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photo credit: duncan

As I was erasing an unused FTP account for my site yesterday, I accidentally let it start erasing my whole website. Completely my fault.

After some research, I realized Bluehost (my host) does daily and weekly (they claim monthly, but that wasn’t available as far as I could tell) backups automatically and will restore them for free. A quick e-mail to their support, and they took care of restoring the site. For some reason their daily backup was from 2 weeks ago, and their weekly was from 1 week ago, but their customer support rep said they’ve been overhauling the system. Nonetheless, thanks guys.

Lost a week worth of posts, Jimmy’s comment on Eliot Spitzer, and general statistics data, but not too bad for this bonehead move.

Bluehost has been pretty good to me, but they’re super slow for me in Vietnam. I actually blame my ISP and Vietnam’s 1(!) undersea cable to international sites more than Bluehost since I’ve heard from friends in the US they find my site perfectly fine.

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More New Year’s stuff in Hanoi, a video from Ho Tay and fireworks.

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As you might expect, Hanoi isn’t the greatest place for Americans (since it’s not in America) and often, I completely forget about the big American holidays, since, well, they’re just normal days here.

But I LOVE Thanksgiving. Love love love. Cause it’s my birthday too (Nov. 26), very convenient to kick off the holidays. Last year on my birthday, I met my two future bosses during a short stay in Hanoi while I was working in Malaysia. This year, ah, I didn’t do too much. As in nothing- had just finished the basketball tournament, and was super sore.

For Thanksgiving though, 4 days before my birthday (and Thuy’s, as a matter of fact), had Thanksgiving Friday dinner with some good friends (Jimmy, Hung, Vinh) and my team at work- wanted to introduce my team to the holiday, especially because they don’t eat Turkey (ga tay) here.

• Did a little Thanksgiving “thankful” speech before eating- never had done that before
• Tried to do the wishbone tradition but we all couldn’t figure where it was on the turkey.
• Brought home a $15/person meal for everyone, at at Hung’s house (which is near the KFC on Le Duan)
• $15/person from the Press Club: outrageously expensive. Good turkey, but low on the sides. Good potatoes, not-so-good stuffing. Stuffing was like a circular patty of what I do not consider to be stuffing. Cranberry was good as well.

A few photos of the attendees:

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