Month: March 2008

Sidenotes in Deuts.NET

While I was cleaning my site for broken links, here are some I learned:

  • This is what zooomr has become. It’s supposed to compete with flickr, but how can it compete when your photos once hosted in them are gone. This is what actually happened to some of my photos in zooomr. Those were not the ‘masterpiece’ type of photos, but hey, they serve as a documentation of my life. Poor photos, poor photo sharing site.
  • News sites to avoid linking to when creating posts: Yahoo! News and Manila Bulletin. Why? Because they can’t maintain static pages for their news articles for quite a long period of time, a year or two you’ll find broken links in your blog posts.
  • Successful / implementation for my permalinks. All posts now appear to have a / in the end. This will definitely affect search engine referrals and ultimately traffic. But hopefully, all will be back to normal soon. Nevertheless, I’ve prepared a friendly 404 landing page just in case one would get lost, with the related posts plugin to refer them to the nearest, possibly related, article.

Awaiting WordPress 2.5

This site is proudly powered by WordPress (WP).

Wordpress LogoWith lots of updates going on into the core of wordpress install, particularly with the upcoming WordPress 2.5, a lot of features are being introduced. I’m afraid there will come a time that WordPress would not be as lightweight but functional as it used to be. WordPress users are asking for features left and right specific to their needs. The WordPress team, it appears to me, are moving towards satisfying all those requests by the various users in one package, that is WordPress.

Continue reading

Bear Stearns at 2.4% of Book Value

Could this be how bad the recession in the US is right now?

Bear Stearns Cos., one of the largest global investment banks and securities trading and and brokerage firms in the world, entered into a deal to sell its business to JP Morgan Chase & Co., another investment banking company, for 236 million dollars or equivalent to $2 per share, which translates to only around 2.4% of its book value.

Bloomberg and other business news magazines and websites are all over the issue.

To illustrate how bad this deal is, the deal was sealed last Sunday (March 16, 2008) at $2, Bear Stearns stock last Friday (March 14) was trading at $30, more than $60 last week, and more than $150 last year. Moreover, the Company reported a book value of $84.09 in the fourth quarter of 2007.

Continue reading

CIA Exam November 2007

The official results of the November 2007 Certified Internal Auditor (CIA) Exams for Philippines candidates are out, although the news are not yet included in the News and Events section of the IIA Philippines website as of this post. Results are also available for CFSA (Certified Financial Services Auditor) and CCSA (Certification for Control Self-Assessment) examinations.

PDF Icon The Gold Medal Award (Top 1), two of the Certificate of Excellence awards (Top 5), and nine of the Certificate of Honor awards (Top 25) were garnered by Filipinos. This means that aside from the Top 1, 40% of the Top 5 and 36% of the Top 25 were Filipinos!

Click PDF icon to download the results in PDF format.

Now that’s what you call Filipino excellence!

Deuts.NET on Food Photography

You were in a classy restaurant, freshly served with the hot food you ordered, whipped out your camera and started shooting the elegantly presented food in the plate in front of you. But then you wondered why you can’t really come up with a superb picture, not even just duplicate the photo of the food in the menu.

Maybe you’re missing something. Or maybe a lot of things. Maybe you missed taking into account the use of motor oil, spray deodorant and brown shoe polish.

Yeah, you don’t want to eat food with these things applied in them. But these are the dirty tricks of food photographers. Read more to learn more.

Betos’