Earthquake details:

Location: 9.964°N, 123.246°E
Depth: 20 km (12.4 miles)
Distances: 72 km (44 miles) N of Dumaguete, Negros, Philippines
74 km (45 miles) WNW of Tagbilaran, Bohol, Philippines
80 km (49 miles) WSW of Cebu, Cebu, Philippines
569 km (353 miles) SSE of MANILA, Philippines

Tsunami details:

The image below shows the max expected wave height according to the latest computer models

This will not reach Manila and it does not seem that it will leave the Cebu region with any destructive power as it will only effect the two islands that it is between.

Custar’s Revenge was released by Mystique in 1982 for the Atari 2600. The game consisted of one level. You played General Custar and started at the left hand side of the screen. The aim of the game was to get from the left of the screen, past falling arrows, to the right side of the screen where there was a native american woman tied to a post who you would fuck to get points. No I am not joking. The native American woman’s name was even “Revenge”!

As you got more points the game would speed up, which would make it harder (excuse the pun) to get across the screen to the native American woman.

The game caused so much controversy that Ataris actually tried to sue Mystique, but lost the case. Eventually Mystique went out of business in the game industry crash of the 80′s and was taken over by Play Around. For some completely unknown reason, Play Around re-released Custar’s Revenge in Europe after changing a few things such as the colour, speed and difficulty of the game.

The game was released as a “flipside game” which is when the cartridge is double ended, giving you one game on one end with another game on the the other end. With the adult games released by Play Around, they would regularly have a game for the boys on one side and a game for girls on the other side. Yea, we all know girls love playing porn games right? Thats some seriously one sided male game designing.

There was also talk that the game was also released under the name “The white man comes”.

Seriously, what the fuck?

For me, the worst part of this game is that it is just a complete piece of badly thought out shit. It is offensive on almost every level, but putting that to one side, as a game, it is just horrible.

While I played on Leisure Suit Larry, at least it had some levels and missions. Custar’s Revenge has just one level with one mission!

Ok, for all you who do not believe me, here are some images of the game.

Custar’s Revenge by Mystique

Custar’s Revenge by Play Around

And here is a three part review of this game by one of the funniest game reviewers around.

It was a grim day, overcast and pollution hanging in the air.

Manila Bay

MOA Eye

Sunset

The exposure is set to 15 seconds.

A few days later, we bought a strawberry cake and here are some of the photos of it. YUM! It tastes as good as it looks!

When the economy collapsed and the economic growth came to a stand still, the governments would not be making the money that they expected and as such, they could not pay the dept on the money that they had borrowed.

This has had a huge impact on the population and what really pisses me off is that the US and EU governments are now spending money creating websites to show people how they can save money and not live beyond their means. But it is the government who has been living well beyond their means for a long time that generated the economic crisis.

Isn’t this insane? The government borrows way more than it ever should have done based on their economic growth. The economic growth comes to a stand still and the government then spend more money telling the population to do what the governments should have done in the first place. Don’t spend money you don’t have fool!

Like this idiotic website feedthepig.org. As if I am going to take advice from a god damned farm yard animal with a hole in his head!

God damn, I am pleased that I am away from the UK where I lived, or you may find me on the streets, Molotov cocktail in one hand and a wild turkey in the other.

I thought he was a tosser. He acted so nice to everyone, but no one as popular as he is can be that nice. I was totally wrong. He is a great guy and I always enjoy his company, especially in private when you don’t have fans, photographers and camera crews everywhere. We had a great time in Cagayan De Oro where he was again a judge for a “Chooks to go” event and we had drinks in his hotel room after the event and into the early hours of the morning.

So that’s how I know him.

He invited Ian and I to go to his birthday parties which were two parties. The first was for the Habitat for Humanity who are a charity who build homes for the homeless. Derek is the Ambassador for the charity and he managed to get a lot of people there to help build the houses. Hopefully it will have an impact on them and they will go back or help promote their cause. The second party was in a bar, but I was not well and ended up staying at home.

Habitat For Humanity

It was an early morning and we were up before the sun. The early morning smog covered the streets and got thicker as we headed along the skyway into Manila.

Crossing a number of rivers, we saw a floating shack in the middle of one of the rivers.

Arriving at the site, we could see a range of houses, some finished, some half complete and others that were just a cement square.

As there were a number of celebrities at the event, there were a lot of police and even a few swat teams. While everyone was scrambling to get a photo of Derek, I wanted a photo with the swat team. No offence Derek.

The land where they were building the homes was reclaimed land which used to be fishing pens. You can see the fishing pens in the two photos below.

The homes are built by a mix of volunteers and the people who will be living in them once complete.

We went to a sari sari shop within the slums and kids would walk past me and say “hey” as I was the only white guy in the area. “hey” I would reply, waving at them and smiling.

We were assigned to Lot 9 and began working. Being my usual self, I ended up making a series of suggestions to ensure that everyone was working at maximum efficiency, which resulted in the team being at least 90% busy and getting more layers of bricks than the other teams. I know it wasn’t a race and I was not treating it as a race, but we had so many people and so few tools that 60% of people had nothing to do most of the time which slowed down the build and caused a bottleneck. I hope to be able to volunteer on a regular basis as a team leader or even as just tech support to assist them wherever I can.

We had to leave early as I had a tonne of work and had just bought a new business that I needed to work on.

As we headed home, we stopped at a flooded street so I could take a few photos. Yes, I really like water photos.

As we drove over a river on our way home, we stopped to get some more photos of the boats and the many fish that were feeding on the surface. Or maybe they were suffocating and trying to breathe, who knows.

We stopped again next to the river so I could get some more photos of the houses and their reflection.

The traffic was awful and as soon as we got out of the thick traffic, we decided to get something to eat at Charlie’s. This is the most bizarre restaurant we have ever seen as it is within a car wash and many many people must walk straight past it every day without knowing it is there. They serve freshly ground burgers with a wide range of side dishes and beers. The burgers are made from Black Angus Beef and the fries are cooked in goose fat to make them nice and crunchy on the outside while still being fluffy in the middle.

After lunch, we headed straight home and back to our work. We had a great day and are making plans to help with other builds as well as doing what we can to help the charity and raise awareness.

Don’t be a stranger, leave a comment!

It’s Christmas eve and 29C outside, with large grey clouds in the sky and a heavy cold that gripped me yesterday. If it wasn’t for the temperature outside, it would be just like Christmas back home.

I still find it weird going outside at Christmas time with just shorts and a t-shirt on. In the uk, I would be wrapped up in jeans, a shirt, jumper and coat at least.

Last night, I spent just short of 24 hours in bed. I simply passed out due to my cold and stayed there until I felt well enough to get up.

When I woke up, Ian was here cooking for the family. It is Filipino tradition to have two large meals, one on Christmas eve and one on Christmas day. These are called Noche Buena which is a feast on Christmas eve and a Christmas day lunch.

Manila bay is not the prettiest place on earth. It’s nice so long as you don’t look down as most of the bay is filled with trash. Manila bay sunset is famous, but unfortunately, the fantastic array of colours that you can see when the sun sets are due to the pollution.

The skyline reflected beautifully on the marina as we boarded the boat and settled into our seats. The kids were so excited, they couldnt wait for the boat to get going into the bay.

As we left the marina and headed into the bay, the sun was beginning to set. I kept flicking between a sunset setting and other settings on my camera, so some of these photos are more colourful than others and even look later in the day than photos I took later.

We sailed along the coastline before turning around and coming back. The meal was served and it was really nice. There was a singer and guitarist on the upper deck where we were seated and they played for most of the time we were on the boat. At one point they said “this is for our foreign friend” as they looked and smiled at me. “I recognise you from somewhere” the female singer said to Ian. I just smiled politely, little did they know that I live here and she recognised Ian from TV.

As we made our way back, we passed the skyline once more an I got a few more shots of the skyline and reflection in the bay.

By now, the sun had set and it was beginning to get quite dark as we neared the marina. I really like taking photos of water and sunsets, so this was perfect for me and I switched back to the sunset settings on my camera.

Low light – long exposure (15 seconds)

After alighting from the boat, we walked back to the van and I setup my camera and tripod to snap a few long exposure shots. It was pitch black, but a mix of the little light there was, lights from the buildings and the reflections on the water made for magical photos.

The Background on My Relationship With Lunarpages

For those of you who do not already know, I had an issue with lunarpages (the webhost) which started as a simple complaint about their support. At the time I was contacting them a lot as the server I rent from them kept going down. They gave me one excuse after another and none of the excuses seemed to be right. I pushed for an answer and ended up demanding that they investigate the issue to the fullest extent possible. They reluctantly investigated and found that all the downtime and server crashes were due to the hard drive within the server which was so heavily corrupted, it had just days left to live.

Lunarpages then moved me to a brand new server, however the staff completing the move failed to follow my instructions or the instructions of their manager which resulted in the server crashing and refusing to come back online. Even more time was wasted as lunarpages did not have direct access to the server and needed a special cage team to go and see why it was not coming back online.

The whole thing was a mess to say the very least and I was treated horrifically. Even Lunarpages staff commented that my issue should have been addressed a lot quicker than it was. All the signs the server was giving out pointed towards a serious issue, but lunarpages ignored all the signs. Had I not forced them to investigate, they would not have found the issue before the hard drive died and I lost everything.

The Lunarpages Review / Report

I wanted to write about the issues I had experienced and I even talked about this with AJ, a lunarpages manager. I decided that the best way to approach it was to simply publish all the e-mails that had gone back and forth between myself and lunarpages. That way I would not be giving my version of the story, I would simply be providing all the evidence so that readers could come to their own conclusions by reading the published e-mails.

I published the e-mails along with some explanations and background info (you can read the full article here). Immediately I received comments and e-mails from people who were shocked at what had happened. Not once did I receive any communications disputing what had happened or even questioning the story in any way.

The Comments on the Lunarpages Review

Recently I received a series of nasty comments from someone calling themselves “La Vita” who seemed to simply be trying to discredit my character by making me look as if I was in the wrong and I should know more than the commenter thought I knew.

Meh, whatever, it’s a free country and visitors can say anything they like. I didn’t pay much attention to it, but it bugged me. Not what was said, but the way it was said, attempting to discredit me.

I checked the stats  for “La Vita” and saw that they were geographically very close to the Lunarpages offices. I didn’t think any more of it, but I could not fight the gut feeling that they were employed by Lunarpages or their parent company Add2Net. Some of their comments seemed angry that I had included the names of the staff involved when publishing the e-mails. I did not add any names, the names of the staff were at the bottom of each e-mail that I received.

The commenter “La Vita” had claimed to be the owner of a truly huge website. They had entered their domain name into the comment, but I removed it as I did not want a link to his website from my website. When I checked the details of the website, it stated that the owner was in the USA, or at least that was the registered address. Yet “La Vita” claimed to be in Italy. Searching for his e-mail address via google, I found that he was not indeed the expert he claimed to be and I managed to locate a couple of websites where he was asking basic questions on the very topic he claimed to be making thousands of dollars a day via his website selling professional website/cms themes.

Putting that to one side, I then received another comment simply saying “Dude, you suck, get over it…”. Again, who cares what an idiot says? If you want to argue with me, make it intelligent, put your point across and try to sway my point of view and perspective on the matter at hand.

Again, I was going to let this comment pass, but the first set of digits in the commenter’s IP address (64.73.252.26) rang a bell and I had no idea why. To satisfy my curiosity, I traced the IP address and found that it belonged to Add2Net, the company who owns Lunarpages. I was shocked. I checked and double checked the details to be sure it was indeed Add2Net who had left this comment. I used multiple systems to check the IP so that I could be completely sure before contacting Add2Net / Lunarpages about this issue. You can view the trace for yourself by clicking here (opens in new window) and as you will see, it clearly says “Add2Net” next to the “organization”. I realised that I had recognised the 64 at the beginning of the IP address as my old shared hosting account with lunarpages had an IP that began with 64.

I then checked my stats to search for this IP address and see how and when they entered my website. It turns out that this IP has came to my website twice searching for names of staff within Add2Net / Lunarpages. The search terms used were “Er. Sarwan Singh Jassi” and “lunarpages bad reviews ation gilliam”.

I simply could not believe that Add2Net / Lunarpages staff were leaving abusive comments on a customers website. It was simply outrageous!

In all, there were two IP addresses from Add2Net / Lunarpages. When I checked the locale of the IP’s they were both at 33 latitude and -117 longitude, the exact same latitude and longitude as the IP address used by “La Vita”. A coincidence? I think not.

The Lunarpages Complaint

As far as I was concerned, this was a serious breach of security, not to mention a breach of trust and a highly unethical practice. I decided that the best thing to do was to immediately inform lunarpages of the issue so that they could ensure I was not at risk. If a member of staff is willing to risk his career to leave an abusive comment on a customers website from their work computer, they may well be more than willing to access my server, account or anything else that is private or personal and stored at Lunarpages. How did I know that they had not already tampered with some of my websites? I didn’t and I was worried that I may be at risk.

I contacted lunarpages and informed them of the situation with the evidence that I had at the time. One and a half days passed while I manually went through all of my stats and other information I had access to, compiling a full list of evidence for lunarpages. However, lunarpages had not replied to my ticket in over a day and a half! I opened a new ticket containing all the information that they needed for this complaint and phoned them to inform them and ask why the initial ticket had received to reply at all.

I was told that the ticket had been queued and would be passed to a senior technician who would reply. When I provided the new ticket number, the member of staff I was talking to said that their staff would not leave a comment like this on a customers website. I pointed to the evidence that I had provided and I was put on hold for a few minutes while he quickly reviewed it. When he came back, he simply explained that he could not deal with this ticket any further and would need to forward it to the Add2Net / Lunarpages Legal team who would reply within 1-2 days. The legal team never replied to my ticket, it went into a black hole and they refused to discuss the issue.

In Depth Research

I checked everything that the Add2Net IP addresses had done while on my site and I was shocked to see that they had visited a number of other pages including a post I made about Christmas which contained photos of myself and my children. According to my stats, the Add2Net / Lunarpages employee had downloaded two photos to their computer at Add2Net / Lunarpages, one which was a photo of my daughter and another which was a photo of myself with my children. Why would they download these two pictures to their work computer? We will never know.

To protect myself, I banned the IP addresses that had been involved so that they could not connect to my website any more, but should I have needed to ban IP addresses of my webhost? I am a customer of theirs, the last thing I should ever need to do is add protection to protect myself from the actions of my webhost’s employees.

Lunarpages Response

After 2 days I became sick of waiting, I had no idea what was going on or if Add2Net / Lunarpages were actually addressing the issue so I called their Dedicated Support team who seemed to be completely clueless as to what was going on. I asked to speak to a manager who told me that Add2Net / Lunarpages do not monitor or manage what their staff do online. If one of their staff wants to comment on a public blog and leave abusive comments, they can. I was stunned at their attitude of this most serious of breaches. I was informed that Add2Net / Lunarpages were conducting an internal investigation of the highest seriousness, but Add2Net / Lunarpages would not inform me of the outcome or findings of the investigation.

I do not find this acceptable as it means that if they find that the member of staff has accessed my account or my server without authorization, I will not be informed. It seemed like an attempt to cover-up a huge issue that would be damning to Add2Net / Lunarpages if it was ever revealed what actually happened. Immediately I knew that I would need to put on my chainmail and be the knight of truth, informing people of what actually happened and showing you the same evidence that I provided to Add2Net / Lunarpages so that you can make up your own mind on this particular incident. As corny as it sounds, I just felt that prospective Add2Net / Lunarpages customers should be well aware of what happened to me at the hands of Add2Net / Lunarpages.

Lunarpages Staff Return

Closely monitoring my stats I noticed that after I had blocked the Add2Net IP addresses, they had tried to visit my site again, but the server refused them access as I had told it to do so when faced with these IP addresses. They were again coming from a Google search that they must have bookmarked as it was the same search query.

Minutes later, I received a connection from a proxy in Romania via google and I could see that they had searched for “‘reasons why you shouldnt use lunarpages com”. It is very strange that an IP address is searching for my post about Lunarpages using the exact name of the article. All checks of this IP address show it to be a proxy server. Later in the day, another Romanian IP address that also seemed to be a proxy came into the site searching for me using my full name (first and last) followed by “lunarpages”. The only company who has my full name is Lunarpages. My full name is not mentioned on any websites that I own or run. The reason that lunarpages have my full legal name is because they needed the name that was on my card when I made my initial payment. On my card it says “David”, but I always go by “Dave”. Every other company that I deal with and everywhere my name is mentioned, it says “Dave” and not “David”. Why would anyone be searching for my first and last name followed by “lunarpages”? No one who would be searching for lunarpages would even know my first and last name, all my friends know my blog and would not need to make a search like this. Even if they did, they would search for “Dave” and not “David”. The only people in the whole world who knew knew my full legal name and also knew that I was with lunarpages were Add2Net / Lunarpages. As such, it is my opinion that these visitors were no other than lunarpages.

Lunarpages Investigation and Final Response

Lunarpages contacted me to inform me that they have completed their investigation into the matter. What follows is the full reply that they sent to me.

Hello, This has led to an internal investigation and actions on our end are immediately being taken to deal with those involved.
We appreciate your bringing these details to our attention. No further communication on the matter is required on your part.

Best Regards,
Shawn Williams
Customer Care Manager
support@lunarpages.com

Notice that there is no apology, no sympathy, no empathy, no emotion at all, just a flat, plain reply that is completely meaningless. The reply does not even come from the legal team who I was told would be dealing with the issue, it comes from the manager who I spoke with on the phone earlier.

I am left completely in the dark with no information at all as to whether my details have been shared and no information on whether my personal security and server security has been breached, which according to my stats, it would seem that it has.

Naturally, I replied immediately with the following:

Hello, I do think that further communication on my part is indeed required. What your staff did was highly unethical and my team of staff are still investigating everything that has happened.
Are you seriously saying that this is all that you will be willing to do?
No apology at all for what happened?
No answers to any of the questions I asked in my previous tickets? The main and most important question was “How can I know that your staff are not doing more with my info, publishing it online or even altering my server files etc?”. Are you refusing to answer the question?
I was told yesterday that this ticket would be passed to your Legal Department who would provide a full reply within 1-2 days. Why did this not happen? Was it ever passed to the Legal team? If not, why was I told that it would be passed to the legal team?

Shawn Willams replied with the following (bold added by me to highlight the main pointers of their reply in my opinion):

Hello, We have very strict privacy policies in place that address these concerns. Those policies, if breached would result in termination. Our policies and procedures have been reviewed and confirmed via audit by 3rd party firms in order to obtain our SAS70 type II certification.

Hopefully that will satisfy your concerns as for your data privacy.

Our operations manager reviews all legal claims and interfaces with our legal council. He has reviewed this matter and is the one who has initiated the internal investigation.

While traveling to a public website that allows public postings would not be a violation of ours or anyone’s privacy policy, its still possible that staff could be reprimanded for using company computers for personal activity.

Best Regards,
Shawn Williams
Customer Care Manager
support@lunarpages.com

Do you see an apology? There are a whole bunch of things I can accuse Add2Net and Lunarpages of, but only one that I can prove and that is the only thing I am asking an apology for. However, Shawn Williams seems to think that the biggest issue here was staff “using company computers for personal activity”, not the fact that said staff said “you suck” to a customer.

Also, notice how Shawn Williams (the customer services manager) is replying to this most serious complaint. Take the following statement for example: “While traveling to a public website that allows public postings would not be a violation of ours or anyone’s privacy policy”. Anyone’s privacy policy? How can he say that when there is no way he has read everyone’s privacy policy. As you can see, this is not an acceptable business attitude to adopt when replying to a complaint of such a serious nature. He is basically trying to make me look stupid and discredit me or bully me into not replying. If you look at Shawn Williams first reply, you will see that although he failed to answer any questions or address any of the issues that I had detailed at great length in my complaint, he says “No further communication on the matter is required on your part.”. That is a very blunt statement basically telling me not to reply as Add2Net / Lunarpages consider the matter closed.

I fired off the following reply:

Thank you for explaining why you had replied and not the legal team. That would have been handy earlier on. See, I was told that “the legal team will reply to your ticket” so I was kinda expecting the err legal team to reply to my ticket if you get my drift. However, knowing that they passed the information to you is fine, you may have wanted to initially include that piece of useful information so that I was aware as to what had happened and would not have needed to ask why it seemed the department who I was told would directly reply to my ticket had not.

I understand as you state “While traveling to a public website that allows public postings would not be a violation of ours or anyone’s privacy policy, its still possible that staff could be reprimanded for using company computers for personal activity.”, but that is not the case. If that were what happened, no problem, I do not mind at all. But the fact of the matter is this:
1) Add2Net Staff (at least one) while using Add2Net internet connection visited my personal blog. (no problem so far) and then proceeded to leave an abusive comment (there’s the problem). Let me get this straight. In this case, given all the evidence, you would think that “using company computers for personal activity” was the most serious offence? Not the fact that they left abusive comments?
2) Since this happened, someone has been searching google for “David *surname removed* lunarpages”. Only you and my bank know me as “David”, the rest of the world knows me as “Dave”. The only people who know that I am hosted with lunarpages and also know my full name are lunarpages and my girlfriend. It was not my girlfriend. Naturally I can not directly prove that it was you, but by the process of elimination, it was no one else.

You said “While traveling to a public website that allows public postings would not be a violation of ours or anyone’s privacy policy”. Are you saying that Add2Net and Lunarpages have no policies against or issues with staff telling existing lunarpages customers “you suck”?

Still no apology?
I am not happy with this as a resolution. I think that at the very least I deserve an apology for your staff (while at work and using an internet connection that you are legally responsible for) telling me “you suck”. This is now the third time I have asked for an apology and each time you have completely ignored it.

I believe I deserve an apology for the way your staff acted (fully detailed in initial complaint). If you do not plan to provide an apology, please say so so that I do not waste any more of your or my time chasing you for an apology. I am assuming thus far that an apology has simply been overlooked by accident.

I have worked as a manager of a superstore where I was responsible for $4 million per year. Every single cent of it was my responsibility as my primary role was the cash office manager. When other managers were not in (early in the day and late in the evening), I was in charge and had to deal with any and all customer complaints, issues or general bitching. I trained all my staff that while we could never admit anything was our fault, we could and always should apologise. This makes the customer feel as if you understand their concerns. Even something as simple as “I am terrible sorry that you have felt the need to issue a complaint about a member of our staff”. There is no admission of guilt or any acceptance of liability. It is a generic apology. Now why the hell has no one said sorry to me yet? After all, I am paying lunarpages $150 per month and when a member of their staff uses their internet connection to tell their customer (me) that they suck, I would expect an apology at the very least.

Refusal to provide any apology

I had had enough and I called Lunarpages to demand an apology. I was eventually put through to the Operations Manager who was in charge of the call centre and after pushing and pushing and pushing, he gave an apology. However. I had to tell him what to say and explain why they should apologise. He explained that the reason they had not apologised for any of this was because it would make them liable. He also said that their other concern was that I would make a huge post detailing this horrific issue. Sadly, that was the only thing they have ever said that was right.

To make matters worse, I have recordings of almost all of the calls including:

• Support staff telling me that their manager refuses to address issues they send to him
• Lunarpages staff telling me that their staff would never leave such a comment on my site. Followed by the same staff telling me they would investigate it.
• Lunarpages Operations Manager telling me why they would not and have not offered any apology for what happened.

I will post these online as soon as I can.