Snail Mails

After being away for nearly month… and filtering out all the brochure type of junk in the mailbox, I got:

  • 8 Credit Card Pre-Approved Applications. All Credit Card Pre-Approved Applications went to the trash except for one since the Annual Percentage Rate (APR) is lower than everyone else. I will start moving some of my bills on an auto-payment scheme from my other credit cards to other cards with lower APR and no annual fees.
  • 2 Pre-Approved Car Loan Letters. Both letters went to the trash. I do not need a new car. As long as my current 2nd-hand hand car still runs.
  • 10 Bills to pay from current bank credit cards, department store credit cards, phone, cellphone, chiropractor bills. All bills due before my payday were paid. Those bills due after payday will be paid after payday.

Domain Selling Tactics

Many people buy domain names and many know about Verisign/Network Solutions and also Register.com who sell domains at $35/year who were the pioneers of domain registrations. You can get lesser prices if you register for more number of years. Network Solutions actually powers the technical backend of the .com and .net domain name extension. Many cheaper and still reputable companies like DirectNIC sells domains at $15/year. To destroy the competition in the early years of 2000, 000Domains.com was a bit popular before since it was one of the first companies to offer domains lower than $15/year. Today there are tons of companies, some are just hard to find while others are easier. Included in the many companies is my own company that sells domains at $8.88/year, OmniDomain.net

And of course, I buy domains from myself, haha and what many people do not know, (but many people also know) is that the owner information of domain names can be viewed in a whois search. All domain registration companies should have it. My own whois search is here: www.omnidomain.net/whois and just type in the domain name and type in the code in the box below it, and you can check out the domain information.

Although there are a lot of spammers that use whois databases to update their spam list, many people do not use there personal email addresses for whois information. Some people use the whois information to send the domain owner some proposal to move over to their domain registration.

Which brings me to this company’s different style of selling. I occassionally get snail mail from this company called Domain Registry of America. Yes, not email, it is snail mailed and maybe they believe if they spam, it will just end up in the trash folder or spam filter deleted.

They are actually telling you when your domain will expire (which they just simply checked the whois information) and is telling you to move over to them. For $40 for 2 years, or $25/year. Obviously, they are targetting the NSI (Network Solutions, Inc.) customer. They are proposing to the wrong person. I buy domains from OmniDomain.net for $8.88/year. Actually I get them even at a cheaper price since I own OmniDomain.net hehehe.

In the Philippines From December 3 to December 31, 2005

I was really scheduled to be in the Philippines from December 3 to 27, 2005, but with my health condition, and a lot of things not completely done aside from shortening the time to be with my family, were all of the reasons extending it a little bit longer to December 31, 2005.

Good thing I was able to talk to Pam Lund, one of our bosses at work who was online and was kind to have a few more days extended during my vacation. Thanks Pam.

After talking to her, I called up Philippine Airlines right away and tried to get flights on January 1 to 3, but all were fully booked and the next schedules were on January 11 and would still be on waiting list. So I opted to get the latest December flight and listed as waiting list for December 31, 2005 at 10:00pm.

I kept calling everyday if I was still on waiting list and everyday I still got the same answer, we were on waiting list, and in the morning of December 27, Marcia woke up earlier and I when I woke up… she was already dialing the Philippine Airlines office. It was hard getting through the phone lines as I continued to fix my things preparing to leave that day, and it was nearly noon when I was able to talk to a Philippine Airlines representative and my December 31 flight was already booked.

It is 2006 already, and one thing I will do is shorten my blog posts. Long posting are sometimes too long to read in one sitting. Although a lot happened when I got back to the Philippines, several stories to tell, I will just break down big stories into smaller chunks making them easier to read in a short span of time.

Happy New Year to everyone!

After working the whole 2005 and was happy to meet my family whom I missed so much… and was with them for nearly a whole month, and just wanted to see them and get away from work for a few hours (few hours, because I was also working during vacation), for some reason… I seem to miss work too. I guess I am crazy.

Playing around with Ajax

There is always something new that comes out. And sometimes it is so hard to catch up with what’s happening. If you are just starting out making websites and learned HTML, once you learn it… you find out there is more to learn with Javascript, with CSS. To make your website look nice, you still need to know your graphic softwares, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator. Then you find out there is some animation software, there is more to learn. Macromedia Flash, and Flash has it’s own scripting language, Actionscript. And you learn you can’t do databases, you need some server side programming language, some database where you have many options, either PHP, ASP/ASP.net, JSP, Cold Fusion, Perl, Miva Phyton and more with so many database options, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase, Oracle and a lot more. After you learn all of that, it just does not end there. You can learn about SEO, and techniques on special ways to do things. Tableless sites in CSS, CSS rollovers, Spritenavs, Suckerfish Navs, better transparent PNGs, cross-browser techniques, scalable designs and a lot more.

Some people get discouraged with all these things to learn but all I can say is, you do not need to learn it all. And collaborate with others. Or how I do it… just find out what everything can do, and just learn specific parts that are needed on a project. And gradually increase knowledge as more projects come in.

After I first read about Ajax or Asynchronous JavaScript + XML on the article on the Adaptive Path website a few months back when former co-worker Jason Kent sent me the link via an ICQ message at work I took a quick look at read and read through it quickly since I still had a lot of work to do that time. I said to myself, great, now I got something new to learn again, when is this going to stop? Can I still catch up with all the new things coming out? The article sound a bit complicated showing all these diagrams and the only Ajax I knew then was some laundry soap.

Although I already had a good grasp of the concept, I never tried it out until just recently, actually last 2 days ago. I was just working on an email contact form and needed to add an anti-spam code generated on an image that the user must type in a text box to avoid spam bots submitting the form. The code should not be found anywhere and should be save on the server. After discussing this with Mike Lopez via YM, he suggested the Ajax approach and I said, nah, I got a lot of projects to finish, I will just do a page reload and study Ajax some other time. But he told me it is not as hard as you think. It is really simple, it only takes 30 minutes to learn. And through the process of looking for a good tutorial online, he found Sajax made by Modern Method which is an Ajax toolkit. Yes it did make Ajax easier.

With my inferior Javascript skills, it still took me 2 days to get it work (but not working whole day on it, only in the night time). I had problems passing the values of variables from Javascript to PHP and back. And when I found out what was causing the problems, they are super simple dumb reasons. I shared Sajax at work and Mike Hawkins showed my something else. He showed me Xajax and after reading about it, it seems Xajax is offering something better. But I haven’t really tried Xajax out yet. I might try that out on my next Ajax implementation.

Philippine Web Awards

I have been fortunate in the past to be part of the web awards in 1999 and 2000 as a finalist and won in the People’s choice awards. And in 2001, 2002 I was a chosen judge. In 2003 was my first time to go to the awards not as a judge nor competitor. Everyone’s skills just stepped up and getting in the finals is not as easy as it was before. 2004 I felt totally unknown in the web awards and I still went there to watch. 2005, at least they contacted me to be a semi-finals judge again. My company had three entries this year and only one reached the semi-finals.

The Philippine Web Awards posted our profiles and they mentioned my blog. Grabe kakahiya. lolz. Puro problema lang ng buhay ko nilalagay ko sa blog ko. hahaha.

Anyway, I did ask them to take it off the site. Pero hindi na matatanggal sa printed materials. http://www.philippinewebawards.com/judges.asp

Thanksgiving na dito sa US, so Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. A long weekend from now to Sunday. A good time to catch up with pending work.

Pero right now… inaantok na ako. Sleep muna… zzzzzzzz

Pare, walang pera sa hosting…

I still remember these words from a friend of mine. We were partners in an old company before I got tired of the company. I got tired making websites. Designing and even more tiring, a bunch of web development projects. The price tag was high, but the work was hell. I was a Zombie everyday due to lack of sleep. That is why I got tired of working as a web designer/developer that time. I felt the price to amount of work ratio was not proportionate since I just got so tired that the money was a small value that I would give up for getting more sleep.

Those early days… I already proposed to concentrate on hosting alone and not to concentrate on designing and development. And I still remember my partner’s words… “Pare, walang pera sa hosting, ang pera sa na development.” (Man, there is no money in hosting, the money is in development) Well only in web development have I experience closing a P1Million deal, as well as a P600,000 worth deal in a single year. Mysteriously… if you get paid in small chunks for the deal… and expenses always come… you never get to hold that large amount of money. And the projects that were targeted for 3 months often turn out to be 1 year. It was not worth it for me having no sleep for these big one-shot big deals. I was so tired… I gave up on the whole company.

I decided to work in the academe teaching computer subjects. And decided to give business another shot… this time concentrating on hosting and domains alone.

As my partner once said there was no money in hosting… I believed otherwise, it may be small, but it was a regular payment. It was passive income in a way. Like a vending machine, like a pinball machine, like an arcade video game machine, not much to maintain. No need to have an employee at the place of business and people pay money. You just go occassional check ups that everything is running fine.

Last week I had 109 websites on my server. Today I already have 117. And I still have tons more of inquiries or hosting and domains. Most active countries are the Philippines and the US, but clients also exist in Australia, China, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Riyadh and Romania. Although good things may be happening… hack attempt happen more often since more websites are exposed, and serve as more known target places. Even if there is no such thing as 100% security, I always try my best to get nearer to the 100% secure with the help of the opensource communities online sharing knowledge. Not an easy task, but for technical people, opensource is still cheaper than commercial software. But for the non-technical people, the time needed to learn opensource softwares or high extra help to manage an opensource server may cost them more and might as well get commercial software with good customer support.

My company is still not earning a significant amount to depend on my company alone, but it is doing better than my company before than concentrated on web design and development deals with a steady amount of income. Not really really big, but still a steady amount. Keep everyone happy, and you keep everyone on the server.

Today, I am still like the way I hated it several years ago, having no sleep. But the no sleep today is more worth it.

For Jamie

I know Jamie is only 3 years old, this may be too advanced for her. But this is not for her to make, this is only for her to realize. Realization of the possibility is sometimes what will drive her do more better things. To show her that what you see, you can recreate is already a powerful thing to me. It lessens the losers in the world that easily say: I can’t do that.

I was a Lego® child since 4, but my real big Lego® sets came in at the age of 6. All these sets are now Jamie’s. Some people say Jamie is smart, and they are judging this on how she speaks. At the age of 3 she can do interesting conversations, has nice pronunciation, and knows a bunch of stuff. But this is not what I am looking for at this moment. I want her to wonder how things work, can see symmetry, color balance and uniformity, do simple jigsaw puzzles, get to count in small numbers and get a simple concept of length units. Talking is nice, sounds smart, but even up to college, there are a lot of good talkers that know nothing. The government in any country has a lot of them.

I like Lego® since it gives you simple rules of measurement, where you measure in the unit of Lego® “dots” which are the circle heads that connect each part. Designing something, from a tree, a house, stairs, whatever, teaches simple symmetry and alignment. Sometimes you are already teaching simple math without knowing it. In centering alone, just tell Jamie, ang ganda ng gawa mo, pero igitna mo ito… and if she ask paano or she says naka gitna naman, bring in the counting of circles on both sides. Just start with that and she will learn more as time goes on. She will learn about planes of symmetry, lines and planes and 3d space without knowing that she is learning. Turning objects in her head. And when school comes… she will appreciate more the number line, the mid point, median, mean, the dot, circle and sphere, area and perimeter, union and intersection. It is just asking her to make the right things.

Anyway… we will have a good Lego® session when I get home this December. Right now, just show her these pictures, do not ask her to do it, because if you do, and she can’t, frustration comes in. And when frustrated, it really depends on the person, sometimes, the more motivated they get to do it, or some totally give up. Jamie is too young to get totally motivated to get to do it when failure arises, although I have seen my trait of having this attitude as early as 6 years old in playing video games or any game. And a common line I would hear from my dad is: And hina-hina mo naman. accompanied with a laugh since he always did better. I do not plan to do that with my children, it will depend on how I see their motivation to do better is working for them.

Famous work of some artist. Famous, but I do not know who the artist is.

The recreated artwork in Lego®

I got the pictures from DamnFunnyPictures.com.

Clients who do not know who to blame.

Clients come in all flavors…

The type of client that makes life colorful, are those that do not know who to blame. those that does not know where the mistake is. But no matter what the problem is, your fault or somebody else’s or sometimes their fault, it will all be your fault.

But I am a pretty patient person. Tell me all you want to say. You may be mad, irritated or a flaming hot screaming client. And I will just listen and find out what the problem is… fix it if it is a problem of my service, and if not, simply point out what is causing the problem.

But I still, do not leave the client in the dark if it is not a problem with my service. The best I can do is calmly point out the problem and lead them into the right direction to get their problem solved.

Now with a growing number of clients, having more than 100 websites on my server, this is just a beginning. I know it will be tougher as the number increases. Bring it on!

Fill up my server more so I can hire a full time techsupport personnel. To the point that every 5 to 10 minutes, a new client will have a problem because they do not know what they are doing, and will call up, email or chat with the company.

As more clients come in, I am taking this challenge. Give me more so I can hire a call center to handle you all when you get to 500 maybe.

I feel bad, I feel good

I feel bad…

…so many projects, so little time.

…some delayed, way delayed.

…so many clients, so many customer support inquiries, so little sleep.

…Philippine Web Awards, still need to do judging, so little time.

…program on registration, database, etc for the San Diego Taekwondo Championship on October 29.

…Pritchon, Martal, JLM, Some work on Mansmith, Waters coming soon…

…so many clients wanting to resell, waiting for my go signals on many matters… Lex’s signup forms, JL’s plans.

…Server administration… *&&@#$%^^&#@!% you hackers. You make life harder.

…YDS Website, forever under construction, PayPlus+ integration, trouble ticket, FAQs, billing system…

…Hosting clients with super delayed payments. Don’t worry I am not going to mention who you are. Your domains are going to get stolen.

…Computer problems, still some important files on my hard disk fried by the Sept 20 San Diego lightning storm.

…two YDS websites out of competition at the Philippine Web Awards.

…zero money, bought plane tickets.

I feel good…

…my family loves me.

…I am going home in the Philippines in December. Vacation approved. Leave at Dec 3. Come back on Dec 27.

…First salary after my increase, (but does not mean i have more money, it means I can pay the bills easier.)

…New Domain and Hosting Client, Gema just paid for her domain transfer.

…One YDS website got into the semifinals of the Philippine Web Awards. www.lana-asanin.com, please vote for her site. Visit www.philippinewebawards.com, register and vote.

…Amor helping out the company

…Wifi at North Olympus home on Monday. #@#$%$&^# that DSL. Never came to us.

…100+ clients, I can’t memorize them anymore, I remember in 1999, I know each and every domain, I even know configuration settings of each one. I can easily login remembering everything. Clients never got more than hmmm… 30 I guess. Today 100+ clients paying on a regular renew, just make them happy so they do not go away.

…I am alive, clean living. God is alive.

…I am starting to learn more about my Dad’s decision making.

Life is Good… Life Sucks… But still good… But still sucks.

Things I wanted to talk about but did not have the time to…

It’s been a long time since my last post because I’ve been so busy lately. And bad things happen to make things even harder.

My PC Problems

As usual PC problems never go away. One time my PC kept rebooting and at first I thought it was Windows, but even before it enters Windows, it reboots just a few second after POST. So it can be a hardware problem. I check some CMOS settings and everything looked fine and the weird thing was even within the CMOS settings it was rebooting. And I checked the system health within the CMOS setup and noticed the fast climb of the temperature. Once it reaches 96o centigrade, it reboots. Imagine that, just 4o less than boiling point at STP. The processor fan was still running, but the problem was mainly it was just a bit loose and the heatsink was not sticking well to the processor.

After that was solved… there was a recent lightning storm in San Diego that woke up the whole neighborhood where I lived. There was one big strong one that lit up my room and my lights blinked even if they were off. And my PC was on during the night. What the lightning broke was one phone line splitter, one DSL line filter, one 56k intenal PCI modem and a bunch of bad sectors on my hard disk. The PC was totally unoperable. Although I had a Celeron Windows PC hanging around and a laptop, a lot of needed files were in separate places on my AMD PC that was struck by lightning and the hard disk had bad sectors everywhere.

I can use an external USB/Firewire hard disk casing but my data was in two different hard disk and I have only one external casing. Taking them in and out of the casing was a tedious task to do. Aside from that, two of the partitions on one of the drives were in NTFS and not in FAT32. And the other hard disk was all NTFS. I got a Mac Mini Recently and even if it can read the NTFS drives, it is read only. MacOS can only write to the FAT32 file system. My only hope is to do a Partition Magic, but the drive must have enough space to be able to do the non-destructive partition changes, or else, I need to copy everything to my other drives and reformat the NTFS partitions to FAT32 and put the files back. And I need to do that on my Celeron PC.

Opening and closing the PC, putting on and removing the hard disk, moving files from hard disk to hard disk all consumes time. But if not done right away, more work is going to catch up on me. So far chkdsk was already done on my 120GB hard disk and was able to retrieve most files. I can do partial work but thework files are on the NTFS partitions. My other 80GB hard disk is currently undergoing chkdsk and when that is done I need to copy my billing statements to my clients and other papers like invoices, proposals and contracts. It’s October and I need to send out October billings.

The Mac Mini

I got a Mac Mini. Only 512MB memory since I will upgrade the memory myself to 1GB. Also got a Hyundai 17″ TFT LCD Panel Monitor. Kensington Wireless RF keyboard and mouse. Mac runs fine, pretty fast and everything how a mac should be, so generally it is great. But what do I do not like?

I am a keyboard shortcut person on the Windows PC. I use the keyboard a lot in many ways that many people will use the mouse instead.

I bodies of text in anything, in word processors, spreadsheets, browser text boxes, anything with text, I use these shortcuts very often:

up
down
left
right
home
end
pgup
pgdown
ctrl-up
ctrl-down
ctrl-left
ctrl-right
ctrl-home
ctrl-end
ctrl-pgup
ctrl-pgdown
shift-up
shift-down
shift-left
shift-right
shift-home
shift-end
shift-pgup
shift-pgdown
ctrl-shift-up
ctrl-shift-down
ctrl-shift-left
ctrl-shift-right
ctrl-shift-home
ctrl-shift-end
ctrl-shift-pgup
ctrl-shift-pgdown

In the Mac, it can also be done. Like instead of Home, you use Alt-Left, and instead of End, you use Alt-Right. No problem, I can train myself with the changes, but the problem is in some applications it does not work. It works on MS Word for Mac, in the text in Adium, it wants the Home and End, and in Dreamweaver code view, it does not work at all. Yes I am trainable to new conventions, but each application in the Mac does not follow the same conventions. And I am forced to use the mouse.

Another thing… In Windows… many applications have keyboard shortcuts, but not everything has a keyboard shortcut. But everything that does not have a keyboard shortcut, I memorize the “Alt” key sequences using the menu bar underlined letters.

Common ones I use often are like

Photoshop:
Alt>I>I = Image Size
Alt>I>S = Canvass Size
Alt>I>P = Crop Selection
Alt>I>A>C = Adjust Contrast/Brightness

Excel:
Alt>O>C>A = Auto-fit column width
Alt>O>R>A = Auto-fit row height
Alt>O>C>H = Hide Column
Alt>O>R>H = Hide Row
Alt>O>C>U = Unhide Column
Alt>O>R>U = Unhide Row

Word:
Alt>F>U = Page Setup

These are just a few of them. And on the Mac, the only shortcuts I seem to be able to use are the shortcuts given and cannot activate menu items with the keyboard alone. Unless there is something I really do not know yet and I still need to figure out how to do them on the Mac. So right now, I am forced to use the mouse.

I still picture myself using the Windows PC as my main general all around computer to use. And I will use my Mac Mini for work specific things that is related to graphics, audio or video. For coding I will still use my Windows PC mainly because of the keyboard shortcut convenience and speed and for websites, the Mac will be used for view testing. And of course Linux still powers my server. Stable, economical, perfect for a server, but will not use it for general all around use.

Investor Workshop

One of my favorite books on my shelf is RIch Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. Although this is not a book only for business people, most business people like it. The book mainly talks about Robert Kiyosaki’s two dads. One rich, one poor, and how he learned from both, but followed the advice of his rich dad when it came to the topics about money.

Robert Kiyosaki recently had an Investor Workshop at the LA Convention Center last October 1. Being on his mailing list, I received an email about the event. It cost $150, in Philippine Pesos that is more than P8,000, but it was really worth it. It looked like there were 2,000 people there and he was really great. His knowledge shared will really charge a lot in the way you think. He also tells you about the common pitfalls people do why they never really succeed. He talked about taxes and other problems with the government laws that you have to watch out for. Knowing the rules to take advantage of the rules and not fall into the wrong paths. He talked about 3 top investments and he had excellent speakers on every type of investment. He talked about inflation and currency and investing off-shore. And although he talks all about money and how to gain more money and get rich, methods he used himself by using real estate, gold, silver and gas. He did not promote nor was trying to sell any real estate, gold, silver or gas shares. He was just sharing his knowledge. And it is very nice to know that he also has a foundation that is helping out schools integrate into some lessons as early as grade school just to get students better equiped with financial knowledge. It is his social responsibility to help lessen poverty. Since he does believe that war, divorce, illegal aliens, and other problems are really money problems. So his foundation is to help educate the people learn more about financial knowledge to make a change in the world.

And the things I learned and changed some of my thinking was… I like gas, I am not going for a sole proprietorship and will register a corporation, I am not getting my 401k or IRA. But I still need to save up and earn more so I can invest more and make money move and work for me so I do not work for money.