So my (now ex-) hosting company tells me they have been emailing me for weeks to inform me they will terminate my account as I haven’t paid for the second part of the semi-annual subscription (after many years of paying promptly).
ONLY I DIDN’T GET ANY EMAILS. So ten years work on my web hosting was wiped out completely and irrevocably on the 14th September 2009. FUBAR.
When I sent emails to support, they were supposed to autorespond with a ticket number: I didn’t and still don’t get them. Not in spam, not anywhere. But they think they’ve sent them. The same must have been true of the warning emails they sent me. I guess I can’t blame the hosts (because they thought they were emailing me and I was ignoring them) and I can’t blame me because I’ve just been using the service (including support requests) up until the last day and had no intention not to pay. But it’s still a massive pain in the proverbial. Other than this catastrophic fail, they’ve been reasonable hosts.
Of course I have backups of most of it, but it is always intensely painful to reconstruct this kind of stuff, and causes problems for the various people I’m helping out as a favour.
Lesson: pay a few dollars more a month (literally $10) to have someone you can speak to on the phone.
Let’s hope this doesn’t happen with the new hosts, who have been great so far.
Published on
September 23, 2009 in
Reading.
I have always found world heritage sites to be interesting and well worth the visit. We try to look them up when we are travelling; they can easily be missed. Here’s a useful list from the Telegraph of some slightly out-of-the-way ones.
I like the finale of this article: we shouldn’t think about micropayments for news as being fractional payment for stories. Given that, what should they be?
Another semi-experiment shows that low-selling items are just that. Maybe it is the promise of the long tail that takes us to retailers where we then buy best-sellers galore.
The new vetting and barring scheme brings unfortunate life to the old adage about children and animals. I’m against it mainly because it falls foul of the pointless screening argument: there are likely to be more false positives (people unfairly suspected of issues) created by the screening than there are potential problem adults.
However, there appears to be another very good reason in this article by a detective who worked on the Soham murders:
it wasn’t Huntley’s job that got him access to the children, it was his partner’s job. So the vetting and barring should really be extended to partners of people working with kids, and potentially to their friends / housemates. I’m kidding, of course (about the last bit).
Disclosure: I am not a parent.
Fascinating article exploring levels of cooperation in different animals. In summary, tolerance (e.g. lack of aggression towards humans by wolves) can lead to cooperative behaviour.
Chimpanzees, though they know to deceive us (and each other) never
really learn that we are pointing towards food for them, whereas dogs
know this well.
So both have some form of theory of mind, but very different to the one we have.
A trial on wolves showed that this behaviour could be bred in relatively rapidly (forty generations). The trial suggests that it might not have been survival of the fittest operating on dogs, but rather survival of the friendliest. So much interesting stuff in there to read. Well worth it.
Published on
September 14, 2009 in
Personal.
First blog since our return from a splendid loop of mid-California (San Francisco, Big Sur, Santa Barbara, Sequoia National Park, Yosemite, San Francisco). We managed to avoid wild fires, bears, rattlesnakes, rock falls en route, which was very lucky for us. On the positive side, we stayed in wonderful places, saw great friends and drove a convertible with the roof down at 111
Published on
September 6, 2009 in
Reading.
Nice idea to use collaboration with expert non-patent examiners to gather prior art. It would probably be worth patent-heavy companies to invest in someone to participate for them: most patent applications won’t be yours, so the more you can steer away from granting through relevant prior art, the better for you.