Monthly Archives: January 2005

Age of Mythology – Game 5

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It’s been a while since we last played this game. So we took the time tonight and played it. Not a particularly nice game, at least for me, but nontheless I got away with the win thanks to Kai‘s last move which destroyed one of Ines’ buildings which put both of them into a tie (which means that both had the exact same number of buildings – the points of the winning card “Most buildings” wasn’t awarded).

After I had bought 6 winning points early on I couldn’t get anywhere near any other winning points due to the fact that Ines had destroyed my temple, which allows you to buy one winning point for 8 blue piece (“grace”). The other players battle for the remaining winning points and it really looked like Ines would get away with both the winning points for most buildings and biggest army, but with the last move, an effort to claim victory himself, Kai destroyed a building which sent it to the tie mentioned above and so only the points for biggest army were awarded to Ines.

Final standings:

  • 1. Ingo: 6 points , race played: greeks :goof:
  • 2. Ines: 3 points + 2 points for biggest army = 5 points, race played: vikings
  • 2. Kai: 5 points, race played: egypts
  • 4. Ralf: 1 point, race played: vikings
  • 5. Nico: 0 points, race played: greeks

Overall winning standings:

  • 1. Ingoal – 3 wins (5 games played)
  • 2. Ines – 1 win (4 games played)
  • 2. Nico – 1 win (4 games played)
  • 4. Kai – 0 wins (4 games played)
  • 5. Ralf – 0 wins (5 games played)

Now I’ve won it with every race (vikings, greece and egypts)! Woohoo :tup:

New spaminator version

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Kitten has just released a new version of her Spaminotor (1.0rc6). You can get it in the WordPress Plugins directory (see here).

If you’re using WordPress 1.3 or above you will even have a admin-page to edit the settings – I don’t WordPress 1.2.2 here, but no worries, the normal configuration (edit the php-file directly) is still working like a charm :tup:

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!