Damn themes

Why do people like to use themes that make their blogs very difficult to read? I’m taking about light blue on blue, light grey on grey/white, dark grey on black? And on top of that, they shrink the font size to 4 or 5?

I woke up to just that today. One of my favorite blogs that I visit twice a day, a US-based Dow Jones analyst, decided to go from a very readable black on white theme with font size 10 to a dark grey on black theme with font size 5. I had to cut and paste the text to notepad to make out what he’s writing.

Ok so he’s trying to chase everybody off and judging from his hits counter, its working. But then, why bother pinging his blog which he’s still doing? Why not just change domains, stop writing or shut down if losing his readers is what he really wants to do?

I just don’t understand some people.

Sprint fires 1,000 customers

If you think you’ve ever gotten a raw deal as a cutomer, wait till you hear this. Sprint the American phone company has fired about 1,000 of its customers. See the news here and here.

Why? For making too many calls to customer service!

I was like what??? but lets look at it for a minute. Who in their right mind would call customer service just for kicks? People call because they have a problem. And as long as that problem isn’t solved, they will keep on calling.

Yes there are customers from hell and most companies write service contracts to eliminate them easily but to ditch customers who were just trying to get what they paid for is bizarre. Think of the message it sends out to their other customers – knock on our door one too many times and you’re history man. Haha what a laugh.

And as if that’s not bad enough guess who made this “A” list last April.

Source: MSN Money

What a joke

Nothing is impossible?

Do you get people telling you this? I love it. It gives me an opportunity to pose them a puzzle they cannot answer.

Although I’m easygoing and optimistic by nature (I think), I’ll be the first to recognize that certain things cannot be done. Ever. Let me illustrate some challenges.

1. Walking thru a revolving door with a pair of skis placed horizontally on your shoulders. Let me be specific. The door is 6′x4′, the skis 7′ long, they (the skis) cannot be pulverized or broken up, the door cannot be moved or dismantled, and it must revolve normally as you go through. And the skis must travel through the door at a perfect 90-degree angle to your body.

2. A flying pig. Let me be specific. The pig must fly unaided. No balloons strapped to it, not ejected thru the air by some sick human, and not be on some type of aircraft – alien or otherwise. The pig must be a live barn animal weighing at least 200kg and not a plastic pig filled with helium. It must be airborne for at least 20 minutes and be at least 5,000 feet from sea level. And it must be able to take off, do loop-de-loops and land on its own, without any aid from any human, animal or alien.

3. Your car travels to the planet Mars and returns intact b4 midnight tonight. It must return with a trunkful of mars rocks from the crater of my choice and preferably with a green extraterrestrial at the wheel. The car is a full-sized car weighing no less than 1 metric ton and it cannot be dissembled for the trip. Oh yes, and it must do all this on under $10 worth of gas. With no rockets or flying saucers involved.

I actually like the tagline nothing is impossible. Its very catchy and makes us appear superheroish but sometimes you really do need to be on some kind of substance for it to make sense don’t you think?

Neighbors from hell (another one)

Last time I wrote about my weird neighbors on one side of the street. Today I’ll ‘celebrate’ the one on the other side of the street.

I call them the Weaver Bird Family because they’ve been altering their house bit by bit every day for 2 years and show no signs of stopping.

Tell me, what sort of people would make it a daily affair to do major rearranging of their furniture? I’m not exaggerating. At 11 every night, they’ll get into this frenzy of moving about their sofa, dining table, chairs, bed, even pictures on the wall. It happened every single day of 2006. How do I know? Every night I had to put up with noises of heavy furniture being dragged about upstairs and downstairs. As I drive out in the day I could see there’s always something different about their interior.

Theory: These are serious feng shui buffs. Must make sure the sitting and sleeping positions don’t conflict with the star positions or something. I’m sure they’d be shifting their furniture around every single hour if they could.

Well this February the Weaver Bird Family changed tactics and came up with a new activity: drilling into concrete and hammering something into their walls every night. This would last about 20 minutes at a time and would stop as suddenly as it starts followed by dead silence. Its like a ritual and its been going on every single night for the last 5 months. Without fail.

Maybe this weird family’s roof will collapse after all that drilling but to do this just before bedtime every night irritates the hell out of me.

Crap why do I always get stuck with the crazies.

What’s up with WordPress?

Am I the only one to get this when I click “New Post” in the morning?

Damn irritating but I’m NOT going back to Blogger. Well not yet anyway.

A joker a day

This week starts of with a rant. But that’s what I’ve been doing in the last couple of posts haven’t I. Anyway who cares.

My jokers for the week (one for each day):

1. People who speak extra loudly in a closed public place like a restaurant not caring if the whole world hears them.

2. People who arrogantly talk down to others thinking they have THE answer to riches, not realizing the person they’re talking down to has already made his millions while they themselves are struggling to pay the rent. Nincompoops.

3. Similar to #2, people who rubbish others and talk righteously about the secret of happiness when their own households are in a state of disaster. Jackasses.

4. People who complain, complain and complain (and look who’s talking )

5. People who don’t know how to park properly.

6. Women who say ladies first when it benefits them and men first when it doesn’t benefit them

7. People who borrow things and never return them.

I got a feeling this is going to be one hell of a week.

How many Malaysians does it take…

…to withdraw money from the ATM?

Three according to this picture. One to insert the card, one to key in the PIN, and one to say “Hey what the ^%$! you guys aren’t doing it right.”

It would’ve been funnny if there wasn’t 5 people in line waiting and fidgeting as these three tried to crack the DaVinci code of ATMs. But honestly why is it that in this day and age, its so common to see people still struggling to use a simple piece of technology? Or is it just in Malaysia?

To complete the story of the photo, after trying all manner of ways these three couldn’t figure out how it worked and left.

My turn was next. I was in and out with da cash within 30 seconds.

They turned around and couldn’t believe their eyes.

Don’t mix business and friendship

I hate member get member schemes.

A friend of mine tried to soft sell me something the other day. I was partly amused and partly annoyed. Amused because being a normally shy and quiet guy, he’s a disaster at selling. Annoyed because I hate to see a good relationship commercialized.

Ok, maybe its just me but I always have this thing against profiting from friends and loved ones. Money has a way of changing relationships, not always for the better. I don’t like to wonder about my freinds’ intentions everytime they call. It’s not cool.

I agree there’s nothing wrong with making a buck from a friend IF he is a willing party. The trouble is I was not a willing party. I didn’t need the thing he was selling and I didn’t enjoy telling him to zip it after he went on and on about it all evening. For me to buy it out of pity or to make him shut up is to be insincere. Either way it puts me in an awkward position. I hope he didn’t take my rejection too personally.

I know many people have customers who eventually become their good friends but there’s a big difference – the part about willing parties. Not everyone’s willing to let their friendship be transformed into a platform to promote products and make profits.

Anyway it was a rude reminder to me that even reputable companies are not beneath the tactics of dodgy MLM companies in turning their customers into direct salesmen. I’ve seen credit card, insurance and telecomms companies do it and in the process contaminating the trustworthiness factor of their brands. So damn stupid.

Are the companies to blame? I don’t think so. A tiger cannot change its stripes. If there’s one thing they understand, its the power of money and people’s hunger for it. In the end its up to us whether to take the bait or not.

Child disciplining: Are there limits?

This post is a little awkward for me as I’m not a parent but I recently saw a couple of sights that nauseated me.

First, a mother of 3 who makes it an almost daily affair to simultaneously beat all her children aged 1-5. The weapon is a plastic clothes hanger. The whippings can be heard a couple of houses away and if you could turn off the screams, the sound of the hanger’s impact with the body is enough to tell you she’s using all her strength to inflict pain. And not only that. Every episode is accompanied by a series of loud thuds. I imagine either the kids would fall or worse, they may be purposely flung against the wall as part of the punishment. I’ll say again, the kids are 1-5 years old and the episodes occur almost daily.

The second one was at a chinese restaurant. A female kid, also about 5 years, was having a tense moment with her mother. Crying loudly, the kid sat at the far end of the table to sulk. Suddenly the mother chased her around the table whacking her with a plate with all her might. This was right in the middle of a packed restaurant. The child screamed trying to ward off the blow with her tiny hands but the mother continued to beat her face with the plate. I swear when the mum paused to lean on a chair, I thought she was going to pick it up and smash it (the chair) against her child. She looked mad enough. Fortunately one of the patrons, a mid-aged father of two, stepped in using kind and calm words to separate the two.

All I can ask about the violence is, why?

I say violence because its not the same as disciplining. As a kid I’ve received my share of spanking which I’m sure I deserved but never to this degree.

What drives a mother to hurt the people she’s supposed to love the most? What do you suppose the kids will grow up into?

Noisy mamaks

What is it with Malaysians and loud noise.

I was at a 24-hour mamak stall last night with some friends, one of those corner shop affairs that would set up its chairs and tables al fresco (under the open sky) after dusk. Nowadays its becoming fashionable for mamak shops to show soccer matches on a large screens placed outdoors, with sound system cranked up loud. Except this wasn’t the only source of entertainment for this shop.

Inside the shop, they were showing a movie on two large screen tvs. The sound was pumped though a home theater system which you can hear from half a block away. On top of that they had Hindi music playing from a cheap cassette player sitting behind the cashier, the volume pushed up to pierce the mighty home theater with its shrill tinny sound. And all the speakers were strategically aimed ar the crowd of 15-odd tables outside.

So there we were sitting in the middle of the crowd. I was struggling to hear the conversation above the din bombarding us from different directions. I could not hear myself think. For much of the night I just sat there paralyzed, having one teh tarik after another.

Surprisingly nobody was bothered by this very loud assault on their auditory senses. Everyone was happily shouting and laughing at the top of their voices.

This noise cocktail reminds me of hot drink mixes popular here like cham (tea plus coffee) and Neslo (instant coffee plus milo) except that this is closer to strong tea, coffee, milo, coca cola and fanta grape mixed together with condensed milk and a spoonful of salt.

Or maybe its just me. I am unlucky enough to be born hypersensitive to sound. In school I could never understand how people could study with Bon Jovi turned up at full blast. Nor could I figure out how my old roommate could play mp3s on winamp, play a noisy computer game and watch tv across the room all at the same time. My brain just jams up when it tries to process too many sound inputs all at once.

Back to Malaysians. Has anyone noticed that tv sets have become mandatory fixtures at tom yum stalls. To stand out in the crowd the stall operator would try to drown out the neighbour’s tv volume, usually with the help of a powerful home theater system and strategically placed speakers. To double the attraction of his stall, he turns on a CD player and cranks it up to compete with his own tv set. To triple the attraction, he sets up a third sound source, maybe local talk radio, to compete with the first two. To quadruple the effect… well you get the picture. All this emanating from a stall no larger than 3mx3m. And from the looks of it the patrons seem to love not being able to tell when one song ends and another begins.

And its not just food establishments. I took a 5-hour ride in a bas ekspres once. In his infinite wisdom the bus attendant decided to turn on the “in-flight” entertainment so that the passengers can enjoy two Hindi movies back to back on a high mounted tv. The volume was cranked up until the speaker crackled. It didn’t matter to him that it was 11pm and that some passengers might actually be desperately trying to catch some sleep. I think the expectation is for you to just sit down and take whatever’s dished out to you.

If you think this only happens in hawkers and cheap express buses, you’re dead wrong. How about the flying mamak express. On a couple of international MAS flights, I got so annoyed with the overly loud (and cheesy) music they played during descent that I flagged the steward and asked him, “Excuse me, isn’t the volume a bit loud? I didn’t know we’re a flying disco.” He just smiled and guess what. He disappeared to the galley and did nothing. Only after I called him a second time, took down his name and told him exactly what I would do if he didn’t lower the volume did he lower it.

Trust me, when you’re thrown about by turbulence and your eardrums are struggling with cabin depressurization, the last thing you want to be is drowned in loud music.

This obsession with shoving loud sounds down people’s ears permeates in every level of society here – from village warungs to taxis to 5-star hotels. Why? I haven’t the faintest idea. I suppose its one of those things that makes Malaysia uniquely Malaysia.