www.seawind-network.com

Since I started subscribing to a web hosting service, I have moved my website 3 times. Perhaps I should commercialize the method of moving sites already. From a basic GeoCities Plus account, to GeoCities Pro, then MD Web Hosting, then Servage.Net and now Hosting Monster.

GeoCities Plus - at US$4.95/mo I thought was good enough. I was hosting a static HTML website on a free site courtesy of our ADSL Provider. The space quickly run out when more photos for the Family Tree were added. The thought of having no ads was the appeal over a free site that comes with a Yahoo Email account. I have a problem when you don’t have any control over what get advertised as you might be endorsing a product you are absolutely against.

GeoCities Pro - at US$8.95/mo - I am now able to call my website www.seawind-network.com instead of a geocities with a ~ and my Yahoo ID (Yooo hooo - SCORE, now I can ego surf in Google and find me in my own site ). It was great, until I realised I was paying too much for too little . They don’t even offer MySQL or PHP support for this. It was also a rude experience when they simply closed my Plus instead of copying it to my Pro. I had to rebuild everything all over.

MD Web Hosting - Introductory Price of A$59.40 for the first year, Australian based - which means I get a very responsive site. This site is my first taste of the cPanel and learned how to move domains from one-host to another. I also learned that it is better to register your domain in U.S. (US$10/year) vs. here in Australia (A$35/year). This is also my first time to use the rommelpascual.com domain, it was given to me as a gift 2 years prior to this - the registration was just about to lapse when I became interested in using it. MD Web Hosting offers a meager 5GB space and 10GB bandwidth per month. I hosted my PMWiki in this site and basically got addicted in anything PHP.

At this point - I was already learning how to use the Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (LINUX for Human). Playing with a test website locally before I release it to the world. Then we subscribed to TPG’s ADSL2 which also gave me a static IP. This allowed me to host a 80GB Gallery2 site from a room in our house. However, Jeanne and I has always been backing up our photos in Webshots and pay a yearly fee for the space we used. This was my ‘excuse’ to go and shop for a hosting company which will give a bit more space.

Servage.NET- At A$8.35/mo giving as much as 500GB space and 5TB bandwidth. I thought I was dreaming when I saw this flash on my screen. This is also a rare time when I responded to an annoying pop-up. They also allow porn - so now I can also host and make online all those smut I’ve been collecting for years Just kidding.

I’m still a customer of Servage, but I’m not happy with the speed of my website. Specially the Gallery2. It has become unusably slow. I’ve optimised the database, uninstalled all unneeded plugins, applied caching etc. Eventually, I created a test Gallery2 site with less than 100 photos - the response was no better than the site with over 10,000 photos. The lesson is - look for a hosting company which offers space, bandwidth and reasonable CPU time slice. There’s no point having a 5TB bandwidth if you can’t get any processing time.

Servage is based in Germany. It was a concern as it takes 20 hops to get there. As I read more reviews about them - I’ve confirmed my suspicion that it is their site that is really-really-really slow. Perhaps it’s all those porn site that they are hosting. Not that I have anything against it - but I’m standing in their traffic, it’s time to move out of the way. This week - I decided, was time to consider another site.

Host Monster - at US$6.95/mo you get 1.5TB space and 15TB transfers - it simply has become ridiculously cheap - compare this to the GeoCities Pro. The allure to me is that it has SSH access. It gives me unprecedented control over my website - almost as good as hosting it myself - except that I can’t install any software. I can use emacs to edit my files (Yoo hooo - no more point and click editing).

FFMPEG - is still not supported which means that the video section of our Gallery will remain to be icons.

I was right though - this Host Monster is super-super fast. There are times when you can’t make a discernible distinction between the site inside our home network to the site hosted all the way to Utah. Incidentally, it takes 18 hops to get to the server in Utah - not much less than Servage in Germany, so the number of hops perhaps does not have quite a bearing on speed as I have thought.

They also have very good and knowledgeable support staff - I login to a support chat at 5am Saturday and they are there - alive and kicking . I hope it remains this way - they have policy not to allow porn to be hosted in their network, so I guess the odds are good.

I’m now officially a Net Junkie - not that I never was!

This weekend was spent mostly in-front of the computer (again). The host provider for our website emailed me last Thursday - saying that they have just improved their service and moved my home directory into another server. They said not to worry - the effect to me would me very minimal.

Minimal my a…, I’ve spent all weekend trying to fix all the broken symbolic links in our Gallery site and just about every site I have were affected. I asked for a shell access to make fixing a bit easier and they give me the crap (pardon my French) - that it’s a security risk. If there’s anything, it made me become inventive with FTP and their so called web-based file manager. (I discovered it is a lot easier to move directories around, using the cut-n-paste feature CuteFTP, a feature that FileZilla do not have.).

Lesson Learned : If you do not have a shell account for your Web Hosting Service - avoid symbolic links. This is my number one source of grief, most of my support calls are to clear broken links which sometimes need a super user id to fix.

My frustration was compounded when I decided to tweak my WordPress site to support Lightbox2. I was doing all my work using FireFox because it has great debugging adds-on. All is going well and I was so pleased with myself until I tried opening a page using Internet Explorer. I got the error message box saying - “Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site …. Operation aborted”. On pressing OK, it goes to a “The page cannot be displayed” page. It took me hours and several reboots to deduce that it was the combination of Lightbox2 and Flash (SWF Players) that was causing the error. So after all the work I did to get Lightbox working - I deactivated it - and waited - WAIT FOR EVERYONE TO STOP USING INTERNET EXPLORER!!!!. Try Googling this error and you will see all the frustrations of Web writers about this IE bug.

Nothing would beat what surprised me last Friday night though - I got a traffic fine for ‘Stopping on a Mailzone’. I drive my daughter to the train station regularly and there is a post office where I drop her off. There are a lot of traffic in the area and if 3 cars stop in front of you - you can’t help but be on the mailzone. Usually the cars in front of you will be setting down passengers and you get held up long enough that passengers could quickly get off and be done with it. This action will now cost me $79. At first I felt like contesting it, as the time I was reported to have been sighted doing this is 8:00am - the post office don’t even open until 9:00am. But the council knows that most people would just pay the fine, to contest it would mean court fees and a day of lost work when you attend the hearing. It will end up costing you more.

It’s a blatant revenue generation exercise. I can understand if it was a Fire Hydrant, an Ambulance or Police Parking Zone - these zones need to be free all the time as emergency can happen any time. This is a MailZone!, the mail van needs the area at most twice a day - one in the morning and in the afternoon. It’s not as if I’ve parked in the zone. The council is printing money just issuing this kind of ticket.

That’s my rant for the week.

T’was a great Sunday weather and a new footpath has just been built - practically connecting out home to the nearest mall. So Jeanne and I decided to leave the car at home, took a small back-pack and walked to the mall. We forgot all about joining the Earth Hour slated on the previous night , so walking to the shop is our way of making up for it. We thought - since we do not have a car to cart away groceries and what have you, we will not be tempted to buy lots of things.

I’ve been in the market for a new mobile phone for a while. My old Nokia 6101, tend to drop out in the middle of a conversation. Jeanne and I have always chosen phones that are popular at the time because they are priced about a third of the latest wizz bang phones. I’ve been canvassing for a Nokia 6300 and every shop I go to sells it at the same price of $249 for unlocked or $199 for pre-paid locked to a provider. The locked pre-paid works just fine for me because my phone bills are paid by the company I work for, all I need is the phone. I had no intention of buying the phone on this trip but Jeanne brought it up - and she did not have to tell me twice

So what do you do when 10 retailers sell the same stuff for the same price? You go to the shop that has traditionally gave you the least grief when you need to return stuff for one reason or another. I’m glad I went to Tandy. I ended up buying a Sony-Ericsson K800i which cost a bit more but I was thinking about every Tom, Dick and Harry man and his dog (that’s more Aussie) who now have the 6300. Since all my research were done on the Nokia and made a last minute switch to Sony - I instinctively ordered a 1GB mini-SD to go with the phone.

When we reach home, Jessica was excited to see my new phone - she’s becoming a regular tech-head - so I let her put together my phone. She cut the packaging of the mini-SD before she realised that it was not suitable for the phone. Then I got a lecture on memory devices from her - I should have asked for the Sony M2. At this point, I had a moral dilemma, should I return the chip even if it was partly my fault - or should the seller bear some responsibility? Afterall, it is implied that I was going to use it for the phone. We decided to walk back to the shop - I choose Tandy for their return policy but the fact that we’ve opened and ripped the casing already may present some problem. To my surprise, the vendor didn’t budge a bit and gladly gave me a replacement. Go Tandy!

3 April 2008 : What do you know? I was just handed a company issue Nokia 6300 … Anyone interested on a slightly used Ericsson K800i? Just kidding - just in case anyone start bidding.

Our neighbour for the past 5 years is moving, not by choice - but just the reality of renting in today’s real estate climate. The Flaxie’s, as we eanderingly call them, had become close to us - as close as a good neighbour can be. Every single member of our family are not pleased to see them move away.

Dave and Leah would always be the first to call if our alarm goes off and you could count on them to check out the house when we’re away. Well, the whole neighbourhood actually look out for each other, so I’m sure they would be missed by everyone in the cul-de-sac. Dave would sometime volunteer to play Santa Klaus in our yearly Christmas on the Street.

Their eldest daughter, Emily, is a sweet child and always speaks her mind. Jack, who is barely 10 is one of the most responsible big brother I’ve seen. Ryan and Daniel who are still very young would sometime knock and ask if they could play our piano, have ice cream or just come and watch tv (not that they don’t have tv - they just want hanging out in our place).

We would miss Emily and Jack most - we’ve known them the longest and they are extra ordinary kids. I’m betting, however, that Ryan would become the tycoon - while everyone pull their weight and do some chores, Ryan seem to have a knack of getting others do work for him I mean this in the nicest way

One day I came home dreading the weekend as it means mowing the grass after all the rain that we’ve been having. When ‘lo and behold, our front lawn was mowed - I also notice the Flaxie’s yard was newly mowed. Jack, took upon himself to mow our lawn and even volunteered to do the backyard the following day. Since then - we had an unspoken arrangement that he look after our yard. It’s profitable to him and my weekends are much brighter

This was not the first time that Jack would impress us. Once, we hosted a party, and while everyone were winding down, saying goodbye - I saw this boy tidying up - beyond what you would expect a boy would do. I was not the only person who noticed it, even the other guests had. On days when we have these children come over for ice cream and cakes, Jack would look after his younger brothers. He’d wipe and clean them up when they become messy.

We enjoy Emily’s company - she’s not a shy girl and a bit cheeky sometimes . Once, we had a spare ticket for a Disney-On-Ice Spectacular at the Entertainment Centre and we invited Emily. We had dinner before the show at the Capitol Thai. Although, she has never eaten duck before - she tried all the food that was served. She’s a great company and you could see that she enjoyed the show. On a conversation, she claimed that she’s a spaghetti monster and would eat spaghetti any time. We got home just before midnight from the show, she went home for a minute to present herself and rushed back to our place because we have spaghetti left-overs. She really is a spaghetti monster.

When we learned about their move, the parents told us that Jack and Emily were most upset. The first reaction of Jack was his concern that he could no longer mow our lawn. We can feel that these kids are distraught when they run to hug us as they told us the news. That’s when we decided to host an Easter Egg hunt in our backyard - to celebrate what would be our last Easter together as neighbours. Following are some photos of the Easter Egg Hunt organised by the 3 bunnies - Jeanne, Celine and Jessica.

Show Selected Photos of the Day ▼

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The complete set of photos are in our Photo Gallery.

Related Links:

• Jeanne’s Easter Egg Hunt Blog

This is only our 3rd time to attend the Royal Easter Show. The first was in Moore Park, shortly after we settled in Sydney. Then again when the show was first moved to the Olympic Park. The annual Sydney Royal Easter Show, which runs for two-weeks over Easter, is currently the largest event in Australia and sixth in the world.

We were playing hosts to Jeanne’s high school classmate - Annie and husband Johnny. They are in Sydney on a business trip and are flying home the next day (Easter Saturday). The challenge is to find a place to go. Most restaurants and usual tourist spots are closed on a Good Friday. The Easter Show was a perfect choice, except that it was raining and had dampen some of the activities. Nevertheless, Jeanne and Annie seem to have made the most of it, frantically catching up in between taking photos on the various displays.

We had pizza for lunch and managed to secure seats around a wobbly table that we shared with another Chinese family-of-4. It was a bit embarrassing but the couple were gracious. I also enjoyed the light conversation with Johnny. As we wondered inside the Fresh Food Exhibit, I took some apples off the fruit landscape and had everyone sample the produce (just kidding).

We didn’t get to see much of the fair and missed the usual animal show and the wood chipping demo, but we hope Annie and Johnny had some fun. Here’s a few selected photos of the day.

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Rommel, Jeanne & Annie at the Central Train Station	Jeanne, Annie & Johnny at the entrance of the Easter Show	Annie admiring a truck of floral arrangements

Jeanne meets a hard working Pinoy at the show.	The landscape at the background is made up of fresh fruits and vegies.	At the fair!

The complete set of photos taken that day is in our Photo Gallery.

Move over Mariah - this Bulgarian Idol is to unseat you off the top charts. Have you ever made up the lyrics of a song you like and kept singing it that way? Take heart you’re definitely not alone!

This was emailed by Vivien to Jeanne on Monday 17-Mar. Two days later, it was also emailed to me by Kuya Mel and also by Myrna (my officemate). Not often do I get the same ‘bacon’ email about exactly the same subject from 3 different sources who do not know each other. So I’m guessing the propagation of this video must be of the same order as Paris Hilton’s video.

If your YouTube Access is blocked, here is a WMV Version ▼

It is still largely a Mimbo Theme with an added dash of dKret and of course the default WordPress Theme. The concept is simple - It allows you to highlight a number of posts using 3 distinct divisions - the FEATURE STORY SECTION, the RIGHT FEATURE COLUMN and the LEFT FEATURE COLUMN. Then followed by a fourth division of 4 of the most RECENT POSTS.

Important Things to know about this theme:

1. All highlighted images are stored in the theme’s image subdirectory.
2. The image in the FEATURE STORY should have a 269×178 size (or close) and specified as Custom Field : MainImage (case sensitive). In the future, I plan to introduce a custom field to specify an alternate flash highlight in lieu of a static image.
3. The image on the LEFT FEATURE COLUMN should have a 255×88 size (or close but keep it uniform for aesthetics). It is specified using the Custom Field: Image (case sensitive). If this image is not specified, an excerpt of the post is published instead.
4. The image on the RIGHT FEATURE COLUMN should have a 51 x 51 size, otherwise the image/default_right.jpg image is used. Again this is specified by the Custom Field : Image.
5. There’s a bit of tweaking involved in the theme’s index.php to specify which categories will be highlighted.
6. By adding a Custom Field: Image in your FEATURE STORY, it may also appear on the left or right column if it fits the category. I’m yet to add the codes to control this so that it appears only when it is superseded as the prime feature.
7. These theme would also allow you to add up to 4 equally spaced bottom bars.
8. For single-author sites, I’ve also added a very small Login link at the Footer to facilitate getting to your Site Admin.

Related Links:

• The Mimbo Theme (my post)
  
• The Original Mimbo Theme
• The dkret Theme

UPDATE :20 March 2008 - I have made some major updates on header.php, index.php and the style.css to define clearer bounderies between divisions. It also now possible to get the sidebar on the LEFT by changing the float style of #main and #sidebar in the style.css.

I love the world of Word Press, it’s the perfect opportunity to explore CSS, XML, PHP, AJAX and all the web acronyms you can throw at it. The Mimbo Theme that I’ve been using is almost unrecognizable, I’m thinking of renaming it as my own already but I have problems yanking code of others and calling it my own - still I’ve added a lot of codes to it already. I plan to add a few more of the features from my other favourite theme - the dKret

Anyway - I also wanted to try a very nice plugin called Piclens. It gives an interesting view on photos included in a blog. Most specially if there are a number of them. Go ahead click on the blue play button. Unfortunately - there seem to be a bug that grabs the thumbnail of the last 3 photos instead of the 800×600 version of it The bug is that images with extensions JPG are not considered the same as the lower-case jpg.

Piclens work on Flickr, Google Images, Picasa and a few more other image sites. Naturally, I researched on how to incorporate my Gallery2 with Piclens.

As usual, I’m about a year late - it has already been discussed to death in a Menalto Gallery Forum. However, as part of this discussion - I discovered a site that dynamically converts a Gallery2 album to a Flash slideshow. It works well - except that it must be CPU resource hungry as it uses ImageMagick to resize the photos to thumbnail sizes. If the album contains a lot of photos - it may be loading for a while. I found a solution to this however, by using my home PC to do the crunching instead of my WordPress site - so far it works because my site perhaps don’t get that much traffic. A sample of this slideshow is currently being displayed at the bottombars of this site.

[piclens-lite-link]

Western Explorer Ride	Miki and Jessica	Celine at a backstage of Le Miserables
Jeanne and Ainsley	Lou Benedict’s first day of school	The Conductor and the Semi-Conductor

Dear Luningning,

I’m writing you this letter to tell you that I’m leaving you for good. I’ve been a good man to you for seven years and I have nothing to show for It.

These last two weeks have been hell. Mr. Lopez called to tell me that you had quit your job today and that was the last straw.

Last week, you came home and didn’t even notice that I had gotten a new hair cut, cooked your favorite meal and even wore a brand new pair of silk boxers.

You came home and ate in two minutes, and went straight to sleep after watching all of your soaps. You don’t tell me you love me anymore, you don’t want sex anymore or anything.

Either you’re cheating on me or you don’t love me anymore. Whatever the case is, I’m gone.

Your EX-Husband,

Papi Willie

P.S. Don’t try to find me. Your SISTER and I are moving away to Toronto together this summer! Have a great life!

Nothing has made my day more than receiving your letter. It’s true that you and I have been married for seven years, although a good man is a far cry from what you’ve been.

I watch my soaps so much because they drown out your constant whining and gripping. Too bad that doesn’t work.

I did notice when you got a hair cut last week, the first thing that came to mind was ” You look just like Michael Jackson ! ” but my mother raised me not to say anything if you can’t say anything nice.

And when you cooked my favorite meal, you must have gotten me confused with my SISTER, because I stopped eating pork seven years ago..

I turned away from you when you had those new silk boxers on because the price tag was still on them. I prayed that it was a coincidence that my SISTER had just borrowed fifty dollars from me that morning …. and your silk boxers were $49.99 !

(en for the finale: adlib ko ito - Ernie)

After all of this, I still loved you and felt that we could work it out, so when I discovered that I had hit the lotto for sixty-nine million dollars, I quit my job and bought us two first class tickets to Manila , but when I got home you were gone. Everything happens for a reason I guess. I hope you have the fulfilling life you always wanted.

My lawyer said with your letter that you wrote, you won’t get a dime from me.

So take care.

Signed,

Rich , Freeeee & Available ,….. Luningning .

P.S. I don’t know if I ever told you this but MARIA , my SISTER, was born MARIO . I hope you don’t have a problem with your hemorrhoids.

Click here to see the photo of Maria

Emailed by Tito Ernie Rivera, author unknown with a bit of ad-lib from Tsong.

Over the past few months I have forwarded some inappropriate pictures and jokes to friends who I thought shared the same tastes and sense of humour. Unfortunately this wasn’t the case and I seem to have upset quite a few people who have accused me of being sexist and shallow.

If you were one of these people, please accept my sincerest apologies.

From now on I will only post or send e-mail with a cultural or educational content such as old monuments, nature and other interesting structures.

Below is a picture of the Pont Neuf Bridge in Paris .

P. S. For those of you who are interested, Pont Neuf is the oldest bridge in Paris and took 26 years to build. Construction began in 1578 and ended in 1604. ‘Le Pont Neuf’ is actually made of two independent bridges, one with seven arches and the other with five arches.

Show the Photo of Pont Neuf Bridge

Forwarded email by Ching Pastorfide, author unknown.