Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Now this one is simply great.

I was reading through the funny IRC quotes at Bash.Org.Ru, which is a Russian analogue of Bash.org, when I came across the quote #4741.

Here is a rough translation for you:

Billing

Dear customers! For the last three days we had a technical problem and your used Internet traffic wasn’t calculated properly. We kindly ask you to calculate the approximate amount of traffic that you used during this period and pay cash accordingly in our office. With best regards, company management. http://isp.kz/

I smiled and almost went away. But before I did so, I noticed a small post-scriptum - it was a moderatorial note from bash.org.ru that confirmed that this message was actually posted to the official website of the provider.

So, I rushed to check it out and, indeed, it was still there.

I was laughing so hard that I almost woke up Olga and Maxim. I mean how stupid and naive that is - asking your customers to pay based on their own calculations? What are they counting at? Good will? Honesty? Or maybe they just have an excellent sense of humor. If so, they should have an update of some sort published shortly.

After all, those who thought tha Borat (.kz stands for Kazakhstan, as does Borat) was an exhageration are wrong. He is by far not. No.

Hellenic Bank has been one of the best banks on the island for some time now. The difference between all of them is very small, but in this case, that’s what makes it more noticable.

One of the reasons that I switched to Hellenic Bank was that their Internet Banking website was working in Mozilla Firefox. And not only it was working, it was almost perfect - all operations were available and there was no need for a Java plugin or anything like that.

A minor annoyence existed though. Main menu was a little bit screwed up and didn’t show completely. It was possible to see it by clicking the little menu frame and either selecting text in there, or using the scoll mouse. Not very comfortable, but at least it worked.

Last week Hellenic Bank finally fixed the issue. Now everything looks and works perfect. More reasons, therefor, to stay with them in the coming year.

If I was to pick a feature that I miss the most, it would be the SMS notification for the change of account balance. Currently I can only setup alerts which will notify me if account balance goes above or beyond a certain amount. But what I want to have is an SMS when something changes at all. Other banks have it and I don’t see any reasons why Hellenic Bank can’t have too.

Anyway, I am still pretty pleased with their service.

The blogosphere is going crazy with this new toy from Technorati. My blog is slightly over $18K. And although I doubt anyone would want to buy it, I won’t sell it anyway. It carries my name after all. So, how much is your blog worth?

Still, I think it would be nice if there was a tool that could be seriously used by those who buy blogs - I don’t know who they are, don’t ask me. If there was such a tool it would be so easy to measure blogs, build blogs for sale, find buyers, and sell them, that it would be a good business opportunity for those of us, who … well … dares to try.

Until than we should simply blog blog and blog hope. We should hope that someone with the will and money will one day find our piles of posts and offer us something in return, so that we could finally go and spend some quality time with our families. No. I don’t think that would inspire that. If bloggers will be paid for what they do, they would probably do more of it. Or so I think.

P.S.: Last two paragraphs were put here for one reasona and one reason only - to make this post look good. You see, because I use DIVs instead of TABLEs, once in a while I get this weird formatting glitches that require me to put more text or be abandoned by all my audience, starting with me. You can stop reading now. Like you even did. I bet you are already cleaning the history and cache of your browser to help you forget this URL faster.

I was scrolling through ThinkGeek’s list of new additions (RSS feed actually) when something broke my concentration. Out of three new items added on October 19th, two didn’t make sense together:

1. Digital Picture Frame with Remote
2. 7″ Portable Tablet DVD Player

[Read more →]

Hazard told me about this new cool offering from Hellenic Bank - P-card, so I went to the bank today to see if I can get it.

Basically, P-card is a regular debit card. It is not connected to any of your accounts though, which is a nice thing if you want to use it on the web. The amount debited can be anywhere from 15 CYP and 500 CYP. If you run out of money, you can debit more. The P-card is for electronic use only, which is good enough if you ask me - web, ATMs both local and abroad, and shopping point of sale systems - are all good.

Applying for the card is extremely easy. Any clerk of any branch can issue the card in about 10 minutes. All you have to do is present and ID card or passport and debit either cash or from your account. The good thing is that you can even use P-card to give someone else money, like a gift for example.

I decided to start with a 50 CYP card, debitted from my account. I have received a package that contained the card itself, PIN, the copy of terms and conditions, and a bonus CYTA So-Easy 5 CYP card. Not bad.

I have also tried if the card worked on the web and didn’t have any problems. I have purchased myself a two year Flickr Pro account. By the way, I have a couple of ideas on how I am going to use it extensively in a very near future.

Resume: if you need a quick, simple, and secure way to buy stuff on the web or via other electronic means, get yourself a P-card from Hellenic bank. That’s a really good option.