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  • Jakub Pawlowicz 7:10 am on February 27, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: ,   

    Is term ‘a legitimate bank’ an oxymoron? 

    I consider banks as the institutions who lie to us all the time. However these lies are not ones visible at the first sight but rather ones hidden deeply, like in the documents we are asked to sign, which are written in a very formal and not understandable manner.

    I hate these situations when after signing the documents in a bank I check my bank account to find out I misread something and they “robbed” me out of my money. It is interesting to point out that I have never experienced a situation when bank gave me a bonus I didn’t expect. It is always the case they took as much as I have expected or more. The “more” being the more probable case.

    Although I am used to banks not telling us the whole story about interest rates, mortgage costs, money transfer fees and so on, this time I found the polish Alior Bank TV ad to lie in a bit different way:

    This ad tells us that with the Alior Bank card you can take your money from all the cashpoints in the world free of charge. First it shows Krakow’s main square and Floriańska street corner where someone takes money from a cashpoint. The problem is this cashpoint does not exist! I have never seen it there before so I deliberately took a walk to that place to find out a bare wall instead of a cashpoint. Computer generated scenes are popular these days to the extent they drive the reality…

    In the subsequent scene there is another cashpoint presented near the Eiffel Tower in Paris. As I will be there this year I will take another walk to find out whether that one is real or fake!

    I hope for a bank which doesn’t lie to me. I don’t know if I ever found one, but I will keep searching.

    PS) Thanks goes to Hubert Gajewski who told me “post it on your blog” once he heard the story.

    UPDATE) We were in Paris in September and didn’t find the cashpoint. Lame, Alior, very lame.

     

    • Dexter 11:47 am on February 27, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Hahah amazing! I really enjoy this kind of fake scenes. :-)

      Unfortunately I enjoy less bank silent actions. How was I surprised seeing yesterday that a “free of charge” action in Deutsche Bank can cost me 15 euros!

    • Alan 2:04 am on March 3, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Nice advert though (even if it’s all based on a lie). I like his bowler hat (or coke hat, if you’re old school) and all the people wearing their hats lining up at the bottom at the end of the ad. Is it normal for bankers to wear bowler hats in Poland too then? Such hats are what, classically, bankers would wear in the City of London (not that you’d see anyone wearing them today, sadly).

      • Jakub Pawlowicz 10:20 am on March 3, 2009 Permalink | Reply

        Even that hats are not worn in real. I think the bank just pretend to be more experienced and long-established than it really is as it was founded in 2008 ;-)

  • Jakub Pawlowicz 8:29 pm on February 24, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: cloud computing, gmail, , offline, outage   

    GMail outage and cloud computing myth 

    A couple of days ago I was enjoying a talk with my fiancée about the myth of cloud computing. As an example of volatility of this kind of solutions I pointed out a hypothetical situation when GMail goes offline and many people loses their emails as they store all the emails on the Google servers only.

    So today it happened. GMail and suite of Google web applications went offline today for 2,5 hours. Looks like a large part of 115 million users were not able to perform their daily tasks losing real money.

    It makes me think cloud computing is right as long as you own your data!

    PS) I don’t use GMail at all.

     

    • Dexter 10:28 am on February 25, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      I couldn’t agree more about cloud computing idea.

      I remember that not so long ago one of friends joked at me that I’m so “oldschool” that I still use desktop mailing application for storing my correspondence locally. Well.. :)

    • Łukasz Milewski 1:29 am on February 26, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Although I was impacted by an outage, I’m using Google Offline with Chrome so still I was able to access my current emails and archive just like if it was desktop application. But no new e-mails or sending ones.

      • Jakub Pawlowicz 11:08 am on February 26, 2009 Permalink | Reply

        I don’t know exactly how Google Offline works but are you able to export the offline database to a text file or a XML database? So do you actually own the data?

    • Psi 7:57 pm on April 1, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      I think you’re overreacting… I think I didn’t even notice the GMail downtime, I just don’t check mail every 5 minutes. It’s not like everyone lost thousands of emails, they just couldn’t access them for 2 hours.

      Sure, there are some people for whom it’s critical to be able to access all their emails and check for new ones all the time, but it’s probably less than 10% of the users…

      • Jakub Pawlowicz 8:38 pm on April 1, 2009 Permalink | Reply

        If it was as you’ve said then 10% of 115 million users is quite a lot of people actually :)

  • Jakub Pawlowicz 12:15 pm on February 23, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: flag,   

    Burning a flag 

    Yesterday one of the Polish biggest political parties came up with an idea that hanging the flag on May 1st, 3rd and November 11th (Polish national holidays) should be obligatory. What’s worse the politicians from other parties think that it is a good idea.

    You know what? It is the worst idea I have ever heard of. Hanging the flag should be imposed by my internal will, by pride of my country not some silly regulations.

    Give me a reason to be proud of Poland and I will hang a flag!

     

    • Dexter 12:03 am on February 24, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      I’d be happy to live in a country, where people respect their national flag, like it is in the States. I’d be happy to live in a country, where people enjoy their tradition, are not ashamed of it and can make something cool about it, like it is in Bavaria. I’d happy to live in a country, where people are proud of their country goods, like it is in France. Finally, I’d like to live in a country, where the term “country” is not dimmed by stupid & selfish actions of “so called” political class, being sick only about the power. I wish it was Poland :)

      Jakub, can you really define Poland? It’s not a mass of stupid people around us. It is not a collection of current, previous and future government actions. It is much more than the law hurting people, who believe in the Constitution. It is not only a place between the Baltic Sea and Tatry. It is not only last year, or ten, but the history, much longer then we can imagine. A country is quite virtual entity. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=on-53-C9ITI

    • Jakub Pawlowicz 4:50 pm on February 24, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Dexter – thanks so much for your comment.

      I think the problem when talking about Polish national identity starts in defining it. We, as a nation, were divided for the past 200 years, not only geographically but also mentally, so the definition is divided as well. Thanks to it polish people do not trust each other but what’s worse they cheat on each other. In the meanwhile 90% of them claim they are catholics where (ironically) cheating is a sin. And that’s fine for them to cheat on each other and then confess on Sunday making “some more room” for another sins.
      I also think an assumption that Poland is (and have to be) a catholic country is genuinely wrong. It hurts me as I am not a catholic but everything I have is thanks to this country.

      Another great example is polish national addiction to celebrate anniversaries. Two years ago we had 35th anniversary of a draw (!!!) with England on Wembley. That’s fu..ing nonsense! Next year there will be 600th anniversary of Polish win on Grunwald fields. What for? It would be better to focus on making some advancements in the future but celebrating past events makes us think that we were great once and now we are not. It’s hard to admit but probably nothing would bring us back these times.

      The last thing is about politicians. They do not resemble Poland to me, but unfortunately they think they do. I don’t want Poland to be the 1st, 5th or 10th power in the Europe – I want Poland to be a part of Europe. I don’t want to see politicians vetoing EU reforms just to show everyone that we have the power to do it. Finally I don’t want people in the other countries to think about us as the ones who stopped Turkish army on the fields of Vienna in 1683 and we they have to respect us.
      How this helps us escape from the label of “these who steal cars”? It doesn’t.

      I would like others to think of us as joyful people, good workers, makers of the best vodka and ones who trust and can be trusted.

      I hope the youngest generation will not follow their ancestors’ path and in 50 years we will have a really trustful and cooperative society proud of the Polish soil. Believe me or not but I would like to be proud of Poland.

  • Jakub Pawlowicz 4:30 pm on February 21, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: global crisis, global warming, warming   

    Fighting global warming… idiocy 

    There are two hot “global” topics still present in the news: global crisis and global warming. Although we know what caused the former one, there are only clues about the latter one.

    I intentionally used word “clues” because there is no more than that. I read a newspaper a few weeks ago and there were 2 articles claiming completely opposite view on the future. One said there will be a global warming and polar capes will melt, while the other was saying we should prepare for another ice age as due to polar caps melting the sea currents will change causing Europe and Asia to freeze.

    I think there are probably as many theories as the environmental scientists and nobody knows who is right, but many claim finding the right answer.

    But after all the answer is not meaningful but the way we live and interact with the environment really is. So living more ecologically would definitely help us, but eventually the Earth too. But I’m really worried about this approach as unfortunately we are pretty dumb species…

     

    On the other hand, as I found the topic interesting I started to read a lot about it on Wikipedia. There are many interesting articles about past ice ages, sea level rises, human migrations, etc, which in general tells a message – global warming is nothing special. Since 20000 years ago the global sea level rose about 140 meters, global temperatures rose about 5 Celcius degrees, humans decided to leave Africa and settle all around the world, etc. As you can see – the current global warming is nothing special. It happened before, and it is meant to happen in the future.

    As always life will find a way.  But what about us?

     

  • Jakub Pawlowicz 3:58 pm on February 6, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: anecdote, einstein, extraterrestrial, life form   

    Is it how the intelligent life forms look like? 

    Cool photo manipulation found on Abduzeedo.com.

    This reminds me of a famous anecdote about Albert Einstein, who when asked if he thought there were any intelligent life forms in the universe, ironically replied: “They have to be somewhere”.

     

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