Today I received a text message from an unidentified number see screenshot below.
Once you call the number, u get a voice recording that says “you credit card is being blocked. Please enter you cc number to unlock ur card.”
Curious abt what happens next I just entered some fake number and then it asks for exp date and pin”

BEWARE of this cc theft pranks

We have come a long way from 1,873,100 websites

Not sure if this is a coincidence but after I tweeted about their trash can on omahashouts I immediately saw a response. See photos day 4,5 and 6

Day 4                                                            Day 5                                                        Day 6

If you are thinking, you paid for your roll over minutes and you own it, you are totally wrong. According to the cell phone company, though you pay for it, they can take it away without compensating you.  That’s their policy.

Yes, when you downgrade your minutes plan, the cell phone company will take your accumulated role over minutes that you paid for with compesating you?
Its their unethical, FUD, we-win policy?

My Story:
Recently I was speaking to my cell phone carrier (AT&T). I was moving all the business phones to personal because maufait no longer exists . We had 5 cell phones (5 phones! that was good bootstrapping!).  I cancelled 4 and kept 1 and ended up  paying $900 for cancellation. That’s fine, i broke the contract and I have to fullfill my obligation.Here is the part that made me angry:
I also realized I won’t need all that 2,000 minutes (anymore) and I also had  8,000 rollover minutes (and I don’t have a lot of people to call). I asked the AT&T rep, if i can go to their 900 minutes package?  She said of-course, may i ask why? I explained the situation and she said

AT&T Rep: If I move you to 900 minutes package, you are going to lose the 8,000 rollover minutes and you will retain only 900 rollover minutes from the new plan. 

me:  Well then will you add 1,000 minutes if I upgrade my plan?

AT&T Rep: Nope.

ME:  Sure you can take the 7,100 minutes from my rollover, but you have to pay me 7,100 minutes. I paid for those minutes, it was not free and I saved them and you cannot take away without paying me back.

AT&T Rep: Well we can’t pay you. That’s our policy

Can you digest their reasoning?

Few weeks ago I was reading a blog post by Robert Scobble
Is the real-time web a threat to Google search?

He makes a valid point on google no longer being the comprehensive search engine.  I agree, when it comes to finding people. Recently,  Linkedin has been actively promoting profiles on google and that could change the game for google. I like piple.com better though.

How i found Roy:
It has been years (9 yrs)  and i have almost lost contact with most of my friends from my years in Bombay. Occasionally I would do a google search  to find my friends. And always i have been very unlucky.  Firstly because when you are finding a person, google still treats your search term as keyword and not a person. And secondly, most Indian names have 10,000 people (Well with population at approx. 1 billion + its easy to run out names).  I had almost given up.

And one day I stumbled upon pipl search at techcrunch. pipl.com is a vertical search engine focused on finding people.

When i typed in Roy varkey + his profession in pipl.com,  the site’s search result gave me more relevant results than google. pipl.com treats your serach term as a person as opposed to keyword and hence fetches more relevant results. Here is some extract from piple.com about their methodology for search.

How come the best search engines fail so miserably when it comes to people search? The answer lies in a little known but very important part of the web called “the deep web“.

Also known as “invisible web”, the term “deep web” refers to a vast repository of underlying content, such as documents in online databases that general-purpose web crawlers cannot reach. The deep web content is estimated at 500 times that of the surface web, yet has remained mostly untapped due to the limitations of traditional search engines.

From the search result I was able to find all the Roys, i could narrow the results by profession and then skim through the results to where he lives and the company he works for. The comany’s website had their phone number and then the rest was easy.

Back-up. Back-up. Back-up. How did I miss that? Last week i moved all my domains to a new server. I took back-up of most files but forgot to  back-up my blogs. Now that I’ve cancelled my account with the previous host, i can’t get back to my posts. Well, that’s ok… clean slate is not bad either. The best part, i don’thave to feel guilty anymore of not blogging regularly and be more desciplened at blogging.