Jan Leow's Blog Page

Eulogy for Abraham Kenny Seow

It is always sad and much heartache when a loved one has to depart from the earthly home to a heavenly one. But that is life and we shall all go on that journey someday. It is just that some will go through it sooner than others.

Abraham Kenny Seow had good prolonged life considering that he was diagnosed with a terminal nasal / brain cancer four years ago. It was a fight that truly transformed him and strengthened his faith to the Lord.

As an elder brother-in-law, he has done some deeds that grieved family members, but eventually he has redeemed himself throughout the ordeal. And of course God sent him a good wife who stood by him for better and worse, who loved him and help him to turnaround his life.

Unexpected Road Change in Damansara Perdana

This is one of those days where you get caught with your pants down. The morning rush hour was under way with the rain the heavy rush hour traffic would be bad. But I never expected it to be worse as I made my way to the usual road interchange at Damansara Perdana Penchala Link for the U turn to head back out to Petaling Jaya via the LDP congested highway.

Damansara Perdana Penachala Link interchange was changed

Surprise, surprise! The road was blocked due to modification of the road with the entrance pushed backed earlier at IPC/Curve shopping mall rather than below the underpass.

I believed many were caught unaware too as there was no way to make any U turn except to head out all the way, pay the road toll, to Sri Damansara Kepong and U turn from there.

Google Panda update info graphic and Google Venice update

Happen to bump into this Google Panda update info graphic which gives a good quick overview of what this update is all about. And yes, this update is a real website traffic killer and it won't care whether your site is an authoritative site or not as long as your web site contain negative points that shows up in the Google Panda algorithm, you will be whacked!

So far I have tried to clean up whatever I can, but I have not seen any re-bounce to the website traffic that I had earlier. Perhaps my site still contained a lot of negative points which are deemed less useful and thus not worthy of inclusion into the better ranking on the search term.

On the other hand some sites owners seemed to have good inkling as to what Google wants and has managed to take steps to rectify their site and get better results. But with so many tweaking done by Google, chances are it is a long uphill climb to the former higher traffic for most of us hit hard by changes. I guess there are many points to fixing the Google Panda update penalty.

Back to Work after so Many Holidays

It is back to work as usual after a string of public holidays in succession. Not just for the day job but also for my various websites. It is indeed very difficult to move to high gear having slowed down for awhile. This was not to say I took leaved, I still went to work, but the mood was not there to push for more sales. Besides the wretching cough and sniffling flu made it difficult. I'm still trying to recover from it, in fact it became worst the last few days with me losing my voice! Argh!

No choice now but to see the doctor again for a course of antibiotics and other anti-inflammatory medicine. According to doctor, if the flu and cough persisted for so long, it is no longer a product of virus as that would usually clear after a week or so. Most likely it would be suspected bacterial infection. Since it has cause inflammation, some anti-inflammatory medicine should help ease the transition for full recovery. Well I hope so, I have tried many traditional remedy and it didn't help, so looks like it was back to Western medicine.

This year, work would be a new challenge both for my day job and part-time. Since my pay is mostly stagnated and the cost of high inflation (no thanks to the current Government who is more interested on their own agenda than the rakyat) has pushed up the cost of living, supplemental income would become more important. No thanks to Google 2011 Panda Update and many other Google algorithm tweaks, my various website traffic has been reduced significantly.

Google's Panda update is really killing my websites!

Whatever happened to the "Do no evil" motto of Google? Sure there may be spammy websites out there, but this year's Google's Panda update is killing my websites, including this personal blog of mine!

I could see from my StatCounter account, the website traffic plummeting! At first it hit my authoritative travel site, it went down by 60%. Along with it my income dropped 50% from it too. It was a lot of hard work compiling the facts and writing them, and had to contend with webmaster plagiarizing my site.

Later Google hit another of my travel site, which also reduce its web traffic by 70% and there after like a bulldozer it started to bludgeon all my websites! This month I see that it is also going after my blog with downward spiral of 70% from the original website traffic! I get only about 30% of the web traffic of what I use to get for the past many years.

My blog website is down

Just my luck. Cynet the web hosting company is experiencing server rebooting. No wonder my website was so unstable! I thought it was a Wordpress plugin that I recently installed causing my entire website to crashed. But I couldn't log in to my hosting control panel too! Panic! I thought no way my plugin cause so much trouble! After submitting a support ticket, I found out that Cynet is experiencing unstable server issues.

In their own words,

One of our server currently in unstable issue that keep rebooting.

Date: 09th November 2011
Time: Since 01:00AM

We are still checking on the root cause.
All user website hosted under server (setali.cynethost.com) will keep experience a short downtime at this mean due to server keep reboot.
We will keep you next update as soon as possible and sorry for any inconvenience caused.
 
UPDATED PROGRESS

Date: 10th-November-2011
Time: 01:00AM

UPDATE:
The server still in unstable stage after we have update and reconfigure the server after 24 hours. We are now do a checking on hardware part by part and replace it if any problem found.
All user website hosted under server (setali.cynethost.com) still will keep experience a short downtime at this mean due to server keep reboot.
We will keep you next update as soon as possible and sorry for any inconvenience caused.

Thank you.
Cynet Hosting Team


Oh, well...
 


[update 11/11/11]

My website is back! But... I think Cynet used a previous back up, because my latest post as well as some maintenance update were missing! The maintenance I could do again, but the post! Argghhh...! I have to rewrite all over again. I didn't keep the Word document after posting it. Waste of my time writing and posting it!

Thumbs down from me for Cynet Hosting. I know, I know, this really budget hosting only costing me RM45 per year, so don't expect too much. Then again, the web hosting services are very competitive and there are many good web hosting companies out there. Aw, shucks, just too bad for me that it happened while I was making a post. Other than that unstable server situation, Cynet web hosting has been pretty decent so far.

Should drink Farmhouse milk tho expensive; Marigold taste a bit weird

Milk Carton - Farmhouse milk and Marigold in my fridge

I found Farmhouse milk taste better though it is almost twice as expensive than Marigold milk. I know the milk prices has been hiking up unprecedented. If in order to keep price low by adding fillers into the milk, eventually it is going to taste weird.

Many food price in Malaysia has been soaring as much as 30%. This is way above the official CPI of 5% which is incorrect. Milk is no exception and has been going higher and higher month by month.

My colleague who has dealings with Nestle and Dutch lady often came and reported that they face very difficult price pressure from imported milk.

Milk processing nowadays is just not milk, but it includes additives some for enriching such as calcium to give it a marketing selling point. But sometimes fillers can be used such as silica, though they are inert and passing through our gut harmlessly they do nothing for the benefit except to lower pricing and remain competitive in the market.

I don't know what Marigold has put into their milk, but it sure taste funny. So whenever I felt like saving a couple of bucks and bought Marigold milk, I do regret as it didn't really taste like milk.

I guess the best way is still to pay for quality and get Farmhouse milk which perception wise felt more like real milk!


[20/1/2012 Note: about Malaysia inflation in relation to carton milk]
The official CPI or inflation rate in Malaysia is about 5%. But the actual is far higher since the official CPI can be manipulated (CPI rate is based on a basket of goods, some of which has very low or no inflation due to government controlled item, and those that soared, would be taken out of the basket so giving it a low CPI average rate eg housing and cars are not in the basket of goods) to fit the government propaganda machinery to attract foreign investment. For the man in the street, the CPI is meaningless. I recalled in early 2011 a carton of Marigold milk was RM4/carton. And early 2012, I saw Marigold was retailing at about RM5/carton, so that's about 20% increase in a year!