Oh, GM has filed bankruptcy!

Announcement sounded like a clap of thunder. General Motors has been bobbing atop Fortune 500 list for ages. So this is a shocker, a real one. One would expect a company of GM's girth to deploy whatever resources to sidestep the slippery time slice the world is going on. Seems whatever they tried to do didn't quite work out.
It might be the sign of the coming times. Environment-conscious Planet Earth is shuddering away from the fuel-guzzling SUVs which, anyway, wouldn't run on battery-powered electric motors. Jobs--blue- and white-collar alike--are going down the grain. There won't be much to spend. Where the jobless get unemployment cheques, they will start learning taking subways, cleaning up environment even more.
While auto industry, (airline and several others too) are going through hard times, we are told of some growth in technology businesses. Here are people who were able to work out miracles with miniaturization: the other day I bought a 4 giga memory card for my camera for quarter the price I'd bought a 1 giga card about six months earlier. What's that joke of exchanges between microsoft and GM on their industries' growth comparison that was going around the net sometime ago?

Geocities is closing. Oh!

It was in the IT news this week. Troubled Y! has sighted Geocities as one of the services to be dropped in the ongoing rationalization exercise.
Many of us who ever coded a page a little while ago (that's to say more than 10 years) likely used Geocities.

Geocities was supposed to make money from ads that would appear on these free website. There was also possibility of getting rid of ads by upgrading. (With my blog--successor of Geocities-like web presence--instead of lugging provider ads, I place my own Adsense links).

I wouldn't be surprised if the younger generation has never heard of Geocities. Now with a myriad of social networking web services such as Facebook, Myspace and blogs, life is easy for page owners, plus, it's quite easy to link to friends etc, share stuff while having fun. Emergence of these web 2.0 services rang the death knell of stiff-upper-lip services that couldn't conform with changing times. Freeservers and Tripod are likely to be next.

The one hosting service that offers free registration that seem almost too good to be true, Awardspace, got me hooked and am now owning a paid hosting that offers hundredfold more for a song. Now this is nice and proper. With it comes database, PHP, server-side installers of a handful of utilities (Zacky tools installer) etc.

I'll say bye to Geocities, it did us lot of good while it lasted. I'm still having my older sites on Geocities such as my resource page. Time I moved them elsewhere, I guess.