Archive for the 'Letters from The Editor' Category
August 30th, 2010 by Solomon
So it has been over a year since I wrote on the blog. I keep meaning to get back into it but a blog is a lot of work, especially when you have all this life going on around you. A WHOLE BUNCH has happened in my life since last year, a lot of which I have not talked about because I have thought that it was personal and I didn´t really want to include personal stuff in the blog, but I guess the point of the blog is personal stuff.
I am going to do a short time-line of all the stuff that has been going on…Maybe I can go into it more in depth later.
So, starting about 3 years ago I got this idea in my head that I would like to go back to college, I sort of felt that there was something missing in my life and I thought that college would maybe be that thing. So I started to look into what it would take to get to go to the local college in Playa Del Carmen. Which led me to the Secretary of Education in Cancun:
The Secretary of Education wanted a whole long list of my vital records, starting with first grade on up to high-school. So I got in touch with my mother in the States and she didn´t have the records that I wanted but she suggested that I talk to the schools that I had attended. I got ahold of them and had them send me out a copy of the documents up until the 10th grade when I got my GED and started attending community college.
Note the part about GED and community college….we´ll get to that later. The secretary of education wanted my records translated and apostilled as well. I had no idea at the time what apostille is, but I found out. I think this is a good lead in for another post. Anyway, after getting the apostille and translation the SEP(Secretaria de Educación Publica) let me know that my GED was not valid in Mexico.
After a few frustrating(for me) phone calls to the director of the validation department of the SEP in Chetumal, the state capital, I resigned myself to the idea that I was not going to be able to use my GED to go to college here. So, since I am stubborn and I wanted to go to college, I continued down the path and started the mexican version of the GED program, which is a year and a half study on your own and take the tests type program.
So in July of 2008 I started this process, looking back on it I am glad I did because I am really sure that it helped my Spanish and got me into the routine of studying. Every one of the posts that you read that I published since that time, I wrote during the schooling process. In November of 2009 I finished and had met all of the pre-requisites of the Secretary of Education to start my higher education.
In January of 2010 I started university here in Playa Del Carmen in a small university, studying law. Its a 3-year program with a six month internship in the middle. Getting authorization from immigration to be a student AND work was a small miracle but it worked out. This could probably lead to a whole other post as well.
In February I got married to a wonderful woman. I had to jump through a few hoops in order to get immigration and the civil registry to let me marry a Mexican girl, but it all worked out. I think there is another separate post here as well. When we got married we didn´t invite our families because we knew that we wanted to actually have a larger ceremony on the beach later in the year when everything sort of calmed down a little bit.
We decided to have the wedding in Puerto Morelos on the beach and one day while there looking around for the right place to do it, my lovely bride suggested that we have the wedding in the church instead of the beach and then have a reception later. Which opened up a whole new can of worms, I am/was not catholic…so I became catholic.
So…between work, school and family I have been pretty busy. It has been hard to write lately. The motivation for this post is simple, I was listening to a talk by Kevin Smith(Clerks/Dogma/Chasing Amy) and he mentioned that the most important thing for anyone who thinks about being a writer is write. So I guess I better write.
Oh, that and this term I am starting an written communication class and am going to have to practice…so I might publish some posts in Spanish. Nothing that can´t be missed…maybe I will translate anyway.
Well, that´s all for now folks.
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June 8th, 2009 by Solomon
So I had some problems with yahoo. They were providing me with email and webhosting for my business website, pdcmanagement.com. Last week the email address stopped working and the website went down. I tried to change my password online because I had just recently changed the security questions, at Yahoo’s prompting. That didn’t work, they gave me a message that I my password could not be reset online and I would have to talk to Yahoo customer support.
I sent an email to customer support, a day later they sent me a response saying that I should check out the FAQ or reset my password online. I sent them another email explaining that I had done this and it was not working, so after another two days they sent me another email with a support phone number. I called the phone number, I got to talk to “Seth”. Seth was as helpful as he could be, but didn’t know a whole lot.
Seth asked me a whole raft of security questions to verify that I was who I say that I was. I think their are eight questions total, all of which I answered correctly. Seth then informed me that my account had been deactivated due to abuse of the terms of service. When I asked Seth exactly what the abuse of the terms of service were he said that he did not have that information but if I wanted I could check out the terms of service link at the bottom of any Yahoo.com website, read section 6, and if I do not agree that I was violating any of the terms of service I could send an email to the abuse department.
I read the terms of service, I found nothing there that I was violating. The website in question had the most basic and harmless content available, I cannot imagine what they thought I was doing wrong. So I went to “abuse.yahoo.com” as directed by Seth. Guess what? There was no email address or contact form associated with this, no “Contact Yahoo! Abuse”.
I decided to send abuse reports about myself, to see if I could get any response. I sent them to hosting abuse, mail abuse, small business account abuse, etc. The only one that I got a response back from was mail abuse, which told me that I should read the terms of service, section 6, and if I don’t agree that I was in violation of the terms of service I should contact the abuse department.
Meanwhile, I have no email. At least no email that anyone knows. Also I had foolishly relied on Yahoo to maintain my address book for me because they do such a wonderful job of it and I was paying them and for Pete’s sake I never do anything to abuse the terms of service. I started complaining to Hans at CyberXHosting who is a good friend of mine and has been hosting Life In Playa since its inception. Hans suggested that I host with them, I was pretty upset, so I changed the domain name server information on my domain that night and by the next day I had my domain back.
Other people had email accounts with my pdcmanagement.com account, all hosted through yahoo. I went about setting up their emails on the new server, I set them up and then sent out the account information to the alternate email addresses that I had for these people.
I started getting bounce notifications, this yahoo email and that yahoo email and this email that isn’t yahoo but they host it, all of them bouncing. Yahoo notifies me that there is a permanent delivery failure, code 554. Again I was complaining to Hans about this and he went to the yahoo site to look up code 554:
There is something about the message contents that Yahoo! Mail will not accept for policy reasons. For instance, it is against Yahoo! Mail’s policy to send phishing/fraud attempts or viruses. If you feel you have received this error for a message that should be accepted, we encourage you to provide us with detailed information about the rejected message.
**A little aside, at no point on this page does yahoo have any sort of way to provide them with detailed information about the rejected message**
So, today, after wading through all that, I finally got all my email addresses setup. The webpage is up but I am redoing it so it isn’t much to look at yet. I got an email from yahoo! A response to one of my abuse reports. I will leave out most of the stuff because it isn’t important, but the last part of the email really got me:
Please note that due to privacy concerns, Yahoo! does not maintain
backups of customer’s mailboxes. Should you be approved for
reactivation, we should be able to recover your web hosting and database
files, but we will not be able to recover mailboxes lost in this
process.
I guess I don’t need to talk to yahoo any more, since the only part of this whole interaction that interested me was the recovery of my contact and email.
So, I really have to look at all this like a learning experience. Backup everything! You get what you pay for! If you have been trying to get in touch with me at the old email address, now you know why it has been bouncing. Please contact me through the blog, or facebook, or one of the various other ways out there so I can get you the new email address.
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September 21st, 2008 by Solomon
I don’t know what category this is going to fall under, I guess its just a general life statement.
I spend about 4 hours a day in my car driving around Playa Del Carmen, about 6 hours a week working on my various websites(I know it sometimes can be hard to tell), and another 15+ hours a week reading or puttering around my house. During this time I like to listen to music, punk rock more specifically.
Now, I live in Mexico, I have for a few years. SolRadio or Radio Turquesa here in Playa is absolutely wonderful if I need to find out the latest reports about the hurricane that is sitting 30 miles out or the teacher strike/riots in Chetumal, but they are seriously lacking in music that I can stand. Don’t get me wrong, I even like the traditional Mexican style music occasionally, it makes me feel like I live in a Quentan Tarentino movie…But to relax or just zone out I like punk rock.
I was introduced to XMRadio about 5 years ago by the contractor I worked for at the time in Oregon. We drove from job to job and listened to XM Comedy or metal or punk rock, whatever we felt like that day. It gives a great break from terrestrial radio, which is often in the more remote parts of Oregon either christian radio or country(nothing wrong with country, just not all the time).
When I moved to Mexico I quickly learned from the guys that had been here longer than I had that if I wanted music here XMRadio would work great for me. So when I went back to the States the last time I purchased a Pioneer Inno XMRadio and MP3 player. It is great, it gets reception down here in PDC, its portable so I can move it from house to car to beach with ease, and it records music so when it isn’t getting reception I can still pull up my favorite music from its memory.
XMRadio has improved the quality of my life in PDC, I counted on it to give me quality punk rock music on Channel 53(FUNGUS) as long as the line of sight from the antenna wasn’t blocked to the south. I could even tune into XMOnline from my laptop so when I am sitting in Coffee Cafe I can still listen to punk rock.
On September 16th when I got in my car in the morning that all changed. The punk channel was silent, I left it for a while, sometimes there are broadcasting breaks or maybe a cloud was blocking the antenna. No dice. I checked the display screen on the Inno, the cute little “FUNGUS53″ symbol was no longer showing in the top-left corner of the screen, it said “AC/DC” and there was a scrolling message about AC/DC Radio starting at 6pm.
I quickly pulled up the programming menu, there must be some mistake, I must have entered the wrong channel accidentally. No mistake, no wrong channel, Fungus53 is gone.
XMRadio and Sirius Satelite radio recently merged and now to pay the bills they have decided to cut punk rock out of both lineups and replace it with AC/DC 24 hours. Apparently AC/DC is releasing a new album soon and they must have contributed a little bit to the Sirius/XM coffers to get their own premium payola channel.
I don’t mind a little AC/DC, despite the fact that it reminds me of getting beat up in the locker room after gym class. You know what I’m talking about. I just cannot deal with 24 hours of AC/DC in order to replace good punk rock variety.
I wrote a letter to XMRadio about this, their answer was rather patronizing, “Fungus was one of the channels that had a very loyal but also a very limited audience.” My subscription to XMRadio is paid until the end of the year, after that I am not so sure about renewing it.
So what am I going to do about the music situation? I just so happens that in a recent update of ITunes, Apple released an add-on called Genius. This thing is pretty cool, I can click on any song in my library and tell Genius to do its work, it picks out a playlist of songs that go well with the song I picked. It also recommends songs that I don’t have in my library that I might like.
I was skeptical at first, I was thinking that I would put in a hard-core punk rock song like “Demonica” by The Dwarves and get back ten kinds of Blink-182 and other highschooly poppy punk bands. Not so. As a matter of fact, I was really impressed by the way this thing worked out.
Now, I like to think my musical tastes are unique, but it really doesn’t seem that way. I was testing this Genius thing out, I put in a Steve Earl(Trucker Rock/Country) singer and asked Genius to do its magic. How does Apple know that Social Distortion(Punk), Slayer(Metal), Reverend Horton Heat(Rockabilly) and Flogging Molly(Irish Punk Rock) will all go so well with Trucker Rock? Well, I am officially impressed.
So, SiriusXM, you may have lost my business, but I will probably be spending more money on ITunes now for replacement music. I am going to miss my XMRadio, but I guess an IPod will dock in my car just as nicely as the Inno.
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September 5th, 2008 by Solomon
So I have been really slacking on the blog lately…I have been getting heckled by email for not being more diligent about posting.I have just been really busy and I can’t even really account for my time, I guess life just gets in the way sometimes.Sorry about all of this if you have all been waiting for something.I am writing a piece about getting “Regimen de Condominio” for one of my buildings, coming soon.
For now, I will just display the picture of “Independence Donuts” that I found at Walmart the other day.I loved them, I had to buy one and take a picture. Then I ate it.
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August 3rd, 2008 by Solomon
Dear Reader,
Here’s the thing: My friend Hans is a technology guy, he runs an internet software company. He was a big part of the reason why I started to blog in the first place. He also helps me a lot with the other websites that I publish, by suggesting new methods and new software, even quite often telling me the way I am doing it can be improved in so-and-so manner.
So I started Real Life in Paradise without checking exactly how to do it, as is my way. I don’t ask directions for most things, I just assume that I can figure it out. So I jumped on Blog.com, because I saw other bloggers from Mexico doing it. They offer very sufficient services, but somewhat limit what you can actually do with the blog. When I told Hans this, he mentioned that I might want to think about getting my own domain and hosting the blog on there, because I would have more control and be able to customize the blog more.
I am very hard-headed sometimes, I told him that blog.com would work just fine for me. He outlined exactly what problems I was going to come up against with blog.com and I dismissed his suggestions. Everything was going to be just fine.
Then I started to realize that Hans was right. I couldn’t add Google Analytics to the site, uploads were slow, sometimes posting a comment was difficult and I got emails from people who just gave up. Then the statistics program on Blog.com started failing, it erased all my stats, etc…
I decided to look into the idea of moving the blog to my own domain. I searched for domains that I liked and found ‘lifeinplaya.com’. Listening to the little voice of Hans in my head saying “If you search for a domain that you like, you have to buy it*”, I purchased it.
Anyway, back to the point, I am now moving the “Real Life In Paradise” blog to “Life In Playa”, I hope it doesn’t cause anyone too much hassle. Thanks for reading and I hope I will have more time to blog in the future.
Solomon
*This is due to a new technique people are using to make money on the internet, industrious people on the internet buy a list of recently searched for domains from the popular domain providers and then buy the recently searched domains. Many domain providers allow you to hold a domain for a short period of time without paying for it. When you search for a domain and then go back the next day to buy it, somebody has already purchased your domain, but they will offer to sell it to you for slightly more than what they paid for it. Pretty tricky.
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