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Finally I’ve got this SMS from Maxis:

We hope you are enjoying our FREE WC Alerts. To continue receiving after today, pls reply by sending WC ON to 26000 (this reply is also FREE).

It seems they are stopping the daily “free” SMS. That’s good.
Now what I don’t understand is this phrase: pls reply by sending WC ON to 26000 (this reply is also FREE)

I’ve sent WC OFF to 26000 before, and it costed me 15 cents. So what do they mean by “also FREE”?
They didn’t mention about 26000 was free on their daily SMS. You think I should try this out?

I was heading to Immigration Department at Shah Alam to fix-up some paper work for my maid.
Traffic on Federal Highway was smooth, but the damn toll now RM 1.10 (for already 1 year and I didn’t noticed).

When I arrived at PKNS building at about 10 AM, found my car park about 10 minutes later, and I start queuing out of the Immigration Department to take a number.

Yes, out of the office. The queue was rather long.
Yes, just to take the queue number, you know the “nombor giliran”?

I was basically standing for one whole hour to hit the counter. And all I’ve got was a form to fill up, and a queue number: 2038

So I have to wait again for my turn.
They have plenty of places for me to fill the form, but they didn’t spare any ball pen around there.
And since the day I left school, I have not carry ANY pen with me, ever.

So I have to roam to other departments to seek for a pen. And I managed to found one in a promotion counter. At least the task was amusing.

It was about 30 minutes wait for my turn again, and it took them two minutes to prepare some documents for me to bring home. That’s it. Two minutes task from them, my 2 hours gone into the building.

I must say the Year 2020 target is a little far here you know, maybe 2038 is a logical year?

I haven’t been visiting Wa Online for quite a while, and it seems being compromised.

Update: The portal seems to be still intact at http://www.waonline.com.my/waonline/

DOS used to referred as “disk operating system” in my school time. These day it means Denial of Service, a rather deadly weapon for cracker to bring one site down, along with many other innocents one.

We had that today, shutting down our upstream ISP for good solid two hours.
Although most people wouldn’t missed my blog, but we have thousands of related patrons effected, and it wasn’t easy to answer them – “we have DoS attacked…” don’t sounds like a good reason right?

“We have virus attacked”… more like it. Most people know how deadly the virus is, be it on the computer or the real life. Thanks Microsoft for incubating most of the viruses, and educated most of our customers.

In case you can’t access this site again tomorrow, we could be down with flu.

It was an unpleasant discovery yesterday (Sunday) when we went to Low Yat for a brief while. My wife did her regular round of get-down-the-car-and-pee-first routine, but this time she came back to me so quickly and she said the toilet entry was RM 1.00!

She was thinking to find some other places, such as the Sungai Wang across.
I valued my time more, so asking her to just paid and we’ll bring some adult diaper next time.

How patrons in Low Yat doing when they have to pee regularly? You have staff price?

Imagine if you need to pass thru the woman guarding the doors a few times a day, it will be more expensive to pay toll going to your work.

Civilization has its price. Aren’t you missed the day when you can simply pee around when you just needed it?
Now it costs RM 1.00 you know. If my wife is 20 years younger, I’ll probably told her to go pee outside the drain.

It is quite pathetic to see corporate “launches” some new wired/wireless services, and the coverage is only available in a few buildings area.

The Celcom’s 3GX is one of them.

I remember Time has made some greater advertisement (nation-wide) on their broadband services few years ago, but the coverage was only a handful of building at that time. And they have never expended it.

Why can’t they work on the real thing first before talking to the ads agency? Maybe they are all artist running the show, they have all kind of ideas on how to market it and showing it off, and they took the easier path to do it and leaved the technical part to the techies – with limited budget too since all the money has gone to the media.

This is how the “high-tech” work here.

By the way, why 3GX? It is 3.5G. Celcom has chosen “3G” branding for their 3G service, what is the problem to use 3.5G here? Why rebrand it to 3GX where no one else on earth know what is that suppose to mean?

Got a call from one of the very old customers. She has been using a Macintosh Performa for 10 years, changed the monitor twice, and still using the QuickBook software, on an ancient Mac OS 7.

Amazing huh? She called not because it has broken down, just concern about the upgrade and looking for a new replacement in case her trusty Performa stop working.

I’ve trouble to keep my hard disk to last more than 3 years, how can she kept that thing running for 10 years? She stay in a clean room all the time or what?

I’ve got the following SMS for the second day:

“FREE WC Daily results 15 Jun ESP 4 – UKAR 0, TUN 2 – KHS 2, GER 1 – POL 0, To stop receiving FREE WC Daily Result, please send WC OFF to 26000.”

I was getting a little annoyed, so I fired up a SMS back to them to un-subscribe. No, I’ve no feeling toward World Cup, or [your-favorite-game-name-here] cup.

The only cup I need is the coffee cup.

I’ve got the following reply after sending a SMS “WC OFF” to 26000.

“Your FREE 2006 Word Cup daily match results subscription from Maxis is now cancelled. To subscribe again, please type WC ON and send to 26000.”

Good. I appreciate corporate that respect user preference.

And when I check my balance, I have 15 cents deducted.
Ok, it wasn’t mentioned in the daily SMS, and not in the subscription off notification. You think I could be wrong?

So I sent another “WC OFF” to 26000.
And yes, I’ve got ANOTHER 15 cents deducted from my balance.

I’ve never been this mad of losing 30 cents in my life.

Question 1:
So why Maxis subscribed me to their daily World Cup SMS? They think I like World Cup? Or they try to fish more money when people try to unsubscribe?

Question 2:
Why charge me twice when I was trying to unsubscribe the second time? Shouldn’t the system be smart enough to know that I have already unsubscribed, and stay quiet instead of charged me again?