Foreign Cheques

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Just like Neil I received my first Google cheque (or check) a few days ago. I was more than happy to receive some money, which is covering at least part of my hosting costs, without doing anything for it.

But my hapiness is a little deadbeat now that my bank has cashed the cheque. Just like Neil wrote in his recent post: if you’re not located in the US you will certainly be surprised about the amount that is ultimatively credited to your account. As of AdSense’s terms of service I’m not to disclose how much I earned, but as I’ve got a cheque you can figure out the lower boundary of the amount. Let me put it that way: the currency conversion and the bank fees for foreign cheques has just cut the amount by 16% :cry:

Now that really sucks, but hey, as I ain’t got an account with an american bank there’s nothing much I can do…

Host move

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As you might have already seen: Ingoal.info has moved to a new host. As I already said in my previous post, Dreamhost has tripled both space and bandwith on all accounts. So I decided to cut some slack and move Ingoal’s Insight over to Dreamhost. That saves me an additional account and hence some money (around 50$/year) – nothing much, but hey, why spend money if you ain’t got to :wink:

It’s not that I was unsatisfied with TotalChoiceHosting or anything. I was really satisfied with both the performance of their servers and their customer service – it’s just that I’ve got more than 1.5GB of space and nearly 120GB of bandwith without use (until now!).

Alright, the DNS update seems to be done, I hope that you’re able to find me again. If you encounter any errors due to the server move feel free to reply to this post or contact me at ingoal[at]gmail[dot]com

Need hosting?

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If you’re on the lookout for a new hosting package, I think you should have a look at the newest crazy domain packages over at Dreamhost. Not only did they recently triple the bandwith, but they tripled the space now, too. The smallest package (Crazy Domain Insane) was: 800MB space and 40GB bandwith – this is now 2.400MB space and 120GB bandwith!

I guess it’s time to move over Ingoal.info over, too – I’ve already got an account with them hosting two of my other domains… :rolleyes:

If you’re interested in signing up with them: do me a favor and use the link above or the following pic, you will get the hosting and I will get a little bit of commision :mrgreen:

Get Dreamhost hosting now!

New mobile phone

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After my old mobile phone died in October (see here), I finally decided which way to go. As I said back then there were two phones which I would want, the Motorola V3 (Razr) or the Nokia 6230. The V3 is just too expensive (still 379€), so I went with the Nokia 6230 (which I was able to get for a discounted price of 49€ now – instead of the 129€ prior to January 1st).

I know that the battery life of it isn’t all that great, but I’ve got a masterplan for that – upgrade the standard battery (850mAh) with a high-capacity one (1200 mAh). That should give it an extra boost and a decent battery life (of greater than 1 day).

Apart from that little downside it has got everything you could ask for: Bluetooth, groovy colour display, etc. Now I can’t wait for it to arrive, hopefully it’ll be here in 1-2days – expect to hear a review then :wink:

New phonelines + dsl provider

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“Konkurrenz belebt das Geschaeft” is an old german saying (roughly translates to: competition is good for trade), which seems to be so true in the current online- and phone-market. We’ve had our phonelines and dsl-setup from the biggest german provider (Telekom (T-Com + T-Online)) forever, but it seems it’s time to move on. We were paying a nifty amount of 74,19€ basic charge for a ISDN-connection (two digital lines), dsl-setup with 768kbit down, 128kbit up and a flatrate. As they’re changing their port-setup you’re forced to upgrade to 1MBit down, 128kbit up on January 1st 2005 – as this is an auto-upgrade there’s nothing you can do about it, apart from moving on or paying 4 €/month more for this “speed increase”. This would bring up our basic charge to 78,19€ which equals 106,10$. :brickwall:

As I think this is ridiculously high for the provided service I told my folks that we should look around for alternatives. As I’m the geek of the family I did the checking and came up with different solutions.

  • Leave ISDN-connection with Telekom and switch online stuff to cable. This would have cut the online-costs to 39€/month (Telekom: 16,99€ + 29,99€ flat = 46,98€) – an improvement, but not quite the cut I had hoped for. :tdown:
  • Switch complete connection (ISDN + DSL) to the competition. In this case to the second largest phone provider (Arcor)…and bingo. Just made the switch (just waiting for the paper work being sent our way and we’re gone – see more details below) :tup:

The Arcor deal is quite sweet:

  • ISDN just like with Telekom. They’re handling all the switches and legal stuff (canceling the old commitment to Telekom, switching over all our MSNs, etc)
  • They’re offering both a DSL-flat and a phone-flat (all calls are free, except for calls to mobile phones).
  • The DSL basic charge and the flatrate are way cheaper.

Cost factor:

  • ISDN basic charge: 19,95€
  • DSL basic charge: 10€
  • DSL-flat: 9,95€
  • phone-flat: 19,95€
  • upgrade DSL to 2MBit (2MBit down, 192kbit up): 5€
  • Grand total: 64,85€ (equals 88$)

Now that looks more like it. We’re saving around 14€/month, but wait, that’s the absolute minimum as we’ve got a phone-flat now, which we didn’t have with Telekom, so it’s gonna be even more, month after month after month (we had one invoice of less than 100€ in the whole year 2004) – and I’ve got double bandwith as soon as the switch is made :mrgreen:

Happy New Year

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After using the first 6hours of January 1st 2005 and the next 7 hours for sleep, it’s 13:18. So, a new year. I wish it to be a happy one for all of my family, friends, readers and generally everyone that knows me!

Recent browsing…a is for…

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Inspired by Aaron‘s and Jeremy‘s posts:

A is for Arlt.com – computer store
B is for Bloglines
C is for Coresite
D is for Dict.leo.org
E is for ebay.de
F is for fcm2.info
G is for Gmail
H is for heise.de
I is for Ingoal.info (hehe)
J is for tragically null
K is for Kundenbetreuung – eplus (customer service of my mobile phone provider)
L is for Landkreis Coburg (went there during research for wikifun.de)
M is for My Ebay
N is for NBA.com
O is for Osthoff innovations
P is for Paypal.de
Q is for nothing
R is for ranking.com
S is for sitepoint.com/forums
T is for t-com.de (checking around for a new phone contract)
U is for Brian’s blog
V is for vr networld ebanking
W is for Wikifun.de Homepage
X is for nothing
Y is for nothing
Z is for zdf.de

Almost everything filled I guess – it seems I’m browsing the web a little bit too much these days :smile:

Different device, different edition?!

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It’s been a long time since I added the WAP-version and I didn’t even link to it. So today I thought that I could add yet another edition, making Ingoal’s Insight… even more accessible, especially on the road.

So I added the WP-Mobile plugin and put up a new category in the right hand menu “editions” – there are now three of them: the standard xhtml one, the wap one and the mobile one (for pdas). Groovy stuff.

On the backend I embedded the WP grin plugin so now it’s no more smiley-writing, but smiley clicking :tup:

screenshot of the backend extension/plugin

Week 17

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Ingoal’s score: 57 pts (total: 549 pts)
Mr. Price’s score: 35 pts (total: 688 pts)

Woohoo! The first week in ages that I was able to get some points back, maybe it isn’t over after all. Watch out, here I come ;-)

Indian Ocean Earthquake

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It’s been some time now since the first news struck, and tbh I’m still shocked. As more and more news emerge the death-toll is rising and rising and has hit 50.000+. What a tragedy!

What makes it even worse is the fact that at least some deaths could have been prevented, if there would have been a warning system. I just watched the latest news and they said that a US earthquake and tsunami warning system suggested the danger of emerging tsunamis and that they wanted to contact the countries in danger, but were unable to get the message through, due to a missing system – hence no central contact persons, no emergency plan, no nothing. This is really said. I guess hundreds if not thousands could have been saved. Hopefully the countries of the region will come together and get a system up and running in the near future…(I heard Indiana and Australia have already plans to do just that).

My thoughts and prayers are with the victims, their families and all people in the region.

More infos can be found in the news, the tsunamihelp-blog and on the wikipedia-sites:
german wikipedia, english wikipedia