Tuesday March 11
18:28
How Long To Gobble Down An 8 Incher?
I found out about this from Eyal, who found out from Jil:
Bob’s BBQ has a standing offer for anyone interested, called The Wagon Wheel Challenge. If you can eat one of Bob’s Wagon Wheel Burgers (about 3 pounds total weight, price range 400 to 500 baht depending on toppings) including the french fries in under 45 minutes, Bob will put your name on the Wagon Wheel Hall of fame (a plaque on the wall of his restaurant), put your picture on his website, and knock half the price off your burger.
What’s funny here is clicking through to the website and seeing the list of people who have attempted to eat the 8 inch burger, and succeeded. There’s a Korean there. A Scotsman. Lot s of Chubby people, but some not so chubby. The longest time was 45 minutes.
45 minutes to eat a burger. Man….
But for some strange reason, it’s tempting. I do love a good burger. And it doesn’t look that big.
Americans, in their typical style, have gone one better.
Tuesday March 11
18:07
The First Korean In Space Will…
…disappear into the toilet for a quick cigarette.
I don’t tend to read newspapers, so I don’t often pick up on what’s topical. Approving Seoul Buffoon for The Korean Blog List, however, I came across this:
Expert comments on Korea’s space lady
It so happens that a 29-year-old female mechanical engineer has replaced Seoul’s original choice as the first South Korean in space…and the reactions on the Internet blogs are amazing!
From The Korea Times:
The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology told a news conference that Russia’s Federal Space Agency asked for Ko San’s replacement, as the 31-year-old repeatedly broke training protocol by taking sensitive training material outside of the Russian space center. Back-up candidate Yi So-yeon will take over.
“The main reason for the cut is Ko made two consecutive security violations,” said Lee Sang-mok, the head of the ministry’s space technology bureau, adding that both events appeared unintentional.
He explained that the Russians regard abiding by the rules as critical since even a small and innocent mistake could lead to serious consequences in space.
The authorities have taken a decision for whatever reason… and the experts opinions are out in full flow. It is a free for all on the Korean blogs. Some male chauvinists are upset that it is a woman who will be the first Korean…
My first thought? My deep and insightful comment on Korean society and the implications of this decision?
What are the Russian’s going to say when they find out the Korean is smoking in the toilet of the shuttle in space?
From all the times I’ve been flying, I’ve only ever seen someone trying to smoke in an airplane twice. Both times it was a Korean. No toilet is sacred. No number of no-smoking signs. No number of announcements.
Not even Space may prevent it.
Tuesday March 11
12:31
My experience with dotserving.com is almost over
…but not quite.
Despite the fact that they never set up my account because they couldn’t get “voice confirmation” that I existed, dotserving charged my credit card. So in dotserving’s eyes, I exist enough to charge my card, but don’t exist enough to get the account I’d paid for.
I’d been emailing the *owner* with presales queries 2-3 days before signing up. I’d told them which of their current users had referred me. All of that meant nothing. Until they heard my sweet voice, I only existed for card charging purposes, not account using purposes.
I say “almost over, but not quite” because dotserving had the choice of *cancelling* the charge on my card, or *refunding*. With a cancellation, the transaction simply disappears. With a refund, I lose the currency spread and movement between charging and refunding, approx 5-10%. Despite being clear to request a cancellation so that I am not charged anything, they processed it as a refund - so I’ll be charged something for this bad experience.
Dotserving claims that they called me, but couldn’t get through to me. With the call options on my phone, even if my phone is out of service, I’ll get a message to say that there was a call when I come back in service. There was no message - so in my opinion, that is just an excuse. Even if they did call and couldn’t get through to me, like they claim, pure business logic and customer service means that you send a notification mail, or you try again. I was customer number 666 (how appropriate, eh?) so they hardly are rushed off their feet. Once again, I’ll repeat that they knew which of their trusted customers had referred me, and I’d been in email contact with them for several days.
It really sounds like ass covering for slow service to me - they are probably not big enough to be able to handle new accounts during the night, but they don’t want to admit it. At the weekend dotserving tried to cover non and slow response to presales questions by claiming they had sent emails but I didn’t receive them. I gave them the benefit of the doubt about emails, but I now suspect that was ass covering also - or that their email servers lose emails.
Dotserving claim they responded to my support tickets within 20 minutes, and sent me mail with their log records to verify it. What they missed out is that the support replies were nothing but “wait 4-5 hours” until Billing comes in, in addition to the 4 hours I’d been waiting. They didn’t give a toss about solving the issue, or checking their systems. Again, if they’d made a call to me, that should have been on the system.
Rather than looking at this from a cool head business perspective and saying “We screwed up” or “We should review our procedures to ensure this doesn’t happen again”, the responses from dotserving’s owner have been “I wont debate this” and attempting to post on my blog.
I initially signed up for dotserving based on a friend’s recommendation. He has had no problems with them, and I should mention that in fairness. But I have had problems. If the support had actually bothered to try to resolve the issue and set up my account, or the replies this morning had been friendly and admitting they had issues, or they’d said “Hey, you had a bad experience, try the first month on us and you’ll see that we’re OK” (I’d have said no, but it would have been a good gesture), I’d probably not be writing this now. I suspect dotserving are one of those companies that are good as long as you don’t have any problems with the process - but in my case, they certainly fell down.
In the big picture of things, I’ve not lost a lot of money on this (assuming the refund goes through), and I didn’t give control of my website to them, so I had no downtime. I’ve only lost time and energy - so I should be thankful for that.
Rant over. Let’s hope the amount charged to my credit card isn’t too much.
Monday March 10
21:26
Finding A Webhost Is Tough
A few days ago I had some problems with my webhost, phpwebhosting.com, as one of the scripts I wrote for The Korean Blog List allegedy was responsible for slow response on the server.
What shocked me is that my webhost was complaining about 100 or so instances of a php script all running at the same time.
Imagine you have a website and suddenly a robot comes in and tries to follow every link - eg on a page which lists every blog entry for a year - then that’s not something that you can control. A webserver should handle that.
When getting a hosting package, one often thinks about how much bandwidth is allowed - but it became clear to me that bandwidth is a pretty useless measure if the servers are not set up to handle high volume. What’s the point of a 10,000 GB per month allowance if your server isn’t able to serve pages that quickly? It’s only useful for photos, warez, etc - which is not what I want.
I started looking around for another host, and eventually selected dotserving.com on the recommendation of a friend, paying with my credit card at lunchtime today. And already I regret it.
Despite boasts of 60 minutes response times, etc, etc, and a mail which said “Your account will be ready within 1-3 hours”, more than 4 hours later my account was still not setup. I contact the 24 hours support line to be told to wait another 4-5 hours until billing get in.
It is complete and utter PANTS customer service. All that crap about fast response, and the first thing they do is FAIL to meet their promise of setting up the account within 1-3 hours. It’s now 9 hours later and nothing. If I didn’t know that my friend is successfully being hosted by them, I’d think that dotserving had just taken my credit card money and run.
It has made me appreciate phpwebhosting.com. Sure, I might need something that gives me a bit more of a server to play with, but their account activation was instant, and I’ve had relatively few issues with them during the 5+ years I’ve been with them.
For the “make money fast” people: Do not try posting affiliate links to webhosting companies in the comments - they will not be approved!
Friday March 7
18:13
Eyes On Speed
Training again today - and entire day of speed reading training. You wouldn’t think that a course on reading would be hard work, but blimey, when you push yourself, it is.
I improved from about 230 words per minute and 60% comprehension to 410 words per minute and almost 90% comprehension. Pretty good improvement, I think.
The trainer recommends the Rocket Reader website for further training. Unfortunately it’s only free for 10 days. There must be some free sites out there.