Really sleepy day. Nothing at all achieved.

Our secretary Rashmi got engaged today, so we got to answer the phones. And to top it, half the company was out on work at client sites. At lunchtime, I found myself all alone in the office!

OK, so maybe I would be able to get some work done. But no such luck – all forms of Internet connectivity died around the same time.

I gave up, kicked off my shoes, grabbed my Palm Vx and immersed myself in reading Ringworld. What a book!

Internet connectivity came back towards afternoon, but it just doesn’t seem like this is a day for getting anything done. Additionally, the heat is building up, as is static electricity.

Been having tons of problems with Yahoo Messenger, who appear to have flawed policies in their routers that basically makes it infeasible for companies or large groups of Yahoo Messenger users to be behind a NAT’d firewalls or load balanced links.

If this and other problems continue, we will have to abandon YM as well (we had to dump ICQ last year after many years of usage because of their strange ways of doing things, including locking out millions of users for good without so much a word of warning).

Looks like MSN Messenger is set to sweep the market in India – not because it is any better, but because it sucks less. Pretty ironic state of affairs!

Fabmart is definitely leaving my recommended list. Their customer relations management sucks ostrich eggs. The worst sin is that they keep the customer hanging for ages without any feedback on orders, and come to life only when someone hollers.

This morning, Shubha told me that Anjali had ordered a CD from there two weeks ago, and it had still not been delivered. When I contacted them and hollered, they were very apologetic, but that doesn’t fix the problem, does it? I cancelled that order, and will probably go to town tomorrow and buy Anjali what she wanted.

Not that the other places (such as Planet M) are any better. I ordered some stuff from there, only to be kept hanging for a week before they told me that that they couldn’t source the material.

Looks like the Indian online shopping scene is sliding fast.