Jut saw that there is a new version of Facebook is there. Features looks cool.

and millions of people around the world are going to burn zillions of man hours on this. Woo! Hoo!

This about a popular bank ... I’ll leave it up to you to decide their quality of their service, because for me it has gone from a very good service to the worst (actually most pathetic) service a customer can imagine from a bank. I have a credit card from this bank and I have been using this almost 5 year. There has been a delay from my side on the payments due to the busy schedule and they don’t have a branch in Nawam Mawatha. If they had a branch this wouldn’t have happened. But in a way I’m glad that this happened because this revealed their true colors.

All of us know that when a credit card payment is delayed the bank charges an interest and a late payment fee and move on with it. They don’t scream or blast the crap out of you to get the payments. Well! This bank does exactly that. I think it is their payment collection team who don’t have any damn clue about how to handle or at least talk to customers. Sometimes another person calls and he knows how to talk to customers. They charge the interest (nothing wrong in that) and the late payment charges (nothing wrong with this too) and as a bonus they call every day like many times. May be somebody there made a policy that it is a must that the agent calls the customer till the phone bill goes up to the value of the monthly card payment or something like that. S&*t Happens!

Even when I say I’m at a meeting these idiots keep calling back every minute, don’t know from which planet this guy who is calling me is from because he doesn't seem to understand any Sinhala or English. May be this fella who is calling don't believe when I say I’m at a meeting ... If I had his email address I can send a pic of how my calendar looks like. Never mind! There is no point in talking to a person who doesn’t listen to you, or who don’t know how to talk to a customer.

I have several other credit cards from other banks and all those payments are going on time because there are branches in Nawam Mawatha. Once in a while when a payment is delayed they have a decent way of reminding. I think this ‘charterr’ bank should learn a lesson from those. Because of this reason I have completely stopped using this credit card ... and apparently they lost a good customer.

What a ‘Charterrr’ Standard ….

Session: “Creating a RESTful Data Access Layer”
Speaker: Prasanna Amirthalingam (MVP)

Abstract: This session talks about creating a data access layer that can be exposed through HTTP based on REST principles. The session also details how exposing the data access layer as a service opens up a whole lot of possibilities, using technologies such as ADO.NET Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services

Date: 7th August 2008 (Thursday) (Please note that from this month onwards the meeting will be help on the first Thursday of the month)
Time: 6.00 PM - 8.00 PM
Venue: Microsoft Sri Lanka Training Room, No 42, 11th Floor, DHPL Building, Nawam Mawatha, Colombo 2
Entrance: FREE

Large Hadron Collider

Just thought about writing about this ... not that I have anything to do with it or understands it. Honestly I don't understand anything about this. It's a massive ... believe me when I say massive ... it's a gigantic ... something being built by European Organization for Nuclear Research and thousands of scientists from all over the world are involved this and of course several billions of dollars. It's about some research on particle acceleration blah blah blah ... creating a micro black hole etc etc ... and destroying the whole world or perhaps the whole galaxy if something goes wrong kinda thing ... or something of that sort. Naaaah! I'm sure there are couple of thousand pretty smart people working on this billion dollar project. Anyways it's about atoms etc ... Last thing I remember about atoms is some stuff I learnt @ school for chemistry. Ewwww! Chemistry was never an interesting subject for me.

Anyways ... this is a very interesting thing ... as they say its going to be a break throguh in nuclear research and many other things. A bigger bomb ... no no ... this time they are going to use this for something good ... may be a free unlimited power source for the whole world ....

Found some high-res pics of this few minutes ago http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/08/the_large_hadron_collider.html

Last Thursday (31st) we had the .NET Day [2008] @ SLIIT. It was great to see many new students and everything went well as planned.

We had 6 presentations ...

• Intro to C# & LINQ by Prasanna Amirthalingam
• Building Web Applications with Visual Studio 2008 by me
• Windows Presentation Foundation by Uditha Bandara
• Getting started with Silverlight by me
• SQL Server 2008 new features by Gogula Aryalingam
• Intro to Student Champs Program by Primal Wijesekera & Buddhika Kalupahana

If you are looking for the presentation slides used please Click Here. (Uditha's presentation slides are not in this zip)

btw: I have been to SLIIT auditorium couple of times but this is the first time got a chance to go to the balcony .. just to see ... It's a fantastic view :)