General | Our thoughts and musings

Slyly yours, Netflix

Dear Netflix,

Did you really think that you could increase your revenue by surreptitiously increasing the subscription price by upgrading the plan without my permission (and several hundred thousands others) to premium.

Well, now the rant is out of the way, I think I can get down to business.

This all started a couple of days ago, when I got an email from Netflix on Apr 21 telling me that my plan price was going to increase to $10.99 from $9.99 and the updated pricing is part of Netflix's commitment to improve Netflix. Ok. So far so good. I understand the prices are going up and I am willing to pay more for better service and I didn't think twice about it.

A week later on April 29th, I received another email from Netflix telling me that they have updated my plan to premium allegedly as "I had asked" and the price had gone up to $13.99. I don't remember asking or even logging in to Netflix account to update / upgrade my plan so where did this come from? I promptly went to the account settings and reverted the plan to standard which is 2 screens at a time with HD content as opposed to 4 screens at a time with HD and Ultra HD content. I don't even own a TV that support U-HD content. Why will I use that service?

In perfect honesty, my family and I don't even get to watch Netflix twice a week. What would make us upgrade to 4 screens and Ultra-HD content? This doesn't seem right and honest behaviour to me. And now I am stuck with a service I don't want to use and will not use till the next billing cycle.

I would still like to see where I have requested this change to the account plan.

Netflix, are you listening?

Uncivilized people in civilized country

I was traveling on the local train today for a meeting. As it happened, the meeting was at 9 am and I had to take the train in full rush hour. There was barely enough space to stand. But we all commuters being civilized squeezed in and managed the space.

I was in a conference call at that time and once I finished I was checking my email as I was going for an important meeting and was expecting some updates that would help me in the meeting. Accidentally my phone was touching my neighbor, a black guy who was busy in his own world.

I don't know what ticked him, but he suddenly said,"Your phone is poking me again and again. If it pokes again, I will grab it and throw it away." I mean, what was this reaction for? He could have simply said that my phone was poking him and I should take care. Being over crowded, I could not realize that my phone was touching him. I also retorted, "You can try..." and he simply looked away.

Where has the politeness and simple common sense of people gone? I can't understand why he was being so rude to me. Well, if he had said it twice, thrice and I still didn't pay attention, then maybe it would have been justified. But just once?

Could it be because I am a brown man in a black and white country? I don't know.

Husband’s mother, wife’s father…

This is a relationship conundrum which I think most of the married folks out there can relate with. When I got engaged with my wife and I looked around and saw my friends' behaviors as well, I realized that regardless of the situation at the home, in the relationship between a husband and wife, the husband's mother and the wife's father is the dominant personality. Whether the person's personality is strong / dominant or not in reality, but the perception in a marriage is always the same. I always used to think, why is it always like this only.

I have been thinking about this for the past 15-16 years and suddenly I had a sort of epiphany and things suddenly got very clear. No matter how much a person loves his or her sweetheart, this conflict or situation if not a conflict will always arise in the relationship. According to me, there's a simple reason for this. For every boy, his mother is his role model for a woman and for every girl, her father is her role model for a man. Subconsciously we are all comparing whoever we interact with, with our role models. For every action a partner in a relationship takes, it is instantaneously and perhaps sub-consciously compared with the person's role model. "How my mother would have done this?" or "How my father used to do this?" While this is unfair for the person being compared, the stark reality of the situation is that it exists and there is no running away from it.

Do I know how to resolve the situation? Absolutely not. I do not claim to have an answer to this conundrum. My aim was to merely share the epiphany that I had and hope that it helps someone. We cannot hope to change the subconscious mind of a person, but the best that we can do is probably understand the person's perspective a little bit and in that process make the relationship more enjoyable and fulfilling.

।।तथास्तु।।

Running WordPress site in distinct containers

I have been running my site on Plone for a long time, but the maintenance required was too high and I ran into several issues with bloated data file, unsupported plugins to name a few. Plus the instance was not very portable in case my server died or I had to move.

Then I was thinking about creating my own content management system, but time was a factor and the I thought I was losing my focus. What do I really want to do? Publish my thoughts, or develop something new. Actually it is both, but I don't want it to become dependent on each other. So I decided to use prebuilt software. I very quickly evaluated Drupal, WordPress, Movable Type and decided that WordPress looks to be the best at this time. More on the evaluation later.

Second challenge was to make it completely portable by using containers and not just VMs.

To be continued...