Ian On The Red Dot

Techcrunch had the links to two quizzes which determine the superhero or villian you are. Below are my results. I thought I might have been batman but I guess spiderman is probably the Marvel equivalent of DC’s batman. Anyway, I wish I had been one of the omega level mutants. The discussion section for that entry is interesting. On a rather worrying note, my gf took the villian test and got Venom.

Your results:
You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 95% Hulk 85% Green Lantern 85% Iron Man 65% Catwoman 60% Batman 60% Robin 55% The Flash 50% Supergirl 40% Superman 35% Wonder Woman 15%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

Your results:
You are Magneto

Magneto 73% Apocalypse 69% Dr. Doom 67% Mr. Freeze 67% Lex Luthor 65% Green Goblin 64% Mystique 60% The Joker 57% Venom 57% Juggernaut 56% Two-Face 56% Catwoman 55% Dark Phoenix 54% Riddler 50% Poison Ivy 50% Kingpin 38%

You fear the persecution of those that are different or underprivileged so much that you are willing to fight and hurt others for your cause.

Why is Google is like the hot girl you just met at zouk? Simple. Imagine a group of good friends where the gender is mixed that likes to club together. The group meets this really hot girl one day. She wears clothes that are attention grabbing. She starts joining the group for clubbing sessions and the guys can’t seem to stop talking about her. Every little thing she does impresses the guys and they are clearly infatuated with her.

At the same time, these guys have a bunch of close female friends in the group who are also pretty while maybe not so bold in wearing attention grabbing clothes. These close female friends have been there for the long haul, putting up with these guys boyish nonsense and as most good friends do, they have offered consistent support as a friend: a ear to listen, a shoulder to cry on. But they don’t seem to get the same love.

Not don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying the new girl doesn’t deserve the love she is getting from the guys. She probably does and in the long run, she will probably become part of the group and join the knit of close friends. What I’m saying is that people tend to forget the ones that have been there consistently and who go about being a friend unspectacularly. The reason why we became friends in the first place is forgotten and we let long relationships grow old.

Now, I talk about all this because recently Google has been getting a lot of love for their ‘Google Apps for Your Domain’ with their move to partner with other companies to offer domain registration. And when I thought of setting this site up, I look to them as an option to register my domain as well as easily setup a web interface for the mail for the domain. Google seemed to offer everything I needed, except a way to host my site.

Recently, I was studying the options available to me to host this blog and also considering which blogging software to use. Wordpress was the first option that came to mine. Joomla was the second. I went to check out the Wordpress site and found this page on their site regarding hosting services for Wordpress blogs.

I have been programming with RubyOnRails and used Dreamhost to host a Rails application that I have wrote. The Dreamhost hosting service is value for money if you look at what is offered for the price you pay and their support service when you need it is earnest, prompt and helpful. However, the frequency of downtimes was something that bothered me. I experienced it about 3 times in the last six months. The thing that I have come to learn is that the promise of obscene amount of monthly bandwidth and storage space for a small price is something that shouldn’t be the main factor in the decision making process when finding a hosting service. Unfortunately for me, it was.

The more important things are reliability and support services. Dreamhost to me definitely does well on the support side. For reliability, the reaction is mixed. 3 downtimes in six months seem a lot to me but they did quickly resolve the issues and were really open about it. Less important is storage space and monthly bandwidth. I realise for a small site like mine, I really didn’t need all that was promised.

And so for the hosting of this site, I decided that I wanted to try another hosting service besides Dreamhost which could offer the same level of support but better reliability as well as offer a good package at a fair price.

I was surprised to find Yahoo on the list of those providing hosting services. I didn’t know they were a hosting company as well. The funny thing is earlier that week, I had discovered Yahoo’s small business page. I learnt they provided merchant solutions for small businesses but didn’t really find out what that meant then.

When I saw Yahoo’s name, the first thought that came into my mind was that I could rely on it for my hosting needs. Honestly, there is no rational way to explain this decision and I can only say it was because of the Yahoo name that inspired such confidence.

Yahoo also offered something similar to what Google Apps For Your Domain was offering. A single point to register a new domain name as well as easily configure the mail for that domain to be used with Yahoo mail. More importantly, they offered a hosting package which I found reasonable. They don’t seem to be having an equivalent of Google Talk or Google Calendar but honestly, this last week has been the first time I used Yahoo services for about a year and a half so they might be there.

Anyway, the new Yahoo mail interface is looking really good. Haven’t really used it much, but my first impression is that how come this doesn’t seem to be getting the love that Gmail does. I loved Gmail by the way, switched to it from hotmail the minute I got an invite, but maybe I should start exploring Yahoo’s offering.
Setting up the Wordpress blog has been a breeze and it has been really fun playing around trying to configure the site. Hopefully, I’ll be able to learn more about the system and do more with it.

Finally, while Yahoo’s Small Business offerings are different from Google’s ‘Apps for Your Domain’ and ‘Apps for Education’ and is based on a subscription model versus a add-supported model (which actually isn’t a bad thing because it means that it is already generating revenue from their service and that since it is a paid service, we can expect a certain standard of service) the fact that recently a lot of talk has been about Google and not Yahoo when discussing ‘Apps for Your Domain’ brings me back to my first point that the new hot girl gets all the love.

(Updated: They have an equivalent to Google Calendar accessed through the web interface for the domain’s mail. The tab for it was there in plain sight.)

Affiliate Marketing is something that I have been considering to try for sometime. It also has been a notion that has given me some discomfort because of the cynic in me. Somehow, I just cannot seem to believe that anyone could be impartial if being partial could reap monetary rewards.Buried in the above thought is the assumption that the blogger would just review books regularly and positively not so much as a recommendation but a sale pitch. In such a scenario, I believe the blogger is not building the reader’s trust in him or worse abusing that trust.

I believe that trust can be built if the blogger is judicious about the frequency of his reviews and the nature of the reviews (i.e. honest reviews and offering a balanced mix of positive and negative points).

So, should I explicitly inform a reader each time I recommend a book that I am also involved with affiliate marketing? I believe it is unnecessary. However, I believe it is necessary to be upfront about engaging in affiliate marketing. And the
way one can do this is by putting a badge on the sidebar which I have done.

Will it be enough? Some might argue that doing so is not enough because the reader may not see the badge. So how to inform the reader that if he or she purchases a book from Amazon after clicking a link on my site, I will get some referral fees.

One could possibly say that all these musings is really much ado about nothing considering that most web users are probably savvy enough to know that a fair number of sites do engage in some sort of affiliate marketing in one form or another. I guess this is about my own peace of mind.

I do not want any readers of this blog to discover later on that I have engaged in affiliate marketing and be suspicious of my views. I rather the readers know about my intent, be initially wary of my writings and earn their trust in the long run then lose the trust later on when their assumptions about the site defer from reality.

In a way, maybe I am superimposing my own decision making process to validate a site’s opinions on others.

Oh well…  I guess all these thoughts are coming up in the wake of the supposed Microsoft ’scandal’.  Is there a moral difference between receiving the laptop, disclosing you received it, review it and talking about a book you read, maybe recommending it (since not all books you read are worth recommending), provide a link to amazon where you get a referral fee if the book gets sold.

Should the amount in question make a difference?

The world is grey today.

Reached work. Went for lessons. Fired up Firefox. Went to Techcrunch. And saw this! Gmail Disaster: Reports of Mass Email Deletions.

Apparently, Firefox isn’t such a safe browser after all. And maybe it is time to start waking up to the fact that keeping all our data online isn’t such a smart thing. It is time to go and start learning how to backup email offline. But offline data can also be lost! My computer might crash. Time to start making backups on disk? But these disks can be lost in a fire? Time to buy a fireproof safe.

But a safe can be cracked. Time to start remembering everything. But the human brain can forget. Arggh……..

Anyway, apparently, it is not really a gmail thing per se. It has to do with a bug in Firefox. Microsoft must be beaming.

There is something about rain which makes you want to just lie in bed with a loved one and cuddle. Singapore has been experiencing heavy downpour for the last few weeks and travelling to work has been a real depressing journey. Apparently, this can be scientifically explained by the fact that the lack of sun causes the body’s level of serotonin (a hormone that affects emotions) to decrease while increasing the level of melatonin (the hormone which makes us feel sleepy).

In any case, every morning when I wake up and wonder why I even bother to prepare for work, I remember an essay that I recently read via Jane McGonigal’s site when she tried to explain cookie rolling.

The essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus‘ was strangely comforting and in a way, each morning, remembering that essay fills me with hope about this life I have to lead. And all is well.

The first post practically wrote itself.

I was looking around Flickr for photos I could use for my banner when I found this photo by Michell Zappa. I thank him for allowing this photo to be shared and remixed. Anyway, this photo kind of gave me the direction I had been looking for this blog.

I have always talked about my desire to travel and explore the world. But recently, there has been this feeling that I have allowed myself to be a stranger in my own country.

And so, I have decided that from this point on, I will stop myself from being a tourist in the country that I call home. And I believe that if I see instead of look, listen instead of hear, experience instead of do, Singapore will have so much to teach, delight and surprise me.

And I guess that is what this blog will be about. About a country I love.