Category: News

We at Icetips send you all our best wishes for a Happy and prosperous New Year in 2010. Our office will be closed until January 4th but we will still check our email and take care of any support issues that may come up:)

We thank you for your business in the past and look forward to work with you all in the new year.

Happy New Year

Icetips

We at Icetips Alta LLC wish you all Merry Christmas and a Happy and prosperous New Year in 2010! We appreciate your business and support in 2009. Our office will be closed until December 28 and then from December 31. to January 4. We will still be checking our emails, but repsonse might be a bit slow over those two holiday weekends.

Arnor Baldvinsson and Susan Pichotta

Few days ago we received an email from a guy named "Tony" with the email address of tony@xgymzc.hk.cn. I have since received two emails from this same person, the last one with an email address of tony@skasia.hk.cn.

The first email went like this:

Dear Manager,

We are SK net service company ltd, the registration organization of trademark,internet brand and domain name in Asia.

On 15th,November.We have already received Juda Asia Industry Limited want to register (icetips ) internet brand and related domain names. After our department checked,you are the original owner of the brand,you have the first protection right. please let me know whether your company authorize JUDA to register them or regsiter them by yourself. If we can not receive your reply within a period,we will think that your company given up them and we will help Juda Asia Industry Limited to register them. Looking forward your response! Best Regards, Tony

SK Asia
Tel: 00852-3071 7712
Fax:00852-3071 7730
www.skasia.hk.cn

Today I received the third email and decided to look into this as this was sounding like a scam to me. After some snooping around I found this blog site with comments from over a hundred people about this scam. Basically they try to solicit people to register domain names with them, indicating that they have a client that is going to register your domain name with one of the East Asian domains, such as .cn, .tw, .hk etc. Currently you can simply go to Godaddy.com and register them, although the price can be quite high, for example the .tw domains are $39.99 a year.

I just thought I'd let my readers know about this so you know that this is a scam.

Arnor Baldvinsson

This past week both Sue and I have been suffering from the H1N1. Our daughter, Laila, got over it in two days and didn't really get sick with it, lucky her!

The problem isn't that it has been so bad - it hasn't! Neither of us has had fever, chills or bone aches, which we usually get with the flu, just nasty caugh og really bad fatigue. If there is one word that sums up H1N1 for us it has to be "TIRED"! As I'm writing this I don't really feel bad at all, still some caugh, but I have about as much energy as a disconnected spark plug - i.e. none at all! We are certainly grateful that it hasn't been worse, but it's that in-between state where you are not really sick but you can't really do much that isn't much fun.

So things are pretty much in very slow motion here these days and I apologize if emails have not been answered immediately! Hopefully we will be over this in a day or two:)

Arnor Baldvinsson

In early 2008 I enrolled in the Microsoft Empover ISV program, which gives you access to various developer tools, MSDN subscription, etc. etc. It costs US$375 to enroll and you can re-enroll if you need to. All in all a very nice program and gives you access to a lot of software.

My Empower subscription was to expire on February 28, 2009 and couple of weeks earlier I went through the re-enrollment process and everything looked fine, except I was never charged for the $375 so I thought perhaps I had forgot how it worked and that it was a one time fee. Turns out that the re-enrollment never completed, for whatever reasons, so I recently found myself without the MSDN subscription and without access to the product keycodes on the MSDN website.

We had heard about the Microsoft BizSpark program so I decided to take a look at it - wouldn't cost anything since it's free. So I signed up for it. Wasn't optimistic that it would go through since it is for startup companies only and I have been signed up for various things at MS for several years. Didn't receive any emails or any further information so I figured it hadn't been accepted. A week later I decided to check it out and see if I could find an email address to write to to inquire about it. To my very pleasant surprise it went right into the member page so the sign-up had been successful. I found out that my MSDN subscription had been extended for 3 years, until July 2012!

To sign up, go to http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark or go to http://www.microsoftstartupzone.com/pages/home.aspx for more information. It is free to sign up, but you are required to pay $100 at the end of the membership period.

The Microsoft BizSpark is an excellent way for developers who are starting out to gain advantage by getting all the latest development tools from Microsoft. This includes anything from QuickBasic 4.5 (which was released in 1988!) to Visual Studio 2010. It includes operating systems from MS-Dos to Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7, including oddbals like Windows 3.2 (16bit). It also includes designer software like Expression Blend, Expression Design etc. The Applications section includes tools such as Access, Project, Front Page, MapPoint, MS Office, OneNote, Outlook, Virtual PC and Visio, which is an excellent database design tool - or at least to print out existing SQL databases. This just scratches the surface!

If you are looking for a good opportunity to bring yourself up to speed with the latest from Microsoft I would suggest that you look into BizSpark. It's free to start so the price is just right:)

Arnor Baldvinsson