Wisetechie Blog : Ctrl your Tech Life

A very good morning to all our readers in the US and a very happy black Friday to you, hopefully you are headed to stores around the country who are selling merchandise at dirt-cheap prices and are taking advantage of fabulous deals all around.

Black Friday is the time to buy the latest electronic gadget, the video game you have been wanting to buy, any household item and quite frankly anything under the earth. Sites like slickdeals etc. will get you the best deals from all these stores.

The friday after the Thanksgiving Thursday is the Black Friday, the concept is yet to catch on in India though, I wasnt able to find any Indian online store offering Black Friday discounts, but a large number of online American stores do So if you are in India and want a black Friday deal, just ring up your relatives in the US and ask them to buy the stuff you want. They can bring it to you when they are coming to India

I know I did that

Among the deals is an Xbox 360 elite system with 7 Game titles for $200, now thats what I call a deal !

Gurgaon kid Puru Pratap Singh drew the above Google doodle for a competition organised by Google, the above is the 1st ever Google Doodle made in India.

The first ‘G’ is a peacock, the ‘o’ stands for wisdom, the second o stands for the discovery of water on the moon by ISRO, the next ‘g’ is about Kashmir, the ‘l’ is representing the Amar Jawan Jyoti and the last ‘e’ represents Mahatma Gandhi.

The doodle is active for today i.e. 14th November 2009 which happens to be Children’s Day.

I recently started using the Kensington Ci70 wireless mouse on my notebook computer and therefore decided to share my views and findings with the readers of this blog.

The Kensington Ci70 K72276US is a very pleasant mouse to work and play with. Its highly responsive, and easier to control. The main issue with my Logitech V series bluetooth mouse was infact its fast scrolling and sensitivity which wasnt very customizable even via the mouse setting sensitivity controls. But this mouse is almost perfect. I have never had an issue with sensitivity or anything else. The scroll wheel is also perfect and the batteries in the mouse are still the original ones and I have been using this mouse for a long time. Its duracell by the way. The wireless dongle fits snugly under the mouse and it also has a sleep mode to conserve power. You need to press any button to wake it up after it enters the sleep mode and stops tracking movements.

Overall the mouse was a very satisfying purchase and if you are looking for a good and decent wireless mouse, this is the one for you.

I had bought this mouse from US on a deal, dont know if the Kensington Ci70 K72276US is available in India or not, but if it is, do get it.

For those of you who buy on eBay and think that negative feedback  is a tool to fight against fraudulent sellers, think again. I was recently dis-satisfied with a seller due to the seller failing at all standards. What was more was that the seller didn’t respond to a few of my emails and selectively replied to 1 ignoring others. The transaction was not smooth at all and I had to face a lot of hardship. What was more was that this seller had a history of such sour deals all over the internet. They also deal via mail order catalogs and had a lot of negative feedback. The seller had deliberately stated false information in the listing, shipped late , misspelled my address etc..

Anyway, after I left negative feedback, the seller’s sleep vanished, suddenly I was getting calls and all my emails were replied to after the feedback. A week later this seller applied to eBay community court wherein users vote on issues regarding feedback disputes. This seller wrote a 5 line dispute with little info and lies. I exposed these lies in my reply which had a good 12 points.

Here is the fraud support by eBay, the seller is allowed to post another reply to buyer’s feedback justification while the buyer may not post any such thing. The fraudier part is that the buyer can’t even see what lies and web the seller has spun. The policy is tilted into the favour of the seller and essentially is against the principle of justice wherein each person should get equal right to present their case.

Also the community court voters seem like disinterested folks who probably cant differentiate between a fly and an elephant. Anyway, I am happy that negative feedback against this seller is swelling everyday. Hopefully ebay will kick him out, but it seems he is using the court to remove other people’s negative feedback too.

Just to give you a magnitude of the eBay fraud , this seller had 29 negative feedback in 1 month yesterday, and its only 21 today, this seller seems to have learnt how to bend rules and continue cheating people ignoring the so called good selling policies of eBay. As his volume is high, it seems even eBay is reluctant to take action against this seller.

Seriously eBay, you need to become better and get rid of this community court hogwash or at least make it transparent ! Who had a court in which one party doesn’t get to see and respond to the other party’s arguments.

I was one of the (un?)lucky few to be invited to use the new Orkut and quite frankly its not that good. Google has used a lot of Ajax, tried to make it more facebooky but have failed miserably. The first thing where they fail is the gaudy and bright color scheme. The bright pink and blue color schemes dont match with the uncluttered look at all.

Plus the new Orkut is not even uncluttered, the huge advertisement on the right column has been shifted to the top and adblock no longer kills the whole element so there is a sick huge void in my Orkut window when I use Firefox. The huge ads are the biggest turnoff in the new Orkut.

The menus are less intuitive, took me 2 days to figure out how to use the communities section and get the latest post times from my various communities. Friend updates it seems are no longer optional, despite having them disabled in the old Orkut I am thrown this huge list of status updates from friends which tries to mimic Facebook but is very unfacebook at the same time especially with all the junk HTML Orkut seems to allow.

Orkut went down the day it allowed all the junk HTML and javascript coding. Compared to that facebook has a much better style and restricted media options and thats what makes it cleaner. Hope the Orkut devs are taking notes