Cav's Place

It seems that the inevitable finally happened and my site’s gone. What’s interesting is that the whole domain is gone, apparently for over 24 hours now, so there’s still a chance that it might only be a problem with the host, but also a chance that Jen canceled it since she wasn’t exactly using it anymore. There’s also a chance that she deleted my blog and banned my IP from accessing the rest of the domain, of course.
Either way, I said I had to be out of there by the end of the month, so guess I need to act on that. I would have liked some more time to look for a good host, but I’ll go with the one I was leaning towards after looking over the offers I already knew of and hope my choice won’t be too wrong. Though unfortunately I’ll need to involve dad, as he’ll have to go to a bank to pay…
But there is also the little issue of the domain name I want being taken by an ISP. They have the .net one, which is what I wanted, but I’ll just sigh and take the .com one. However, I’d rather be safe than sorry, so I sent them an e-mail asking if they had any problems with me registering a domain with the same name and waiting for a reply. I wonder if they will reply, in fact… If they don’t say anything by Monday, I’ll just assume they have no problem with it and go ahead with registering it.
Then it’ll only be a matter of setting everything up… And hoping that my last backup is in perfect order, of course, because I really don’t want to lose anything.

Otherwise, I seems that I just keep coding lately. Just wondering both why did I think to restart learning programming now and why did I stop in the first place, considering how immersed into it I now am. Gave up on Ruby though, since I didn’t plan to learn something that doesn’t compile anyway.
The bad part is that whenever I stop for a moment and let my mind go where it wants to go, I’m gripped by a paralyzing fear, thinking of what is likely being hidden from me. And that will only get worse the more time passes without me knowing exactly what’s going on, but I’m too afraid to try to force someone’s hand because I’m too afraid of what may be going on… So there’s no way out of this, just like there hasn’t been any way out of the nightmare I’ve been living in for the past five years so far either.

Since I mentioned that, exactly five years ago it seemed as if there could still be a chance, as it was the night when she talked to me again, after those three weeks during which she wouldn’t let me be in the same room with her while she was awake. Of course, that proved to only be false hope, just like all the other times when I hoped that something good could happen to me and last… And yet, somehow, I’m still not crazy enough. Or at least not in the right way…

Since this is what I’m looking at and I often think better with my fingers, as they say, I’m going to put the ten hosting options I’m considering in a table and post it here for comparison. The ten options are from seven hosting firms because two of them have more than one in my price range, which tops at €25 per year, all taxes included. All but one of the firms were picked after looking through a couple of forums about a month and a half ago, when I first realized I may well need to start looking for such options, seeing as Jen was already ignoring me for some time.
The tables will only include details that seem relevant to me and where there are differences between the offers. If I find conflicting values listed, I will post the range. All prices will be per year, since the hosting firms usually require payment for a year in advance for their cheapest packages, in Euros, and will include the 24% VAT and any listed exchange fees. If the price is given in lei, I will convert using today’s rate.

Notes:
* As there was no mention of VAT, I assumed it was not included in the listed price and added it myself.
** Starting in the second year. First year free.
*** Taking into account the 20% discount valid until the end of September. Not cumulative with the free domain offer.

Other observations:
DespreGazduire: Not sure about adding them as I hadn’t heard of them until just now, when I was preparing to publish this and went to look for some more data about the others. They’re supposed to be a group of hosting firms who joined to provide such offers. The interesting thing is that they claim to activate the accounts as soon as you order them, deleting them if you don’t pay within seven days, so you have a week to test the service before needing to pay. They mention payment by SMS as well, but only up to €3 per message for the network I’m in.
eGazduireWeb: I’ve seen their services praised pretty much left and right on sites and forums that deal with the issue, without others contradicting the posters. However, the plural doesn’t seem to be the right choice, as it appears that a single person manages the entire operation.
EvoHost: I remember a few people recommending them, but the site seems suspicious to me because you can’t exactly find out detailed information unless you log on as a client and it seems like it hasn’t been worked on in quite some time.
MxHost: I remember choosing them several years ago, when dad wanted me to pick a host for his firm’s site. He gave up on that idea, but the name stuck, so they were the first ones I checked this time as well. A huge advantage is that they normally allow payment by SMS, which would add €1.24 to the price but allow me to handle it myself, without needing to ask dad to somehow go and pay in my name and therefore also avoiding even letting him know that I have my own domain. However, right now they say the system is suspended. Forum posts say that their services are good and they have entered a partnership that allowed them to set up a great data center, but also that they artificially inflate the traffic generated by those who have the cheapest hosting packages in order to force them to upgrade.
RedHost: There is some praise sent their way on forums as well, but what I noticed was that their staff is very active on said forums, answering any complaints about their services and trying to sort things out right away.
Webfactor: All I can say about them is that they’re extremely active on sites and forums that deal with the issue. Even if some posters would honestly recommend them, I couldn’t trust those recommendations because their staff is all too likely to jump in and recommend themselves whenever someone asks for a decent hosting service or complains about their own host.
XServers: Like eGazduireWeb, I have seen their services praised left and right. They seem a more serious company as well. The problem is that they made a very bad impression on me, because when I first started looking their site kept crashing and timing out, and it didn’t recover for nearly a full day. I haven’t seen that happen since, but it really didn’t help their cause.

At this point, I’d rule out EvoHost and Webfactor simply because something doesn’t feel right about them, and DespreGazduire Start 25 because that’s too tight even for me. eGazduireWeb, RedHost RH-1 and XServers simply seem too expensive for my needs, though if I was in fact wrong and either eGazduireWeb or XServers included the VAT in the listed price then it’d be quite reasonable, but I somehow doubt it, considering what they offer. Same goes for DespreGazduire Start 150 if I take the normal price into account. MxHost stays in contention thanks to the option to pay by SMS, assuming it’ll be made available again soon enough, no matter what else happens, but I am very worried about those reports about them inflating traffic…
RedHost RH-0 and DespreGazduire Start 75 may be the obvious choices at the moment, as the only ones that’d actually fit inside my price range in the long term, if you add together hosting and domain prices, and also offer quite enough for my needs. Unlimited traffic certainly makes the RedHost offer sound even more interesting, but there’s also the question of speed, which is something that XServers makes a point of stressing, as they guarantee at least 2 Mb/s at all times for every site hosted by them. On the other hand, I’d strongly prefer to have at least two MySQL databases, which would point me towards DespreGazduire, but the severely limited subdomains really rub me the wrong way. And the fact that I just learned about them now make me be quite suspicious anyway, so I’ll need to look into this further to see if they really are an option.

In conclusion, eGazduireWeb and possibly XServers seem to be the safe options, but also the expensive ones. RedHost RH-0 edges ahead of DespreGazduire Start 75 as the best option at the moment because I know a little more about them, but that can change depending on what else I’ll find out about DespreGazduire, and either way there are some problems with both offers. MxHost remains a possibility, but I’m certainly far more likely to dismiss them than I was before writing this. As for the rest, I think I can quite safely rule them out at this point.
If anyone happens to read this and has any further information or advice for me, please go right ahead and post a comment, because I most likely need to be out of here by the end of the month and really want to make the right choice.

This should have been a post about programming, because for some reason I found myself installing Ruby two days ago and fooling around with some simple scripts, and then last night getting the crazy idea of burning pretty much every stage in between and teaching myself some basic D. There were some things to say about that, even though the latter attempt seems doomed from the start because I can’t seem to grasp the first thing about it and tutorials are few and far between, most of the existing ones also being meant just for C++ programmers who want to switch, but I won’t bother anymore.

That’s because I just noticed today that Jen removed me from her friends list on Facebook as well. At least she didn’t put me on ignore yet, but that may well be the next step. So of course I sent her a message, asking once again what the fuck did I do to her to make her ignore me, but not exactly expecting a reply, though I really fear getting one.
I really don’t have the slightest clue as to what I could have done, so tend to assume that she either did, does or is about to do something she doesn’t want me to know about or knows something she really doesn’t want to risk making me aware of, which makes ignoring me a safety precaution. Being removed from the friends list serves only to strengthen that assumption, as it prevents me from seeing her status updates or pictures, which is where such information may be revealed. And that’s the reason for my fear, as the first thing my mind jumps to is obviously the thought that she may know something about Andra, especially since she was about to go on a trip to London when she started ignoring me.
That’s really all I can think of, though there may be two potential things about her as well, namely that she may have gotten or may plan to get pregnant or married. Though I somehow doubt the latter would make her ignore me, as I obviously wouldn’t approve and nag her about it but don’t think it’d be bad enough to justify such a course of action. So that leaves me thinking that it either has something to do with Andra, in which case, as much as I want to know, the impact of learning anything that could be going on in her life but not somehow make her seek me out herself could only range between being devastating and utterly deadly, or that Jen has at least thoughts of pregnancy, in which case I guess she only saved herself one exchange, as learning that would just make me send her a very vicious message and then ignore her myself.

In fact, that’s very likely the main reason for the feeling of imminent doom I’ve been experiencing lately, because both those options are in the “worst case scenario” range. Of course, as long as Andra doesn’t have and isn’t about to have children and Jen would have gotten back in touch with her, it would be nice to get some information out of her, learn how Andra’s doing at least, but if she does know anything she’s obviously determined to hide it, so that’s an impossible scenario, which only leaves the devastating ones, as I said. And, of course, my constant fear that Andra may have or may be about to have children is only worsened by this, and since that’s absolutely the worst thing that could ever possibly happen, I’m sure you can imagine my state of mind…
Now there is also a second important reason for that feeling of doom, or actually a series of reasons, but they all seem to pale more and more in comparison to these…

But I doubt there’s anything I could possibly do about any of that, not that there has been anything I could do to get any bit of the life I want for the past five or so years… So the only thing I can try to sort out is this blog, which is hosted by Jen and therefore quite likely to vanish soon enough. In fact I also noticed that the backup link was gone when I checked last week. I worked around that, but next time I try I may very well find that the password is no longer valid, so it may already be too late if I want to move without losing anything. I’m even taking a risk with this post…
Fact is that I really need to find a decent cheap hosting plan and move right away, because I don’t seem to have any other options. I’ve been fearing this moment ever since she stopped talking to me, but the priority was to somehow figure out what happened and then sort it out… Until now, when I guess the only thing left is to put her next to Elena G. on the list of people who started ignoring me without any apparent justification and move on to damage limitation…
Of course I know the domain name I want, or at least I know what my second choice is, seeing as my first choice is taken, and also have an idea about the host, but really worried about that due to all the problems a wrong choice would end up causing. And there’s also the fact that, while I want a paid host just to be able to do whatever I want with the site, I’m as insecure as ever when it comes to my abilities to even keep the blog functional, much less actually do something that would justify having my own site as opposed to throwing it all on a free blogging site.

If she will reply something, I guess you may well get another post from me tonight or tomorrow, depending on how badly it will affect me, assuming I’ll still have access. If it’s that absolute worst case scenario that I mentioned above, it hopefully will also be the last thing anyone will ever hear from me, though I still fear I’m way too much of a coward for that…

Been saving this result for a time when I’ll get to the end of the week with a single post and in too crappy a mood to write anything non-personal but not quite bad enough to feel sorry for myself in writing yet again. And this is such a time, so here it is.
Forgot how exactly did I get to that site again a while back, but since I was there I took their Belief-O-Matic test again, and here are the results:

1. Neo-Pagan (100%)
2. Unitarian Universalism (89%)
3. Theravada Buddhism (85%)
4. New Age (83%)
5. Secular Humanism (79%)
6. Mahayana Buddhism (76%)
7. Jainism (73%)
8. Liberal Quakers (70%)
9. Nontheist (63%)
10. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (58%)
11. Hinduism (54%)
12. Reform Judaism (54%)
13. Taoism (54%)
14. Baha’i Faith (50%)
15. New Thought (46%)
16. Sikhism (46%)
17. Orthodox Quaker (45%)
18. Orthodox Judaism (43%)
19. Scientology (41%)
20. Islam (31%)
21. Seventh Day Adventist (27%)
22. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (27%)
23. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (25%)
24. Eastern Orthodox (24%)
25. Roman Catholic (24%)
26. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (19%)
27. Jehovah’s Witness (12%)

The test is obviously biased towards Christianity, considering the number of denominations it includes, but it can produce decent results even so. Should note that it doesn’t say exactly how closely you matched a certain belief system, but automatically lists 100% next to the one you matched most closely and then the other percentages are relative to your top match, so if for example your top two matches would be 60% and 54%, it’ll list 100% and 90%, respectively. So I’m clearly not a perfect Neopagan, but simply more Neopagan than anything else, which should be quite obvious to anyone.
I do wonder about the exact match though, because some of the percentages that come afterwards seem too high, which would imply a relatively low match with Neopaganism as well, possibly not far from the example I gave above. Which likely wouldn’t be far from the truth, in fact. Having Unitarian Universalism show up second is probably quite accurate as well, as is the fact that Secular Humanism is creeping up the order, though that’s probably more an expression of doubt and hopelessness than anything else.

In addition, their What’s Your Spiritual Type test correctly listed me as Active Spiritual Seeker, which was described as “spiritual but turned off by organized religion”. And that was despite it also being biased towards Christianity and having questions about “God” that did not provide suitable answer choices from my point of view, making me struggle to pick something at least somewhat suitable.

Yesterday’s news when it comes to environmental issues was that an ecoterrorist attacked Discovery Channel offices, eventually being killed by cops. His demands, which can be seen on his site, make him an early victim in the coming Population War, because his main concern was obviously overpopulation. (In case that site will be taken down or is already blocked by your ISP, I do have the page saved. I won’t upload it here, for obvious reasons, but leave a comment with a valid e-mail address if you want to see it and can’t and I’ll get back to you.)
I’d look for more articles about this, trying to find a better one, but I dread the prospect because I saw a few and don’t exactly feel like wading through countless others that just depict him as insane and the concerns regarding overpopulation as ravings of lunatics. Which is not to say that he wasn’t insane at the time he took this action, or in fact at the time he wrote those demands, but focusing solely on that and dismissing the valid concerns he pointed out produces articles that I just can’t stomach anymore. Seen way too many of those, since generally people don’t even need a reason to start calling anyone who brings up that topic lunatic, Nazi or just plain evil.

What James Lee did was undoubtedly a terrorist act. Now I’m not against radical action and ecoterrorism in itself, quite the contrary, but the problem here was the target he picked and the way in which he chose to act. When you do something like this, you need to strike at those directly responsible for causing the problem and do it in a way that will help the cause, while also making full use of any media attention you will receive to make your opinion known in a rational manner. However, he did pretty much everything wrong and therefore at best sacrificed himself for nothing, and most likely did more harm than good.
He seems to have subscribed to the idea that commercial television should educate people, which is quite simply wrong. Or, sure, it would be nice if it happened, but it doesn’t and you can’t demand it of them. So, while Discovery Channel is quite obviously not part of the solution when it comes to the overpopulation problem, they’re not directly responsible for perpetuating it either. But it seems to have been an ongoing conflict between him and Discovery Channel, as he has repeatedly protested and demanded using their programs as an active method of coming up with solutions for the major environmental problems the world is facing.
On the other hand, the way in which his demands were written clearly shows that he was in a very unstable state of mind, which does nothing but undermine the causes he was fighting for and put the rest of us who share those concerns in an even worse light, though it often seems like the public’s perception of those who wish to reduce the human population can’t exactly get any worse. In addition, he’s demanding an end to wars, which sounds quite hypocritical considering the violent method he used to make his demands known. At least I never claim to be a pacifist in any way…

Quite frankly, his actions set us back and we’ll need to figure out how to recover from this. For that reason, I most certainly won’t call him a hero and shy away from calling him a martyr as well, but he is a victim of the Population War. And make no mistake, there will be one, if it hasn’t started already. It would all be very peaceful and simple if people would understand that this is by far the world’s biggest problem and that it can rather easily be solved by simply reducing fertility rates well below replacement level until the population will get back within sustainable limits, which can be anywhere between 100 million and three billion, depending on the studies you check and each person’s environmental footprint. But people will never do that willingly, so the end result is inevitable, but his actions were still unwise to say the least.
So now I’m looking for solutions, because the wave of bad press this generated will be hard to counter. But, while I saw attempts, perhaps we shouldn’t even try to counter it, but instead hit the ground running and see where can we go from here. The media is there to be used after all, and sensationalism sells. Plus that heavy-handed methods are needed if we’re to get anything done anyway, so we should look more into what would actually be effective ways to use radical action and ecoterrorism in the future. I’m not particularly worried about the backlash, because the people who started posting comments all over and saying they’ll specifically go against environmentalists and do things that harm Earth in response to this are those who were doing such things anyway and the chance of making them see the error of their ways nicely is slim to none.

If I let my mind drift down that path I can actually come up with several interesting ideas, not to mention targets. But I’ll dwell on them a while longer, though I already mentioned a couple in another place. There are probably some law enforcement agencies getting a bit interested in me already, considering how they track everything…

Back to James Lee, I’ll say again that he seemed to have serious mental problems, picked the wrong target and acted unwisely to say the least. He also went too far for my liking with his demands, obviously supporting a policy similar to that of VHEMT, which I don’t agree with simply because we still need to be around to fix the damage we have caused and prevent it from happening again in the future, when perhaps other similar species would evolve or land on Earth. So his mind was seriously flawed, but in principle his heart was in the right place. I fully share his concern about overpopulation, the belief that civilization has brought about so many evils and that those who most need saving and better living conditions are the other species we share this planet with.
What’s left to ponder now is whether this will start something or end it. I do hope for the first option, though also hope that any further action will be much more rational and done in such a way as to aid the cause instead of harming it. When it comes to this issue, we’re but a few Davids facing a huge army of Goliaths, so we must stay on our toes and make every shot count. One way or another, it will get very ugly very fast… Even if only because nothing will be done and more and more people will be fighting over fewer and fewer resources and struggling with more and more pollution and environmental damage.