Mtweeter seems Scammish
The phone is a pretty personal thing, very much like the internet but closer to you. It is very much like a home... So imagine some person, walking into your house, smiling at you and telling you he's taken some loose change you left in your room. You yell at him, he waves and runs off.
Now the very next week, he comes back and does it again!
Dad has been plagued by mtweeter feeds that charge him RM2.00 every week for a service he has neither used nor signed up for in the first place. The instructions to stop the feed doesn't work as sending it yields no results and you're only informed of it the next week when you're hit with another RM2.00 charge.
Personally I find this to be a little unscrupulous, its like skimming their userbase to earn a few bucks here and there. It can grow to quite a large sum if left unchecked. Imagine (taking my dad as a case study), he received the charge, he doesn't know what to do. He tries to stop it, but only finds out he fails a week later. Thats RM4 now. All in all, by the time he roped me into helping him stop this, he's already spent an average of RM10. This is non inclusive of any charges for sending the 'stop' messages. I'm not sure if that incurs charged.
So that is RM10 earned off a single user for nothing. Now imagine doing that to your entire population of users... that amount is quite a whopper.
I checked around and it seems that Maxis IS doing this a lot of its client database. Check out the discussion at their facebook discussion page... theres a lot of disgruntled peeps out there that are being afflicted by mtweeter and a number of different 'Maxis' services. The facebook page is quite a god-send as no company can afford to ignore public complaints for too long. The fact that they can't censor facebook also adds to the transparency in handling customer related problems. Usually feedback forms sent thru websites are usually sucks into a swirling vortex never to be seen again til months later when you've already discontinued the provider. To be fair, the chaps manning the facebook page seem to be pretty efficient and patient in handling the disgruntled online customers.
But it makes me wonder if Maxis is indeed leaking private information or using client databases to send spam to the public.
I would love to see a feature that prevented this from happening... something like Google's Spam block which would automatically block numbers that users define are spam. I'm quite sick of offers to have sex with strange women or to look at their pictures of them having fun being sent to my phone.
Change
It is said that inspiration comes from all sorts of unexpected sources and I was graced by one such moment a few days ago...
It was like Danny Wallace's sudden meeting of Maitreya the universal teacher in his book the Yes Man but my 'Maitreya' appeared to me in the form of a machine. A cold unthinking machine whispered to me a line of inspiration that shook me to the core. It was the ticket payment machine at Midvalley where I was paying for my ticket. As I popped in my notes, It boldly displayed, "Change is possible."
Time stopped...
This machine knew something....
Others might scoff and claim that the machine was referring to the spew of coins that it spat out moments later but I do believe it was trying to tell me something. That life is about change and that change is indeed possible. Changing to adapt, changing to improve, changing to better oneself... the machine knew it and it was sharing that simple truth with me. The cycle of reincarnation reinforces this concept that everything changes in some way or another, in some form or another.
I knew I had met my 'Maitreya'.
This here is a picture of an odd little game I purchased and played once... Pictureka! I should have read the instructions..
Keep on Digging
The more I dig down, the more I want to build up! I want to change to a new world but this one held such strong foundations. :p
On a different note, Buzz if you're reading this... vertical files are larger than horizontal files.. Strange huh...
Doom & Gloom
All the doom and gloom is really settling down on the world. The earthquakes and tsunamis wrecking Japan with the added threat of a nuclear meltdown... I don't see how things can get any worse for them.
Makes you appreciate our country for all its flaws, we don't have mother nature up in arms against you. Well,.. not yet anyways.
It is also a timely warning where Nuclear energy is concerned. Malaysia should NEVER utilize nuclear energy... at least not at this stage. If Japan with their ridiculously stringent processes have problems with a possible meltdown, I shudder to think what would happen if a nuclear powerplant were ever to be built on our soil. Malaysians do have a tendency to skip a beat at times.
Well if doom is indeed upon us, we'd be playing real-life Fallout pretty soon and I'll be damned if I'm caught unprepared.
CARROT APOCALYPSE!
Beware the impending carrot-apocalypse!
Currently very into the post-apocalyptic setting esp. a Zombie Apocalypse after watching/reading a lot of Robert Kirkman's 'The Walking Dead'.
Its frightening and dark and most of the time, the zombies on the outside are more humane than the people on the inside. Quite makes you want to stock up on tinned food and blunt weapons.