By Chewxy, on June 23rd, 2010%
Telstra sucks. Don’t get me wrong. I’m on Telstra (I was on 3, but I churned to Telstra because they had the HTC Desire, which I had desired for some time already). I spent the last long weekend in the cold collecting data, and here’s why.
So my girlfriend got on Telstra too, seeing that I had just switched to Telstra, and Telstra-to-Telstra phone calls are cheaper. She had wanted a Blackberry for quite sometime now, her previous phone being a Nokia E71. So, the decision was to get on Telstra’s Blackberry plan – the $49 cap to be exact. Now, she’s not a stupid girl (I mean, how could she be, she’s my girlfriend), and she knows a fair bit about Blackberries. So 2 Mondays ago, she went to get her phone – the Blackberry Bold 9700.
When she came back, she found none of her apps were working. Why? Because she had no BBpin. And after 2 days of troubleshooting, she discovered that Telstra sold BB data plans separately from a cap plan – a fact that she wasn’t told before hand. So she went back to the Telstra shop that sold her the phone plan. She clearly wasn’t informed about that, and guess what, neither were the people in the shop. The people from the shop didn’t know that in order to run Blackberry apps, you need a connection to the Blackberry servers. And to connect to the Blackberry servers, you need a Blackberry data plan.
2 days into your new contract, and you discover that on your own accord, spending countless hours worrying and fretting and troubleshooting the phone, my girlfriend was understandably quite upset about it. So, the Telstra shop people offered to put her on a Blackberry data plan and then immediately cancel the plan once she has downloaded all the apps and activated it. Hereupon, a second mistake was made. You needed a constant connection thru the BB data plan to get your apps working. It doesn’t just activate once and works. Neither the shop people nor my girlfriend knew it at that time.
Needless to say, by the end of the night, her apps were not working again. Naturally, everyone was upset. So, the very next day I went to the store with her, and tried to get things working. Here’s basically the summary of what happened in conversation (the Too Long; Didn’t Read edition is here):
Continue reading Telstra Sucks
By Chewxy, on April 4th, 2010%
First up, a little about what I’m currently doing. I moved recently after getting a new job – I’m now an economist in an online advertising company. What does an online advertising company need an economist for? Same reason why Google hired Hal Varian I guess (hint hint Google Sydney, if you’re ever looking for economists…).
Now, . . . → Read More: If I Could Start Over
By Chewxy, on January 30th, 2010%
In my experimental economics class 2 years ago (wow, it’s been that long?) we studied something called the Winner’s Curse. Essentially, what happens is when the winner of an auction (of a common value type) typically overpays for the auction. In some sense it’s a phyrric victory. Of course, the extreme form is by overpaying. Some other forms of the Winner’s Curse, feeling as if one has overpaid is also included (only if you consider independent value auctions as a form common value auctions).
I was involved in one such auction today.
So, as you may have known, I’m moving houses again, to a different state (and I complained about the design problems of the Rock Band guitar). Today I was involved in house inspections for rentals in the new state that I am going to be living and working in. Back in the Old state, looking for houses was a simple thing – there was very little competition. But over in New state was the first time I saw 30 people rock up to a tiny apartment and having half of them picking out the forms from the real estate agent. In all my years of finding places to rent, never had I encountered such competition. Continue reading Winner’s Curse
By Chewxy, on January 26th, 2010%
I’m moving houses again. This time, to a different state. So, as you can guess, I’m packing stuff up. And because this time round I cannot just put everything into the car and go (Australia is testament to failure of human cognition of large distances – one simply cannot visualize the distance from city to city) – I actually have to use a removalist. And so I started packing.
Then this is what I found:
Yes, you would have noticed that the guitar is larger than the box. No worries, you say, because the guitar headstock snaps off and it will go into the box, right (afterall, when it came, the headstock had to be manually snapped onto the neck)? So I flip to the back and looked at the place when I first snapped the headstock onto the neck, when I first bought the game: Continue reading Rock Band Guitar Design Failure
By Chewxy, on September 19th, 2009%
Ye gods, its the time of the month again. I rant as much as a woman constantly having PMT (I can imagine a barrage of feminists protesting this post now, you go girls!). And yes, its that time of every month again, where I feel so bloated from everything that happened. Its that time again, where . . . → Read More: Thinking About Entropy
By Chewxy, on September 20th, 2008%
YesIt’s been a while since I last posted a desktop picture (the last time, I posted a picture of the dining table. Previous times were of my desk back in Malaysia). I realize I haven’t posted pictures of my current desk, so here it is:
Continue reading The Geek’s Desk
By Chewxy, on September 16th, 2008%
Short rant. I was doing some work earlier. Then out of a sudden, my PC BSOD’d on me. So, fine. I can always continue my work on the Ubuntu laptop (though by then I had lost about 4 hours of work) while my Vista machine scans itself for errors.
So I booted up my Ubuntu machine, and . . . → Read More: King of Kernel Panic
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