Just to let everyone know I’m still here. My blog encountered some technical problems the past week. It was down for a few days, actually. I didn’t have the luxury of time to fix it immediately. I have a hunch the blog was being hacked. I had to ask the help of my web host to restore a previous backup, so I lost a handful of my recent entries, which I simply re-posted anyway. Nawalan din ako nang ganang magsulat because of that, aside from the fact that after semestral break, all the academic and extra-curricular started to pile up quickly. I’ll be posting an entry in a little while.

Tags: blogging

Last December 29, my website just suddenly became inaccessible, and for the past two days, anybody who tried to access it, ended up in an error page. At first I was dumbfounded. True, my web host sent an advisory about a scheduled downtime due to some server migration, but that was supposed to be today, December 30. Perhaps it was one day early, I thought. However, their advisory said it would take at most 24 hours. By tonight, it had been almost two days. I was honestly getting really impatient and pissed. Not that it should really matter, it’s not as if there’s much to lose financially for me. This blog doesn’t even generate a dollar a day from paid advertising.

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Google Maps has aerial close-up photographs of the entire United States. You can actually see and fly through everything, well… except the White House Congress Building, which is blurred in close-up.

I just realized that LiveJournal has been beta-testing a new image-hosting service. Oh, but it’s for paid accounts lang pala.

Gmail celebrates its first anniversary by upgrading all existing accounts and offering up to 2 gigabytes of email storage. If you want invites, just email me.

It sucks when your barber doesn’t understand what you want with your hair. I’m going to wear a cap the whole week.

Okay, onto more technical annoyances. Our cable modem keeps resetting without being unplugged thereby disconnecting me from the internet every 30 minutes. It sucks.

Onto other technical annoyances. WordPress 1.5 has been released last last week. Since my blog is running on WordPress 1.2, I decided to upgrade the script. Anyway, since it looked like it was easier, I upgraded through the single-click upgrade link found in my web host’s Fantastico script library. Yea, so it did take just one click. Just one click to ruin everything!!!

I checked on my site after ‘upgrading’ and kept getting these “500 Internal Server Error”. My blog was gone!! I didn’t know what to do, I panicked! I emailed my webhost to ask for help. But I was too impatient so I decided to try and remedy the mess myself.

Anyway, thankfully, I realized that my blog wasn’t really gone since the entries and all those information are still stored in a MySQL database. So in order to restore it and successfully install the new WordPress 1.5, I had to deal with MySQL. Damn it, those insert queries and everything were confusing to understand. I swear, it drove me nuts. I was trying to understand the database structure with all those MySQL tables, rows, columns, whatchamacallthem! Fuck it. I kept encountering errors. I spent three hours dealing with these server shit. I have very low tolerance for these techie programming or whatever. I have a pretty fair grasp on HTML and CSS but really, I was never someone who enjoyed coding or programming at all. Geez, it really drove me insane. Anyway, intolerant as I was, I was still able to get it done, the same way I get my HTML done after hours of being frustrated.

After three hours, I finally got what I wanted to do. I restored my blog entries to the new MySQL database with the new WordPress 1.5 upgrade. It felt really good, having accomplished trouble-shooting my own technical problems. I felt so geeky. But good. But it didn’t end there.

Right after I fixed my own problem, my web host replied to my cry of help and informed me that they just restored my website with a backup from yesterday. Meaning, everything I did today was a total waste!! My website is back to what it was yesterday, before all these upgrading complications happened. Right after I fixed my own problem for three hours!! Damn it, I wanted to cry.

It sucks. I’m sticking to Wordpress 1.2 for now.

Okay, I’m now using OpenOffice to do my papers. It’s an open-source software that can rival MS Office. The best thing is it’s free. And it’s open source! Meaning… it’s free of corporate watchamacallit. It can open and edit your MS .doc, .xls and .ppt files too, just as you can with MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint, so that’s great too. I’m liking it so far! It’s just a ~40mb download. I can’t believe this is for free

[via Prem's blog]

FREELANCE PHILIPPINES is a “website set up to be a place where freelance graphic designers, art directors, programmers, writers and editors from the Philippines meet with potential clients who post details of their projects and receive bids online.”

The beauty of this system is that it takes out the cost of marketing and advertising and passes those savings on to the client and contractor. Imagine an Ebay-like community where Filipino independent contractors can meet with potential clients, expand relationships, build reputations, and do what they do best without having to leave their desks (and deal with the traffic!). A place where a small or medium sized company can look for a qualified parttimer to do their website, or their brochure, without going through the expensive process of hiring an advertising agency or placing an ad.