I first picked up Jasper Griegson’s book The Complete Complainer from the library but I didn’t get a chance to read it. Then, for some strange reason I couldn’t find the book there. I should’ve complained but I was lazy.

The book mysteriously appeared on the shelves much later and this time I picked it up, determined to read it. The Complete Complainer is about how to complain in different situations. Griegson’s writing is funny and his letters usually get results. Just to clarify that this is not a book telling you to wring your hands and get upset; it is about taking action and making things happen.

How many times have you complained about a product or a service that you found less than satisfactory? How many times did you get a satisfactory response? Griegson makes the important point that it’s wise to wait until you’ve cooled down before making a complaint. Angry, invective-filled letters may make you feel good temporarily but they probably aren’t the best solution.

A few days after I’d read the book, I had a chance to complain about a box of cereal that was stale. The store asked me to write a complaint letter to the manufacturer, which I did and in turn I got to pick up another box of cereal (this time I went with a different brand) at the same price.

Did I complain about other situations after that? No, but it’s empowering to know that I can. Or something.

Philip Hesketh’s book Life’s a game, so fix the odds (How to Be More Persuasive and Influential in Your Personal and Business Life) seems like it’s just your usual marketing or selling book, but it actually is a book about communication and persuasion.

Hesketh’s use of anecdotes and humour makes the book light and you don’t feel like you’re reading a “business book”, which given the number of business books out there is a blessing. If you feel like sampling Hesketh’s writing, some of his articles are available for your mental pleasure.

Whatever your line of work, you probably have to either persuade people or influence them, so it’s a book that most people will find useful. In fact, people working with customers directly could benefit from some of the ideas presented in the book.

Verdict: LAGSFTO is worth reading.

Babel came out a couple of years ago but I only got to see it this past weekend. I should’ve let sleeping movies lie.

I really did not enjoy the movieor its attempt to tie different threads together and in the end the best I could come up with was, What?. To me, Babel seemed is the kind of movie that gets critical acclaim because it’s made by a supposedly brilliant director but I just didn’t see it. (Roger Ebert is one of those critics who enjoyed the movie a lot, for instance. I tend to like Ebert’s reviews but in this case I didn’t agree with his review.)

Oh well, watch it or not. It’s not like I have the power to change your mind.

Based on a TV series in the 60s, Get Smart is about a secret agent, Maxwell Smart, who tends to bumble his way through spy-hood. In the movie, Smart, played by Steve Carell, is a desk agent who aspires to be a field agent. Circumstances aspire to pair him with Agent 99, played by Anne Hathaway, and Smart is sent on his first mission.

Smart and Agent 99 pair up to take on the bad guys and lots of funny moments ensue. India’s very own Dalip Singh (The Great Khali) is cast as the bad guys’ strongman and reminded me of Jaws in the old Bond movies. Good times.

I never watched the TV series but Carell is perfectly cast as Maxwell Smart. Anne Hathaway as the sidekick is also perfect, but I do like her, so take this with a pinch of salt. She’s pretty, she can act, she’s got a great personality (as some people say), so what’s not to like.

Overall, Get Smart is a movie that you can watch to relax, have a few laughs, and in the end come out having had a good time. That’s good enough for me.

From Who owns your friends, an interesting article by Erica Naone of MIT Technology Review:

Technology blogger Robert Scoble wanted help moving contact information for his 5,000 Facebook friends into his Microsoft Outlook address book. He turned to Joseph Smarr, chief platform architect at Plaxo… Smarr gave Scoble a short program to test out, which automatically paged through Scoble’s Facebook connections and extracted the names, birthdays, and e-mail addresses of his friends.

There was just one problem. The program triggered alerts at Facebook, which disabled Scoble’s account. “My identity disappeared,” Scoble says. “If I was your friend, I turned gray–all my information went gray. ” Scoble was transformed from a man with a small town of Facebook friends into a nonperson.

This article illustrates the problems associated with trusting companies (social network providers or others) with your private, confidential information. We can’t get by without giving some information out to companies but the amount of information that people give out willingly boggles the mind.

In the same issue of MIT Tech Review, Bjarne Stroustrup, founder of C++, speaking on the future of the web says:

“The total end of privacy. Governments, politicians, criminals, and friends will trawl through years of accumulated data (ours and what others collected) with unbelievably sophisticated tools. Obscurity and time passed will no longer be covers.”

Yikes.