What a fantasitc GTD tool

As I am more and more fascninated about Wiki’s I slammed into TiddlyWiki’s page. What a fantastic idea. A Wiki that’s just a single HTML page and that can even be backed up. The stand alone Wiki is searchable. This can be a good start who want to organise their routinue life but don’t have a tool like Outlook or don’t want to use a tool like Outlook. As I see this HTML can be uploaded on a personal website and can be used from there too. Fantastic idea mate. This has to be tool of the day for me.

INGDirect Sucks, Sucks, Sucks..

**Warning** This blog post is full of personal dissatisfaction towards INGDirect Bank.

Today I got a link for INGDirect’s bank offer. They were offering $123 (bonus deposit) to any new customer who would open a savings account with them before 11:00 P.M. on 10th May 2005. Here is the link. I have saved the print screen of this image as well ;). Now I have seen INGDirect advertising all over Hotmail about their savings account and they are always offering some kind of bonus deposit over it. $123 was a good start and I wanted to open an savings account that was giving me more interest rate compared to my existing bank account. So I thought why not give it a try. I went ahead at 8:45 P.M. in the night and started the process. To start with their website was too slow and irresponsive After few retries I got to the account opening page and was slowly moving ahead. I was nearly at the end of final step (where I have to select a pincode) and then I clicked next and I got an error message saying something like ‘cannot move further False’ and some script= *6.asp page. Hmmn, the beginning of real problems. I went back more than five times and clicked on continue again, but with no luck. I called their customer service. I am on hold for 22 minutes approximately. The customer service representative was rude, was not showing any signs of helping me and the only answer she kept on giving was ‘I cannot help you, you will just have to start over again’. I said ‘OK, Thank You’. Came back to my computer and started all over again using different browsers this time. No luck now I could not even go to their main link page from where I was supposed to start my application. I tried to call them again and was on hold for 15 minutes before I just hung up the phone.It was 10:18 when I stopped trying on INGDirect and writing up this blog. This also happened with two of my friends to whom I forwarded the URL link and they had no luck either.

INGDirect you guys have wasted nearly two hours of my life without any fruit. I think all customers like me should charge you for the waste of time done on the phones and on the INGDirect.com.au website. I am totally dissatisfied and I doubt that I will ever sign up any accounts with you guys unless I get an explanation to what happened with your marketing campaign today. You guys advertise and spend thousands of dollars all over the Internet in attracting customers. You guys lure them with better incentive schemes. But what’s the fun when your own website is not co-operating nor are your customer service reps. I had four more customers on the move excluding my wife and I who were going to be your customers tonight. Your website was not ready to handle the load I think. Your call centre’s were not ready to take the calls. What impression does it give when your prospective customers are calling you for the first time and they have to wait on hold for more than 20 minutes? I had problems trusting a bank without a branch office and on top of this such rude customer does not help. What are you guys going to do about it? Are you going to exend your offer till a later date.

If not than listen all the Other banks in Australia, give me a deal that INGDirect was giving me today, $120+ bonus and 5.4% of variable interest and I will sign up two accounts with you today and now. I will make sure I bring along many friends of mine too.

By the way I did take some screen shots of the pages from INGDirect website. The screen shots were taking using OneNote 2003. The screen shots can be found at http://www.itejas.com/gallery/INGDrama

I might also send a copy of this post to IngDirect through email (not sure if they check it though).

Web Search and my mentality

I just realised consiously today that lately my way of doing search and search engines have changed. Before I used to look for things on Google and I used to have a gooood long look. Now I go on Google and if the search results do not show the things I am looking for on the visible screen, than I move away and do a search on Yahoo or MSN and do the same there. Just look for the search results on the first screen. I have’nt remembered scrolling down the search page for a long time now. And do quite a bit of searching. I have 250 searches in Google search history. I am sure there will be millions of people like me who have so many choices now that they are not ready to scroll down the page to see more searches. This might mean that businesses will have to work more harder now to get their websites on the top so that it is visible on the first available screen. What do you say?

Will people start bitching about Firefox now?

There is a security advisory on Mozilla Firefox. Two vulnerabilties are found which when combined can let a attacker to run arbitrary code on a user’s PC. E-week has an article titled “Zero-Day Firefox Exploit Sends Mozilla Scrambling”. I am sure this vulnerability will not get the same kind of coverage and bitching supposed to a similar vulnerability would have scored if this was found in IE! I am still using Firefox and loving it. I will keep on using until I find something that really worth changing to.

Will watch how much coverage this vulnerability gets. If you are still with IE than you might want read this funny post.

MCSE Upgrade: Domain and Forest functional level

Domain Functional Level

There are four types of Domain functional level:-
1) Windows 2000 mixed (default)
2)Windows 2000 native
3)Windows Server 2003 interim
4)Windows 2003 Server

Here is more detial on domain functional level. Changing a domain functional level is a one-way process only.

Here are some related links.

–>How to raise domain and forest functional levels in Windows Server 2003
–>Raise the domain functional level

Exam tips:- Remember the domain functional levels and the various domain controllers supported in each functional level.To raise the domain and forest functional level one must be a member of either Domain Admins group of that domain or the Enterprise Admins group in the forest of the root domain.

Videos:-
1. Video 1
2. Video 2

My first Video Post

I love training. I love teaching people new things and I love to see when they are amazed as to what they can do with the tools and software available to them. As I am preparing myself for the certification exam, I thought I will do a video of labs that I am doing as the part of my studies. So just to get started I recorded a video today, merged the sound with it and the outcome is a video of the lab I did. OK, I know it’s not the best quality video I have ever seen, I know the sound is shaky and I am stammering at times and I am also aware that what I saw it not 100% technically accurate in the video. But here we are with my first video. Is this what video podcasting is? 🙂 :). I have to admit that I enjoyed doing it. My video can be downloaded here. Although I am going to write notes that go along with this lab, I am just to excited till I finish writing up the relevant notes and share my first video with you.

In my next video, I will make sure that my objectives for a lab are clear before I start doing the video. I will write the main points to be discussed on a piece of paper so I don’t forget to mention those. Also if I keep on doing these videos than I will learn to edit the videos and the sound and how to save the videos at better resolution along with keeping the size down as possible. Please extend any suggestions you got. Positive criticism will be appreciated.