Worst experience with Nokia

I own a Nokia N73 phone. It came with a 2 Gig memory card, but that hardly worked after I bought it. I gave it at one of the nokia care centers in march. Still, I dint get the replacement for the card which was covered under warranty upto now. Be careful when you choose your nokia care center. Edgecom in Tippasandra Market, Bangalore is one of the worst in providing service. I thought I was the only unhappy customer of theirs, but there were lots more. Lot of people are complaining of their service. Don’t forget to choose a good service center. Dont be a fool like me.

Update: I got it back at last, after fighting with the center manager. Whoa, six months!

Phoonk

Today, I watched Phoonk with my roommates. I’ve seen few movies on black magic in Telugu, which are usually scary. Phoonk is really very low on getting me scared. Except some sound effects, there’s hardly anything that can scare badly. I watched his Bhoot, which was better than Phoonk in scaring the hell out of me. But, Bhoot was a different kind of movie.

On the whole, RGV kept Phoonk short and simple, his usual style. The movie is all about black magic. When I was at school, I used to hear stories on black magic from fellow students and teachers as well. There was one guy who told me that his grand father was killed by his enemies using black magic. I’m very neutral to the concept of God, I know people who are for and against the concept of God. It’s really hard to think of these abstract subjects. But one for sure, God exists if and only if devil exists. Oh! Gimme a break.

Coming to the plot of movie. The movie opens with Rajeev, a builder, talking to his employees. While excavating for the building, a stone like Lord Ganesh in shape is found, so all his workers want him to construct a small shrine to the Lord. But, Rajeev being an atheist, doesn’t agree to the proposal. His lawyer friend, who is neither an atheist nor a theist, tries to convince him that there is hardly anything he is going to lose by constructing the shrine. But Rajeev is just not convinced. After that, to celebrate a new contract that he won, he throws a party at which the lawyer reveals that Rajeev’s employees had cheated on him. Rajeev angered by that, throws those two employees out of the scene and dismisses them. As a revenge to the humiliation, the two thrown out employees plan to do black magic on Rajeev’s daughter, knowing Rajeev loves his daughter so much.

It all begins then, the typical black magic stuff – bones, lemon, kumkum and turmeric powder appear in his courtyard. Being an atheist, he asks his servants to throw it off, but they refuse to do so and Rajeev throws it off in the bin and get back to his work. After that, his daughter complains that somebody has cut her hair. Rajeev hardly pays attention to the matter. After that, again typical black magic stuff, some one picks up mud from the place bones were placed, after the girl stands there.

Then, it becomes worse. The girl behaves wild, she shouts hysterically with out her knowledge. Her arm gets twisted with out her knowledge and she floats in air. Rajeev and his wife worried, call up on the doctor and a psychiatrist. As usual, they look it from scientific view and take her to hospital. But finding nothing unusual, they say it’s a split personality kind of disorder and treat that way. A fake swamiji appears in middle trying to drive the evil spirits away. Rajeev’s mother feels that doctors can hardly do anything and says black magic was done on the little girl.

The lawyer, seeing all the pain his friend is undergoing, asks him to consult another magician who knows about black magic. They bring him to the little girl. The magician detects that and asks to take him to the house. He detects everything bad there and says two people have done this black magic for taking revenge and there was another person helping them and points to his driver. Then, they find where the evil people (his ex-employees) are and destroy the black magic. The magician kills the evil lady by his super power.

On a whole, it’s a good movie, but not scary enough. Sudeep’s performance is very good, so is the little girl’s. There are open ends and RGV has announced a contest to suggest the story for Phoonk 2. Try it out if you can.

Related Read: A report on banamati/chetabadi and how strong the superstition is prevalent in the masses of Andhra Pradesh.

Annoying video ads on IBN Live

Advertising has evolved. Video ads are good, but it doesn’t feel good when you open some web page and hear some noise that you din’t ask for. Such is the video advertising by the ad-dollar hungry site – ibnlive.com

Annoying iphone advertisement plays some sound track when I open ibnlive.com home page. Such a bad user experience. The ad guys at IBN need to think of what ads should they show on their home page.

BTW, iphone looks very overpriced. If I’m right iphone is trying to push 3G phones in India and TRAI has just given 3G regulations in India. Until 3G comes in, we dont know what the usage charges will be. Think before you buy an iphone at the price of 31-36K INR.

Bye Bye ibnlive.

In the name of CNN, comes the malware

I trust my mail provider to filter all the spam, but I regularly check the spam folder to avoid false positives. Any way false negatives show up in Inbox.

Email scams are normal, I’ve learnt to live with it. This is a recent scam that I saw. The email says “CNN.com Daily Top 10″ which has a lot of links (all pointing to the same page). It’s very appealing with the recent news headlines or celebrity names in the links.

The links lead to a rogue site that asks you to install an activex control. Even if you press cancel, it asks you again and again and it’s almost a DoS attack on your browser. You gotta kill the browser or install the malware.

I love Microsoft (and other browser guys) for this. What if the default setting is to automatically install ActiveX controls with out asking the user. How many of the users would change the default setting.

The minds behind this might be trying to create a bigger botnet. You definitely don’t want your computer to be a part of a world wide botnet that can pull down websites and cause a havoc on the Internet. Recently Georgia president’s website was subject to similar DDoS attack through a botnet.

Do not install any ActiveX with out properly knowing what it does.

Update: Another variant of the mail, which is more convincing mail with one link to cnn.com and one link to a different rogue site. Be careful when clicking links. Even your computer can be affected by this.