Just a few days ago as I was browsing around my websites and notice all of my web sites on one particular server were hacked by a so called "Sarbot511".

See the image below of the screen capture of one of my web site when the hack happened. If you want to, you can click here and see the actual file used by the hacker. (I scan it, there is no virus but it contain very bad html codes)

"This company (Just Energy) is engaged in the worst kind of consumer fraud, preying on people's fears of rising natural gas bills and resorting to deception in order to boost sales." said David Kolata, Citizens Utility Board's Executive Director Read More...

Here's a quote by Attorney General of Illinois.
“U.S. Energy (aka Just Energy) is purposely deceiving consumers,” Attorney General Madigan said. “Many of these families signed up for this program based on the false claim that they would save on their monthly utility bills. Instead, U.S. Energy (Just Energy) locked them into a contract that actually charged them more for natural gas.” Read more about the lawsuit here...

Here's what wikipedia.org (The world's biggest and the world's most trusted website) have about Just Energy, "Complainants allege they (Just Energy) were subject to misleading sales practices, such as unauthorized enrollment in the program offered, and/or misrepresentation of contract length, and/or guarantees of savings, and/or ability to cancel the contract after the initial three day period..." Reand more...

Here's another quote on The Better Business Bureau's website, "Other complaints allege that upon signing up with the company (Just Energy) on the premise of savings on gas, consumers' bills did not decrease, but instead increased substantially." Read more...

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan has reached an agreement with U.S. Energy Savings Corp. (aka Just Energy) that will allow hundreds of Illinois consumers to terminate contracts and receive $1 million in restitution as a result of a lawsuit filed last year alleging that the alternative gas supplier sold fixed-rate gas contracts using misleading sales tactics that falsely promised significant consumer savings. Read More...

On December 13, 2005 The Better Business Bureau sent an advertising challenge to US Energy Savings Corporation (aka Just Energy), asking for the names and contact information of ten (I repeat 10 people) UESC consumers who enjoyed financial savings while enrolled in the company's five year fixed-rate program. The company declined the Bureau's request to provide such documentation, citing that doing so would be contrary to the company's privacy policy. Read More...

"Overall, 98 percent of Illinois consumers who have signed up with U.S. Energy Savings (Now operated as Just Energy also operate in Canada as Ontario Energy Savings Corp, Alberta Energy Savings L.P, Energy Savings Group, Universal Energy Group Ltd., Universal Power, National Home Services, Newton Home Comfort) have lost money, with an average loss of $780 to date, CUB concludes." Read it here, see the actual statistics done by The Citizens Utility Board here or read my post about it here.

Just two months ago (December 2009) this website www.keyframe5.com got hack by a spammer! I never thought I would end up as a victim, I always say to myself this will never happen to me.

Here is what I did to find out how my Wordpress website was hack and how to protect your Wordpress website from becoming a victim.

1. The fastest and easiest way to keep your Wordpress website protected from hackers and spammers is to always upgrade your Wordpress website to the latest Wordpress version.
2. Validate your CSS and source code with W3C.
   
   If some unknown html codes were added, you can easily pick it up the errors with W3C. If you don’t know how to validate your source code through W3C, you can still do it by remembering the amount of errors you have and later on when you check it again you suddenly have 100’s extra errors. Then that should tell you something is wrong.
3. Look at your web traffic statistic. If you notice a slow decline of traffic on your web site and you have a gut feeling something is wrong. Check and see what key words some of the people use on search engines to find your site. For example, I notice someone used the key word “3D penis mesh”. I know the word penis is not on my website anywhere (except on this page), but for some weird reason someone found my site with the word penis. That should be a good warning sign something is wrong.
4. Lastly, regularly check your source code. I check my source code all the time and I’ll admit I didn’t notice anything wrong when I got the hack but if you’re careful you might be able to find something out of the ordinary.
5. Yes, always upgrade Wordpress when in doubt.

The short answer is NO, over 98% will not save money according to statistics on the Citizens Utility Board’s website. The Citizens Utility Board represent the interests of residential utility customers across the state of Illinois. I believe Citizens Utility Board in Illinois is similar to Ontario Energy Board.

"Overall, 98 percent of Illinois consumers who have signed up with U.S. Energy Savings (Now operated as Just Energy also operate in Canada as Ontario Energy Savings Corp, Alberta Energy Savings L.P, Energy Savings Group, Universal Energy Group Ltd., Universal Power, National Home Services, Newton Home Comfort) have lost money, with an average loss of $780 to date, CUB concludes." Read it here.

Here’s the actual statistics dating back to 2004-2009 on how much money people lost while paying for their fix gas rate with an energy company called Just Energy, formerly U.S. Energy Savings Corp. People who sign long term contract for fix gas rate lost anywhere from $10 USD to more than $3000 USD with Just Energy 1 -5 years fix rate gas contract. See the full report here.

I am no expert when it comes to laptops and notebooks, but I had some major hardware failures with my laptop and PC because of overheating and power surge. Let me tell you that it didn’t feel so good to have waited 2 weeks to get it repaired. Also, the extra few hundreds of dollars I had to paid for the computer repaired shop.

From my own experience, the two reasons that caused my hardware failures were overheating and power/electrical surges. The first hardware failure happened when I was running my HP Pavilion DV6000 laptop/notebook during one summer night. It was hot and humid but I never thought my laptop/notebook would easily get over heated and it did just that after about 2 or 3 hours of use. There was no fire but I smell something was burning and the next time I tried to turn my laptop/notebook, it didn’t start. Read all about it here.

Are you always on the road or for get to install your favorite a HTML Editor? Well, I came across this website called online-html-editor.org and it is free to be download. It is not going to put Dreamweaver or any other WYSIWYG HTML Editor out of business but this little software does a decent job for basic HTML editing.

You don’t even have to download it to your computer. You can just visit the website and load your html files while using your favorite internet browser. This HTML Editor is good enough for basic html editing, inserting images, formatting text.

Here are some images render with hyperShot.

More sample rendering images by Hypershot here.

Well, let me say that I felt in love with hyperShot the first time I saw it first used. Ok, not love, but you know. Ok, I don’t know. LoL

It was one of those software where you said. Yes! I need it! It would save so much time! I don’t have to learn all the technical stuff about 3D rendering and 3D lighting. I don’t have to learn about photons, illumination, reflections and all that stuff. Yik!

If you do 3D, which most of you probably do since you are reading this. You would relate and understand how much time consuming it takes to render and then rendering an image to match the look you want to achieve. The technical know how to understand a rendering engine is huge. You need to spend a lot of time to learn and it is too technical for me.

While I was in Thailand for my vacation and had no access to the internet the first couple of days until I found some internet café. When I was trying to search something on Google in Thailand, everything was in Thai. I tried typing in the url as www.google.com, or www.google.ca, but each time I get redirected to the Thai version at www.google.co.th

So the easy trick was to type in the url as www.google.com/en the en at the end of the url is the initial for English. After typing in that url you will be redirected to www.google.com/intl/en/ which is the international English version of Google. You can be anywhere around the world and type in this url www.google.com/en and you will always have access to the international English version of Google. No need to learn Thai…

There is something called TwintonMSN, it allow any of you Twitters addict to write all your tweets through MSN Messenger. This can be time saving because you don’t have to go the Twitter’s website at twitter.com to write your twits.