Finally, I have some good news to share. I have resolved the problem with this domain reseller and have taken control of the domain name. However, I am totally dissatisfied with the way this fella handled this problem, without an apology at all.

Even though the fees were all paid for by my friend, the real domain owner and I am just the custodian, I still feel cheated by this domain reseller for forcing me to renew it through him.

In the end, I had to pay about RM50 more than necessary but that’s not all. I now have to wait a few more months before I can transfer this domain name from my GoDaddy account to my NameCheap account. I want it to be with NameCheap because that’s where all my domain names are and it would be easier for me to keep tabs of them and their expiry.

All in all, it took about a month for this issue to be resolved in between this time frame, the blog was down for about two weeks from the date the domain name expired until it was renewed.

This means that on top of losing RM50, my friend also lost his revenue from the blog. Tell me, would we still want to be their customer or recommend friends to shit service like this?

A couple of days ago, I felt that Streamyx was seriously slow for me. I did not know why I had no problems with some websites while there were some others that would take long minutes to open the page and some would not be able to load at all. I thought that there was a problem with my browser so I cleared my cache and temporary internet files and all the other junk that accumulated through days of being on the web.

There was still no change and it was the same even when I used another system to get online. I thought there was something wrong with my broadband connection but since I could access some websites, I decided not to call the Customer Support line.

I suffered from this slowness for a day or two until a friend told me that there was a fault with the underwater cable network that Streamyx uses. So I went to the website of Streamyx to check, which I nearly could not open as well.

The notice on the website of Streamyx states, and I quote:
“…..circuits fault on Southeast Asia – Middle East – Western Europe 4 (SMW4) submarine cable network between Palermo (Southern Italy) and Alexandria (Northern Egypt) linking Malaysia to Europe.”

Even though this fault looks like it will only affect web traffic to European based websites, because of this, TM has channeled traffic from this through alternate routes, causing congestion even to websites hosted in North America.

Well, TM says that they are striving to rectify this latest by 31st December, 2008. I hope that it would be before then or I would lose all my hair on my head! GGGrrrrrrrrr

As the owner of two freebies blog, I spend a considerable amount of time scouring the web for good deals, freebies, samples and generally, goodies that I think my readers would be interested in.

Today, I was told of this FreebiesJunction.com Website which, actually, I have come across occasionally in my search for freebies via the search engines.

Based on my experience browsing through a host of freebies websites over the past two years, Freebies Junction is a pretty comprehensive website that not only offers freebies but also trials, new offers and a good money making opportunity through their referral program.

To fully utilize this website, one has to register as a member of Freebies Junction. Unfortunately, registration is open to USA, Australia, Canada, Denmark, New Zealand and United Kingdom addresses only. This would be an awesome website for freebie junkies in these countries!

If you love freebies and enjoy earning a little money along the way, sign up with Freebies Junction. You will receive $3 sign-up bonus plus stand a chance to win extra prizes in their monthly jackpots and contests. Of course, bear in mind that you will have to be at least 18 years old and a resident of the countries listed above to be able to participate.

Two out of three of my Blogger blogs required me to go pass a word verification process before publishing my post. I know that this is a form of spam protection since I publish multiple posts a day. I know that I could write in to Blogger to request for removal of this process after they have manually reviewed my blog and ascertain that I am not spamming with my blog.

I thought I could live with the word verification process even though I would get the words wrong the first time all the time. I didn’t mind though because frankly I couldn’t be bothered emailing Blogger. You know, emailing them is like emailing Google.

Anyway, a couple of days ago, I suddenly realized that now I am not required to go through the word verification process any longer. I logged out of one account and logged in to another and it’s the same for the other blog too. And what totally surprised me was that now, my drafts actually SAVE automatically.

My, publishing on Blogger is such a breeze now. Yay!

Google, the web search giant, has further increases its share in the online search pie for November, 2008, compared to October, 2008, according to a study conducted by comScore, Inc.

Within this same period, which has one day less than October, 2008, Yahoo! searches lost 0.1%, falling to 20.4% from 20.5% a month earlier. MSN on the other hand, fell 0.2% to 8.3% while Ask, which also fell 0.2% only garnered a total of 4% of searches.

While I do not feel like I have made more online searches in November compared to October this year, I know that no matter what I search for, Google is always the first choice. Now, I am not saying that the other engines are less accurate or whatever but like everyone has been saying, Microsoft and Yahoo! need to serious think of ways to collaborate their search divisions to give Google a good challenge.

I personally feel that they should do something about their search pages. With so many fancy elements, links to news, etc., it’s actually off putting to me and I would rather start my searches from a blank page like Google.

Over the past year, I had to reformat my hard disk because of various problems about three or four times. I have lost count of the number of times but what I remember most is the hassle of installing all my programs and restoring my preferences. That takes up plenty of time because of the many programs that I must use for work. I’m pretty fussy and need my programs to open exactly as I like them so that I could work quicker.

My friend told me that I should do a copy of my hard disk so that I could just restore EVERYTHING into a newly format hard disk but I had no idea what to do and how to do it. You see, I am not very technical but I was so happy to find this solution of backing up the entire drive without hassle of technical know-how with EZBackup.

I had the opportunity to check out a trial version of the program and what I like is that I cold back up my entire drive, including my email messages in Outlook Express. Doing a back up is just a matter of selecting what to back up. While it would take a while to back up our drives initially, we could then set to automatically back up our new files and those that have been newly modified subsequently. That would save some time. Of course, we could back up our drive manually but I don’t like that because I will keep forgetting!

Download your Free Trial of EzBackup now to try it out yourself.