I just had a chat with my new company’s network engineer. Well, for a micro small company, there isn’t much engineering brain required but this guy has a Microsoft Certified System Engineer (MSCE) certificate and recently, my superior handed over him to take care of the hundreds domain name the company has bought. It should have been my job managing all those domain names but I was swamped with blog works that the company’s client asked to do.

Anyway, the guy confesses that he had never shop online so he had never bought any domains and he has no idea how to do it. So, being a good guy I’ve always been, hehe..I facilitated him over what is supposed to be done. If you have never bought something online, then things can be pretty scary because you have a fear of screwing things up. Still, the best way to learn is by doing mistakes and that is normal. I’ve been shopping online for a while but my first time entering my mom’s credit card, I can still remember the goosebumps.

So, how do you buy a domain name? It is fairly simple. Let me show you how I did it and I’m not even paying it with any of my own cash. Okay, first step:

Just fill in the form to see if your domain name of choice is available or not. Mine was unique so I’m the owner.

I had Byethost, the webhost that I had use to host a couple of free subdomain wordpress blogs. There are free php hosting that allows you to host your own domain but that’s a different topic. The cheapest domain name (unused one of course) that I found was USD8. So, basically Byethost offered a yearly package of USD35.99 with a free domain name registration for a whole year with an extreme amount of features. That is about USD2.99 per month or RM10.50 per month.

So with the PayPal money that I’ve gotten by writing paid posting from Blogvertise, I bought the domain and the web hosting subscription.

The only thing that is required is that you must have a PayPal account that has a credit card or the right debit card attached to make the transaction or else you can’t even get any money into PayPal itself.

That’s about it. The transaction is done. Now just wait for the moderator contact you by e-mail. It should take no more than a day unless if the moderator is on holiday. I had to wait for 4 days before my domain and web host got activated.

The conclusion. Don’t be afraid to shop online. Need help? Asked a friend who had tried it. Shop till you drop my friends!

I like to take pictures for the thing that I wanted to blog about. I think I should really consider having a camera phone. The reason is because I don’t bring my digital camera all along with me. Plus when using camera phone, it doesn’t look awkward to most people, don’t you think? I am still using a 4 years old Nokia 3100 which only serve a basic purpose of SMS, MMS, WAP and making/receiving calls. It is time to upgrade, at least.

Yesterday I went to Shah Alam on a date with my lovely girlfriend. The mission was to spend as little as possible which I apparently failed to do so and to be connected online. After having lunch at my favourite Sup Ani Utara in Section 2 Shah Alam, bringing along my girlfriend’s laptop, we went to Secret Recipe at SACC Mall where they have Wi-Fi Internet access under TMNet Hotspots. We also had some nice cheesecake and lattes. The only setback was the place has no plug to plug in the power chord so I had to cut my visit short because the battery could only last for one hour. I pulled up my new Public Bank Visa Electron card but the payment counter said can only accept card charges if you spend more than RM50. I think it ridiculous to turn down a cashless customer. Lucky I got RM20 in my wallet.

We then hunted for another Wi-Fi place in Shah Alam and the best and cheap place was at Butler at Petronas Section 7 which is next to Unisel Shah Alam. The only problem was, the place was packed with people mainly students and all the power sockets were occupied. Our last resort was to search for the nearest Starbucks and that is at Jusco Bukit Raja Klang.

After the Secret Recipe incident, this time I asked the Starbucks Barista whether they accept my PB Visa Electron. The guy answered to me that they accept whatever credit card with no minimum requirement of payment. That was a good thing to hear. So, I happily had a RM10 Signature Hot Chocolate and surfed the internet using the High Speed TimeZome Wi-Fi. My girlfriend was so happy she downloaded some YouTube videos and a lot of Hindustani Indian MP3s. This was actually my first time using my Public Bank Visa Electron. I’ll use it again for my next visit to Starbucks ;-)

By the way, there is a Nando’s restaurant just next to Starbucks at Jusco Bukit Raja. They are equipped with TM Net Hotpsot. Again, no power sockets so it is so ashame of Wi-Fi places not to have power sockets. I wonder how and where these Wi-Fis is transmitted since I can’t see any sign of antennas unlike my home and office wireless router. Maybe our LadyAzurt could explain that on her blog. Any thoughts on that my lady? ;-D

Yesterday I got an e-mail from the sales department of my web hosting which I’ve recently purchased to host this blog. The e-mail announcement starts like this:

Dear Valued Customer,
We have increased the capacity of our Premium Hosting accounts by over two times! And we are giving you a unique opportunity to get a Premium Hosting account for FREE!

I was like “What’s going on here?”. I haven’t set up an e-mail account yet. So, I logged into my web host Cpanel and saw this:

As you can see, my disk space is now 5GB. That is 4GB more than what I purchased. Let’s make some comparison:

Now, what the hell am I going to do with that amount of storage? Plus, they add more 150GB of traffic monthly bandwidth. This is too much if you ask me. All I wanted was a reliable web host that could host a couple of my other domains and a couple of MySQL databases. Most cheap webhost that I was browse shopping would only give me 1 MySQL database and I don’t like that.

Since the free .com domain is part of the package. My ashrufzz.com domain is not registered with my details:

Oh well, I can always transfer it whenever I want. I’m thinking of purchasing a local web hosting plan, well that would be next year I guess. For now, at USD2.99 or RM10.50 per month this web hosting package is providing me more than enough. So now, it’s time to utilize it to the max baby!

After Valentines Day, I got a mail from the Ministry of Entrepreneurship and Cooperation Development (MeCD) dated on the 14th February 2007 for an invitation to come for a briefing. The briefing would be on an Entrepreneurial program associated with Takaful Nasional.

The insurance industry is very lucrative. If you are very meticulous about legal mumbo-jumbo or if you are able to explain and present insurance products well enough to a client, then this would be a great career opportunity for you. Imagine for one client policy alone, you can get at least RM70 commision, that is even better than doing telemarketing for a hotel membership product for which I failed at.As always in any business, it’s a numbers game. The more client you get, the more commission you make. The better you are at getting more and more clients, the more chances you can get to open up your own insurance agency.

Oh well, where were we? Oh yes, the invitation letter. I get so carried away when writing about business stuff.I don’t know how they get my address, maybe they got it from the job searching websites that I’ve registered while searching for a job online a couple of months ago. It says that I am selected to undergo an intensive training for 6 months. The closing date was 3rd of March so I think I was too late. Let see what else they offer, oh they will pay me an allowance of RM500 per month for six months but accommodation is not included.

They have a limit of 200 early candidates. From what I heard, the organizer of the program gets more pay (which was cut from the RM500 allowance the Ministry given) if they can get more jobless people to sign up.Wait a minute, I’ve already gotten a new job. Why would I join the insurance business? Well, I was introduced to the insurance business before. Someone even wanted to sponsor me for all the trainings, exam fees and all that but I refused. I guess my future is to go online most of the time, configuring web-hosting, domains, PHP, Wordpress, CSS, XHTML and soon AJAX. I guess I have more fun doing that. Still, what is more fun than working on a dual monitor in a cozy apartment turned office with a gym and a swimming pool? :-)