What is your excuse?

For as long as I can remember, I have tried to avoid utilities / bank / councils / whatever, which insists on using the telephone only as part of their customer service frontline. Sometimes, I find myself compromised or faced with no choice but embark into the myriad of irritating telephone systems, along with my inconsistent telecomm solution for the Deaf and HoH – the infamous Typetalk. I am aware that telephone systems are also a major gripe among hearing customers too but they haven’t experienced it through Typetalk, have they. My experiences usually are further compounded with technical problems and compatibility issues and I am sure this is also the case for many of the minicom users out there. The current systems of using Typetalk to access telephone systems and call centres are too inconsistent to make it an empowering experience. I usually get in a grump afterwards so it is affecting the quality of my life because I have to contend with 2 telecomms systems in one go and then pray….

Once I have a breakthrough, one thing I always ask: “Can I have your email address please?” I always get fobbed off because of security issues with using emails. On most occasions, I argue how can they guarantee that the person on the telephone is the actual person they claim to be so therefore isn’t that a security issue? For all we know, they could have the vital information at hand and pass them off as somebody else. Security issues revolving around using Typetalk operators have been brought up many times but, lately, there seemed to be less occurences of this. All Typetalk operators and calls are covered by Data Protection Act and Official Secrets Act.

Anyway, despite my efforts to get corporations to take my communication needs seriously, I never get very far as it is like talking to a robot – “It is company’s policy” – well, do something about it!!!! “It is company policy, I am sorry.” yes, I know but I am telling you I have a problem with this policy and accessing your services “Let me talk to my supervisor…” – …Note from Operator….[music in the background]…..huh, why do I want to know that……..”I am sorry, my supervisor said it is company policy…..”….arggghh!!

I can only deduce that eavesdropping a landline call must be more harder to achieve than hacking an email and vital data ending up with the wrong person – that is my impression. Although I have never seen my email ending up in the wrong hands in all my life, except through human error. Recently, I came across these articles recently – Computerworld | ZDnet – it is highlighting a real concern about the security of making phone calls over VOIP.

This is interesting because VOIP calls can be intercepted over the internet by determined hackers in tenfolds, as compared to eavesdropping on the traditional telephony. Yet, publicity, we are not seeing any waves regarding the withdrawal of telephone customer services in the face of potentially damaging security breaches, especially the ones where vital data are exchanged. Therefore, I cannot see any difference between accessing telephone services via VOIP and email-based customer services, which will, in turn, be an enormous plus for the Deaf and HoH customers. Companies need to wise up when making communication provisions for their customer service frontline. I really can’t see a convincing reason why failing to provide email-based customer services should prevail especially if they are allowing for VOIP calls, email encryption have improved and there are ways to establish secure communicatons online. I am able to communicate with my bank (First Direct) by using the web-based messaging system, which is hosted internally on the browser. I usually get a reply very rapidly. There can be no excuse in continuing with this discriminatory practice of providing only telephone-based customer services. By having this email communication outlet opening up, we can control and deal our own affairs independently and privately anywhere, without needing a minicom within the vicinity.

Does anybody have any thoughts or input to make here?

Ubuntu because u want to

Yesterday – 19th August 2007 - it was a landmark moment for me. I have always considered myself a long-time Microsoft puritan but I have broken the ranks because……..

 I have just installed Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn) on my machine!! I’ve completely wiped out my hard drive (after backing it all up obviously). I was feeling tense and had palpitations all day long because I am venturing into the great unknown and I have never reformatted my hard drive before. I felt I would be able to cope, digging into my long forgotten IT knowledge/experience for the best part of 90′s and late 80′s. At 3am this morning, Ubuntu is finally up and running. It was easier than I thought – except for a few niggles.

Fintan gave a good tip before diving in head first. You can create a Live CD with Ubuntu on it and run the OS from the DVD/CD drive to try out whether graphics card, printer, network et al are all functioning first. This can be done by booting up the PC with the Live CD in the drive. If you are happy with it, then click on Install icon showing on the desktop and it will do all the installation for you.

 My niggles were that the hard drive was playing silly beggars with me. “Install” would not work. So, I forced the main partition into FAT32 (using Gpart) – this is purely guestimation, on my part, cos it was trying to install on ext3 which contains pitiful disk space. I have no idea what that is used for but since I formalise my hard drive as a Linux drive with bootable sector (using Gpart), it did the tricks.

 As for the new OS itself, I need to spend a lot more time on it to see the benefits of it. So far, I like it and I have been drool over Gnome Art work available on the internet.

Don’t forget this is a complete change of my computing culture – not unlike trying to drive a left-hand drive car and having to flip your brains the otherways round i.e.  I always grab the window handle when I meant to aim for the gear stick.

Any tips and advice would be hugely welcomed here. I am about to add apps onto it in the coming week so if you got a favourite, please do drop a line.

Calm down..calm down….

This article is something I have kept for for the past few months and I constantly use it as a source of inspiration and provide me guidance whenever my emotions boils over. I have, on occasions, put my hands up in the air and admitted cupability/mischief/whatnots. I advocate transparency and being accountable for my actions. My biggest bugbear is victim mentality, which I occasionally find myself doing due to my conditioning and I recognise this and it is something I want to shake off. The article below capture nearly every essence of my feelings, the dilemmas I was faced during my short life as an internet poster/blogger and have a philosophy that I aspire to. Anyway, it is a great article and I hope it will inspire you all too:

RT recently posted an article on his blog with a piece of advice which is fairly common on the internet: do not feed the trolls. But day after day, month after month, year after year, trolls continue to enjoy the same level of success that they have done since the beginning of human debate and discussion. Why? I think what is fundamentally missing from such advice (anywhere) is how trolls operate and why they succeed and how they hit you where it hurts the most (metaphorically).

So the next time you read something on the internet which makes your blood boil to such an extent that you are dying to respond with a stirring, stinging reply, stop just a moment and ask yourself the question: Am I a reasonable person?

If the answer is: yes, then ask again, Is the person who wrote this article a reasonable person?

The question should be asked not because you were at boiling point. In fact, chances are you are a very reasonable person and you are open-minded enough to participate in debates and discussions without losing your cool. You are wise enough to know where to draw the line and when to withdraw decently from an argument. At the same time, everybody in their senses gets upset at issues around them from time to time. No normal person can remain perfectly unaffected by everything written or said about certain issues. The key here is whether the piece of writing which affected you was deliberately written in a manner which would emotionally affect any reasonable person. Because, once emotion takes over, logic goes out of the window. It always happens.

Internet trolls operate on this principle – they don’t care for factual accuracy of anything they write about so long as it sounds reasonally logical or intellectual and is superficially subtle. I say “superficially” because closer, dispassionate inspection would definitely reveal their true colours. But for that you need to remain unaffected by emotion while reading such provocative content.

Those of us who have been online for any length of period have experienced trolls in one form or the other, knowingly or unknowingly. We also know how immensely frustrating such trolls are because we are dying to prove that they are absolutely wrong and misguided in their writing. But at this precise moment, consider for a moment whether the person who wrote that article was honestly misguided and if so, whether your efforts at “correction” will actually be received in an open-minded manner. At some stage, I realized that it doesn’t matter whether a person is deliberately intellectually dishonest or honestly misguided. It works to the same thing. Very few people will admit to making a mistake in real life and even fewer will do so online. The very open nature of the internet makes it nearly impossible to admit an error without losing face. And most people, right or wrong, don’t want to lose face.

So rather than analyze why somebody would write such a provocative, misguided and factually incorrect article, you would be better off asking whether anything you add to the discussion (if it is a public forum) or communicate to the author (privately) would really be of any use. At best your response will either remain ignored or get buried under a huge pile of other responses. At worst, you would get rude replies which drag you further into personal conflict with the parties involved.

It’s better to be cynical about such things rather than implicitly believe in the honesty of such people or try to beat our heads trying to expose their dishonesty. I think a problem is that too many people are tricked into thinking that it’s their duty or obligation to respond to every argument with counter-points to show that they are not afraid of discussion or debate and so find it extremely hard to get out of a debate once they get in. Well, so what if you are afraid of debate? Does it matter when a nameless, faceless stranger thinks you are a sissy? So what if people think you’re rude by not responding? Are they related to you in any manner that their opinion about you will affect you in any way? Is the stranger who wrote that crap really going to have the last word on the issue under discussion? Isn’t it better to leave rather than make emotional outbursts and give them the pleasure of seeing you dance to their tunes? If you focus on the person rather than the debate, you would realize how stupid it is to even converse with a stranger on an issue that you feel so strongly about.

Getting drawn into argument with such people can get dangerously addictive and emotionally sapping. There’s nothing constructive in debate, genuine or not, beyond a point. Really.

The best response is to clear out and never return to that website to read it again. It can be hard for a while, but it is the only thing that works effectively in the end. Everytime I stumble across something disgustingly objectionable online, I make it a point to completely forget the URL by wiping out the browser history.

Social Bookmarking video – subtitled

This is a great explanation about social bookmarking where you can access, organise and share your bookmarks on any computer/machine with internet access. For further info, click here.

Update: If you feeling more confident about the del.icio.us milarkey but still haven’t a clue what RSS brouhaha is about, please click on this link.

Update: Further background viewing, regarding social networking, is here.