Had a late notice 2 weeks ago that I need to travel to US for a workshop meeting. Naturally, I am expecting the travel fare to be either expensive at this late hour of reservation, or with a cheap but undesirable itinerary. And no prize for guess what’s the outcome. In all fairness, there was no available flight to fly directly to San Fransisco, even I was willing to take the worst possible airline you can find in the earth. There were two alternative flights proposed to me by the travel agency. Both were travel-round-the-world-just-to-get-to-SFO type of flights. But the SQ flight is twice the cost of the Emirate flight, and therefore I ended up flying to San Fransisco via Dubai from Singapore. 27 hours to SFO, and 31 hours when I came home. Torturous experience, enough said!

Then today I was curious about a problem on google analytics service which I encountered 3 months ago. Google analytics is one of the free services offered by Google (duh!), which enables one to analyse the web traffic to one’s web site.  It started off well when I first subscribed to the service, but a month later, all of sudden the service registered zero web traffic (or at most 5 visits per week type of traffic), and I made a report to Google’s “self service help desk” only to find out that I’m not the only one encountering this problem. After few correspondences, it didn’t look like I’m getting any attention of Google staff to make any good progress, so I gave up, thinking that the problem might resolved by itself somehow if given some time. Fast forward to now, at least 3-4 months after the problem occured, I logged into my analytics account, and found out that the problem remains unresolved. Well, what do you expect from a free service?  And the ironical thing is that the tracking web site is actually a Google-hosted site, subscribed via their free google site service.

There’s no free lunch in this world.