Monthly Archives: May 2008

Doctor Who, Home Delivery Network

HDNL (Home Delivery Network)

43 Comments

Since I wrote about how the Home Delivery Network (HDL) botched a delivery of an Amazon order I placed by throwing it over a gate into a puddle, in the pouring rain, I’ve been getting loads of comments on the post. Indeed, this website has received a considerable amount of traffic from people looking for the Home Delivery Network, or at the very least, looking for complaints about them.

It’s hardly surprising though as this website ranks on the first page of Google for a search on ‘Home Delivery Network’.

Hopefully Amazon and other retailers will take note and stop using the morons at HDL for any of their deliveries.

CSA, Movies

Child Support Agency hang up on me

18 Comments

This phonecall follows on from the one I made a video for last year, it was just a few hours later. The Child Support Agency had set up a DEO with my employer for £550 per month, far more than I should be paying, and more than enough to mean I couldn’t pay the mortgage on what was mine and my-ex wife’s home.

They had already admitted their mistake in what they described as an ‘administrative error’ moments earlier in the previous phone call, but couldn’t see how their taking £550 per month from me in any way jeopardised my home as I couldn’t afford my mortgage. I guess everyone at the CSA can afford to have amounts that large taken from them and still make their mortgage payments.

My attempt to communicate this to them fell on deaf ears, especially when they realised I was recording the call.

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

Rants

Cheshire Council are shit

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Right, this morning I was ten minutes late for work. Why? Because the council are too fucking inept to do their job.

For the last few weeks there has been a sign up by Styal Golf Course saying that the road will be shut, for one day only, on May 12th. Today’s date? May 13th.

One could quite justifiably assume that the road, already declared shut for one day only yesterday, would be open today. However, one would be wrong. The sodding incompetent morons didn’t turn up yesterday, instead choosing to do it today, obviously without any frickin’ notice.

The diversion tried to go through Wilmslow, which naturally was not happening. I had to turn around and go a different route altogether, which would still have gotten me to work on time, had it not been for the roadworks on the bridge near Poynton. For fuck’s sake.

On the way home this evening, obviously the road was open as they’d finished the work???

Fuck no, still closed.

Whenever a council states that a road will be closed on <insert date> you can safely assume it will be later, and when they say it will be shut for <insert number of days> you can quite assuredly double that figure.

Why can’t they just do their job? Why are they this incompetent? How fucking hard is it to organise a day and do it?

Bastards.

Internet

Spam emails really should improve

1 Comment

We’ve all had spam emails in the past, some of us receive hundreds of the damn things each day. They’re usually very easy to spot, some more so than others. However they still get sent because generally, there are still people who fall for them.

I just received this prize winning notification email, which could be described as a classic, but I wonder if the spammers are really trying anymore.

—–Original Message—–
From: Mrs. Becky Owen [mailto:info_europeanlotterycompanydavid@yahoo.com.hk]
Sent: 06 May 2008 10:36
To: undisclosed-recipients:
Subject: [SPAM?]: REF: WE67/4360/34

EUROPEAN PRIZE AWARD DEPT
1 Plough Place,
London EC4A 1DE
UNITED KINGDOM
REF: WE67/4360/34
BATCH: 11/4578/GN

OK, so far so good. The email claims to be originating from London and there’s even an address. But wait, the email address is .hk… what’s that about?

Attn:Sir/Madam.

Top of days greetings to you.Finally today, we announce that you are one of the winners of the ELECTRONIC LOTTERY PROGRAMS.

held on 6th MAY,2008. Your company and your personal
e-mail addresses, attached to ticket number: 7-1-8-36-4-22 under agent ID: 18 and lucky ball number 7363789,which consequently won in the Tenth lottery category.

My email address and my company? I don’t have a company… I’m getting suspicious.

You have therefore been awarded a lump sum pay out of 860,641.28 Great British Pounds(GBP) which amounts to $1,500,000.00 (One Million,Five Hundred Thousand United States DOLLARS).

Now, why would they tell me the amount in US Dollars? The email is supposedly from a UK address in London, I’m based in the UK… so why mention US Dollars? I’ll tell you why, because the kind of people who usually fall for these scams are based in the USA, they’re Americans.

Americans are the most gullible race on the planet, particularly when they think there’s some sort of financial gain heading their way.

The online draws was conducted by a random selection of email addresses from an exclusive list of 29,031 E-mail addresses of individuals and corporate bodies picked by an advanced automated random computer search from the internet. No ticket were sold but all email addresses were assigned to different ticket numbers for representation and privacy. This is to encourage our prominent and consistent Microsoft Internet Explorer users all over the world, and for the Continues use of E-mail.

Whoooaaah there! Internet Explorer users??? Now I know it’s a load of shite. I haven’t used IE for years, it’s an awful browser full of security holes. It is used by Americans quite a bit though. Notice a recurring theme?

Your fund has been insured with your identification number {CPEL/OWN/9876}. To claim your winning prize, you must first contact the claims department by email for Processing and remittance of your prize to you.
***********************************
Mr. Mark David
Executive Secretary,
TEL:+447 045 740 589
+447 024 098 309
EMAIL:info_europeanlotterycompanymark2@yahoo.com.hk
**********************************
Do email the above email address all at once. In order to avoid unnecessary delays and complications, please remember to quote your reference and winning numbers in all correspondences with your claims officer.

You are to keep all lotto information away from the general public especially your ticket number and ballot number.All your personal datas are to be sent to YAHOO/MICROSOFT ACCREDITED AGENT via email for the processing of your winning.

‘personal datas’? ‘processing of your winning’? The grammar is really starting to break up. Evidently the author of this scam doesn’t use English as a first language.

FILL THE FORM BELOW WITH YOUR DATAS.

1.Full Name:____________________ 2.Address:______________________ 3.Nationality:____________________
4.Age:______________________________
5.Occupation:____________________ 6.Phone:________________________ 7.State of Origin:_________________ 8.Country:______________________ Sincerely, Mrs. Becky Owen Online Co-ordinator Secretary ====================================================

Again, if they’re in the UK, I’m in the UK, we’re all in the UK together… why ask for my STATE OF ORIGIN??? We don’t have States in the UK.

OUR Executives:
Dr. P. Swier (CEO), Mr. Gerald Goodman (Manager
Foreign Operations), Mr. Franklyn Van Der Weijden
(Manager Domestic Banking Operations), Dr. James
Williams (Director International Credit Department),
Mrs. Lonni K Anderson (Legal Representative), Mrs.
Lyudmyla Marchukova(Regional Manager), Mr. Stephen
Boer (Chairman), Mr. Chris Moritz(International
Relation Officer).

And they print out a list of impressive sounding names to give the scam credence. That’s me sold, have my bank details so you can send me the monies without delay.

Seriously, if you’re an Internet scammer, please at least try to make an effort with your emails. It’ll make all of the difference.

Affiliate Marketing, Internet, Rants

Text Link Ads refuse one of my sites

2 Comments

I just received a refusal from the advertising network Textlink-ads.com for one of my websites. This came as something of an annoyance to me, rather than a surprise, because the site itself is one of the newest of my portfolio, but one of the fastest growing.

The traffic on the website is very good, slightly below MrDaz.com presently, but should eclipse this site in the next month. However, as I said it is new. Which means it doesn’t have any Netcraft data, it doesn’t have any Google PageRank and it doesn’t have any history.

All of the useless stuff that pointless networks take into consideration when deciding whether they’ll take on a website or not.

Textlink-Ads said:

Hello Darren,

Unfortunately, at this time we feel that your site http://www.*******.com, does not meet our internal requirements to be accepted into the InLinks publishing program. We recommend that you continue marketing your website and generate a significant more amount of traffic to your site. Once you feel you have strong enough traffic — this normally takes a few months at least — you can feel free to contact us back and we will be happy to revisit the opportunity to work with you.

I was a bit annoyed and replied straight away with:

You probably shouldn’t base your decisions on Google PageRank.

Just a hint.

😉

As a consequence I won’t be using Textlink-Ads on the site even when they consider it to have met their ‘internal requirements’. I offered them the chance and they refused, their loss.

It’s frustrating but as I say, they’re the ones who will miss out.

Humour, Rants, Stolen Car

Now I’ve annoyed the Gypsies

7 Comments

You may remember when my car was stolen from the Hillcroft garage in Langstone, Newport, I put up a post calling the garage ‘thieving gypsy bastards‘. It was a comical post highlighting my anger at the garage and how my car was stolen from them, with the keys, and their ‘end of year accounts’, making the whole thing look very suspicious.

Very suspicious indeed.

Well, I’ve now had a complaint for my use of the term ‘thieving gypsy bastards’, from the Thames Valley Gypsy Association. The complaint reads:

From: Joseph G. Jones [info@gypsy-association.com]
Subject: Unpleasant remark

Please remove the term “Thieving gypsy bastards” from your website, as a community we find the term offensive.

If you wish to call the garage names feel free, but please leave us out of it.

Besides which it makes you seem like a racist.

Reagrds

Joseph G. Jones
Thames Valley Gypsy Association

Joseph found my website because I rank on the first page of Google for the term ‘Thieving Gypsy Bastards’. This site tends to rank for most phrases it uses, and will no doubt rank again for the term for this particular blog post.

However, as you can see while the original post does rank for ‘thieving gypsy bastards’ it doesn’t actually have a go at gypsies at all. It’s referencing the garage and the fact that my car was stolen from there. If I were to remove the post, my site would no longer rank for the term and more, anti-gypsy posts would rank in Google in its place.

Therefor, my post being there is helping.

Plus, the term ‘thieving gypsy bastards’ doesn’t reference gypsies at all, it’s a reference to a comic strip in Viz, which is infamous and even has its own Wikipedia page. An extract from the page reads:

The comic got in trouble with the United Nations after featuring a strip called ‘The Thieving Gypsy Bastards’; unbeknownst to the Viz editorial team at the time, Gypsies are regarded as a race under UK law and thus the comic was guilty of racism. During the resultant court case, UK newspaper The Sun ran a story revealing that the principal Roma man who initiated the action against them was in fact also being tried for, and was later found guilty of, handling stolen property.

Hilarious!

Rants

People with glasses should be neutered

12 Comments

While out this bank holiday Monday I was disgusted to see bespectacled nerds lording it around with attractive women, as if they were normal people, like the rest of us.

What sort of breeding stock are they? They can’t even see straight for fuck’s sake. It would benefit humanity if people with glasses were neutered so they couldn’t procreate, leaving the rest of us normal, able bodied people to live free of their goggle eyed interference.

I’m not saying this out of anger, I just feel the human race would benefit without the constant adverts for Specsavers and other such bollocks.

Neuter the glasses wearing community, make Britain a better sighted place to live.

Affiliate Marketing, Google, Internet

Play.com miss the point with PPC restrictions

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Today sees Google changing the rules with regards to brand bidding on its Adwords platforms, meaning that you can now bid on terms such as HMV, WHSmith and Play.com… should you wish to.

So what does this mean? Well, for one it means that you’re likely to get clued up companies bidding on the brand names of other companies, so for example Tesco may bid on the keywords ‘Asda’, ‘Sainsburys’ and ‘Morrisons’, meaning they’ll get search traffic for people looking for their competitors. There’s nothing the other companies can do about.

Or is there? What they could do is allow their affiliates to bid for them. You see, now that there are no restrictions on brand bidding, there’s nothing stopping HMV, GAME, WHSmith and everyone who sells games and DVDs bidding on the Play.com brand. Therefore, Play.com will be losing a lot of traffic and sales to their competitors. If they were smart, they’d allow their affiliates to bid on their brand name as well, meaning the affiliates would be shouldering the PPC costs for them, in exchange for the commissions. Then, anyone looking for Play.com, rather than finding their competitors, they’d find Play.com through the affiliates.

That’s if Play.com were smart. Sadly, they’re not. They’re quite stupid. They, and a great many other retailers have panicked at the change in Google’s brand restrictions and have sent out this email.

Hi Darren,

Bearing in mind the Google changes on brand bidding which come into effect on Monday, we would like to take the opprotunity to draw your attention to Play.com’s PPC restrictions:

“Unless specifically agreed in writing with Play.com, Affiliates must
not:

i) purchase, license or operate any domain name which is confusingly similar to ‘play.com’;

ii) bid on the ‘play.com’ keyword, or any of its misspellings, on any of the search engines that currently operate web services; possible derivatives of the brand term are:

Play.com
Play
Play .com
Www.play.com
Play.com uk
Play com
www play com
www Play
www.play
play dot com
playdotcom
play .com uk
Play.c
Plya
Play co
Playcouk
Play.co.uk
www.play.co.uk
play uk

and also:

Playusa
Playusa.com
Play usa
Wwwplayusa
www.play.usa
www.playusa.com
ww.playusa.com
playusa.com
play usa com
playusacom
play.usa.com
playusa.com play usa

iii) use the keyword ‘play.com’ to perform paid search activity across any search engines that operates web services  and to that effect, Affiliates must add the ‘play.com’ keyword and its derivatives as above as negative matches to their PPC campaigns.

iv) use the term Play.com or its derivatives in the Affiliate’s ad text for driving traffic from Play.com’s competitors’ brand terms to Play.com’s site nor the affiliate’s sites.

v) drive paid or unpaid traffic from search engines directly to Play.com pages or the Play.com site overall. The affiliate has to use their own sites for traffic from search engines.

For the avoidance of doubt, the above restrictions or the specific terms of agreement regarding authorised PPC activity shall supersede any conflicting provision that may be found in any section of this Agreement.

These rules are effective immediately and should the Affiliate not comply They will be banned from the Play.com affiliate programme with immediate effect and also face potential lawsuit. “

‘Face a potential lawsuit’? What are they thinking? How stupid are they?

I worry for the sanity of these people. All that will happen now is they’ll lose business to their competitors, and I hope they do. I hope they lose a lot of business. Come on GAME, HMV, WHSmith and everyone else… bid on Play.com and the rest of the keywords Play have listed above. Take the customers from them. As they won’t let affiliates bid on the terms you’ll find them quite cheap too!

Happy bidding.