What’s wrong with the story?
First - it was not a bailout. We loaned AIG the $85 billion in exchange for about 80% control of the company which makes us the US taxpayer now majority owner in one of the largest insurance companies in the world. In exchange for this loan, we got warrants and a fairly nice interest rate, which means if the company is managed well, maybe we can make some money out of this transaction.

Second - Executives? What exactly does that mean? A lot of big companies normally call their sales force “account executives” or “sales executives” in order to pump up their egos. In this case, it seems most of the folks attending the conference were indepedent insurance agents (not AIG employees) who had earned this luxury spa conference as a sales incentive that was planned over a year ago and probably awarded well before the company hit the financial crisis.

You can still criticize the spending if you want, but remember that we now own this company and stand to be impacted by its performance. If we fail to deliver on rewards promised to indepedent contractor insurance agents some time ago, they might not be interested in representing our company very well in the future.

The press really missed this one and got everybody all riled up over false stories, just as they did with the “great $700 billion bailout to the fat cats on wall street” story which also is not a bailout, won’t cost us $700 billion and doesn’t go to the fat cats on wall street.

Did I mention that I don’t like the press?

Its too bad you skipped the Awards banquet, as it was a great time! I definitely enjoyed meeting you this year and hanging out around the fire pit was a great way to wind down each evening.

Hopefully I’ll see you again next year in Galveston!

re: changing your site around – If what you want to do is have people type in “wazika.net” and see the content that’s currently on “wazika.net/quatschen.html,” probably the easiest thing to do is just rename “quatschen.html” to “index.html” on your server. Of course, that has the potential of wreaking all kinds of havoc on your site navigation, links from inside your content, etc., depending on how you built all that stuff in the first place.

So, pretty much, what you’d do is this:

1. Make a backup of your whole site — pages, database, images, everything.
2. Rename “quatschen.html” to “index.html”
3. Rebuild the broken parts of your nav structure
4. Check the rest of your site for broken links. It’s probably easiest to use some sort of automated tool like http://www.dead-links.com/.
5. Drink a gin & tonic knowing that your site is now more beautiful than ever before. Or at least things work the way you want them to.

-aj

Hm. My point. I had one, I am sure. Ah right. As for the folks who changed it…maybe they wanted some updates and didn’t want to impose on you again.

But to sooth your soul, it wouldn’t hurt to send them an email saying you check out the site and wished them luck. Boy I wish I had better advice.

I want advice on my website! I want to know 1. Is it hard to change my domain to the main part of my page — as in … right now it’s http://www.wazika.net/quatschen.html and what I want is for it to be straight up http://www.wazika.net

How would one go about doing that without their head exploding?

@Kevin: We actually went to Gino’s East since that’s where the rest of the crowd was headed. We had good pie and a double helping of Chi-Town attitude form our waitress, so we made sure to leave her a big tip. ;)