Views and Reviews

How would you treat people who just hop back at you only when they need something  for themselves?

• I have no idea regarding the specified framework called Drupal. If you would need, I can muster some PHP folks through my known recruitment circles and help you with. That would take a week’s time.
• Not sure, if the entity mentioned as ‘some one’ is very important and is on a pressing need and hence I would not rather give any firm commitment from any delivery commitment from my perspective in this aspect.
• I also expressed my dissatisfaction in that this request is being routed to me after a long sojourn of no-contact and then just as a ‘bolt-out-of-blue’, this request is bothering my attention.

• When he joined an insurance company in Chennai around in 2002, he could help us with a good insurance policy to enrol. Had we been visiting another new insurance agent, we would end up with a class two policy paying up a higher premium for the same, since we were in the start of the career then and not knowing how best to negotiate and clinch for a good deal.
• He joined another private bank in 2004. He used his privileges to bargain for different loans with processing charges either heavily waived or subsidised for a number of associates in the group who were interested.

But the benefit I outlined should be treated as a one-off case. The bottomline of the story is that let us not treat others as just only information carriers/service provider piggybacking on them for selfish benefits. That does not fit the ethical spirits too.

The government should consider distributing its officials including the ministers throughout the state instead of keeping in one closed place of the city.

This discussion applies from the observations based from Chennai. It might be applicable to other states as well. Readers: Please feel free to share your views on this as well. A number of main ministers in the state of Tamil Nadu actually relocate to Chennai after being elected so that they can attend the daily assemblies in the secretariat. But the catch is that most of them are located within the same area. Either like MLA hostel or in posh areas of the city.  For example, I remember, Stalin was better associated with his residence in Baby Nagar (Velachery). Whilst he was in Velachery, the state administration was very particular in ensuring the civic and commuting infrastructure of the town. But once he was elected as the minister, I believe, the statutory shifting of the residence process chipped in and he was moved to Greenways Road. Perhaps similar plight and argument applies to other ministers as well from other parts of the city.

1. The civic administration agency would have a fear and would ensure that the area would be maintained in a good order.
2. The police would ensure that law and order situation in the area and vicinity are perfect.
3. This would also ensure that one particular area does not become cordoned off for the general public and minister-public rapport/relationship would be elevated to a greater extent. In other words, the difference between them would shrink.
4. Since they are in different areas, they would know the problems faced by the public and help achieve the resolution quickly.

Readers: What do you say?

1. Revamp and renaissance of the Friends of Police movement. This would complement the efforts of the cops who seemed to be having a shortage of labor in enforcing law and order in the nation.
2. City/Town beautification efforts
3. Quick relief disbursements

Readers: What do you feel? Do share your thoughts on this topic too…

1. ICICI Bank Infinity Logout still uses defunct Web Browser object and gives Scripting Errors: When you are logged on to the Internet banking module of ICICI Bank (called Infinity) and after completing the transaction when you logout, you would for sure encounter weird scripting errors because of the now obsolete Web Browser control. You can see the following code in the view source of the page which reveals the bad programming practice used by their development team and also use of old unsupported code:

   <OBJECT ID=”WB” WIDTH=0 HEIGHT=0 CLASSID=”CLSID:8856F961-340A-11D0-A96B-00C04FD705A2″>
     </OBJECT>
   <SCRIPT LANGUAGE=”JavaScript1.2″>
   <!–
   function winload()
   {
   if(navigator.appName==”Microsoft Internet Explorer”)
   {
   var BrowserVerStr =navigator.appVersion;
   parts = BrowserVerStr.split(“;”);
   var preBrowVer = parts[1]
   var BVNum=parseFloat((preBrowVer.substring(5,preBrowVer.length)))
   if (BVNum >= 5.5)
   {
   WB.ExecWB(45,2)
   }
   else
   {
   window.close()
   }
   }
   }
   //–>
   </SCRIPT>

2. Every page in Infinity gives a warning like ‘This page contains secure and insecure items’ warning page, which is rather very irritating when one seriously is involved in a banking transaction. There hasn’t been any visible effort by the bank to correct the same too.
3. Citibank Online seems to be nurturing an aspiration to make internet banking as difficult as possible for the user. You have to logon using a big debit or credit card number. Only a few days now, they have started to bring the concept of storing a nickname for the number and that too as a cookie in the computer. So if you use five to six computers to logon to Citibank Online, you would need to setup the nickname in five to six computers. You also end up effectively in divulging your debit/credit card numbers to multiple systems and the fiscal peril increases its wings and dimensions when you are using a shared computer from a library or an internet kiosk. Standard Chartered was using this workaround long time back but now they have migrated it to a friendly username rather than beguile numbers for logon process.
4. All these internet banking applications also have something called timeouts. Even if you are typing a long message to customercare, the timer still keeps ticking and half away through the message the clock would alarm and signout of the application, if you aren’t careful. Not sure, what is causing them to monitor keystrokes within the application and have the timer automatically renewed.

I just thought I would share these observations with other readers so that people can be careful whilst dealing with these buggy internet applications.

1. Mobbing
2. Reference Spamming

1. Citibank: Whenever you call Citibank India, you would be required to punch in your long debit card number first. A few months before you were prompted to enter your telephonic PIN (to waive off any crazy q&a session with that cabbage phone banker). They have intentionally modified this to entering your date of birth. But when you transfer to the customer care, you should again opt to exercise your choice (1) Pending Query (2) General Query. You need to brief to them first your problem. He would summarize you again. Now he would put you on the IVRS to authenticate your TPIN. Again you have to brief them since by the time you go to IVRS and come, there is a good ninety per cent chance that the phone banker would forgotten your query only to greet you with ‘Thanks for authenticating your TPIN. How can I assist you?’.
2. Standard Chartered: Even after you authenticate TPIN, you are always forced to have some interactive Q&A session with the phone banker. Some of the questions are:
   1. What is your name? [In future, they might include ”What is your dog’s name?’ too. :)]
   2. What is your account number/full card number? [Can’t they read it from the input I have already given to the IVRS?]
   3. What is your date of birth?
   4. What is your mailing address? [They might tweak this to “Where did you have your hair cut this Sunday?”]

      I challenged them quite a few times on the need for this redundant validation. They just have the same standard gibberish scribble (through Internet) and feeble replay (on the phone) that ‘for security reasons’. Not sure what is that curiosity in the crazy security procedure they are trying to use.

3. Vodafone: Vodafone is another set of jokers. I believe we have a good length discussion on this topic already here.