The following text is NOT about some ground breaking evidence to prove an Apple scam, its just a bad experience I had due to the behavior of some incompetent Apple employees.

How to buy a Mac?

• Go to the Apple store
• choose the Mac you want to buy
• pay for it
• and you have a Mac.

How to buy a Mac with student discount?

• Go to the Apple Store
• Choose the Mac you want to buy
• Ask for the student discount (You have to show some proof though)
• Pay for it
• and you have a Mac

For me it wasn’t as easy. I went to the Apple store at Stoneridge Mall, decided to buy a MacBook, the basic one, it costs $1099 and then asked for a student discount. The woman who helps people out said I will have to show some ID or they will need a print of some web page on the university website which says I do go to that school. What I did was login to the MyUnivname site and showed them my ID, the names matched and they were convinced so I was eligible for the student discount.

Then they told me about the printer rebate(buy any printer and you get a $100 mail in rebate) I didn’t see a need for the printer but then I was like, hey its free! So lets get it. Got a HP printer for $99 (Effective free when the mail in rebate is used) and the MacBook. I got the laptop and then checked the bill they gave me at the parking lot, just to make sure everything is right. This is when I noticed that the student discount was only $50 but I was almost half-sure that it has to be $100. So I went back to the store and talked to the guy that billed me and he said, the discount depends on the model and its $50 for the basic MacBook and $100 for the other two MacBook models. I was still in doubt but but was not very convinced as I have seen the price of the MacBook on the online Apple Store for Education to be $999. Its quite possible that they might have changed the discount so I didn’t insist them to re-check the correct discount.

By the time I reached home, I was feeling more hesitant about the discount and went online to check the discount and there it was, a sweet $100 discount on all MacBooks including the basic model. I immediately called the Apple store where I bought the MacBook and asked them what the discount for a basic MacBook was, the guy just said $100.

Oh really, I bought a MacBook few hours back and you only game a $50 discount

We are sorry about that come on over, we can rectify that

I forgot to ask him if I had to bring the computer along when I come for the correction, its obvious that the computer won’t be necessary because its just a change in the billing system that needs to be done, I called them back to make sure I didn’t need to bring the computer. This time it was a different guy on the phone and I had to tell him the whole story and what he said was just shocking

Actually the discount on the basic model is only $50

What???? The online Apple Store says $100

Oh, let me check (music)

……….

We are sorry, we confused it with the student discount for the iMac, come with your bill and we will credit the money back to your card.

I went back after a few hours and every employee was different than the ones I saw while buying the laptop, may be there was a shift change in the mean time. I directly went to the billing counter and told the guy about the $50 vs $100 issue and then he was surprised to see such a grave mistake

Who the hell did this? We are very sorry, let me correct this for you.

He typed something on the computer and then gave a new receipt with some $54 being credited back to the card. I guess the extra $4 should be for the tax they charged on the $50. So now I have got a $100 discount as I was supposed to. Its not such a bad world after all.

You may say why do all this when you can easily buy on the Online store and Apple will ship it free to your place in a day. It was actually a Saturday and I just couldn’t wait until Monday to get my MacBook so I decided to go straight to the mall and get one instantly.

Its Diwali today, one of the most exciting festivals in India. India is a country dominated by Hindus but still people from other religions can never find a better place with such cultural harmony. Every religion’s major festival is a national holiday for us. Diwali is the festival of lights, people celebrate by lighting candles and is now more of a multi religious festival with everyone enjoying the spirit. I will stop talking about Diwali here and you can find more about the festival at the Wikipedia page for Diwali.

Okrut today had a link in the top header when clicked toggled the theme to a Diwali theme which lookied like in the screenshot below.

Much attention has been paid to the footer to make it look more web 2.0

The logo has been slightly changed to belnd with the theme

Incase you don’t use Orkut, this is how the original theme looks like.

This Diwali theme just showed how ready the site design is to implement clean and blended themes. It might as well be an indicator that Orkut is getting ready to be themed. And the recent Open Social launch makes the okrut team more busy as they have to make it Open Social ready. Till now there is no sign of adding applications to Orkut.

Orkut does not allow customization like MySpace, but they have recently added many features like ability to embed media in messages, show updates from friends in the user’s homepage, ability to add feeds to user’s profile and more recently an Ask Freinds feature.
Orkut is one of the major social networks and is watched closely by analysts because its from Google. Intially Orkut was like a Brazilian social networking site but the scene is fast changing. It noew enjoys a strong presence in India. The Demographics page from orkut proves the point.

In India you can rarely find students who don’t have an Orkut profile. There are many home grown social networking sites trying to get a pie of this but most of their users overlap with Orkut. Online social networking is more a wild phenomenon among the youth and the college going crowd than with the working class. This might be more because of the censorship at offices than lack of intrest to network online. More schools and colleges are starting to block the use of social networking sites in India.

Google is silently rolling out a new version of their email offering. GMail has features that made the competition jealous and forced them to build new easy to use interfaces. GMail has been and is still popular because of the wonderful interface with an intelligent use of AJAX.

Today my account was automatically upgraded to the new version and though the features or UI have not drastically changed they have left an option to switch back to the old version.

The more actions menu has new options added to it. Select a message and select Filter messages like these from the menu and you are prompted with a new page to create a new filter.

There is also a mute option which allows you to stop the message received sound alerts while you are using the Google Talk integrated with Gmail.

GMail’s contact manager was definietely better than the competiton and now it gets even better. Earlier Gmail added the option to group contacts and new the contact manager in itself is a great applicaiton.

Click on image to view larger version. Sorry for the crappy editing, was feeling a bit lazy to edit in Photoshop.
Google announced introduction of IMAP for GMail and if you havent got the upgrade yet you are going to get it in this big upgrade.

GMail is the first web based client that changed the way people thought of email storage or may bethe one that made people to never think of storage. And whats a GMail upgrade without a storage increase. The new version has added 2GB to the existing 2.7GB making email storage more ridiculous to be worried about.

And changing between Basic HTML version and the standard AJAX version is easier than ever. There are links in the footer to make the switch.

The colors are now a bit softer. The notifier which used to tell us of our actions now uses a lighter yellow and it sure is better looking now than earlier.

Well what can I say, I’m so sad and depressed with what Google said to me today. Google called me a computer virus :( Oh you mighty Google, how ever mighty you might be, you can’t call a real person a computer script. People use CAPTCHA to avoid this situation, but you guys at Google used a CAPTCHA but still you called me a computer, too bad, real bad.

How it all happened

I was trying to create a new Google mail account, yaa I already have many but this desire thing, it never dies. I was trying to get hold of an impressive name when this insult was thrown at me. I tried quite a lot of combinations for my username, may be this is what pissed Google off.

Computers may be impressive electronic devices, but when some one praises the work done by a computer, they are actually praising the the algorithm that made the computer do that task which was in fact written by a human but when things like this happen, its the algorithm creators that are culprits.

I actually don’t know how they chose the old 7 wonders of the World but each of the wonders was pretty worth the title it was given. How and when did this need or may be desire to choose new 7 wonders arise? Nobody knows. At least I don’t and I also don’t think most of you even knew that there was a process underway to choose new 7 wonders until the pre-final and final voting started. Most people who voted may still not know what the final 7 wonders are, what they cared for is if the wonder they voted for made it to the top 7.

History of the 7 wonders

The very old 7 wonders (2nd Century BC) known as

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient world

Pyramids of Egypt at Giza*
Hanging Gardens of Babylon
Statue of Zeus
Temple of Artemis
Mausoleum of Halicarnassus
Colossus of Rhodes
Pharos of Alexandria

*The only Ancient wonder that still exists

The new 7 wonders

Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Colosseum in Rome
Taj Mahal in India
The Great Wall of China
Jordan’s ancient city of Petra
The Inca ruins of Machu Picchu in Peru
The ancient Maya city of Chichén Itzá in Mexico

The new 7 wonders website says

More than 100 million votes had been cast by citizens around the world using modern communications technology in this unprecedented global dialogue

What? Did that text have the number 100 million in it? Lets do some math here, the world population is 6 billion+ and they chose new 7 wonders of the world by considering the votes of 100 million which is a mere 0.01% most of whom were people trying to get their national monument into the list. Forget about the wonders people are  far less interested in electing their political leaders even though every democratic country declares the  election day a national holiday. They want to use the day to relax and get some relief from daily chores. Think of a farmer working on his fields, would he be worried about electing new 7 wonders of the world. So such small turnout can be justified but what about modern communication technology? Leaving alone the developed countries, how many in the world have access to modern communication technology.

The only thing cool about this new 7 thing seems to be the choice of date to announce the new 7 wonders, 07.07.07 (7th of July 2007) at Lisbon which again has 7 letters in it. Strictly speaking it was not really a tuff choice. They at least had to have something interesting to draw the attention of the rich who can donate more and more funds for …. guess what monument conservation and documentation worldwide. Ok monuments are important and they are symbols of various cultures but aren’t there other things like hunger deaths and AIDS which are more important than monument conservation?

The website goes on to say that they have used part of the funds raised to create a 3D model of the statue of Bamiyan Buddha which was destroyed by the Taliban and if the Afghan people are ready to rebuild they are ready to fund that project too. Doesn’t this seem like they are way away from moral thinking? Afghanistan is a country ripped apart by terrorism and war since the time of the cold war when the super powers used it as  a pawn in their strategic moves. Rebuilding some monument would be their last choice.

Well that’s what I think of the new 7 wonders but different people think in different ways, what do you think?