Email from Ric near Ultra

From the same OFW Mailing List…

I live near that place…. Have talked to some people… I almost cried…. really a tragedy…

This is a picture of our fellow countrymen here in the Philippines… kawawa talaga tayong mga pinoy… marami ang nagbabakasakali na mag ka pera…. ganyan kahirap ang mga tao dito… people came from all places… I have talked to someone who came as far as mindoro…. she almost died too due to stampede…

🙁

66 Confirmed Dead at Ultra, Wowowee Event :(

I just checked the time, Manila Time, it is 10:50am. An email came in from an OFW email list I am a member of. Saying that 66 died at the Ultra statium, where the TV program Wowowee was held. A stampede broke out killing 66 people. I went to INQ7 right away, no news. I went to Manila Bulletin, no news. I went to www.abscbn.com, very nice, it forwarded to some resort. ABS CBN does not own the domain. Yehey News was up to date. The news is fresh and was online right away. Copy of the article below:

66 dead in stampede at Philippine stadium: reports
2/4/2006 10:50:00 AM
Source : AFP

Sixty-six people were killed and many more injured on Saturday when a stampede broke out at a stadium in the Philippine capital, local radio quoted unnamed officials at the scene as saying.

Metro Manila authority executive director Lito Vergel De Dios said in a radio interview that a crowd had been gathering around the ULTRA stadium since Wednesday to get into the taping of a popular television variety show.

He was earlier quoted as saying 54 people had been killed.

Officials contacted by AFP said they were still trying to compile a total from all the hospitals in the area.

De Dios said someone in the crowd was believed to have shouted “bomb,” sparking a panic that caused people to trample one another.

Dead bodies, most of them women, were taken out of the stadium on stretchers and laid down on a dirty street, covered with newspapers, plastic bags and discarded cloth.

A little boy was seen crying over the body of his mother, trying to awaken her.

Thousands of people were still streaming through the area after the incident, milling around dead bodies and blocking the entry of ambulances.

Discarded shoes and slippers along with broken bottles and food were scattered all around the stadium.

kw/mm/jah

Sad news. 🙁

4 New Hosting Accounts

4 new web hosting accounts just today! Well isn’t that cool? Thanks Rebecca and Shawn.

Hmmm… Drew and Edgar’s free periods end. So it is like 6 new hosting accounts. And John also renewing another year.

More accounts in the Philippines.

I also like web design and development, but I can only do so much. And I am not yet done with the training of my outsource team.

Hosting rocks! Sell a million, it is totally fine. All I need to do is setup the hosting account and make sure the server is running fine.

Revenue Streams

I have been working as an employee since 1994 and also doing business at the same time since 1997. Business has been paying pretty well but not really the big bucks yet. Just enough to get through life. Then sometimes in an instant… these revenue streams pop into your head. They seem very promising. You feel very positive you will make it big. Earn big bucks. But then again… wasn’t this the exact same feeling I had when I just started my business? A computer shop that is now closed down. Full of enthusiasm and optimistic. Like nothing can go wrong, and everyone will love your product and service. You feel the urge to work every minute, knowing that every second counts.

I have been doing business since 1997, some businesses failed, and others went on. And some of those that I was very optimistic about in the past, were also the ones that died down, and the ones that continued to go on were the ones I least expected before hand, not until I was experiencing the work already.

I haven’t felt such enthusiasm and optimism in a very long time, since I always reserved these feelings in anticipation of the “anything can happen.” Things may go on right and things may fail. And by experience, things of such great feeling of enthusiasm and optimism don’t really work quite well I believe they supposed to be.

Ideas come and go, ideas come in a split second. And sometimes ideas just hit me, thinking of how great this idea is. Eversince the start of this year, business is doing good and revenue stream ideas keep pouring in. And I have never felt such enthusiasm and optimisim to work once again like there is a bright light at the end of the tunnel that I have always been travelling and finally, the light is really in sight. It is in proper range to reach.

But then again… maybe not. Well we will just have to see how it works out.

Blogger™ Byebye… Hello WordPress 2.0

Yes, I made the switch. Yes, I know this Kubrick theme is not unique and there are tons of blogs out there with the same theme since it is the current default theme in WordPress. I’ll improve on that later on, too busy to work on my themes right now. And if I had links to your sites, sorry… I will put them back soon. I just needed to work on other things first.

I have blog post since 2004 using Blogger, and WordPress 2.0 seemed to have no problem importing all my Bloggerâ„¢ postings. I had one problem though… I did a search on Googleâ„¢ for all of my blog pages in their database by searching site:blog.benjarriola.com and if you expand the search to show all pages, there were tons of pages that were giving Error 404’s (page not found).

Since Bloggerâ„¢ and WordPress had different kinds of permalinks. For example… the first error 404 i got was for this URL found in Google:

https://blog.benjarriola.com/2004/07/house-blessing-by-kuya-jef.html

and WordPress was doing it this way:

https://blog.benjarriola.com/2004/07/31/the-house-blessing-by-kuya-jef

In reality, the directories do not really exist since WordPress is doing a mod_rewrite for the URLs and it is simply checking the database for the post name: house-blessing-by-kuya-jef.html and if it cannot be found, then it displays an error 404 which is simply pulling the file 404.php, which is part of the default WordPress files.

So I was thinking all of these links in Google will do no where. So I decided to make the yds404-redirect. This file replaces your 404.php and also has another file 404-redirect.php what will parse the URL and search for the latest best-related title and forward to that page. This is not the best solution since a redirect 301 would be the best, but I did not want to mess with the .htaccess file. It still serves the purpose. And I just signed up for a Googleâ„¢ Sitemap using the WordPress plugin so i can tell Googleâ„¢ to update their database. I know this will take a long time, but at least, while it is not yet in effect, the yds404-redirect will do the trick.

For those that have the same problem in converting from Bloggerâ„¢ to WordPress and search engines have you linked and goes to an error 404 page, feel free to try out my yds404-redirect.

Changing Direction

After attenting the Internet Marketing Seminar by Sean Roach, it also changed the direction of how I will run my business marketing-wise. I just know my plan of action is to fix a lot of stuff on OmniDomain.net, then I will make my killer hosting plan that I will promote so well.

Hump Ahead

Working right now… listening to various music… and I decided to pay attention to the song Hump Ahead by Cueshe. And almost after every stanza, all I said in my head was p***ng *na. Cool tune, nice arrangement, pero p***ng *nang tragedy ang kwento. Not detailed, just in a few sentences… tapos paktay na. Labo. Pero sige. Ok pa din. Pero sana walang similar event na mangyari sa akin na ganun.

Incorporation

My business is currently not a corporation but another business entity. I do not sell good, but non-tangible services and the Internet has always been a companion in my business success.

After hearing Gary Sutton in Robert Kiyosaki’s Investor Workshop in LA whom the former is part of the Rich Dad Advisors who acts as Robert Kiyosaki’s legal advisor whose specialy is corporate law, has expressed the importance of having corporations as business entities for asset protection. Sharon Letcher, also a Rich Dad Advisor and CPA is Rich Dad’s Accountant. And one thing they stressed out is business is a team sport, and get your proper advisors. And some mistakes some people do is to get legal advice from their accountant, or get accounting advice from their lawyer. This is a big no and they said it is best to put them together if the situation calls it.

Last Christmas, I was in the Philippines and while I was at National Bookstore, I saw some Rich Dad Publications, and deicded that I wanted Gary Sutton’s Own Your Own Corporation. Just like the orginal Rich Dad, Poor Dad book, it flows in a way with stories, real life stories, cases while teaching the lessons, and not the boring approach of mostly denifitions then explaining later after all terms are defined. I found this book very very good. I gave me all the reasons why I would want to register a corporation and not any other business entity. And most of the reasons were from the point of view of a lawyer, Gary Sutton, from a legal perspective.

Two nights ago… I decided to attend a seminar by The Learning Annex in San Diego. I attended the How to Setup Your Own Corporation and the speaker was Mr. Jerry Dixon. Mr. Dixon was very, very knowledgeable in what he was discussing on very business entity, advantages and disadvantages. What can be done and what cannot be done, and what others do that is not good doing. I haven’t finished reading Gary Sutton’s book yet but I have read fairly a lot that I already knew some of the stuff being discussed. But the main difference in what Jerry Dixon was teaching, was he was teaching in the view of an accountant. So his focus were on cost, tax obligations, tax expemptions, federal, state and IRS fees, prices and frequency of payments. He also show to us each form and where to file them as well as give many tips on filing and precautions to make the process faster.

In short, Gary Sutton’s book and Jerry Dixon’s Seminar were very good. I feel happy with what I have learned the past week.

Now, my next step is to incorporate. 🙂

The Money Tree


My wife gave me a Money Tree for my business while I was in the Philippines last December.

The business scene in the Philippines is heavily influenced by Filipino-Chinese. Nearly all of the biggest companies are being run by the Filipino-Chinese. Many businesses from big corporations to the small sari-sari stores* has Chinese business good luck charms from the Chinese Feng Shui Bagua, the waving cat, the frog with a coin in it’s mouth and other good luck charms. These are said to be lucky if given to the business and not bought for the business.

The money tree I got was made of plastic in a gold shiny finish. I guess signifying gold itself. As instructed by Marcia, my wife, I placed rice, chocolates that are wrapped in gold foil, and some money inside of the vase of the money tree.

As I was putting this money tree together which is made of not finely cut platic, I needed to occassionally file down some parts of it to make them fit well into the holes of the trunk of the tree, when it came to the base of the trunk going into the the golden pot, it would not fit well it just cracked open a larger hole and the tree would not stand anymore.

I checked my toolbox to see what I could find useful to fix it up. I found a metal plate from an old PC casing with holes for motherboard ports. This came from my old casing which was good as trash since it had no other use.


The holes for the audio ports were good enough to tightly fit the plastic plug for the tree base and I just bent the plate to make it fit in well inside the cover of the golden pot. And it worked out well.


Thanks babe for the money tree and hope it does bring good fortune to the company.


*In the Philippines there are sari-sari stores everywhere. Almost every home is a block or less away from their the neighborhood sari-sari store. A micro-business where sari-sari means something like “all sorts of” or “different kinds of” signifying the store sells all sorts of stuff that are most of the time food groceries, snacks and other consumables.