Went on a pub crawl on Thursday night in Leeds as The Hoff. As you can see I take my Hoff very seriously, and just for the record (as many people on the night seemed unsure) that is NOT my hair.
All posts by MrDaz
Server downtime
You may have noticed this site has been down the last few days. You wouldn’t believe the phone calls I’ve had, seriously.
Anyway – the story goes that our server was reimaged and everything had to be backed up and reinstalled. We’re back now, and here to stay.
Rest assured that I’ll be dispensing knowledge, wisdom and insults for some time to come.
Man of the Match
Saturday night at the Cardiff Devils v Manchester Pheonix game I presented the man of the match award to the Devils and Manchester players.
Devils netminder Phil Osaer was the Devils man of the match after saving a penalty shot, and a breathtaking save with seconds remaining to win the match 4-3.
You can read the match report on the Devils website here.
Royal Sun Alliance enter the fray
Strap yourselves in, the quest to sort out my stolen car is heating up.
I was given the insurance details for Royal Sun Alliance (who are the insurer for the Hillcroft Garage) by Churchgate Insurance (who are the insurance broker for the Hillcroft Garage). I still need to get my locks changed on the car as the theives have the key, and some items were stolen as well. Churchgate were supposed to have passed all this onto RSA back in November.
Guess what? RSA had no idea about any of this. There’s a surprise. After speaking to their claims department I was passed onto Motor Liablity Claims, and then onto Commercial Claims, and then onto the Total Loss Unit. Fun and games had by all.
The Total Loss Unit said they’d post my documents back to me, and arrange an engineer to look at getting the locks changed on the car, and also find out if the ‘brand new’ engine they paid for, and BMW supplied was actually fitted in the car. I have my doubts there you see.
However, I then had a call back saying to phone the original claims number, back where I started from, because they were the only ones who could handle the claim. Seems the buck has been passed through every department of RSA before eventually coming full circle.
I am now waiting for a call back again to see what they are going to do, all the while sitting on a car I can neither tax, insure or sell.
I think this will go on for some months yet, if it gets to July it’ll be a full year!
Snowed in
Oh the weather outside is frightful, and I ain’t going nowhere (I know, that’s a double negative).
No one has got up this hill besides a land rover, so my insanely powerful rear wheel drive car on low profile slicks is staying put.
PayPal Spoof emails
Like many Internet users, I get hundreds of eBay and PayPal fake emails a month and forward the best ones on to spoof@paypal.com – but sometimes the emails are just plain lazy.
I mean, if these guys are hoping to fool people into giving them their credit card details, the least they can do is ensure they spell the sender’s name correctly. The one I received this morning was just a joke.
Just look at the way they’ve spelled ‘department’.
HMV stands for DVD
I was just checking up on some keywords I optimise some websites for, and was quite stunned – nay, in awe of hmv.co.uk’s ranking in google.co.uk for DVD. They’re #1, out of 1.2 Billion results.
Now that’s impressive.
How did they do this? It’s done through an awful lot of link building, as they have 5,000 indexed Google backlinks compared to just 108 from game.co.uk – who are a similarly sized company and website.
You see what you can achieve if you put in the work? dvd.co.uk, play.com and of course amazon.co.uk all rank inside the top 10 as well.
It’s sort of comforting to see the high street retailers getting to grips with ecommerce in a big way.
SEO Contest
In an attempt to steer this blog back onto the topic for which it was created, I’m posting this link to the SEO contest results from last March.
I don’t think I’ve added this before, but I may have done whilst drunk, so apologies if I have. This was the contest run by v7n.com, where I finished 7th. Here are the top 10 placings in the final shake-up. Notice how a Transformers website stands out like a saw thumb?
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