I’ve been having problems with my eMail for the past week and my consultant tells me that the best way to fix it – now that the patches have been shown to be insufficient – is to upgrade everything.
So all my websites, including this one, will be down for a short period this evening: probably about half an hour. If you have sent me an eMail in the past week and are wondering why nothing has happened, please resend the eMail tomorrow!
Readers will have noticed that there has still not been a report of January performance by the fund, nor a review of the January performance of low-spread FixedResets (although performance for the fund was reported in PrefLetter).
Additionally, formal account statements for Malachite Aggressive Preferred Fund and segregated accounts have not yet been mailed.
I apologize for this.
February was horrendous in terms of keeping up; the year-end audit has been very time-consuming and the market has kept me on my toes as well. Throughout the month I was looking forward to the weekend of February 27-28, thinking that production would be very late, but at least done during the month.
Regrettably, a personal emergency blew up February 26 at about 9pm and occupied all my time until Monday. So much for the weekend!
I hope to get caught up on this coming weekend, March 5-6.
It has become apparent that Microsoft has completely lost control over its servers.
I’ve been getting more than a few eMails bounced back recently, of the form:
Recipient: [SMTP: [eMail address redacted]]
Reason: 550 SC-001 (SNT004-MC2F3) Unfortunately, messages from 184.172.98.210 weren’t sent. Please contact your Internet service provider since part of their network is on our block list. You can also refer your provider to http://mail.live.com/mail/troubleshooting.aspx#errors.
This appears to affect eMails directed to @live.com and @Hotmail.com. There may be more, but I haven’t seen any bounce-backs from other domains yet.
I don’t know quite what to make of this. I have contacted my Server Wizard and hope that the situation will be resolved shortly.
In the interim, however, I cannot respond to eMails originating from these domains. All my eMail from each of my domains (including automatically generated eMail from PrefBlog and PrefLetter) is routed through the server at 184.172.98.210.
I apologize for the inconvenience and hope to have this situation resolved promptly.
The Toronto real-estate market is getting too much for me!
268 Poplar Plains Road #801
Toronto, Ontario
M4V 2P2
Update, 2018-3-5: This post has been superseded by another move.
All other contact information remains the same:
jiHymas@himivest.com
416 604 4204
I have added Ben Bernanke’s blog to the blogroll – see the right-hand navigation panel under the heading “Recommended External Commentary.
This blog was inaugurated on March 30; I’m very pleased to see that Bernanke has joined the Brookings Institute, a US think-tank with heterogeneous funding.
The U.S. Office of Financial Research has announced that it:
launched a new website [February 3, 2015] to provide policy makers and the public better access to the OFR’s high-quality data and independent analysis that helps to promote financial stability.
The new website is at www.financialresearch.gov.
The OFR was established by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act to provide research, data, and analysis for the benefit of the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), Council member agencies, Congress, and the public.
“The launch of our new website marks a new chapter for the OFR,” OFR Director Richard Berner said. “This stand-alone site promotes transparency and accountability, and it greatly enhances our ability to provide to the public the results of our efforts to assess and monitor threats to financial stability, to fill in the gaps in financial analysis and data, and to evaluate policy tools.”
The new site contains a “Directors Blog,” biographies of senior managers, and details about OFR initiatives to collect financial data and improve data quality. The site also provides the OFR’s annual reports, working papers, staff discussion papers, and other research and analysis.
Other information on the website includes:
•An inventory of the financial data purchased, collected, and developed by FSOC member agencies;
•Updates on the OFR’s leadership on the Legal Entity Identifier, or LEI, a global data standard like a bar code for identifying parties to financial transactions; and
•Information about the OFR’s Financial Research Advisory Committee, which helps the OFR develop and employ best practices for data management, data standards, and research methodologies.“The new website helps us create our own, unique identity – which is critical for ensuring the integrity, objectivity, and independence of our work,” Berner said.
I have always admired the quality of research published by various arms of the US government. To be sure, every now and then something is highly politicized – weapons of mass destruction in Iraq come readily to mind – and even on a more mundane level, I have criticized the SEC’s report on the Flash Crash as serving more of a political than analytical purpose. But by and large, you can learn a lot from research sponsored and published by the US government.
I have added a link to the site on the right-hand navigation panel, under the heading “Recommended Official Sites”. Many thanks to Assiduous Reader MP for bringing this to my attention!
I mentioned earlier that there were problems with PrefInfo.com … for some reason my server refuses to run PHP for the site, although the PHP code runs on all the other sites (including this one!).
I haven’t been able to figure out the problem, but I’ve re-written the code for index page to be HTML, rather than PHP. There has been some loss of functionality – the last ten headlines from this blog are no longer displayed. But all the information is there, same as ever, and that’s the vital part.
I continue to try to understand what my server has against PHP, but my main hope right now is my Help Wanted ad, which you can see (for now!) in the right-hand navigation panel, right underneath “Publisher”.
My informational website PrefInfo.com is not currently working for some mysterious reason.
I have attempted to fix it in the past few days without success, but now that the weekend’s here I will be able to spend a bit more time determining what has gone wrong on my server.
If anybody can provide a little help and expertise about this, please call me or eMail. I am running the websites via Plesk under Windows.
I have been able to determine that the basic problem is that the server will no longer run PHP for PrefInfo.com, although it continues to run PHP for this site, for instance. It’s rather a shame about the PHP / PrefInfo problem, because the site is written in PHP.
I hope to have the problem resolved shortly.
User registration has now been enabled, as I have now ticked the “Membership [] Anyone can register” box in the administrative settings. You must be logged in to comment.
A link to the registration process may now be found in the right-hand navigation panel under the heading “meta”.
Sorry about that, folks!
One problem I’m having is with comment spam (many hundreds of spam comments per day) … we’ll see what changes, if any, this brings.
There are lots of ‘bots about! Within seconds – literally! – of my posting this there were registrations by “VeraJeppesen”, “WeldonWeindorfe”, and “JuliShannon”, who have many things they’d like to share with us about Mulberry outlets, wholesale jerseys and NFL jerseys.
Update, 2013-12-11: As noted in the comments:
Assiduous Readers are required to register prior to commenting on my posts, which helps reduce the volume of spam. In turn, registration requires that the A.R. respond to an eMail that will be sent automatically and immediately upon completion of the registration form
If you do not receive this eMail, it has probably been intercepted by your software or ISP as spam. Try sending an eMail to wordpress@prefblog.com; this will usually result in your being able to receive future eMails. Then you may log in; tell the machine you have forgotten your password and it will eMail one to you.
Sorry about all this rigamarole. If all else fails, send me an eMail and I’ll sort things out.
I am very relieved to announce that the importation of posts from the Old Server to the New Server has been completed, at least as far as I know. The Partial Importation took place on November 27.
I’ve also been able to upload the various images and post attachments that have accumulated over the years.
I regret that importing the posts for the last two years required me to resurrect the Old Server as the official PrefBlog host for a day; perhaps that wouldn’t have been necessary if I knew what I was doing, but it wouldn’t have been necessary if WordPress’ programmers knew what they were doing either, so I win. I’ve alerted WordPress to the problem, but it doesn’t look like anybody’s very interested.
However, I’ve lost all my links on the right-hand navigation panel. Those will be straightforward, if rather tedious, to recreate and I hope to accomplish this job in bits and pieces over the next little while.
Additionally, Assiduous Readers seeking to point out all my mistakes, absurdities and other shortcomings in the comments will have to re-register. Sorry!
