Maria's blog

Almost forgot. I talked Maria into setting up a blog for herself. Maria's blog also has a picture of our cute little kitty, Sigvard.

Awstats finally working on 1and1

I have been struggling to get awstats to work on 1and1 and today I finally cracked it. A stupid little mistake that I made months ago kept me from getting the correct stats for my websites. Oh well, after hours and hours wasted on this, it is finally working and I have a peace of mind. A big thank you goes to Ravi's Tutorial: Installing AWstats at 1and1.com, couldn't have done it without that tutorial.

Need to get some work done now.

Hosting

I'm trying to decide what hosting plan I should go for. Currently, I'm only using 1and1, which I've been using for free since January 2004. 1and1 may not be enough for me anymore, because I'm building more sites and the capacity of that hosting plan isn't quite sufficient.

I also need to decide whether to go with shared hosting or have a dedicated IP for each of my sites. HostGator seems to offer pretty nice deals on shared hosting, but I don't know how reliable they are. A friend of mine uses Pair Networks, which seems to be highly recommended by several webmasters.

Money is a bit of an issue for me, so I don't want to spend more than $30/month on hosting. If somebody has hosting recommendation, please let me know. Thanks.

Traveling & US Presidential Election

I've been roaming around Scandinavia for the last 1, 5 weeks and it's nice to finally sit down and relax. First we visited my sister and her fiance at their new apartment in Helsinki. They had a housewarming party with a lot of booze and food. It was good. I'm not a big fan of the city of Helsinki though, especially in the fall. Everything there looks, feels, smells and tastes somewhat depressing after the summer is over. I think it's the grey and brown buildings and the general unhappiness of the people after they realize that the long winter is ahead of them. Again. Having said that, I did have a good time. It's all about the people you're with (and the alcohol in your bloodstream).

After we got back from Helsinki, it was time to back our bags again and head for Stockholm. I attended a Search Engine Strategies conference, while Maria walked around in the city and did some shopping. She fell in love with Stockholm and tries to talk me into moving there all the time. I'm not excited about the idea. New Zealand sounds much better...

The ferry to Stockholm felt strange. There was a handful of young couples and hundreds of elderly people going crazy with the slot machines. I've been on the ferry at least 15 times, but it has always been full of drunken teenagers and some pathetic old farts who are drunk out of their mind and who desperately try to find some young bird to sleep with. It's a sad sight. Anyway, this time it was very different. It's a good thing that I didn't bring my party shoes with me.

The US presidential election takes place today and I'm afraid of the outcome. Well, it's not like we're going to know the results until weeks of debating and re-counting. I'm pretty sure there has never been an election that receives so much attention from other nations. The Finnish media, for example, has been following the election for several months and YLE sends a live broadcast of the election starting at 2 am. It seems that the Finnish media is more concerned with this US presidential election than the any Finnish presidential election. Frankly, so am I. If W gets re-elected, it will be a very dark day for the entire world.