Does any of these sound familiar? “So-and-so bank offers you a free lifetime credit card” or “Would you like a personal loan of …” or “You have been selected for a special vacation.”

Almost all of us have been disturbed by the shrill ringing of our telephone only to realize that the important call we’ve been expecting is in fact the call of an overly zealous telemarketer just trying to do his/her job at the cost of our irritation.

Here in India it is terrible, and I understand it is even worse in the USA. Even the Do Not Call registry is unable to successfully stop every single call.

Enter TelemarketerCatcher.com. Launced in 2008 Telemarketer Catcher is a public forum for people to share information about telemarketers. Telemarketer Catcher claims to have the largest list of known or suspected telemarketers, and that users are constantly adding new suspected marketers to the list.

You can use the site to look up a number and determine whether it’s a marketer, or more importantly to publish your own complaint as a warning to others.

I haven’t been able to test the effectiveness of this service, simply because I’m not from the US. Hence, I would love to hear feedback from readers from that region on how effective this actually is in catching telemarketers.

Were you able to find and stop any? How accurate is the database? Have you reported any telemarketers?

So, instead of reinstalling SMF, I decided to give a shot to bbPress. For those who are not aware, bbPress is forum software from the creators of WordPress. bbPress includes complete support for integration into WordPress. However, I haven’t utilized that feature since I don’t have registrations on this blog.

bbPress allows you to create new themes (something that I may work on in the future) as well as extend its functionality with plugins. I’ve installed a few that I thought were essential.

I’ve created two support forums, viz. for themes and plugins that I have authored. You will need to register at the forum in order to make any posts. You can also subscribe to the recent forum posts feed.

I also offer support via email and / instant messenger.

Can you imagine this happening in INDIA ?

Government of India has an online Grievance forum at http://darpg-grievance.nic.in/

The government wants people to use this tool to highlight the problems they faced while dealing with Government officials or departments like Passport Office, Electricity board, BSNL/MTNL, Railways etc.

I know many people will say that these things don’t work in India , but this actually works as one of the person working in CSC found. The guy I’m talking about lives in Faridabad . Couple of months back, the Faridabad Municipal Corporation laid new roads in his area and the residents were very happy about it. But 2 weeks later, BSNL dug up the newly laid roads to install new cables which annoyed all the residents including this guy. But it was only this guy! Who used the above listed grievance forum to highlight his concern. And to his surprise, BSNL and Municipal Corporation of Faridabad was served a show cause notice and the guy received a copy of the notice in one week. Government has asked the MC and BSNL about the goof up as it’s clear that both the government departments were not in sync at all.

So use this grievance forum and educate others who don’t know about this facility.
This way we can at least raise our concerns instead of just talking about the ‘ System’ in India

Anyway, when I started off the course it was meant to be at 30 wpm and scheduled for six months. Within three months I had finished off everything that had to be learned and was thoroughly bored. So I started out with 40wpm and finished that by the end of the six months.
I didn’t bothered giving any exams because I was more interested in learning.

Well, it’s been eight years since then and my typing speed has improved and online sites rate it between 70 to 80wpm.

My extremely perfectionist nature adds to the fact that any job given to me is done to the best of my ability and hence was requested to type out a song book by U. Conrad.

So a good time of Tuesday and Wednesday and the next few days as well are going to be spent compiling the book. It’s a fun job and the problem is verifying and ensuring the job is perfect.

Monday was spent collecting chocolates and viewing photos of a friend who just returned from the US.

Tuesday was also spent setting up a brand new forum for my batch at SCMHRD. If any of you folks haven’t signed up at the forum and will be joining SCMHRD here, please do signup and join the discussions.

The forum shall be the central point of discussion for our tenure out there. Ravi (who seems to be a geek like me) has been great help administrating the forum

Have been working slowly behind the scenes to change some things about this blog.

5 posts on index

For one, I have reduced the number of posts displayed on the index page in order to speed up initial loading time. (used the Custom Query String plugin for this). The archives still show the default ten posts per page.

AjayDSouza.com Support Forums

Secondly, the AjayDSouza.com Support Forums are now open. It is powered by Simple Machines.
These will be used exclusively for any support related issues for my plugins, themes and hacks.
I will not be answering any support related questions in the comments.

You will need to register at the forums in order to post.

Articles

Thirdly, I have added an Articles page. This is currently empty, but it will contain links to articles that I have written over time.
Additionally, I intend to write more articles on various topics. These will be updated here.

Quick Links

Fourthly, I have added a quick links section in the sidebar. This is to provide direct access to various pages.

Subscribe

Lastly, would just like to iterate that you can subscribe to the various RSS feeds offered by this site. Currently there are two feeds, one for all the posts on this blog and another exclusively for Connections Reloaded related posts.
I will also be adding an RSS Feed for the Support Forums in due course.

That’s about it for now.