Another turn around the sun …

Another year has passed by and another year is upon us. Time seems to go by so fast that we barely have time to catch our breath :p I’ve been meaning to make a post here for a while now but I was let go (as the euphemism goes :p) on the last day of the year and so, since then have been either searching for new employment, fixing up my resume or looking for a new host so that I can move my sites since I had been hosted on a free VPS given to me by my former employer.

I am still somewhat bemused by the firing. The reasons given made no sense because some of them were for "supposed" offences which happened before the company promoted me. So why would a company promote you and then fire you for something which happened before they promoted you? Wouldn’t/shouldn’t they have fired me when these incidents took place instead of promoting me? Plus, the "offences" that they list were acknowledged at that time as due to lack of training/documentation on the part of the company.

My manager told me in his e-mail providing me notification of termination that he didn’t want to terminate me because I was a good tech and the customers liked me. But apparently the rest of management didn’t feel that way 🙂 Weird … but then again, I have never really understood people or their motivations :p

Anyway, the job hunt continues at the moment though the hunt for a host is over. I was initially looking at shared/reseller hosts but after having been on a VPS, I find it difficult to go back to shared hosting where I don’t have as much control over what is installed on the server and what software I run. I especially like how I can tighten up security and spam-control on a VPS on my own. The issue of course was price. Since I don’t have a job at the moment, I didn’t want to have to pay too much for a VPS and while there are plenty of people offering VPSes for less than what shared hosting used to cost 4-5 years ago, none of those offerings were any good. I did find a couple of VPS providers who appeared to have fairly decent offerings for around $20 but on checking them up at the WebHostingTalk forums, I discovered that they didn’t have too good a reputation with their customers :p

So it was back to square one again. However, I found a pretty good deal on the WebHostingTalk forums themselves – it was from Select-Level Web Hosting and they had a VPS which had pretty much the same specs as the one that I had my sites hosted on. The regular price was $45 and that was way too much for me but they had a special going on where they discounted the price by 50% – for the lifetime of the account 🙂 That sounded like a pretty good deal to me, especially given the good reputation SLHost appeared to have at WebHostingTalk forums. I signed up yesterday morning and they had the VPS up within a couple of hours. By evening I had transferred my domains over, set up all my usual security and anti-spam measures and was up and running. So today, I’m free to post 🙂

Updates about being inundated

I’ve been meaning to update the blog for a while now but what with a trip to Dubai (from November 8th to the 10th) where we went gadget hunting, the setting up of the said gadgets on our return, work, doing some web server stuff for some people I’m working with and so on, there hasn’t been much time for updates. Finally, I’ve found the time to put up an update and to also mention a few things that I wanted to mention before.

The first thing is that I’ve put up a new blog called "Honest, the Martian Ate Your Dog" 🙂 This is basically a serialization of my novel – the one I’ve talked about here before. As I’ve mentioned before, I plan to rewrite the novel almost totally. But there are some people who read this version and liked it very much. Since this version will probably never see the light of day in any other form, I decided to serialize it online weekly and see if anybody else likes it 🙂 If they do, then I’m happy. If they don’t, well, nothing lost.

The other thing of note probably is the fact that I have been dragged back into BlogShares :p A long time ago, I used to be really involved in BlogShares. Then I lost interest and I believe the site itself crashed/was down. Then it was revived again and I discovered that my old user ID no longer worked. So I signed up around the beginning of this year but didn’t really get into it at that time. I was reminded of BlogShares again by Simon, who made a passing reference to is somewhere or other online, and so went back and checked on my account. I was surprised to find that my stock had gone up a lot and so got back into the game in earnest 🙂 Of course, it became even more fun when Laurie decided to join in – but for a while, they tagged us as cheaters because we both came from the same IP and were doing a lot of connected deals :p

The IQ-drop factor – an anatomy of a scam

When money is involved, people seem to suddenly drop at least 50 IQ points. This is probably the reason that so many scammers still exist (and even flourish) amongst us. No, this is not about scamming agents this time but about real life scammers :p

In Sri Lanka at the moment, Seagull Softwares (yes, indeed, they called themselves "softwares" :p) is major news. This is because some guys from Seagull Softwares ran a Ponzi scam on a lot of people over here and absconded with a boatload of money. There are varying accounts as to how much actually was taken but one of the figures thrown around is 300 million rupees (which is about US$ 3 million) – not a bad haul.

The scam itself worked like this. These people say that they’ve got some sort of BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) venture and that you could earn money in your spare time by helping them do data entry. To get a job, you have to buy a slot at US$ 65 a year. Each slot is supposed to pay you back $40 a month if you did the assigned work. You can get as many slots as you want. The work? Apparently, you have to sign into their server and you get a job per slot. The job is basically a keyword (or a set of keywords) and you have to go online and find information relating to the given keywords, compile it all into an Excel spreadsheet and upload to their servers.

I first heard about this from a friend of mine. I was suspicious since I don’t like "jobs" where you have to pay to work. My friend told me that he knew somebody who was doing it and had already recovered their investment within two months. I still didn’t like it. Why would anybody pay you to find information via Google when they could do the same thing themselves? A few days later, my Mom told me that there were relatives in our family who were doing the same thing and earning a fair amount of money because they’d bought 10 slots. There was apparently another relative who’d bought a 100 slots (or some such large number) and was employing other people to do the work for him. He was paying them about $250 per month (on 10 slots I believe) and keeping the other $150 for himself. So again, good business and apparently paying well.

My Mom was like, "why don’t you do this too?" I said that nothing which sounded easy ever was. Her response was the motherly equivalent of a raspberry :p She wanted to know how come there are so many people making money if it was a scam. I had no response. I went online and checked and there were just two entries that I could find which talked about these people and even there, they were asking for more information rather than enlightenment. The website (for there was a website at that time) was rather crudely done and was registered by some guy in India. I decided that I wanted nothing with them.

Last week, the news broke. Apparently the police were investigating an Internet-based scam operation which sounded a lot like Seagull Softwares. But no name was given and no details. Yesterday the papers were full of it. I went online and suddenly there are lots of sites, all talking about how they were defrauded or how their relatives were defrauded and how they’ve lost everything.

I feel for these people. Some of them are retired pensioners who used their savings in the hope of making more money. Others are schoolkids who begged or borrowed the money. There are people who’ve invested millions hoping to run sub-contracting businesses. I feel sorry for them but I just can’t help wondering, what is it about the human race which makes you lose sight of everything when some money is waved in front of your face? They say that a crocodile’s eyes close when it opens its mouth (this is part of some folk-tale – not sure about the accuracy of the statement :p) – people seem to be like that. People’s eyes close when their mouths open wide in greed.

After the whole Seagull Softwares debacle, there seem to be new scams and new twist rising out of the ashes. There is a mysterious organization which says that it is trying to gather information about the victims of the scam and wants all their personal details but nobody seems to know who they are. They seem to be very insistent that people send them information on the sites where the scam is discussed. There’s also talk of all the scammed people getting together to have a meeting in front of the Seagull offices today. Others have all sorts of weird theories as to why (and who) perpetrated the scam.

Sure there is a lot of brouhaha. But unfortunately, I have a feeling that a week from now, this will be forgotten and the same people who fell for this one will be lining up for the next great thing. Such is the nature of humanity.

Time flies and fruit flies :p

I thought I had not updated this blog only for a couple of days but it turns out that it’s been almost a week! Man, how time flies :p

Unfortunately, I’ve not been doing much in the way of writing the last week or so. It’s been working on one computer project after another with not much time devoted to writing or reading about writing. The good thing is that I’m hoping that I’ll come out of this period away from writing and be more refreshed to continue work on my current novel. But then again, the break might just serve to do the opposite, make me so lazy that I won’t want to write. You never know :p

One good thing did happen to me recently – I won something! I never ever win stuff – except of course for the scams where you always win something and then find that you have to pay for it :p But Simon Haynes has been running a bunch of contests over at his Hal Spacejock blog, giving away copies of books in his Hal Spacejock series. I’ve been fascinated by Simon and his road to publication ever since I stumbled across his site a while back. He seems to be doing really great with his Hal series and I’m really happy for him. But what made me even happier was snagging a copy of Hal book one in one of his contests! I’m over the moon actually :p I believe Simon is planning to give more books away in the future and so you might want to keep an eye on his blog – besides, it’s a good read 🙂

How do you cope?

How do you cope with all the stuff that needs to be done in one single day? I’ve often talked about Stephen King‘s assertion that life is like a pony – that it sometimes canters, sometimes gallops and sometimes walks. (Or words to that effect – I couldn’t find a reference online after doing a casual search :p) At the moment, the pony of my life is galloping for its life – in fact, its running so fast that its likely to break its own fool neck :p

I’m so far behind on stuff that I need to do that I can’t even see the back of the line :p I’ve got articles that I need to write for TechPedia; a crit that I’m supposed to send out to my crit pal of his next chapter and I’m working like crazy on my blogging app, Blog, every spare moment I get to get some features that I really want working. That’s just the tip of the iceberg though. I’ve also got to do at least two installations – one an auction system for a friend to test out and another a forum + WordPress integration installation to test out some functionality. Yeah, life is full 🙂

No, this is not a whining thread where I talk about how hard my life is :p I actually wanted to talk about how you deal with such a situation. What do you do when you feel overwhelmed when things are piling up and you feel so pressured to get things done but all that happens is that you get more and more worked up and everything starts crowding you in? First of all, take a deep breath. Then do the same thing that you do when you walk – lift up your foot and put it down and do the same with your other foot 🙂 Just take things a step at a time. That’s about the only way to deal with a situation like this. Of course, it would also help to prioritize but for somebody like me who does things on impulse, that doesn’t really work. So do what comes naturally (except to panic that is :p)

There will always be things to do and most probably, all of them are going to be urgent. The trick is not to let things get the better of you. Tell yourself that you are in control. Do what needs to be done now and put the rest off till later. Hopefully, you’ll come out on top … if not, I’m already at the top of the tallest building I can find and you can join me there … to enjoy the view of course :p

Days of meandering …

Yesterday was a tiring and hectic day :p No, we didn’t move, we just spent most of the day out shopping since Laurie’s sister was here on a sort of a flying visit 🙂 We were out most of the day and by the time we got home, I was totally and utterly tired.

In the process of all that shopping, comparing, gazing etc. I came across a few things worth a mention. For instance, I think I have just switched my preferences for my next phone :p I had wanted to get the Sony Ericsson P990i as my next phone since it had all the features that I wanted. However, I have been increasingly aware of the fact that Symbian OS phones don’t seem to have all the apps that I’d like to see being available for them and that developing for a Symbian OS phone isn’t as easy as it would be developing for say a Pocket PC phone. At least, that’s how it has looked from where I stand.

Then, I came across the HP iPaq hw6500, which is both a handheld PC and a mobile phone! Now this device has all the capabilities that I can think of using (except for Wi-Fi and 3G) and it uses a variant of the Windows CE OS which makes development fairly easy! So, for instance, if I wanted a way to transfer my DVD database over to my phone so that I can carry it around on shopping trips, I probably will be able to do so much more easily on this device than I would on a Symbian OS based phone since I would be able to code the functionality in myself. So, I’m looking very hard at the HP iPaq hw6500 as an option but the lack of Wi-Fi access bothers me. I’ve looked at a couple of other similar handheld PC/phone combo devices but some of them lack a keyboard and others have those bulky (and annoying) antennas sticking out of them. So I guess I must continue to look if I want to find the ultimate phone device … or go with the HP iPaq hw6500 :p

Moving blues …

We are getting ready for another move. When we were kids, we used to have to move like every couple of years since my Dad was in government service and the government doesn’t like keeping people in one place for too long. Over here at least, they believe that familiarity leads to corruption :p Basically, you get too established in one place, know everybody really well and then you start cutting corners and making allowances for your acquaintances. But that’s another story.

Because my parents moved such a lot when I was a kid, I should be used to moving myself. But I’m not :p I hate moving! I hate the work involved in getting everything together and the break in the routine while we pull up stakes and move elsewhere. When I went to the US, I took two suitcases with me and I vowed that I wouldn’t accumulate too much stuff because I wanted to be able to move quickly and without too much hassle. Four years later, when I wanted to come back to Sri Lanka, I realized how unsuccessful I had been at keeping my vow :p I had a house, a car, some furniture and lots of DVDs and books. So much for that!

When Laurie and I got married, it was the same story. We started out with about four suitcases of clothes and not much else. After moving houses twice (so far), we’ve got some furniture accumulated now and it is becoming more and more tedious to move because there’s a lot more stuff to be moved :p Actually, we got rid of some stuff after the last move because our current place was pre-furnished. So this move hopefully will not be as bad as the last one. But still, there’s all the little tears, breaks in the wall, the cracks that accumulate after a move that makes it even harder. Your stuff just doesn’t take a move too well and we have a lot of sensitive stuff :p Ah well …

Attack of the purchase pains

My new computer purchase pains that I’ve been chronicling for a while now, decided to strike back in force yesterday :p Of course, the story stretches over a few days and begins day-before-yesterday.

The story actually begins on Wednesday the 3rd when I last referred to the purchase pains story 🙂 I received a call from the notebook sales guy and he said that they had the RAM and that they were ready to come over to our place and install the RAM. I said fine and they said "see you in about half an hour" and hung up. An hour goes by, nothing. Two hours go by and still nothing. So I call the guy up and ask him if he’s lost or something and he says, "Oh sorry, our boss had an urgent job for us and so we’re doing that instead. We’ll try to come over to your place tomorrow".

And of course, they never turn up on Thursday :p On Friday, we had to go out and so I decided that we might as well take the notebook over to the shop and get the RAM since otherwise we’ll probably be waiting forever and still get nothing. So over to the shop we went, got the 2GB of RAM installed, got the USB flash thumb-drive we were promised as well and came back home.

Everything appeared to work fine on Friday. Saturday morning (yesterday), I turn on the notebook and start working and half an hour in or so, the screen suddenly goes blank and the computer reboots. I get a sinking feeling in my stomach since these are familiar symptoms (at least for me :p). When the computer comes back up, it doesn’t even get through the boot process. I think perhaps the new RAM is not seated properly and so I open up the machine, remove the RAM and replace it. The machine boots up, stays up for another half an hour and then reboots again. So it goes through the morning – sometimes the machine boots up immediately, sometimes I have to keep it shut down for a while before it will come up again and it always appears to go down soon enough.

I had sent a Windows crash report in there somewhere and Windows came back saying that it was probably a RAM issue and to use their Windows Memory Diagnostic utility. I download the thing and realize that there is nothing remotely Windows about it – it’s a DOS-ish utility which needs to boot via a floppy or CD-ROM and I don’t have any CD’s to burn at the moment. So I find an alternative – AleGr MemTest, which can be launched from XP itself. I launch the test and one screen into the test, the screen goes blank and the computer refuses to come up at all after that :p

It’s around 9 o’clock at that time and shops do not open for another hour. I get read, call a trishaw and go to the notebook shop. The shop is closed! I call the guys and they are like "Oh, we had a meeting and so we are opening late but we’ll be there soon!". They come in, get the machine open and test the RAM and it turns out that one of the RAM sticks are bad. And guess what? They don’t have any more RAM in stock! What about the two 512MB sticks they removed from my machine a couple of days ago? Oh, they’ve already sent it over to their head office since they needed RAM badly! So now I’m down to 1GB again and they tell me it is going to take at least a couple of weeks for them to get the other 1GB in because they’re having cash-flow problems. If mine is any indication of the kind of experience in dealing with them, I can perhaps see why they might have cash-flow issues …

The phantom purchas pains

The saga of my notebook purchase woes, which was started almost a week ago, continues :p The last I wrote, I was supposed to get the RAM upgrade on Monday. And now the continuation of the exciting saga …

On Monday, I learn that it is a public holiday and that no shops are open due to it being May Day. And of course, the guys at the computer shop were either ignorant of it or didn’t care. Well, nothing to be done. So I waited till yesterday and call them back. The salesman who dealt with me is not there. I call him on his mobile. He tells me that he’s at a meeting at their head office and gives me the name of another sales guy at their shop and asks me to ask him about the RAM.

I call the guy and ask him about the RAM and he’s like, I’ll find out and call you back in ten minutes and takes down my phone number. Ten minutes go by – nothing. Twenty minutes. Still nothing. I call him back and he’s like, "Oh yeah, I’ll call you back in ten minutes – can I have your phone number again?" He’s done nothing in all that time! I just give him my phone number again since there is no point in getting angry with them anymore. They are just not going to care. Of course, he doesn’t call back after ten minute or for that matter, twenty minutes. I call him back and he says that he had to speak to the other sales guy (the one I originally spoke to) and that the other guy will call me back in 15 minutes. I’m like, "I call him and he says that I should call you and now you say that I have to talk to him to get this resolved?" and the guy can only stutter something incomprehensible.

Fifteen minute go by and not surprisingly, there is no call from the other guy. I wait another five minutes and then call him and he says that they don’t have the RAM because of shipping delays and that I’ll have it on Friday "for sure". Of course, knowing how good their assurances have been so far, I’m not holding my breath :p Come Friday, I’m almost certain that I’ll get another excuse. This is the way they do business here in Sri Lanka and people wonder about us being a third-world nation? If they had a category for fourth-world nations, we should probably be demoted to that, the way these guys do things. Ah well, the joys of life :p

The return of purchase pains :p

If I thought that my notebook purchase problems were after day-before-yesterday’s trials, I was sorely mistaken – as I found out yesterday :p Of course, this being Sri Lanka and my fellow Sri Lankan’s being notorious for this kind of thing, I did expect this new turn of events …

I called the notebook place again to see what was happening with the RAM situation since they’d told me the day before that I would have my 2GB of RAM yesterday. Of course, when I call them, they say that I will have my RAM on Monday! So I casually ask, "I’ll be getting my USB thumb-drive then as well?" and the guy (this is the sales guy that I had originally dealt with) says, "No. I told you last night over the phone that you can’t have that and drop the 2.6% on the card as well …."

I tell him that that was before they bungled up my RAM and that the guys who were in the store at the time I was there the night before agreed to drop the 2.6% and to give me the USB thumb-drive and what is more, that they wrote all this down on the invoice. But this guy is adamant – I can’t have the USB thumb-drive! I tell him that I’d been patient with them up to that point and that they had been constantly delaying stuff and that they’d better be nice and meet me halfway or that I was going to cancel the order :p The guy says that he’s got to talk to his boss and get back to me. I give him half an hour and of course, I get no call back after 40 minutes had elapsed. I call him back and he says that his boss said to give me the USB thumb-drive and that he’d get me everything on Monday. So that’s where we stand now.

This again is typical behaviour for Sri Lanka and not something that I’m proud of about my countrymen (and women) 🙁 An agreement means nothing to them and they’d rather say "yes" because they hate to say "no" (because they think it somehow is bad to say "no") and so they’d rather give you a promise that they can’t keep than tell you outright that they can’t deliver something on a given date. I asked the sales guy specifically before I placed the order whether he could deliver everything on the date he specified and he promised that he’d do so. Now he tells all sorts of stories ranging from "it’s my boss’s fault" to "you have the notebook and 1GB of RAM and that’s enough for you to work with". Ah, Sri Lanka! I hope the people change sooner rather than later …