Life As It Goes By

Just an update here…

If you had been trying to access the website for past week or weeks, then you were one of the those shocked to find that the website no longer existed. Sorry about it.

My previous web hosting company decided to stop hosting this website and I only noticed a few days ago (didn’t really have much time left from world cup viewing).

I ended my relationship with the company earlier on but had put up a notice to them to end the hosting only till July. Who knows  they just cut it off abruptly. My experience with them so far tells me it is common (they won’t live up their promises to their customers) for them to pull off such acts.

Anyway, search for alternative partners was made and Bluehost.com is my new choice. Not too sure of its reputation and popularity, I am only aware of their services, which are quite compatible with my previous web hosting. I did shift one of my other websites to GoDaddy.com but it is really too complicated for beginners to start and there are just too many ads and promotions. I’ll keep both web hosting suppliers to continue evaluate which is better (my prior experience has taught me not to put all the eggs in one basket).

In the end, I am glad that I am able to resolve this in 2 days (actually only a couple of hours). Thanks to prompt and “automated” services of Bluehost.com, I can now go back to the Netherlands vs Slovakia match!!!

Recently, I have disabled a WordPress plugin, in charge of filtering spam comments. I had been wondering for a while, why hadn’t anyone dropping their comments?? Was I really doing a bad job?

As it turns out, there are indeed some comments that have been filtered off. I am glad to know there are some responses out there. The only downside of this is that I have to check all comments myself. So, I have to make some disclaimers stating that I won’t be able to reply to your comments and for those who wish to follow the links provided in the comments, please use your own judgment.

So far, the experience of hosting this website has been great. I hope I have written articles of wide ranging topics and offered some perspectives of such topics. I guess I tend to be more cautious with my words. Bits of sarcasm (which could be too subtle at times) can be expected in all parts of the articles. I tried to provide up-to-date information but I do not attempt to emulate the function of a web-based news agency which I think Reuters (not so much after its recent face lift) and New York Times have been doing a great job. The aim is to portray the image of a rational writer.

Looking at some of the statistics not available to you, I found that the link with the most hits is, in fact, /feed where you can subscribe feeds to new articles from this website. I am thrilled to know that we have this connection between us. I am sure this will keep me going.

If you come to this link a few days ago, you may find yourselves at missing link which returns an error.

Well, there’s the same shock that I had 2 days ago when I visited the site (I forgot why I did so but must be  that I have a hunch of something brewing against my back ). As the administrator of the web site, I have more to face. It appeared, to be an attack by a smart alec who mistook me or my website as corporate. Luckily, I realized it was partly my fault. There is currently newer versions of the CMS that I am using and the previous version has security issues. Thus, to fix the problem, I need to update to the latest version.

But it is not definitely the case for all the banks now. I am not a financial expert (still working hard) but something is definitely not right when UBS has to sell off $10 bil worth of shares. This is slightly more than the net income of UBS in 2006 (source from wikipedia).
What is this trend called “subprime write-off” all about? Why are banks taking turns to do this? I even wanted to list down the links to all the news announcement made over the year on this. Luckily, I found this diligent work from this guy (http://riskfriends.wordpress.com/2007/12/04/update-subprime-bankparade-vi/). Not sure if the link will be there for long… But what is for sure, this subprime write-off thing is not for fun (http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a3fCFxLIgT2s&refer=worldwide).
$400 billion of dollars are about to go down the drain… This explains why the low interest rates (0.25%) the banks offered for my savings account. All the money must have just vanished into the air. How many countries in the world now have GDP of $400 billion? Imagine if this fund has been spent on research for newer energy sources and methods to improve on the global warming effect. We could have advanced time by a decade or two.
Sometimes, it just makes you laugh when you think of stuff that we humans do. One day, when the world is coming to an end, we will look back and reflect, “Are we really the most intelligent beings on this Earth?”

(dated: 11/12/2007)