Category: Personal

Despite being at work all the time, and being constantly busy, I am still a human. I am social. I have a life, family, and friends. I have thoughts and experiences. Once in a while I share them, and when I do, I do so in this category. If you don’t know me personally, chances are you’ll find posts in this category particularly boring.

Kudos to Amazon

I’ve been ordering stuff from Amazon.co.uk rather frequently.  I never had any problems with any of the products or deliveries.  Until my last order.  For some reason it just didn’t come.  And because it was a DataPost delivery, it couldn’t have been tracked either.

So, when all the dates for estimated delivery passed, I emailed back to Amazon asking them if they have any information about that order.  They told me that they haven’t, but if the order won’t arrive in the next few days (they gave me a specific date), then I should just let them know and they would resend it free of charge.

The date they mentioned came and went but the order still wasn’t here.  So I waited for another couple of days and asked Amazon again.  They emailed me back and said that they will place a replacement order within the same day.  A few minutes later they confirmed that the replacement order has been placed, and just wanted to know if I still want all of the items, since one of the DVDs that I had on the list changed status from “In Stock” to “Usually ships within the next 4-6 business days”.  I said that I don’t mind about more delay and would rather just get all of the things that I ordered.

And that was it.  Two weeks later the re-placement order came in.  And now let me state the obvious: I am a really satisfied happy customer.  My respects and thanks go to Amazon for handling the situation the best way they could.

P.S.: A few days after the replacement order arrived, the original order came too.  Very much delayed, but it came through as well.  Because I am a greedy bastard, and because those DVDs are just so good, and because Christmas is almost upon us, I won’t be sending one of this orders back.  I’ll keep both of them.  But I will for sure order more, a lot more from Amazon.  Thank you, and an early Merry Chrismas.

New phone : Sony Ericsson G900

A couple of weeks ago my beloved Sony Ericsson P910 died.  It got dropped one too many times.  A rather large semi-lequid patch appeared in its left bottom corner and touch screen stopped working.  Since the keyboard died a long time ago, I was left with no way to input or navigate the phone.  Being an exceptionally smart individual I decided that a reboot might cure this, and, obviously, that left me at the “Enter your PIN” prompt with no hope what so ever.

Next morning I rushed to the mobile shop.  The first two on my way were closed, since that was too early in the morning, but gladly I remembered that there is a Germanos branch in Debenhams, which opens pretty early.  Like 8 or 9 o’clock in the morning.  And indeed it was open.

Continue reading New phone : Sony Ericsson G900

New day, new month, new job

As some of you already know, I’ve changed my job. For the last year or so I used to be the Senior Developer, System Administrator, Project Manager, and so on and so forth at mmVirtual Ltd, which is one of the top web design and development companies in Cyprus.

Starting from today, I am employed as Senior Web Developer at EuroOrient Ltd. This company is in the financial services markets. I will be a part of IT team, working for the first time with my brother. Most of my time will be spent on taking all FxPro web sites to the next level.

In the meantime, I will still be doing IT consulting and occasional development for mmVirtual Ltd., as well as a few other companies that I managed to develop some relationships with over the last couple of years. While I mostly do system administration and technology assessments for them, I see that my career is moving more into web development area. I am a frequent user of web development techniques and technologies, but I feel that my programming skills need a lot of improvements. So if you see a change of focus on this blog, don’t be too surprised – I have a lot of catching up to do (pointers and suggestions are much appreciated, by the way).

50 Ways to Help the Planet

50 Ways to Help the Planet is an excellent initiative.  These are 50 simple, straight-forward tips for how to make a little bit less of an impact on our planet.  You probably already do some of these things.  You’ll probably never do some of them.  But chances are you’ll find some things in that list that you won’t mind doing.

Here is the list of things as applied to me and my family.  You should probably read the original list first though.

Continue reading 50 Ways to Help the Planet

30, here I come!

Yesterday I celebrated my 30th birthday.  That was a blast!  I received congratulations and best wishes from more people (and bots) than I ever did.  In fact, there were so many that I can publish some statistics (numbers are approximated):

  • Automated greeting messages from forums and social services: 35
  • Phone calls: 15
  • SMS messages: 10
  • Paper postcards: 1
  • E-cards: 1
  • Emails: 4
  • IM chats: 15
  • Social networks contacts (Odnoklassniki.ru, Facebook, etc): 70
  • In person: 20

Some of these overlap, but not that much.  Messages started coming in from Monday afternoon and they are still pouring  in. Needless to say, I am overwhelmed.   A huge thank you to all of you!  You made my day.