In perhaps the most fitting tribute to the shaky world economy, Chairperson of the Finance Portfolio Committee, Nhlanhla Nene, is brought down to earth.
Month: October 2008
Categories
British Biker Jailed for Road Stunts
Biker Sandor Ferenci landed himself in the poop with the English police by telling them about his stunt clip which had been posted to YouTube. Of course the motorist who ratted him out to the cops in the first place is the real, well, rat. Get out of your cage and get a life, moron! Anyone who can pull a wheelie like that on that bike (and there are many people who can) deserves a medal, not punishment.
So 12 weeks in choekie for Sandor it is. I’m sure he’ll be back to reap the rewards of his new found fame.
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The Global Financial Crisis for Dummies
If you want the lowdown on what exactly has happened in the global economy to cause the panic and strain we’ve been seeing over the past few weeks in finance markets worldwide, you could do a lot worse than the following links:
In The Giant Pool of Money, This American Life producer Alex Blumberg teams up with NPR’s Adam Davidson to tell the surprisingly entertaining story of how the U.S. got itself into a housing crisis.
In the follow up show, Another Frightening Show About the Economy, Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson recount what happened when the credit markets froze, and how the housing crisis started impacting the markets as a whole through the ‘evils’ of unregulated credit default swaps.
In plain spoken English these guys do a great job of informing the rest of us exactly what the hell happened.
As an added bonus, they’ve now started the Planet Money Podcast and Planet Money Blog, essential material for anyone who wants to keep abreast of what is happening in the world of money.
Over the past few days I’ve been messing around with Google Webmaster Tools in an effort to make sure that all the little bugs and issues from my major blog upgrade, from b2evolution to wordpress, a few months back are ironed out.
As always, there tend to be silly little things that are the real pest – misspelled words, poor grammar, obscure comment links and the odd stray feed needing a redirect, all of which were quickly sorted out. After first digging into a few Apache mod_rewrite rules, of course.
I was reading through some tips on the Google Webmasters Help pages when I stumbled on this gem: “We recommend that you use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs.” Say what? I looked through my archives, and discovered to my dread that all my old content used underscores in the titles. “Eish. Oh well, this is Google, they can probably figure it out anyway – it’s a simple character substitution in their algorithm. It probably doesn’t matter that much.” I thought. But then I picked up in a guest blog entry by Vanessa Fox on Matt Cutts site that there is a distinct difference in the way Google handles underscores and dashes:
‘”african-elephants.html is seen as two words: “African” and “elephants”. african_elephants is seen as one word: african_elephant. It’s doubtful many people will be searching for that.’ This statement alone indicates a huge difference in exposure because of this one trivial character.
That made up my mind to try the big change, but it would require jumping through a few hoops:
1) Changing all the old urls to new urls with dashes instead of underscores. That’s a lot of editing.
2) Redirecting any existing requests for underscore-urls to the new dash-url. That’s a lot of redirecting.
3) Hoping like hell that it worked.
Fortunately problem 1 could be solved by a simple mysql command:
mysql> update wp_posts set post_name = replace(post_name,'_','-');
And problem 2 was easily resolved with the Dash Redirect WordPress Plugin.
I suspect the Dash Redirect Plugin can actually fix both issues at once, but I only discovered this after I’d already changed my urls.
Today I’m feeling good karma from the synchronicity of my blog.
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Where to get a free credit report
Financial woes abound during this period of worldly financial turmoil. In addition to this, people across South Africa are being forced to hand back their big, expensive vehicles, with tears in their eyes at their inability to make the next payment. Some have even lost huge sums of money on purchases that have simply become too expensive with the current interest rates.
I’m glad I’m not in that boat, and perhaps it has something to do with knowing my credit status. It’s also quite handy to check up on who’s been checking out your credit status. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who is watching the credit givers, if you will.
If you need to get access to your personal credit report, which the credit bureaux legally have to provide to you at no cost once per year, head over to MyCredit.co.za and register for your Transunion ITC report. Registration there was quick and easy and you get a cool pdf report emailed to you pretty quickly once registration is complete and the report has been ordered. I enjoyed tracing the deliberately confusing trail that I have intricately laid down for anyone who examines my credit situation. After all, they don’t need to know everything perfectly accurately, now do they?
There’s also CreditExpert, who will give you your status as per Experian’s records, but after registering they still wanted a whole lot of that eminently forgeable paperwork they call FICA records, so I have not yet seen the quality of their report.
Have fun. You now have the knowledge to get yourself out of any credit situation you might be stuck in. Oh, and when you’ve fixed that, take a minute and cut up one of those credit cards. It’ll do you a world of good.