Logical Eccentricity

I finally got back to reading for fun, and last night I finished reading The First Patient. Basically, the book revolves around the doctor to the President trying to unravel a medical mystery. Gabe Singleton, a country doctor from Wyoming, is asked by Andrew Stoddard, his long-time friend and now President, to take the place of his missing doctor at the White House. Things get complicated with the president suffering from strange psychotic breaks, murder attempts on Dr. Singleton’s life, beautiful women, D.C. politics, and more.

The plot line, and theory behind the novel are excellent as usual. However, not everything is good with the book. There are several points in the novel where it seems very disjointed, almost as if the author was rushed to finish the book and left something out. Then there a plot line about an accident in Singleton’s past that doesn’t really need to be there. For most of the novel is a background plot line, and then at the climax of the novel the author brings it to the forefront, and nothing really happens with it.

Overall, it is a good read; nothing amazing. I would give it 3 out of 5 stars.

This past weekend was wonderful, a great combination of the weather and fun activities. Saturday was supposed to be sent watching an electrician install wires and speakers in our den, but the dude never showed up. So, instead we drove to Foxwood Casino; surprising there were a lot of people out on the road despite the high gas prices. Now, I know that I’m looking at a very unique subsection of America, the North-East, but the roads were very crowded. We spent a couple of hours at Foxwoods, good times all around.

Sunday was spent out on Long Island tasting wine. The Long Island wine yards are very nice, and they make great wines. I don’t remember any of the names, but it all tasted great; I’ve got to go back and do some more tastings. A great part was getting the free wine glasses at each place; if you bought a tasting you got to keep the glass. This was great because I ended up with 8 glasses for my upcoming bar/wine holder when I move into my own place.

All I did on Monday was sit in the sun and enjoy the weather. Again, since it was such wonderful weather, simply sitting in the sun was a great activity, along with eating food fresh off the grill.

Hopefully all of you had an enjoyable weekend, and are ready for this short week at work.

Enjoy the weekend everyone; the weather is supposed to be wonderful. Now if only gas prices weren’t so high…

I’m sure you’ve all seen the Sprint commercials with the CEO, Dan Hesse, walking around a city talking about a wireless revolution. The commercial ends with a screen showing an email address where people can send suggestions that Sprint could potentially implement. I’m sure they are getting flooded by emails, spam messages and such; but someone is actually reading them.

On Monday I sent them an email suggesting that Sprint start paying the Early Termination Fee for customers that wanted to leave their current provider and start a two year contract with Sprint. I got the usual auto-reply thanking me for my idea; I wasn’t expecting to get anything more beyond that; I was just hoping someone would eventually read it.

When I checked my email this morning, I saw I had a message from Sprint’s Customer Service; at first I was confused as I’m not a Sprint customer, why would they be contacting me? Basically, the email looks like a standard form reply, but is signed by “Patricia,” she gives her phone number along with it, and the subject line seems to have a support ticket tracking number. I haven’t called to see if it is a valid number and if it works; I honestly don’t care that much about Sprint. I found it interesting that their customer service would be on point enough to send a follow up email to their first auto-reply.

The following is the text of the email that I got (without the phone number):

Dear Ankur Mathur,

I appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule to write us. Our goal is to serve our customers with world-class customer service and feedback from potential customers like you is a great source of motivation in our endeavor to achieve that goal. I will forward your suggestion to the appropriate group.

Thank you again for contacting Sprint.

Sincerely,
Patricia S.
[Redacted]

Sprint

I’ll update if I get any more emails or anything.

I was going to write a blog post about something completely unrelated, but then I noticed this on my home page:

That’s right, if you look at the second ad, you’ll see an advertisement for Google Ad Sense; and what’s that all the way at the top? “Ads by Yahoo!” I guess the Yahoo/Google deal is going better than expected.