tasuki’s blog

I’m willing to pay money for a good service…

Example: I bought not too large amount of cheese for almost 20€ recently. At the shop, there was a cute girl who spent like 15 minutes helping me to choose what to buy. When I was interested in some cheese, I could try it out to see if I liked it. The cheese was like 5 times more expensive than your “usual” cheese, but it was excellent cheese and the service was just great.

But I don’t want to pay insane amounts of money for a very crappy service…

For example my bank. They send me all kinds of totally useless letters (snail-mail letters, even) all the time. But when I need to bring them a small piece of paper or they charge me 5€, there is complete silence, they just charge me 5€ without even telling me, hoping they’ll be able to do the same the next month. Also, I originally created the bank account to be able to withdraw my money from paypal and to buy things on the internet with the credit card. They gave me a card which doesn’t allow that (how should I have known?). A card that would enable me to do that would cost me 30€ a year. Also, it would enable the companies I buy things from to steal all my money from the account. What I need is a (possibly virtual) credit card that enables me to pay money through the internet when I allow it (yes, that’s actually possible, thanks to vertigo for telling me). But nope, this bank doesn’t have that, and they don’t know whether they ever will. Well, guess what, as soon as I find a bank that sucks a bit less (shouldn’t be much of a problem, anyway), I’m getting outta there.

Another good example of bad customer service is Czech railways. They’ll do anything to prevent you from learning when, how and for how much you can travel. I’m going to Vienna in about a week and it took me considerable time to find out that the return ticket Brno-Vienna costs 50€ (no wonder they are trying to hide that information as deep as possible). Surprisingly, going through Bratislava would be for about half the price (although Brno-Bratislava is about the same distance as Brno-Vienna, plus there’s the extra few dozens of kilometers for Bratislava-Vienna). But I’d have to change trains 2 times and considering the usual delays, there’s a chance that I’d miss my next train.

And for a change, a good customer service again: Student Agency buses. They are rather comfortable (I’d even dare to call them slightly luxurious) and take you from Brno to Vienna and back for 10€ (yup, that’s five times cheaper than the train). And if I had a better credit card, I could even buy my ticket on the internets…

To sum it up, big companies that charge a lot of money for nothing are driving me nucking futs.

Short stories are good when you don’t have much time but want to read something (why welcome, Captain Obvious).

Here are few that I really liked:
Isaac Asimov: The Last Question
Terry Bisson: They’re Made out of Meat
Ambrose Bierce: Moxon’s Master
Edgar Allan Poe: The Pit and the Pendulum

I strongly advise you to read at least the first two.

Somehow, I wasn’t that impressed by other short stories such as Nightfall (it wasn’t that bad, but somehow I expected the generally accepted best short story to be better, it was also longer than needed—the shorter the better) or An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge.

And finally, I would like to ask for your advice. Do you know any really good (and possibly short) short stories?

I’m mildly paranoid — and fully aware of it.

For example, when leaving a windowless room with the lightswitch inside (typically a bathroom) and entering a lighted corridor/passage/room/whatever I always switch the light off before opening the door. Why? Well, if there was anyone out there out to get me, this could give me a considerable edge. First, I wouldn’t be occupied with switching the light off, and more importantly, you always want to be in the dark with the other person out there in the lighted area.

I’m also slightly paranoid in other ways, but it’s not as funny as the above example and I don’t want to tell because you guys would abuse the knowledge to poke fun at me.

No, not another Pink Floyd post…

It happened that I changed schools again. Faculty of business management at vutbr was real crap (so crap I’m not even giving them a link). Easily the worst school I’ve ever seen. While I think that educashion is very important, I’m not a fan of schooling. One can educate (or should that be “educash”?) oneself watching google’s educashional videos (thanks to keo for pointing it out), reading books (some of which are even available online, like SICP), or listening to podcasts (I’m not really into that, though).

Currently, I study cca 8 hours a day and I’m learning a lot. Although it consists mostly of selfstudy, if I face a hard problem that I can’t solve or just get stuck, there are teachers to help me. Also, there’s free water and they even pay me money for studying there. All in all, can’t complain.

As some of you might have noticed, I’ve been writing this blog in English exclusively. My “official reason” was for it to be accessible to more people. While I’m happy that more people can read my blog, it certainly wasn’t the main force behind my decision.

I spent my highschool days writing papers in Czech, and I always found it very difficult. For some reason, it never felt comfortable. Although Czech is my native language and I’m certainly much more proficient at it than at English, I definitely prefer English for writing any kind of prose (haven’t tried poetry yet ). I am not sure why I prefer English, but I think the language just suits my style of thinking better. The idioms are also quite different, and I like the English ones better.

Writing in English is a joy for me, while writing in Czech is a nightmare. Isn’t that enough of a reason?