Views and Reviews
My views of the world, news, sports, or just random thought. Some reviews of products and services I tried first hand.

Saturday, October 28, 2006

IX Web Hosting

Alright, before I'm going to bed, I'd like to share with you a strange experience I just encountered.

Now, some of you might remember the first blog I posted about web hosting... well, I decided to give it one more shot and re-review some of those candidate companies I didn't choose the first time.

So I was looking at the IX Web Hosting site and something really weird happened.
OK, first of all, you might not be able to reproduce it because it depends on the configuration of your computer. Since my PC laptop broke back in June, I have got an iBook G4 as a replacement, and so far, I'm not too too good using it.

Nevertheless, I use the Safari browser (v2.0.4) that comes with OS X Tiger.

So here are the steps (again, that only worked using Safari with OS X Tiger):

1) go to http://www.ixwebhosting.com/index.php/v2/pages.planBusinessPlus



2) click on the "DEMO" link (next to "Free Site Builder") or go directly to http://72.41.4.29:8080/demo/psoft.masonry.Builder?, and that should send you to this page



3) finally, click on the first link ("Click here to continue editing your website.") or go to http://72.41.4.29:8080/demo/psoft.masonry.Builder?action=last
and you should see:



WTF!?!?

Now if you try with firefox or IE, you will certainly get something more politically correct.
By the way, IX Web Hosting is based in Hopkinsville, Kentucky...


Or maybe I was just too tired and dreamt the whole thing... can someone let me know if that content is still live??

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Friday, October 27, 2006

A Dark Anniversary

Exactly one year ago, France witnessed one of its most chaotic chapter. To refresh your memory, thousands of young people from what are called "banlieues" (poor suburbs), stormed the street of the main cities and unleashed hell.

What sparkled those riots were the accidental deaths of two teenagers from of of those banlieues, who thought they were chased by the police and got electrocuted while hiding in an electricity substation.

And you thought the LAPD were the most hated people on planet... well, think again! The French police and the US Marines in iraq might just have passed them for that title.

So what is wrong in France (besides the usual stuff)?
One word: unemployment.

You can say whatever you want about race, difference of culture and religion, but the one thing that always comes back is the constant complaint about the lack of job, not only for those young-people-of-African-descent-living-in-a-suburb-and-burn-cars-from-time-to-time-because-maybe-it-is-cold-outside, but for the French youth in general.

The unemployment is hovering around 10% compared to the 5% we manage to do here thanks to our 3 daily McJobs (but this is a completely different topic).
For people under 26, this rate skyrockets at a pathetic 23%.

it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that nobody really cares about young people anymore, as long as they don't destroy too many things in town.
No job, no school, no money... how long do you thing they will stay quiet and calm about it?
But this problem is also a bit more complex than that... it's also a problem of cultural clash and failed integration that no one (with enough power) wants to seriously tackle.

All in all, I don't think the end of the tunnel is really in sight, and that makes me fell how lucky I was to escape all these... and also how powerless I am to do anything.

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Thursday, October 26, 2006

Daylight saving this weekend

From the AP:

"WASHINGTON - Most Americans will get a chance at an extra hour of sleep this weekend, as the clocks fall back to standard time. It's the last time this will happen in October.

Thanks to a law passed last year, daylight-saving time will start earlier and end later beginning in 2007. It will last from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November.

The clock change switches an hour of daylight from evening to morning, meaning drivers will need to be extra careful on Halloween night to be sure of avoiding excited little trick-or-treaters.

The official change occurs at 2 a.m. Sunday, though most folks will make the change before going to bed Saturday night.

Some states and territories don't observe daylight-saving time and won't have to worry about changing their clocks. Those are Arizona, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam and the Northern Marianas.

Daylight-saving time returns next March 11."



Now, tell that to a toddler (I guess no extra sleep for us).

Yet another fantasy game

Except that this one is UNIQUE!

It is called "fantasy congress", and yep, it's like fantasy football, except that your team is composed with members of congress.
Now this is an awesome idea, which might give more interest to the world of politics.
Can that help lower the quantity of BS that politicians submerge us with? If the concept takes off, it might just help our democracy.

http://www.fantasycongress.us/fc/

Apparently points are scored whenever a congressman manages to push bills to pass law...

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Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Friends quitting on Lost

This is so sad... After so many nights watching that show, coming up with theories and being (sometimes) awed with some plot twists, well, season 3 is going to be much more different now.

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Choosing the right web hosting service.

In this time and era of infinite choice, one could think that it would be really easy to pick a web hosting provider... in fact, pick ANY web hosting provider and be merry and on the way to creating a web site.

After searching, reviewing, searching again and reviewing and reviewing again, I found out first hand, that this experience can be quite astonishing, in a bad way.

First of all, there are so many providers out there that it becomes quickly overwhelming to decide which one to pick.
Second, most of the web sites that are supposed to give reviews on these web hosting providers, well, usually give different opinions from "best choice" for one review site, to "avoid at all cost" for another one.
It would not surprise me at all, that some might get commissions for signing up new customers, but this is a different thought I would spare you today.

After reading a guide on http://www.work.com and running a few searches on http://www.business.com , http://www.yahoo.com and http://www.google.com keyword 'web hosting', I decided that the best candidates would be 1and1, godaddy, IX hosting and maybe host department.

However, after running a search with each provider's name and the keyword 'reviews', I was extremely disappointed to find out that the sheer number of negative reviews for all of them. I must say that these opinions must be taken with extreme care, since competitors could simply create bogus comments just to sink the rating of another provider, but still...

So after almost a week of fine tuning my research, I finally decided to go with http://www.bluehost.com
Let's hope I won't have too many problems with them!

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