March 2006

Monthly Archive

His Needs, Her Needs

Filed Under Movies/Books

I am very thankful to my friend, Marjz, for giving me and my wife a great book on our wedding. The book is all about how to build an ‘affair-proof marriage’ and is authored
by Dr. Williard F. Harley, Jr. The book discusses things(small and big) that we tend to ignore but may affect our relationship. I particularly liked the way Harley presented each topic especially the real-life examples presented that he got from his years (or decades) marriage-counselling. It made the book an easy read.

The basic idea that the book tries to present is that each person has a set of needs that must be met in order for them to feel satisfied and happy in a relationship. A person must be aware of the needs of his/her partner to make their relationship much happier. This book will help you guide and direct in meeting those needs.

I’m quite surprised how sex and affection play a great role in maintaining a happy and fulfilling marriage. You’ll find in the first few chapters that sex(for men) and affection(for women) are two of the things that keep the warmth of the relationship and the lack of it contributes to animosity and bitterness.

This book is highly recommended for newlyweds and for everbody who are in a relationship. I’m not a bookworm but I can assure you, this is an excellent book.

Dr. Harley summarizes five basic needs of a husband and a wife as follows:

Hers

  • Affection
  • Conversation
  • Honesty and Openness
  • Financial Support
  • Family Commitment

His

  • Sexual Fulfillment
  • Recreational Compansionship
  • Attractive Spouse
  • Domestic Support
  • Admiration

You can visit Dr. Harvey’s website here.

Victim or a Lucky Bastard?

Filed Under General Nonsense

I saw a news item in http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11943967/ regarding a female teacher who had sex with a 14-year-old male student. Well, that’s a crime in the U.S. and here in the Philippines and the boy is the considered ‘victim’. Or is he?

If you haven’t read the news yet, the case has apparently been dropped to protect the welfare of the victim who had already suffered from unwanted media attention. I fully understand why it’s illegal to have sex with young girls on the grounds of morality and conscience. The penalty for the crime is quite severe and it’s much worse if the perpetrator is somebody who is on an authority. That’s called qualified seduction or if he is not lucky enough, he can even get death sentence for statutory rape if the ‘victim’ deny their affair.

But this case is different. The victim must have even reached the 7th heaven numerous times (they apparently did it in school, in her home and SUV) and you call him a victim? For grown-up men, have you ever come to think how lucky this bastard was? How many professors have you had a crush on during your college days? Forget about your high-school days, please, as you’re too young then.

I know 14 years old is too damn young for a Filipino to think about sex but if you are an American (with their built) and you are approached by a hot 25-year-old blond, would you turn down that blessing? I advise you to check the news item in case it would help you on your decision.

Knowing Your Limits

Filed Under Personal

It really annoys me when some people forces me to explain (usually repeated after a couple of days) the details of what I plan to do with a particular task to the extent of asking the technical info, the actual coding approach and other unnecessary details. It’s fine with me if the person is a technical person who can easily understand technical jargons, design and inner workings of a system. But if a person is on a business side, I think it would be better if that person concentrate on what the business needs, the business process and the required output from the system. It’s like drawing the line between being a marketing guy and an engineer. In the several companies I worked with-including the current company I’m working in- you’ll find this kind of scenario. This is a typical marketing man versus engineers. I hate it but it’s a reality. Although I do not discount the capacity of the business person to do such a technical task, I think it is always better to let the subject matter experts(SME) do the job.

Cases like these leads to greater problems as usually, the marketing guy tends to make baseless conclusions and worst, dangerous assumptions. We all know that ‘assumption is always the cause of fuck-ups’. Actually, it annoys me if I see a business persons making technical decisions without consulting his/her SME. Same thing goes for a technical person trying to make business decisions without discussing with the marketing guy. I’m not trying to be self-righteous but as much as possible, I keep away from things that involves management as I am not trained to be one. That’s another person’s job, anyways. Whenever there’s a need to haggle/negotiate something, I let my supervisors decide and haggle.

The problem lies on people who can’t wait to get to the top of the ladder but are basically inequipped with the necessary skills and competencies even just for their current position.
We must understand that in a large multi-national corporation, even our small decisions can be worth thousands of dollars, sometimes even millions. As ‘ChowKing’ has taught us before, “always make a calculated risk”. A person with a Messiah Complex is the last person you’d want to team with.

Actually, this problem can be easily solved. All we need to do is communicate. Let the person know what you feel and discuss things constructively. The bottomline is, everybody must know where he/she is standing.

Money : Love Me Not!

Filed Under Personal

Before we go further with our money-making project, I’d like to remind you first that money isn’t everything. It is unarguably one of the basic needs of a civilized person. However, ever since man has learned to use money, it has been the reason for both development and distruction. Add to that is love for money(or greediness, if you call it) of our dear politicians that has put out country on this chaos we are currently in. So please be reminded that this little project of ours will not earn you much other than bragging rights and self-fulfillment. That, I can assure you but money? It will come later…. hopefully!

Remember, Things you own may end up owning you… that is if it doesn’t own you yet.

Web Real Estate

Filed Under Uncategorized

Web Real Estate : Domain Name and Web Hosting

We all know that for people who hosts their blogs to the free to sites (blog.com, friendster, blogger. com, etc.) are giving away their opportunity to make money. The best thing to do is to get your own website and two of the things we need is a domain name and a web host. That is where you are going to build your own web real estate which will one day become an empire… you wish!!!

For starters, I’d like to share what a domain name is as defined by Wikipedia. It says:

“Domain names are hostnames that provide rememberable names to stand in for numeric IP addresses. They allow for any service to move to a different location in the topology of the Internet (or another internet), which would then have a different IP address.”

SimpleNet.com gives a more simpler explanation.

“A domain name is the text name corresponding to the numeric IP address of a computer on the Internet. A domain name must be unique. Internet users access your website using your domain name.

CHOOSE
Since you now have an idea of what the domain name is, your next step is to choose one that fits your personality. If you haven’t pick one please remember the following items before you choose.

  • 1. Pick a memorable name. The keyword is that it should be CATCHY.
  • 2. Make it easy to spell! Try to target for the masses when you pick your name. If possible, make your domain name as simple as it can get. You must understand that not all people can spell correctly.
  • 3. Make it short, try for a two or three word domain. Usually, this is the same as your company name but for personal sites, you can use your nickname or pseudoname or name of your pet or any name you can think of. The bottom line is, make it short.

I recommend Jim Symonds article to help you more on choosing and better understand its secrets.

BUY
To buy a domain, I recommend GoDaddy.com if you’re not using a Philippine-issued credit card even if it is from Citibank. Other alternative is Netfirms.com which offers USD4.95 a year. However, their renewal is a bit pricey at around USD10.00. Yahoo is also offering domain name registration at very low price ( USD2.95 for a year) but I don’t know the catch. For local (PHL) web hosting companies, I buy from TurfSite.net

Generally domain names are selling at less than USD10.00 for a year. All you need is a credit card to buy them. So even if you don’t want to setup your own website after this, at least you will not be fooled by anybody who’ll offer your a supposed ‘business’ which will give you a website that allegedly worth so much. That’s actually a catch phrase of a multi-level marketing firm that has amashed billions of pesos from their victims. Luckily, that company has already been closed by authorities.

HOST
The other building block for your web real estate is the Web Hosting on which Wikipedia defines as:

“Web hosting is a service that provides Internet users with online systems for storing information, images, video, or any content accessible via the web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server they own for use by their clients as well as providing Internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Web hosts can also provide data center space and connectivity to the Internet for servers they do not own to be located in their data center. ”

Basically, you need a web host for your domain name to work. This is where you stores your web site’s HTML files, and graphics

Initially, I bought a 5MB webhosting package from TurfSite for a little project I did for FCON-Services. However as time goes on, I found other packages from other webhosting companies gives better service and larger space. I tried some and as of now, I’m happy with ExtraServers. Their service is good, the packages are very affordable and most importantly, they use CPANEL X for the control panel. They offer unlimited domains, emails, ftp users, a lot more. That’s all for only US$1.00 per month for the 25MB package. That’s good enough for starters but if you are already using Content Management System like Joomla and Bulleting Board like PHPBB, then I would suggest you get the 100MB package for US$3 per month.

I also bought hosting from UCV Host but did not have a very good experience with them and they have a lot of add-ons for every feature you want to have. I hear that GoDaddy is one of the best web hosting company but I never had the chance to try them because I’m using a Philippine-issued credit card. Discrimination? Naah… they say it’s about security blah-blah-blah.

So, that’s just for now and I hope you finally setup your own web empire. Good luck!!!