Note - from June 24th 2009, this blog has migrated from Blogger to a self-hosted version. Click here to go straight there.
The universe sometimes decides to give you a kick in the crotch at the same time as it gives you a gentle nudge towards the light. So, nobody ought to have been surprised at events which have occurred just as I was about to make a glittering debut with another interesting 'distribution channel' for my sometimes-incoherent rantings.
The negative event - the cloud around the silver lining, so to speak - is the fact that my webhosts for RantPRO have upped the ante in our little dispute about costs.
I got an e-mail from the firm (which shall for the moment remain nameless but not blameless), which stated that due to traffic they were moving the site to a dedicated server, and would therefore need to increase the costs associated with hosting the site... they named a new price which was a mere SIX TIMES the old price.
Of course, my response was simply to say "Not on your best day, lads", and invite them to refresh themselves regarding the contract.
Then I found out that the site was switched off completely - and my access to the most recent backup was also refused.
Thus, RantPRO has - for now - gone into hiatus. Oddly enough, the webhosting crowd sent me a new invoice - at the old rate - for the NEXT three months' worth of hosting, on the same day as they claimed that they were not going to reactivate the site. Odd).
And now the good news. As of this coming Monday, I will be contributing a different stream of semi-consciousness (about the Oz markets) for a new venture which has been initiated by the people who bring you The Daily Reckoning. As it stands, I am still not sure whether that means that I can lay claim to being part of Team Reckoning, but suffice it to say that I hope so.
With housing prices - even those around the median - in Sydney now really showing some signs of distress, and with high-leverage, interest-only, about-to-reset fixed-rate BTL (buy-to-let) mortgages making up an uncomfortable chunk of the banks' loan portfolios (and since WhichBank? was the big pusher of equity extraction, you will remember), I think there will be some lively musings from here on out - and of course a re-examination of the earnings multiples that banks ought to carry...
Now that I have fixed the display side of the blog (all of the code to render the blog purty was stored on RantPRO - I had to copy the CSS file into the blog template from out of an old backup of RantPRO), and now that I have finally got a QWERTY keyboard, the old Rants will begin to re-appear starting this week... as well as the musings for the DR crew. thankfully I have been reading vast amounts of completely non-market-related stuff recently (Thackeray, Waugh, Wodehouse) as well as the usual gristly diet of finance-related sites (DR, FinancialSense, 321Gold, and so on), so I am well and truly primed for a torrent of blather.
See youse all soon.
