I Drink My Coffee Too Fast , So That the Sugar Doesn’t Get Mixed

As long as the spoon is falling inside the cup, the coffee doesn’t have enough sugar.

Probably, it doesn’t worth to think about it. But every time I order coffee in these cafes, they put a lot of sugar in it that makes it undrinkable.

Recently, I started to get mad by the cafes and restaurants in Addis. The Service has been improved a lot compared to the last five years for instance, but you can still get fairly mad at the restaurants. Four things that almost every restaurants have in common in Addis.

1. You can’t get menu until you ask for it:

The restaurants shouldn’t wait until the customer ask for the menu. Nobody comes to the restaurant to hang around. Taking long time to bring food is one thing, taking long time to bring the menu is another thing. I assume, you don’t cook the menu, or even print it out for every dinner. Spelling error in the menu discourages people from ordering it. I simply imagine if they can’t write it correctly, how do they cook it tastefully?

2. Shouting at the waiters doesn’t make the customers comfortable:

Ah, you are running a restaurant, not a military group. I usually feel discomfort when the owner/manager of the restaurant shout at the waiters. The wrong assumption is that when the waiters make mistakes, the customer get mad. True! but It is even worse when you treat them so badly.

3. Waiters, learn to write down orders:

You have great memory, but writing down the order doesn’t kill you. Now a days, I give up changing my food to the right order. I usually don’t have preferences. I don’t mind choosing between Burgers and Tibes – yes, this wide. But it is tiresome to eat what i don’t order all the time. I don’t even like it when they come back and ask me what I ordered. Sometimes, i don’t even remember it. I recall this one time, the food took long time to come that i had no idea what I ordered anymore. It was a surprise lunch. But I don’t want to get surprised all the time.

4. Stop feeding us too much Oil:

Is it me or it happens to everyone? Every time I order something, it is coming literally swimming inside oil. We go to the restaurant to get healthy food. Have you eaten Spaghetti recently? I think I missed the market price for cooking oil these days, but I don’t need too much oil in my food no matter how cheap it could get.

Well, these are what is in my mind in this very moment, my timely, recent emotional thought of restaurants in Addis. Different people have different experiences. What is your wildest experience in Ethiopian restaurants?

Simple Changes ETHIO Telecom Should Consider – Part II

Since I created etc sucks group on Facebook, 441 people joined and growing. It is not an empty shout though. Telecom is the most critical service in this rapidly growing economy. In some countries getting certain amount of bandwidth is a human right. We haven’t reached there yet. But at least …

Online Identity is important for Internet Service provider:

I don’t think no other ISP has such a bad website like Ethio telecom has. The design is bad. The navigation is bad. The content is too bad. Listen what the CEO said about the website.

This website has therefore been designed to be user friendly. Special efforts have been made to simplify the site navigation

This is a joke, right? Which website he is talking about and what special efforts they have been made?

Here are good examples how other ISPs use their website. (I intentionally take the examples from Kenya)
http://www.safaricom.co.ke/
http://www.kdn.co.ke/

You don’t tell to a customer that you also don’t have internet connection:

Internet is extremely slow these days. In their own words,

Due to the current DNS address 213.55.64.36 and 213.55.64.38 will not be functional starting from the end of March 2011, Broadband customers are required to change their DNS address configuration by the new address 213.55.96.148.

I usually call at least five numbers whenever there the connection is down, most of the time the response I get from the technical people is that they don’t also have internet. What? Did I hear it correctly or how come the internet service provider tell the customer that they also don’t have internet connection?

Start selling .ET domains, because we can only get it from you:

Dot ET domains are for Ethiopia. (.ke is for Kenya, .de is for Germany etc …). Ethio telecom is the only one who should sell these addresses under this domain. The only organization who has .et domain is ethio telecom itself – ethionet.et. I have tried to talk to them several times why they shouldn’t sell. The response is rather funny. It is not secure to use .et for other organizations. Why don’t they just say, they don’t know how to configure it?

Google’s Instant Search vs I’m Feeling Lucky

In April, 2010 I wrote an article about I’m Feeling Lucky button on Google. I know what it does, but I haven’t seen the point of it. I think Google also realized that there is no point to use the button anymore.

Google’s instant search feature is one of latest updates on Google. It gives you a recommendation on life-time searching. I found it very important especially when i am looking for something that i don’t know all the key words. The thing is, the instance search option completely made ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button useless. You can’t even have a chance to click on this button.

If you click on this button without inserting any search query, it will direct you to Doodles. Google use different logos for different occasions and holidays. No Ethiopian logo so far, that’s why I came up with my own version.

I am wondering, can you imagine Google without ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button?

Is Internet Twitter or Google?

If you are asked to define internet in one platform, what would it be? Is twitter or Google?

It is not a simple question to answer though. People who browse internet use Google day to day. It is almost mean the same when we say “Searching on the internet” and “Searching on Google”. Google is way beyond searching.

But I need to go one step forward. Twitter in the other hand is not “140 characters of inanity” as some people say. But it is a place where I get every piece of information from individuals.

Do I need information from human or machine?

Decide yourself! I made a little search 40 seconds ago.
I searched “Japan Earthquake”

Google’s result (www.google.com)

8.9 Earthquake struck Japan triggering a Tsunami Alert

Japan quake, Saudi tensions drag Sensex 154 points down

… Japan earthquake map We are borrowing Gideon’s blog to cover Japan’s …

.. A magnitude 8.9 earthquake strikes off the northeast coast of Japan

.. The most powerful earthquake to hit Japan in at least 100 years

.. TOKYO (AP) — A powerful tsunami spawned by the largest earthquake in Japan’s recorded history slammed the eastern coast Friday,

… and so on, …

Twitter’s result (search.twitter.com)

Pray for Japan. They’ve just been hit with a 8.8 earthquake – (it is 8.9/9.0, by the way)

People wait out their fate after Earthquake at Tokyo Disneyland in Japan

Our thoughts go out to all those affected by the terrible earthquake and tsunami in Japan & the Pacific basin

Massive Earthquake In Japan Forces Evacuations In Hawaii, Strands Travelers

Pray for Japan!!!! OMG that was the worst earthquake for the last 10 years …

An earthquake hits japan and it’s 8.9! And they sent an alert to Russia and hawaii! :O

10.000 tweets every 30 seconds worldwide …

.. and such …

I also searched for “Lol” yes, lol… lol

Google’s results

LOL, an abbreviation for laughing out loud, or laugh out loud

League of Legends – Free Online Game | LoL – League of Legends

LOL.com – Funny 2.0

Lolcats ‘n’ Funny Pictures of Cats – I Can Has Cheezburger? (lol)

The name ‘Lol’ is an abreviated [you misspelled it dude, just like how people do it in Twitter] form of the name ‘Laurence’.

Official website for the film LOL, by Joe Swanberg, C. Mason Wells, and Kevin Bewersdorf

Twitter’s results

Blackberrys lol R E T W E E T if you have a iPhone or Android

I would never unfollow you lol (nice one!)

i love how humans always out-smart the aliens, even though they’re centuries ahead in technology LOL

Apparently these are the best 2 fingers you could ever receive lol

lol kool i see ahaha (are you okay? Lol)

I know, I know I’m sorry ! Well now I’m back lol

wwwhhh,Lol.!

i would stay at hme…Lol cause u kno them crazy teachers will try 2 gve out wrk

Which glass would you like to drink from?

March Unpublished

March is not my favorable blogging month. For some reasons i can’t explain, i found myself with a lot of ideas and can’t manage composing writing. I still keep wondering if i write blogs when i don’t have anything to say. Don’t get scared of this statement. But I write blogs when i don’t have anything to write is scary. Wrong?

Let me give you summary of what happened in the last 11 days and you will decide if I need to write an article for each.

Panel discussion with my fellow bloggers in Ethiopia

I represent about 8% of bloggers in Ethiopia. We are only handful of Ethiopian bloggers who writes from Ethiopia, about Ethiopia. I got the chance to meet three of the bloggers who are obviously cooler than me. Sara, Endalkachew, Daniel. Both of them are very talented bloggers and have passion to share their ideas and a kind of people you feel like receiving their post in your inbox everyday.

Beyond the panel discussion, there was also a forum called “Digital Identity Ethiopian Forum”. There were great presenters from North45, newthinking-communications, GTUG-Addis.

I have changed my social network from Mixxt to SocialGO

I have been running the ICT Cracker social network for a while and I decide to change the platform. It wasn’t emotional decision though. I encountered different problems with Mixxt which i am not interested to suggest for them anymore. The customer service in this platform is very poor. Ethiopia is not also included in the country list. I have been constantly requesting for this change, but I didn’t receive any response from them. Apparently, the group feature of the Mixxt is not also functional. But on the other hand SocialGO has all the features i need for my social network.

Eleven days without a blog post. But I was already in the training for process consultancy; Sabrina is town this month; and such.

You might need to wait for the next post to see if I am really serious about my blog posts. Probably, to the next time until I don’t have anything to write about.