First Flight Couriers – absolutely miserable shipping

First Flight Couriers‘ shipping time is absolutely miserable. It might be good for other places in India, but at least not for North East India.
I ordered an item from Bazee.com for delivery to Imphal, Manipur. It was shipped by the seller on Oct 9 from Mumbai. After that, the item was never received. I sent various emails to First Flight and finally got a reply after many days saying that they were “looking into it”. I assumed that my packet was lost. Finally, I was informed that the packet arrived yesterday (Oct 28). The packet took 19 days to deliver! According to the First Flight website, it was supposed to be delivered in 3 days. And it seems that FirstFlight has only *one* courier person for the whole of Manipur.
If you would like to send items by courier to Manipur from other parts of India, I would say use DTDC or BlueDart, but NEVER First Flight! Their service is absolutely miserable!
And oh, their online tracking service, it still says – “09-Oct-2004: Despatched from Origin”. No other information. Great, huh?
Update (9:46 PM 12/24/2004): I recently ordered an item online from a seller in Mumbai. The destination was Delhi. The package was delivered in 3 days. So, it seems that FirstFlight service is good for delivery between main cities in India.

Movable Type 500 Internal Server Error

I had upgraded to Movable Type 3.11 from 2.661 a couple of weeks back. But I did not change the default styles and templates. Yesterday, I updated the styles and templates. Everything was great but I started getting some mysterious 500 Internal Server Errors. I could not figure out what the problem was. Later, I found a couple of these lines in my server error log.
[2004-10-21 05:36:31]: error: file is writable by others: (/home/maisnam/public_html/blog/archives/000102.php)
I then chmoded all the files in the “archives” folder to 644. Now, I am not getting those internal server errors anymore. Hope I have solved the problem. I will be posting updates on this topic.
Update (12:53 AM 10/21/2004): I am getting these errors again everytime I add a new entry or make a change to an existing entry. It seems that the problem comes back everytime the files are re-generated. Right now, the patch-up solution I have found is to manually chmod to 644 all files in the “archives” folder and the index.php and archives.php files in the main folder. Any suggestions are welcome.

The Day After Tomorrow

Watched “The Day After Tomorrow” on DVD today. The theatre release was on May 28, 2004 and the DVD release was on Oct 12, 2004. Liked the movie though I guess it would have been much better in the theatre.
Also, read somewhere that the theory proposed in the movie (i.e. the North Atlantic Current failing due to the melting polar ice caps) is actually feasible but it would take a lot of time for it to come into effect (not 7 to 10 days as in the movie).
Have been watching a lot of DVD movies over fall break. Here is a partial list:
– Along Came Polly
– Man On Fire
– Mean Girls
– Paycheck
– The Alamo
– Walking Tall
Links:
Review at Yahoo Movies
Review at IMDB
Official Site
Update (11:13 PM 10/17/2004): Found the article. Here is a quote:

“There is evidence that the North Atlantic branch of the current has failed in the distant past

Google Desktop

Google has released a new application called Google Desktop. It is still in beta.
It indexes your computer and enables you to search your Outlook and Outlook Express
emails, Internet Explorer history, Word, Excel, Powerpoint and text files.


 
Google Desktop   Search Sample

I downloaded it yesterday night and let it do the indexing. Today morning, I
found that it had indexed 145,991 items! (21,148 emails, 28,687 web history and
96,156 files!). Hmm, I guess I have a LOT of emails and files. I tried some sample searches
and it was pretty good.

It runs in the background and pauses automatically when you start doing something.
This also means that if you want to see how it works, you will have to install it
and then not use the computer for some time. A good idea would be to install it
before going to bed or maybe before going to lunch.

More info
http://desktop.google.com/

news.com
article

Left brain, right brain!!!

While sitting at your desk, lift your right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles.
Now, while doing this, draw the number “6” in the air with your right hand.
Your foot will change direction and there’s nothing you can do about it!

Lexar 8 gb CompactFlash card

Came across an article on PcWorld about Lexar’s 8 gb flash card . It’s official price is $5,499.99 (!!!) but currently (10/14/2004) sells on Lexar.com for $2,730.00. It seems to be targeted towards professional photographers.
The 4gb version currently costs $399.88 on Amazon. Now, THAT sounds pretty reasonable! πŸ™‚
And as the article said –
“what do you do if you misplace your $4K memory card?”
πŸ™‚
More info:
Dpreview.com (02/12/2004)
Lexar.com