The ash cloud from Iceland is affecting things in Asia too. Passengers of the cancelled flights of Singapore Airlines and Cathay Pacific are getting free accommodation in local hotels. Just think of all the logistics that requires. It's not only about booking rooms and making deals with hotels, but they also have to keep their budget in mind.
Then there's the problem with administration. Think of all the names they have to shift from the "transfer" list to whatever the list is now for these people who are forced to stay in this city till the cloud dissipates enough and all the tickets they have to provide for them so that they can board a flight in the future. Some would have definitely tried to cancel or even argue with the airlines, causing things to get even messier than it already was. So much room for errors here, especially with the short amount of time they have to work with (less than 24 hours probably).
There is also the question of which hotels to choose from. It's not like airlines have much contact with hotels since it's usually the travel agencies that combine the two for the tour packages for travellers.
Finally, think of all the airline meals going to waste!!!
Things have to be worse over in Western Europe since they can't even get incoming flights unlike Asia. Must be an administrative nightmare there.
LOL! China is going to give 20 billion dollars to Venezuela, in addition to the 12 billion already being invested by the country. That is obviously a political jab at the US, which is frequently insulted by the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez on his own TV show in his country. In any case, this also shows how oil-hungry the PRC is. Apparently its investments in Africa aren't enough.
Salami tastes so good. Why does it have to be so expensive? T.T
One can tell how profitable scamming WoW accounts must be simply by reading the scam emails. Here are 2 of the most legitimate looking emails I have received in my spam mailbox within the last couple weeks:
If I don't describe the discrepancies between these and actual emails from Blizzard, one might have thought that these went to Spam by mistake! Seriously, the first time I got these email I really did think that. The only thing that made me think twice about them was that I haven't touched WoW for years.
So I googled these and discovered that they are all fakes. The second screenshot already has the link highlighted. The one typed into the text of the email is perfectly legit, the one it's really linked to as shown at the bottom of the screen is not, even though to a noob it may seem perfectly fine.
The first is a little less obvious. Other than the wrong amount of spaces between words in a few spots, there really isn't much to make it look false. Even the links go to exactly where they say they're linked to.
The problem is that you're supposed to check your password at us.battle.net/support/login. In the real Blizzard websites, "battle" and "net" should be in one word, "battlenet". Really close there.
If I were still playing WoW, I might have believed them but not go to the website. What I would have done is email Blizzard Support directly and ask them what the heck is happening and when it happened because most likely I would have logged on to check all my virtual belongings and found nothing amiss.
Truth to be told, I don't know what I might have done since it isn't happening and "would" is not "will". Still I am pretty sceptical whenever I'm asked to enter highly sensitive info like IC number and passwords. Call it paranoia, but when you see how incredibly realistic some scams are you'd know that some degree of caution mixed with fear is necessary on the Internet.
Even things like Paypal and stuff aren't really that secured. It's just that no one is making a big deal out of the scams and frauds they have been victims of over the years. All the secured network nonsense they use today over Internet transactions are merely "secured" enough to be not worth the risks, ie if a professional hacker wants to steal your credit card info he can. It's just that hackers today don't do things that don't make enough money to cover the risks, except for newbie hackers aka script kiddies.
This is already proven by past cases of hackers stealing data from banks and companies that have appeared on the news. That is how much of a risk the hackers get if they try to do that - the entire world gets alerted by their success. The other banks, in turn, may increase their security. Hence we don't see them do it often. If I were a hacker I'd have to be making at least a million USD in such a hacking operation to convince me to do it.
One of the better ways to save electricity is to switch off your aircon before you are done sleeping. The trick is in estimating how long it takes for your room to become warm enough to wake you up, and make it coincide with the time you're supposed to get out of bed at.
For my room, it usually takes an hour to warm up enough when there is sunlight, two hours on a cloudy morning, 3 hours between 2-6am or 4 hours on a normal morning up till 8am if I have my fan on. This is also due to the fact that my window faces the east and I do not have curtains. If I hang a large towel to cover my window, I can slow down the heating process by about 30mins, but I always have trouble getting out of bed in the morning if the sun isn't shining at full blast into my room.
Therefore I usually set the Off timer of my aircon to at least an hour before my estimated waking time. After all, the cool air that remains when I leave my room is always wasted. Now I'm experimenting with the combo of fan and aircon to see how long it takes to become uncomfortably warm.
Don't jump to conclusions. My usual settings on my aircon when I switch it on at night is 27 degrees and at the minimum 1 out of 5 fan speed. My fan is left at minimum speed because even at these settings it gets very cold (the human body's tolerance for the cold is very much reduced when it is asleep). If I could have it switch on automatically right after my aircon switches off, I would. Too bad I can't, so here's my only option.
I estimate that if I have my fan on, I could have my aircon switch off itself at 5am and wake up at 8. The time between 7-8am is when my room heats up very quickly due to the sun rising from the east. 5-6am is when I get a nice cool breeze as the sun warms up the air in that direction, hence switching off the aircon before 5am when I plan to wake up at around 6-7am is a feasible idea.
The only way I can come up with to stretch it more is to cover my window, but sunlight is important.
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