CityBlogz Design Studio / Blog

I haven’t posted an update in a long time because I’ve been in transition with my domain name expiring under GoDaddy. GoDaddy had messed things up royally. My domain expired recently and I had decided to transfer to another registrar. GoDaddy made it impossible for me to do the transfer, and I eventually ended up renewing my domain under them. This is unfair practice, if you ask me. I am still trying to initiate a transfer out of GoDaddy, but they have made it quite impossible to get out of this arrangement. Buyer’s beware!

My SpyMac mail has been out of service for about one week now. I am a little bit pissed that they did not warn anyone ahead of time. I cannot access my email in any way, form, or shape. This is quite unacceptable, especially since I paid $39.99 for the Premium email service. I depend heavily on email, personally and for my business. Looks like I will have to search for another email provider. I wrote a brief last year about the Email storage wars. Looks like I will have to revisit that list and check out which one has come out with the best plan. For those who are looking to reach me, I have a alternate address at tomasyung AT hotmail.com.

UPDATE: Looks like my SpyMac mail finally came back online (on Monday evening). Fortunately, some of the emails that were in route to me during the outage, did come through. However, there was the issue of my archived mail folders being lost. After calling them up and leaving them a message, I finally got my archived mail back today (Wednesday). Even though, they got me back to the state where I was before the outage, it was still unprofessional as to how they handled this “planned mail server migration”. I hope they learn from this mistake, because this user has just lost its trust in SpyMac. I assume many others feel the same. I will be backing up my email regularly from now on. I will also be on the lookout for another email address. Unfortunately, the pickings are slim. Gmail (free) and Yahoo ($20/yr) both provide 2GB mail accounts, but they don’t provide IMAP, only POP mail. Hotmail ($20/yr) also has 2GB accounts, but only provide access using Outlook using their proprietary HTTP mail server and POP. Why is IMAP mail access so important? It allows you to connect from different PCs/Macs and synchronizes your mail and folders automatically between them all. Without it, all of us who access our emails using our email applications from home, work, and other machines, would all be out of sync.

Today, I’m still alive after 31 years. I wonder how my next 4 years will look like. Will I still be living where I am? Will I have kids? Will I continue to live a life of continual existence working for the “man” or will my ideas flourish into something greater? I’d like to think that someday all my needs will be met, and all my false senses of security will be realized. Only the Man upstairs can answer all these questions.

Wow! Can you believe this story? The folks at NASA have built something called “The Highway in the Sky.” It’s a computer system designed to let millions of people fly whenever they please, and take off and land from wherever they please, in their very own vehicles.

And here’s the good news — a lot of people are building machines you’ll be able to buy. The article is located at CBS’ 60 Minutes website entitled “Flying Cars Ready To Take Off“.

My last day at work was March 3rd, 2005. I’ve been having a mini-vacation since then. It has been quite interesting seeing how many employers have been knocking at my door. I’ve had to say no to some already. I guess I can afford to be a little picky.

As far as keeping busy during that time, I’ve been picking up skills in PHP and the whole L.A.M.P. open source development architecture. Even IBM seems interested in supporting it by partnering with Zend (the PHP optimization company). On February 25, 2005, IBM announced an agreement with Zend Technologies to develop the industry’s first integrated solution designed to help developers build and deploy applications and services based on the popular PHP Web language. You may be curious why I chose to learn PHP and MySQL. I do have a special project under tight wraps that I am hoping to release in the next couple months (all using L.A.M.P). I will be partnering with my close colleague Jason Bagorio and his company BizwareTech to release a special version of his current website PlaceAdz.com. Anyway, I can’t really say too much, so look for it in the upcoming months.

I came across a very interesting web application/service called del.icio.us. After a few days of continous use, I’ve decided to comment on my overall experience using the web application. According to the website,

del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others.

For now, this service is completely free. In my mind, it has some very interesting marketing potential. At the moment, it does one thing and does it well. I did have some performance issues during peak internet hours and I did get a 404 error during that time. Some future enhancements that I can think of are to include a favorites/bookmarks import/export feature in the same manner that Yahoo! Bookmarks does it. Anyway, here are my public bookmarks at del.icio.us. Enjoy!