits of the phone number for this post).

Damn. This must be the fifth time this has happened. Previously some idiots left messages in my shoutbox! I wasn’t going to let this go without some insults. So I replied to that.

Marc
So you think my site is the official Airtel site.

There is a limit to stupidity. Shall I come to your house and ask you to cancel my Aavin milk supply? Cancel your internet connection immediately and never come back to the internet.

Ha!

b.anuradha
i am very sorry sir

Well, it looks like she learnt her lesson.

Marc
Good. Now call 42111213 (Airtel Broadband helpline) and ask them what to do.

Deep down inside, I really am a good guy. After I’ve had my fun.

Hmmm. Now that I think about it the only reason for my final reply is that she was smart enough to chose Airtel broadband. BSNL users would have got no reply. (Mostly because I don’t know what BSNL’s call center number is.)

People contacting me asking me to change their broadband plans is almost as stupid as this.

Airtel DNS Problems (Temporary)

Late last night, so late that it was technically early early morning, Ragha and I were online on messenger and were talking about something or the other. I was also looking at some sites on the side and suddenly found that I couldn’t access anything. I couldn’t connect to any site. I suspected t hat either my connection was faulty or the Airtel DNS servers had gone down.

But the connection couldn’t be faulty since I was still talking to Ragha and that meant that messenger services (which don’t need DNS services) were working fine. I asked Ragha and he too reported that he couldn’t access any sites. I was really sleepy so I gave Ragha the number for Airtel broadband tech help (42111213) and then went to sleep. He told me he would call them right then (at 2.30 AM).

Since everything works now they must have fixed things. But I’m wondering if Ragha managed to report the problem and if someone was up at that time working in the call center. We’ll know more when he comments in this post.

CS CZ - From Noobs To Semi-Pros

A few months ago my classmates were total noobs at Counter Strike. Having played simple dumbed down games like Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 they found the game mechanics and weapon-buying concept of CS hard to grasp.

Some people didn’t understand how to plant the bomb.

Some tried to defuse the bomb by shooting at it. How could they possibly expect that to work? (Must have been watching too many Tamil movies.)

Some people forgot (or didn’t know how) to buy ammo for their primary weapon and then claimed ‘de gun is not shuting da’.

Others consistently fired upon teammates and claimed that ‘i tot u wer enemi’.

Well, we’re past all that now and most of them have learnt to play the game correctly, if not brilliantly. However we still get our asses kicked while playing against Expert difficulty bots in maps such as Aztec. Sometimes we get bots with names such as OBiT and MYTH while adding bots and these must be super elite bots or sometime because they usually take out two or three of a 5 member human team. Two of those bots usually end up wiping out all the human players!

Damn bots.

Read Gowtham’s post about this here.

Them Cats Be Everywhere

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any stranger.

Cat Vader find your lack of cats… disturbing.

(In case some people are not getting these Vader jokes, Darth Vader says “I find your lack of faith… disturbing.” in one of the Star Wars movies.)

George’s kitten should have similar L337 Math skills soon.

This last image is funny in itself but it needs a caption (LOLCAT style). Suggestions, anyone?

Darth What?

I’ve seen some very odd stuff on the internet. Like NASA shark. (Now that was seriously weird.) But there is never a shortage of strange stuff floating around on the internet. Look what I found recently:

What on Coruscant do you think Darth Vader is doing?

Oh No! Not You Too, Kitty!

Even the cats are not spared from the inevitable zombie apocalypse.

Speaking of zombies, Ragha came over today and tried to take over my computer. I confused him by giving him a pair of headphones I had bought for him earlier and he forgot what he was going to do and left.

Lazy Buggers At Invisionfree

Ever heard of Invisionfree?

Long before sites like Forumer came up offering free hosting with very limited control for forums, there was one major service on the net called Invisionfree (IF). Invision Power Board (IPB) was a forum development company that sometimes released their old versions for free usage.

What IF did was take IPB version 1.3 Final and then modify it to use on their servers. So you could provide some details and a free forum would be created for you at http://invisionfree.com/forums/yourforum and you could begin using it immediately. It wasn’t exactly free though. They put ads just below the header to get revenue. In those days we didn’t have Ad Block so we were forced to put up with the ads. (Well the amount for ad removal was decent but back then we had no source of income either.)

I started Alternation, our first forum, sometime in 2003 along with Krish Raghav. It’s a long story for another day.

We started on Invisionfree since we had nothing to do with domains or hosting or forums scripts at that time. We just needed a place to talk and waste time. After a few years of usage we realised that the platform was too limited for the customizations we had in mind.

Looks like many people felt the same and the people at IF finally decided to upgrade their forum script. They said they would build it from scratch and that it would be done very soon. They called this venture ZetaBoards. So we waited and waited and waited… Finally we moved to other forum scripts like IPB, phpBB and myBB.

That was about three years ago. We checked the IF support forum now and then and every time there was never a release date.

Today I went to IF expecting to see a grand new forum script running and a vibrant community and this is what I see:

November 27, 2007
After countless hours of hard work we’re proud to announce the full release of ZetaBoards.com. Registrations for new boards are open here - http://s1.zetaboards.com/zb/register/

Unbelievable. They had finally finished it 6 days ago. After working on it for YEARS. I think myBB was developed in lesser time than that!

Vote For Cthulu!

I only fear that he will be considered less evil than Bush.

Speaking of Bush… saw this on YouTube yesterday. An interview with a dead terrorist. Damn good.

Force India F1 Team Website

Kenneth pointed out the Force India F1 Team website in a Twitter update so I decided to check it out.

The page loads with a rather dull intro and the actual page is decent looking. Nothing fancy. The tricolour animation on the menus was a bit silly.

Even though the team is going to flop badly in the next season (all new teams do) it is still nice to see India competing in such an expensive international sporting event. The only other team to have the name of a country in its name is BAR (British American Racing). Now we have a home team to cheer, even though the only things Indian about the team are its owner and its name.

Just So… Wrong

This is so very disturbing.