In the early days of this blog, I wrote about how I lost my data due to a Trojan attack. I don’t even know how that could happen when my computer is protected with anti-virus software and I never visit any websites that are suspect. But attack it got and the end result was a corrupted software and data.

I heard from a friend that there is a data recovery New York-based company which offers their expert advice on how to recover data in such a “disaster”. I wonder if they could help me to recover my data this way or not.

This company also offers Raid data recovery service and they are experts when it comes to recovering lost data from hard disks, compact discs, media cards, memory cards and many other storage devices.

Data Hotline, this company, has a No Data No Fee policy and everyone can write in to them to request for a free evaluation. I think that what they are offering is great as sometimes our data could be lost in an accident and we did not have the lasted back up copy of our database! This is no longer a worry as we could call Data Hotline and let them do the dirty work in data recovery. Hahah!

If you remember, my friend told me to set up an ecommerce store because I am spending way too much time online and he told me that I should make better use of my time. According to him, if I were to set it up, it is very easy to do so. All I need to set up an ecommerce site is a domain name, web space for hosting, an attractive layout and an solid ecommerce software for people to buy my items seamlessly.

That sounds easy but I am not that confident!

My friend says that there is nothing to be afraid of because I can always give Ashop’s shopping cart software a trial run for free for ten days without even providing my credit card details. I can always cancel my trial without being billed if I were not comfortable with it.

However, in his opinion, Ashop’s shopping cart is the easiest to use and I should not have a problem using it. This is a great software with unparalleled technical support. That sounds great. Now, let me think what I should sell first!

While surfing the internet, I came across a site that reviews online casinos. I remember that I once got into a heated debate with a friend regarding which is the better casino online. O course, we did not come to an agreement and there was no conclusion to our debate.

Now that I discovered Pro360, I can let him know the top fifty leading online casinos and there will no longer be any debate because this review was compiled by an independent third party!

Based on this list, Full Tilt Poker received 9.5 out of ten points from the editors which makes it the top online casino. It is also one of the handfuls of online casinos that is US-approved.

I think that whoever is serious about playing for big money on online casinos should check out Pro360 and read through all the reviews. I am sure that there are lots of useful information and pointers here that are not available on other similar online casino review websites.

Have you upgraded to the new Yahoo! Mail? Well, I have. Although I do not use my Yahoo! Mail for any serious email anymore because it is swamped with junk mail more often than not except for the occasional email from old friends way before I migrated to Hotmail and then Gmail, I still check it almost daily to read up on newsletters that I signed up with. Of course, these companies always claim that they will not sell our email address but I receive more and more junk mail each time I sign up for a new newsletter.

I actually find this new interface better than the previous one which always took ages just to load. That was why I reverted to the Classic interface after trying it out for a couple of days and could no longer stand it. I hate draggy sites and usually just close my browser and go on my merry way.

This time, I am going to continue using this new interface because I see no reason to downgrade to Classic version, although there are a few quirks here and there which will get some getting used to!

A few weeks ago, I received an email from a stranger who told me that he has added my blog to his online blog directory. He said that if I were to give him a reciprocal link, he would upgrade my listing and move it to the top of the page.

Out of curiosity, I went to his directory to check it out and saw that he has hundreds of links in there. I scanned though the whole list and used the search functions of my browser and his directory but could not find my blog listed.

Ahh.. he must be joking if he wrote to me to fish for a link back and why should I give i to him when he bluff me like that?

If he really did list my blog like he said, I would gladly link him up too but now, sorry! I even deleted his email already and I don’t even remember his directory address anymore! Bah!

Yesterday, I was chatting with my friend about my websites and he asked me how many websites I have. I said I have more than ten and he went, “Whoa! How can you afford them??” Seriously, Web Hosting is not that expensive if we know where to look. There are many hosting companies that offer free, cheap or at least affordable web hosting packages for personal or commercial use. Of course, to look for these free or discounted hosting, we need to put in some effort.

Take for example, Comfort Hosting, which has a website at http://www.comforthosting.com. They offer three different packages to cater to our hosting needs. There is the Basic Plan that costs US$50 only per month, the Second Plan that is US$70 per month and Business Plan at US$100 per month. All these plans come without additional set up charges and offer unlimited sub-domains, Pop3/IMAP accounts, FTP accounts, MySQL databases and mailing list.

If you are familiar with web hosting, you would know that some companies will charge an additional fee for the above. Therefore, it is important to find out before hand what exactly you are paying for and what will or will not be included in your plan.

As a webmaster with more than ten sites hosted on by four different companies, let me tell you that besides affordability, my other concerns are reliability with at least 99.99% up time and solid technical and customer support. I think these are what every webmaster look for in a web host.

I think most of us have never heard of Jaiku until Google took over it. Well, I don’t know what it means in Finnish but anything that ends with “KU” in my national language is not good, unless it is AKU which means ME.

Out of curiosity, I hopped over to Jaiku to see what it is all about. Hhmm I heard someone saying that it is like Twitter. Is it? I did not register with Twitter though I am tempted to mainly because it is supported by Fring and I have Fring installed on my mobile device. I do not see the logic in announcing to everyone what I am doing every minute of the day. Is that the purpose of Twitter or have the majority of the people misused it?

With Jaiku, I also did not have the intention to of joining, but it looks as if we could go mobile with Jaiku and I would like to try it since my Symbian S60 is supported. I am trying to maximize the use of my device but I do not wish to bust my postpaid mobile line.

Are you Jaiku-ing (new term coined by me!)?