Why Would I Write

Category: Technology

  • No Rat Glue for the New Year

    Earlier today, I received an email from Lazada Philippines telling me that my order of a hair straightener, rat trap, and rat glue was being processed. Hmm. Very strange, I thought to myself – considering that I had no need for any of those items and the fact that I don’t shop on Lazada Philippines. The email was legit, so I knew it wasn’t some sort of phishing attempt. But it was sent to an email address that I don’t use for Lazada.

    Curious, I decided to log in to the account (using the forgot password option). Funnily, the email address wasn’t even verified to begin with. I had to verify it in order to reset the password. Fine, I thought – I verified my email address and reset the password.

    After logging in, I noticed there was another order that I wasn’t informed about via email: a ladies bag. I checked out the profile attached to the account – there was a name, address and phone number of a lady living in the Philippines. I guess she has a rat problem and likes to keep her hair straight.

    Anyway, I did the only reasonable thing I could think of: cancel the orders she made. Unfortunately two of the four orders were already shipped out so I could only cancel the other two (rat glue and handbag).

    Why do people use email addresses that don’t belong to them? On a side note, Lazada – why do you let people make purchases without verifying their email addresses? I’m not going to do anything else with the Lazada account and all the personal information I have but someone else with malicious intent would probably have a field day with all this stuff. Hopefully that lady learns a lesson about using other people’s email addresses to order stuff online.

    Imagine if it was some live-saving medication that I cancelled (assuming I was unaware of how important the order of medication was), and the recipient died because they didn’t get it. Would I be considered a murderer? Or would the judge say, “all this could have been avoided if the recipient had used their own email address. It’s not that hard to get an email address. Also, it is free. There is no excuse not to have an email address of your own.”

    Lady – here’s to hoping rats continue plaguing you until you realize your order of rat glue has been cancelled. And that you don’t have a bag for going out to celebrate the new year. Please use your own email address next time.

  • Goodbye Unifi

    Yesterday I handed in my termination application form and returned my broadband modem to Telekom. I’ve been using Telekom’s Unifi service since I moved in to my current home in 2011 so you could say I was a pretty loyal customer. I never had any problems with the service – my download/upload speeds were good enough for gaming, streaming and torrenting. The network was rarely down – I didn’t have any issues with the service at all.

    So why did I terminate my account? I was happy with my internet service. It was Telekom’s very own marketers that pushed me over the edge. About a month or two ago some dude called me up and told me that because I was a long-time customer, I was eligible for a “cheaper price promo”. I told him that was great, and I was interested in switching to it. But he told me that I couldn’t just switch my account to that new price – I had to cancel my account and sign up for a new account to get this new price point. We got into a debate over how absurd that was and I ended the phone call with him after about 20 minutes without agreeing to take this “promo”. Immediately, I went online to do some research about TM’s current price offerings.

    My plan then was RM179/month for 30Mbps (which was supposed to be upgraded to 100Mbps for free this year but due to my condominium’s network cable limitations, it wasn’t going to happen) – a plan that they don’t offer anymore (you have to Google to get to this page, it’s not even linked from their homepage – why is it still up?). If you check their website, they currently offer: RM129/month for 100Mbps (unlimited) or RM79/month for 30Mbps (limited to 60GB a month). This meant that I was paying an extra RM50/month for my current plan. Now, who in their right mind would want to do that?

    My 2-year contract had already long expired – couldn’t they have just reduced my monthly fee to match the current price? Why did I have to cancel my account and sign up for a new one just to pay the correct price? They aren’t selling my old price plan anymore, it doesn’t make any sense that I have to keep paying for it since I was no longer bound to a contract.

    I wrote them a lengthy email about my situation and they didn’t answer my question. They kept harping on the fact that I had to cancel my account to get the correct price. They marketed this ‘new’ price as a promotion. How the fuck is it a promotion if it is just the correct price for a service I’m overpaying for? If I had to guess, they probably wanted me to commit to another 2-year contract, or they wanted me to contribute to their number of sign ups for the year.

    Since Telekom wanted me to cancel my account anyway I decided it would be a good time to give Time a shot. I signed up for an account over one afternoon at Seng Yip’s house (the sign up process is a stupidly simple and quick process, big props to Time for making the transition so easy) and scheduled a date for them to come over. That day was yesterday and after successfully upgrading to Time, I drove to the Telekom center nearby my house to terminate my account.

    I hope Time lives up to its reputation – based on my friends’ experiences I’ve made the right choice (and for the past 24 hours I’ve been very very pleased with it). When the billing date comes around, I’ll be happy with the lower price and the fact that I won’t be charged for a service I never use (looking at you HyppTV).

    Also, this switch comes one year after I shut down a Time telemarketer almost a year ago. Does this mean his call worked?

  • Transitioning: Tablet Life

    Transitioning: Tablet Life

    I’m amazed at how far technology has come. I remember when I first got my iPad, I was struggling to do anything remotely productive on it. Sure, I was trying to type on the on-screen keyboard, but the fact that I couldn’t have multiple windows open, use decent copy/paste functions and cloud storage made it such a hassle to use. This was back in a time when transferring documents meant connecting my iPad to a computer and dragging files out from it. I decided not to ever use it for productivity and it turned into my gaming/video streaming device.

    Fast forward about 8 years now, and I find myself using a tablet to do my work and holy shit, the experience is amazing. So much has changed since then. “Why am I not working on a laptop?” you ask. My laptop is currently at a service center for repairs (one of the USB ports isn’t functioning properly) so I needed another computer to work with (for when I’m outside or in the office). I decided to pick up an Android tablet (Galaxy Tab A10.5) as my backup computer – since I could use it to replace my dying Android tablet at home anyway. After spending the past 24 hours with it as my working machine – I think it could replace my work laptop instead.

    I don’t want to spend paragraphs gushing about the device, so I’ll just summarize my thoughts on the device. The kind of work I do doesn’t require a very powerful device: a lot of word processing, the occasional spreadsheet or presentation, checking and responding to emails and research on the internet.

    Why the tablet works for me:

    • Having multiple windows open on the tablet’s display is a breeze to do (you can have split screen apps and/or floating windows), with no noticeable slowdown or lag. I can easily have multiple documents open to work with at the same time.
    • I can easily plug in any of my keyboards to the tablet (via a USB A to USB C converter) to use with the tablet, and a lot of shortcut keys remain. Even better if your keyboard has mouse move commands as that lets you have an onscreen mouse so you never have to touch the tablet display if you don’t want to.
    • Long battery life – according to what I read, I think it should last 15 hours – which is plenty of time. Longer than a regular work day for me which means I don’t have to worry about charging it as long as I charge it to full before I leave the house.
    • Because Android/Google is awesome, I have all my Drive files easily accessible to me without having to do any additional settings. I just log in to Google and I’ve got everything I need.
    • The 10.5” display is more than sufficient for my tasks, and when I’m not working, it doubles up as a great video player.
    • All the apps that I use run smoothly on this machine. Don’t think I’ll be gaming with it anytime soon, but I doubt it’ll be a problem if I ever decide to game on it in the future.
    • It’s friggin light. Having to carry it around in my backpack feels wonderful compared to the laptop I was lugging around previously.

    What sucks:

    • WhatsApp for some reason doesn’t allow you to run the app on multiple devices with the same phone number. I have to resort to using WhatsApp web on the tablet. It’s not the end of the world, but I don’t see why I need to rely on such workarounds – it’s 2018, everyone has multiple devices. Please implement support for it. Then again, this isn’t the tablet’s fault but I thought I’d bring it up anyway since I use WhatsApp a lot for work.
    • The screen is a fingerprint magnet – but it is only noticeable when it is off, so not really a big deal.

    That ended up being longer than I thought. I’ve only spent 24 hours with this tablet, so this piece is only a first impression, I’m sure I’ll find additional things to say about it in the future. If anyone has any experience with the transition or has recommendations about must-have apps or tricks I need to know, feel free to chime in!