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I’ve been charged $79 for something I don’t remember that I asked for!!!

Is it internet fraud? I panicked! It turns out I have signed up for the free trial to Amazon Prime and after the trial period has lapsed, Amazon automatically enrolled me to an annual paid membership to Amazon prime. And oh yes, if you look back at the free trial and the fine prints that follow, they did say they would charge me. Grrr…

I GOOGLED for people who had the same problem. Alas. I’m not alone. I saw plans to sue Amazon and discussions on how unfair it was that Amazon was doing this. A lot of people even said that they will never transact with Amazon again.

The bottom line is that I don’t want to have Amazon Prime. I don’t want the yearly $79 charge…

SO WHAT CAN BE DONE? Amazon Prime Membership can be cancelled  easily… and as quite clearly stated in Amazon Prime’s FAQ, the $79 bill can be refunded. HOW?

1 SIMPLY, go to

https://www.amazon.com/gp/subs/primeclub/account/homepage.html

and click cancel account. DONE! You will get your refund in 2-3 days if you didn’t make any Amazon prime purchase in the period you have been automatically enrolled to the Amazon Prime.

2. You can CALL the number:

+1(866)5572820

(I called the number using Skype)

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And you just give them your email address and request that the Amazon Prime membership be cancelled and your $79 be refunded.

No questions asked. You’ll have your money back.

AND NEXT TIME, read the fine prints

Misery loves company… and when there’s just too much misery… misery might just be able to invent company.

He’s gone. I know. He’s been gone for a long time. I thought it was just a physical separation at first. I cushioned the blows by thinking that we were both just being brave. He was being brave to go beyond the hurt for a greater good. I was being brave and supportive of his courage to get back what he lost… because it is the right thing… and doing the right things will make me happy. I believed our unity was so real and it will take time to recover from breaking that. How real it was… I explained elaborately in my head. There were reasons for every action and where there is no reason there is human fallibility. Time paints the colors of how elaborate I explained them to be. Time again has let the drama wash away… and the etches left were quite simple. The boy speaks for itself. He is just simply gone.

The basic lesson of medicine does apply… the rule of parsimony. I was right the first time. He was just trapped in sadness and hurt. And I was just stupidly in love. That’s it. No soulmates. No tortuous explanations.

And now he is happy. No misery there.

And I just wish
I could dance awkwardly again
And fall, and feel trapped
and just drown in the sound of that heart’s gallop.

But it’s gone.

I hate trying out all these free software just to get free software. It usually leaves a lot of mess in my computer even if I reinstall them… It also makes me susceptible to viruses and opening unsafe sites. But what can I say? Free is free. So I am recommending software that I’ve tried and I hope it will help somebody out there like me–one who doesn’t want to be bothered with all these jargon in video processing. I just want to preserve the videos I take from my Canon DC-100 with minimal loss in quality and I want to do it fast and simple.

DVD Ripper. VOB to AVI. VOB to MPG. My pick would be FreeDVDRipper. It can rip DVD movies and convert DVD VOB-files to VCD, SVCD, DivX, MPEG1, MPEG 2, MPEG4, AVI files. The interface is very simple and you can possibly do without tweaking the default settings to be able to get a good quality rip It rips DVDs at about a 1:1 ratio compared to the actual length of the video… Quite acceptable for me.  The alternative to FreeDVDRipper would be Freez DVD Ripper.  One of my mini-DVDs had an error in the first part so and FreeDVDRipper couldn’t deal with it.  It doesn’t have a chapter by chapter conversion.  I used Freez DVD Ripper to rip the DVD and skip the damaged chapters.  What prevents me from using it as a primary Ripper is that I get errors when I line up multiple chapters to rip at one time.  For it to work, I have to rip the chapters one by one. It is comparable to Free DVD Ripper in speed but has more limited fileoutputs (MPEG4,XVID,AVI).

VRO to VOB converter. I accidentally changed the settings in my videocam and had one DVD record a VRO file. Eeek. While my windows media player can play VRO, it’s not such a popular format to be used in simple video editing software like Windows Movie Maker. I like to put together my small video files so I really have to store them in popular formats so I searched for a VRO converter. SOme have suggested a combo of VCDgear and TMPGEnc–too complicated steps for me. SOme of the other names that came up were DVDJr. (I couldn’t find the download link to this… grrrr!) , DVDMovieAlbum, and DVDWorkshop. On searching google, what was prominent is the AVS video tool but it’s just a trial download… so no thanks. What I recommend is the one that can be found http://www2.mnx.jp/~dle871/ It’s a software in Japanese. It turns out guessing what buttons to press was much easier than the other suggested methods to convert VRO to VOB. To use this, open the exe in the zip file. Then there is no need to fill in the two text fields in the opening window. Just press button with a label ‘T’. There are two browse buttons. The one at the top is intuitively for picking the source file. The one at the bottom is for picking the destination directory. After choosing source and destination, press the button ‘G’. Then, you’re done! Cool. Check out the vob files in the destination directory. Cool

Hope this helps! Does anyone know a free tool that can do all of this in one application?

There have been a lot of ways to present data and compare them amongst different countries.
Gapminder, the toy for world visualizers, is by far the most dynamic I’ve seen. With it, you will be able to choose the different indicators you want to visualize and set it to be either the X-axis or the Y axis. You can also set the colors of the different countries based on a third indicator in addition to those you picked for the x and y axis.

In this diagram, I set the x-axis to be the income per capita and the y-axis to be the number of internet users per 1000 in the population. There seems to be a linear correlation between these two factors. As income per capita increases, the number of internet users also increase. I chose to highlight the countries I’ve visited.

Among them, the outliers seem to be Malaysia and Ireland. Ireland has few internet users relative to its income per capita. I would tend to accept this data as it is on one glance because the short visit I had to Ireland always gave me an old city feel with all those classic buildings and old brick houses–and the faulty assumption that ICT infrastructure in this country is not so good. It surprised me that Wikipedia states that Ireland is one of the largest exporters of software-related goods in the world. Intuitively, I’d expect this to correlate with an increase in internet usage but this is not what the graph reflects when viewed on year 2004. However, since gapminder is able to present the data as a trail relative to the year, I noted that it was rather the income per capita which was exceptional in Ireland. Most countries (like the United States, Philippines, Malaysia) have very vertical graphs and thus very little increase in income per capita from 1995-2004. This is not the case for Ireland, whose remarkable development in 1995 and more so when they joined the EU in 1999, reflects a more horizontal graph from 1995-2004. If this had been a more vertical graph, Ireland would easily fit into the linear correlation. (My conclusion: Ireland is really an interesting case study on the effect of joining the EU hehehe )

On the other hand, Malaysia has a lot of internet users relative to its income per capita. This data might be reflected in the strong ICT in the country. If you look at the world’s most popular ICT areas, Malaysia’s Multimedia Super Corridor is along the lines of US’ Silicon Valley. Even in a paper by United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in 2005 by Jomo KS, increase in electronics exports (which may be reflective of the strength of the ICT industry) was one of the most significant reasons for the remarkable recovery of Malaysia relative to its neighbors from the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997.

So try Gapminder and play with the different indicators. You can find it at www.gapminder.org ! Fun fun fun! Personally, I use it as a start-off point to learn about different countries. If something in the graphs interest me, I go read more about these particular aspects. Fun fun fun!

What I would like to see in this resource is an angle of collaboration from the different sectors. This will be possible if there is capability for users to plug in values for other set indicators outside of what is already in the resource(life expectancy, physicians, military budget, fertility rate). Let’s say a particular organization does research on child labor and they have figures from around the world. It would be good if they could send these data to Gapminder along with let’s say a paper or a methodology of how they got such data.
Also, for those who want to do more extensive analysis, it might be good if we could get links to the sources of these data (so we’ll know about the methods used to arrive at such) and if we could extract the actual figures behind the graph. For example, with my graph above, with the figures available let’s say in an excel file… I could do personal calculations like the correlation coefficient given the 2 indicators I chose to be able to determine if there is in fact linear correlation between the two.

How are you silverfork? Oh. Still studying.

Where have all those ink gone? I don’t know. I couldn’t remember anything. I used them all somewhere.

Where are you, btw? Just there. Look closely. That’s my hand, struggling to stay… I’m still up and alive!  Look, I am forcing a smile.

All I can say is:

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Memory is in the brain of the memorizer.