Blackhat SEO - Esrun

Quick post

This is just a quick post with no real seo focus.

To start with, I have a special promo for Boysstuff this week! 25% of anything in their catalog. Okay their prices are a little high to start with but with 25% off they’re pretty good! Just use the coupon code RTN25 before 31/03/2008.

The old saying is that the way to a mans heart is threw his stomach.. the way to an SEOs contacts or knowledge also seems to be the same way as I recieved a box of kitkats today from SEOIdiot as a bribe lol! He knows I would tell him anyway but he does like to have his little jokes. So thanks for that

 

I’m going to be doing a few posts on targeted offline spamming</strike> I mean advertising soon. I’m sure everyone has thought about it before so keep an eye out for the future posts

I’m also going to start offering online versions of some of my scripts so you can use them quickly online without having to download them and put them on your own hosting

ukskydiving.com moan

So 2 days ago I book a sky dive with ukskydiving.com who are “North london parachute Centre”.. North london my arse, it’s in March, Cambridge and cost me a ridiculous 4 hours travelling (1 hour into London then 3 onwards) and the ticket from London to March station was £77! What a joke, they want people to use public transport but its dog slow and costs a fortune. Fuck the environment, I can’t afford to care for the environment with prices like these.

The guys at the airfield said the weather has been terrible and unsuitable for days so I’m not sure why ukskydiving.com let me book it just 2 days ago knowing full well it was absolutely more than likely I’d be wasting my time and money. What a load of bollocks.

Its my birthday and I’ll cry if I want to

Well It was my birthday and I turned upto the office to find a tin of strongbow, carlsberg and blackcurrent to make a snakebite in the morning wahey!!!!

I went out with good old mates in the evening to nandos, keeping it real with good quality and well priced food. Although the alcohol is a little over priced. A mate bought me the new radio 1 live lounge CD so I tried to get them to play it while we ate the food but supposedly the CD is “incompatible” with their CD system… rightttttt…

After the food we went onto a quality bar in Southend and bought a couple bottles of laurent pierre champagne. After buying a couple bottles of the champaigne and some shots they were happy to play my CD and put on some tunes which other people in the bar obviously weren’t enjoying all that much.

I went to the bar again at about 11:20pm and they wouldn’t serve me because their licence only went upto 11PM but after offering the bar guy £20 ($40) her sold us another bottle of champaigne which was cool, even if he did get all pissy about one poxy broken glass.

After the bar we went down to the casino and I logged my friends in as guests and we continued to drink ciders, shots and lagers.

I pulled one of the bouncers to a side and asked about strip clubs.. there was two He recommended and one was in Southend. Unfortunately the Southend one had already closed at half midnight so we drove to the Basildon one but when we arrived there they wouldn’t let us in because only half hour was left at the club so I offered some money to get in but they wanted £40 ($80) per person to get in, even though some other people were allowed in without hassle. So I told them they were trying to mug me off, especially since there’s only 30 mins left and it got a little lary. After two big guys and a smaller guy told me I should just leave I was happy to just say “Okay you were trying to mug me off but I know when it’s time to leave” so that was the end of my night.

It was a good birthday keeping it real in Southend

Random: Moro reflex

Well this post is a bit of a random slightly drunk post… but hey its my blog so I can do that!

I was browsing Digg earlier and came across a story about the Moro Reflex in babies. So most people I have tried to talk to about this think I’m just crazy but oh well! It seems to be that when babies are born, for a long time they have this reflex where if they’re dropped they put their arms out straight away, it’s presumed to try catch something to stop themselves falling. It’s quite interesting and quite funny at the same time.

Example video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2508818082092298520

Anyway, I was in the bathroom this evening and looking in the mirror, I stumbled back in a tired/sleepy way and straight away my arms went up. It really made me laugh.

So there you go, a sad and random post.

Macbook pro warranty

Well some readers will remember that about 10 months ago I purchased a macbook pro and have been using it pretty much constantly since and it has been a joy. Unfortunately along the way a few problems did start to appear.

Macbook pro pitting paint

After about 2-3 months of using the laptop it started to develop loads of little black dots where my palms rested, pretty much wrecking the appearance of the laptop. I called to report this to apple expecting them to offer to fix it but instead they told me it was a cosmetic issue which wasn’t covered by warranty. This got me pretty mad considering their warranty states defective materials and If you ask me it wasn’t upto the task of what it was built for and certaintly didn’t last a reasonable amount of time before becoming damaged which to me indicates it to be a defective material! The problem is discussed throughout the internet but apple refuse to accept it as a problem. Anyway I figured that it doesn’t really impact the use of the laptop other than the resale price and of course appearance if used in a meeting or such like so I decided to just ignore it and carry on. The image below shows the problem, although mine was much worse than this.

Fading paint on strip under keyboard on macbook

Soon after another issue appeared which is a strip just under the keyboard which also started to show paint issues. Again I ignored this since I knew what the responce from Apple would be.

Red light coming on when unplugging headphones from macbook

Sometimes I would unplug my headphones from the laptop and a red light would come on where you plug in the 3.5mm headphone jack and it would disable my speakers. I searched for this problem and found out it was a little switch in the hole which enabled/disabled digital output for fibre or something like that. To get around this you simply plug in and remove the headphones several times until it resolves itself.

After experiencing a few more issues I decided to take the laptop into an apple store before the 1 year warranty ran out. Handy tip for those thinking about buying a mac… buy from a John Lewis store and you will get an extended warranty of 2 years.

Right hinge worn out

Macbook latch doesn’t work causing it to not close properly

Optical drive wont eject disks (Resolved by blowing into the drive and then hitting eject, oddly enough!)

When I showed the “genius” my macbook he said it was the worst condition he’d ever seen a mac laptop in and that he’d been working there for many years. I tried to explain that I used the laptop every day and wasn’t just your average user but he just said “Well most people use their laptops everyday”. Oh well, I couldn’t be bothered to explain the different between those who use their laptop and those who really use their laptops, if you get what I mean. He argued that the issues were cosmetic and unlikely to be covered by the warranty but to leave the laptop with them and they’d let me know. He asked me to sign a form which confirmed that I was leaving the laptop with them and that I had declined the £30 backup, I duly signed the form and left the shop with my laptop in their hands. I declined the backup because the harddrive has only just been replaced with stock HD so doesn’t contain any sensitive information, just the operating system.

Anyway, I left the store after about 30 minutes of talking to the genius and giving him all the information about me and my macbook. I got into my car and started to read through the form he got me to sign and it had some text about possible charges and T&C in faint on the back. I was a little annoyed that he advised the form was simply to confirm I was leaving it with them and declined the backup when infact it discusses possible fees etc. Okay fair point you should read all documents in full before you sign them but when someone explains to me what the form is that I’m signing then I generally just accept what they say and sign the document, especially when its somethign so trivial like warranty issues. Annoyed about this and the fact that they were arguing issues which i consider to be covered within warranty I wrote to(well, emailed) Steve jobs on saturday and this morning I recieved a call from a rep on his behalf who spoke to the staff in the apple shop and sorted everything out for me.

Provided it has all indeed been sorted out then I think I’ll buy the new imac when I go to pick my macbook up. I’m a little annoyed that I have had so much hassle getting warranty issues resolved because I have had ipods replaced with pretty much no questions asked in the past so I expected a similar level of service. If there are continuing issues with this warranty claim then I’ll probably not buy the imac just out of principal. I can get dell systems for half the price and with next day business replacement for half the price of the mac systems. Okay I admit it will not look or feel as nice but I reckon I could get over that knowing that if/when something goes wrong they will be on it straight away. You can install mac os x on a standard pc now anyway so that’s not a problem! Get a bog standard dell system, install os X, plug in a mighty mouse and mac keyboard, job done

Back to Europe

Regular readers will remember that I went over to Europe and drove around a bit about a month and a half ago… well I have decided that I want another little break so I’m going back! I just booked an 8pm ferry tomorrow night to Dunkurque and a return ferry Midnight on tuesday.

If anyone has any suggestions on where I should go then let me know! I’ll be looking over flash earth tonight to see what my options are, I love driving through different countries so no matter where I go it should be good.

The funny thing is I have spent forever looking at new cars since I think it’s about time I bought a nice car. I currently drive a rather basic renault clio but only drive about 10 miles a day so there’s never been a good reason to get a decent car. Anyway I have spent so much time looking at new cars but no time at all on this trip lol oops.

Comment if you have any suggestions

Update: I decided to go see a friend tonight and have a few drinks(read: A LOT of drinks) since I’m going away and he plays guitar quite well and made a song up on the fly which I recorded on my cell phone so I thought i’d stick it up here …*file removed. back 14th july*

Legal action against spam hunters

Every now and then you get a new boy scout who feels it’s their duty to go hunting for spammers and “out” them to the public. They wont do something constructive like come up with a real solution, such as improving captcha systems.. no because that takes brains! They just fixate on certain people and spend all their free time (highlights their sad lives) trying to track down spam and make a big deal about it.

I don’t know if spamhunters are stupid or naive but outing someone as a spammer won’t stop them spamming, at worst they’ll loose a batch of sites. Everyone I know in this business builds sites over different domains, servers and whois details so you would never actually close down someones whole operation.

Sometimes I feel that it is necessary to take legal action against people to protect my reputation, often these people make libel comments online and think they can just get away with this - they cannot. I was speaking to a friend this morning about taking action against someone who has been making comments which I consider defamation of my character and they said they weren’t 100% if the comments would be considered libel…… Okay fair enough I said but the bottom line is most people don’t want to go to court or simple can’t afford it. Even if I loose its going to cost them a reasonable amount of money defending themselves which should teach them a good lesson.

I’m laid back enough to take shots against me, take the piss out of me.. but it goes one step further when people start trying to publish details about you and make you out to be a criminal. Even if the information is already public and known by most, its just the intention made by these people that bugs me.

Back in the U.K

Well I just arrived back home and it’s nice to be able to lay back in my own place. I got stopped for a “random” customs search and I ended up stuck there answering questions for 30 minutes or so. The main problem was that I was unable to provide any proof of where I had been staying within the EU. One comment made by a customs officer which made me laugh was “And you know it’s illegal to bring guns and drugs back into the country?”… why on earth would it be LEGAL!?

Some pics… Some were taken while driving so aren’t that great.

My route:

Random:

Eiffel tower:

The police in Paris chased after this vehicle and stopped it in front of the lights I was waiting at. After a short time they had the other people from the car in cuffs and on the floor:

When in Belgium I think there was a football (soccer) match on or something and there was such a huge police and military presence.

Ugh good morning amsterdam

lol its about 5a.m and I’m feeling a bit rough. I got chatting with a couple of canadian guys in one of the ‘coffee bars’ yesterday and ended up spending the day with them getting pretty wasted. We went on the hienikken factory tour where you’re given 3 tokens to get beers while walking around but people keep giving us their tokens because they didn’t have time or just didn’t want to drink… we had a hell of a lot to drink there. I’m feeling a little worse for wear this morning but oh well I’m off to Dunkerque now.

Amsterdam here I am

I didn’t get a chance to go online last night but I did make it to Belgium.. I stayed in Brussels. To be honest I didn’t think much of Belgium. It was okay I guess but it just seemed a bit … I dunno just not that Great.

I have literally just pulled into Amsterdam and there are hundreds of open wifi points which beats paying 4.50 euro an hour! Looks good, I think a lot of places are closed though because its sunday and/or because its early. Oh well I’m off to explore now.