General

Up, up and away!

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This weekend I finally managed to take off on the taster flying lesson I’d been given in February. Despite booking the flight three times, it had always been cancelled as a result of bad weather (raining, Liverpool, who’d have guessed) and I’d had to rebook it.

This weekend the weather was good and I finally piloted a plane for the first time from Liverpool airport with Merseyflight Flying School.

One requirement for flying the two seater aircraft was that I weighed under 16 stone (which I now do, but didn’t when the flight was booked) and I can see why that’s so important as the plane itself is paper light. The instructor pushed the plane, one handed, onto the runway before we boarded. It was that damn light!

Anyhow, after squeezing into the cockpit, and positing my legs so they weren’t hindering the wheel, we set off for a quick flyby of Liverpool, where we soared over Anfield, Goodison Park and even saw Blackpool in the distance – which I was informed would take about 20 minutes to reach. The experience was excellent, and I picked up my logbook which details the 30 minute flight – counting it towards one of my main goals in life, attaining a pilot’s licence!

I am definitely going again and recommend it to anyone. The whole flight was also recorded on camera, and I should be getting the footage on DVD in the next few days. I’ll add that to YouTube and get it on here as soon as I have it.

Internet, SEO

UK SEO company uses my website for forum spam

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I received an email last week, through one of my other websites, from a company that specialises in e-cigarettes. E-cigarettes are electronic cigarettes that are used to help quit smoking, as they’re better for you than smoking real cigarettes and you can even smoke them in pubs and bars as they don’t actually produce real smoke (many produce a vapour). Anyhow, I digress; a firm that sells these e-cigarettes contacted me because of the recent Google updates that crack down on dodgy links, spam links and irrelevant links. It seems one of my websites has been linking to their website in an act of SEO spam… me? Surely not!

Indeed not, as SEO spam isn’t something I engage in. However, many other people who claim to offer SEO services aren’t so ethical, and a Transformers forum I run had been used by this firm’s SEO company to build dodgy links. A profile had been created on the forum, linking to the e-cigarette website in the home page field of the profile.

tf-forum

This is a common spam practice and one that many dodgy link builders and spammers have used for many years. Spam link builders will create profiles on forums, adding links to the target of their SEO, and often never intended to even post a single thread. It’s one of the easiest ways to build worthless links, and one of the lowest pieces of link building spam.

Anyhow, the e-cigarette firm (ecigarettedirect.co.uk by the way) asked me to remove the link as they were aware of Google cracking down on this kind of spam. Their request stated:

Google has recently made some major changes to their algorithm and we are taking action to remove certain links in order to keep within their Webmaster Guidelines moving forwards. As a result of this action please can you remove the link from your page and let me know when it’s been removed.

This all seemed fair enough. They had probably received a notification from Google about unnatural links and, as Google requested, were trying to get them removed. In our mutual interests I have removed the link by deleting the profile, but I did ask them which SEO company they used and who was responsible for this spam. They stated it was webpromotionuk.co.uk – an SEO company based in Birmingham, run by a chap named Steve Hill.

Steve – this spam link to ecigarettedirect.co.uk was only added in March, so whether you’re building these links yourself or (as is more likely) outsourcing to someone offshore to do them, you really need to change your link building tactics. Things have moved on quite a bit in the field of SEO, and spamming the crap out of one of my forums isn’t going to get you anywhere.

CSA

CSA worker steals money from parents

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This story, just posted on CSAhell.com, made me physically sick. A CSA case worker named Clair Jones has just been jailed for ONLY 12 weeks after she systematically stole money from parents (PWCs and NRPs) to fund her own lifestyle. This hideous woman stole almost £7,000 in a period between 2009 and 2011 to pay off loan sharks – and complained that she had bills to pay, her child benefit had been stopped and she’d had car trouble.

What is worse is that this disgusting woman was only caught after the CSA investigated why a father hadn’t received a £400 refund he was due, only to find she’d paid it into her own account. The defending solicitor is even going to appeal the disgraceful 12 week sentence, and claimed she intended to ‘pay it back’.

clair-jones

What utter crap. This stain on society had no intention of paying anything back at all. The magistrate who sent her down for this pitiful sentence even said the thefts only stopped when she was caught. I hope she never works again, though I imagine she’ll go straight back into employment at the CSA as she seems a typical employee from what I’ve seen – she could even be employee of the month for this.

You can read the full story here.

Humour, Internet

Fire Safety Notice for the Social Network User

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Are you an avid social network user, more interested in Tweeting than actually ‘talking’ to people? If you are, you’re probably uninterested in typical safety notices, the boring ones, telling you about what to do if someone has an accident or if there’s a fire. If this does sound like you (or your staff) then you’ll want this Fire Notice for Social Network enthusiasts.

You can download a print quality version of the notice at StuckOn.

Fire Safety Notice for the Social Network User

via

CSA

CSA Calculator WordPress Plugin

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If you remember a while ago I posted about a CSA Calculator over at CSAhell.com. The calculator attempts to make sense of the way the CSA works out how much money it wants NRPs to pay. Well, when I say it attempts to make sense – it calculates the total based on their calculations, and it does it correctly, but whether that actually makes sense or not is another matter.

Anyhow – if you run your own website in WordPress there is now a CSAhell.com CSA Calculator WordPress Plugin you can use. You can download the WP Plugin from here and install it on your WordPress website, and offer your website’s visitors the calculator so they too can see just how much the CSA is trying to screw them over.

Isn’t that nice?

CSA Payment Calculator




Complaints

SWALEC and the disappearing invoice

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Forgive me Internet for it’s been a while since my last complaint. I recently moved house for work reasons and found the house in which I am now living had a pre-pay meter for gas and electric (the last tenant was a bill dodging scally by all accounts). Naturally I had no intention of being one of those ‘top-up-Tommies’ who scuttles down to Londis every week to put £10 on his ‘leccy card, so insisted the letting agent had the meters removed. They agreed, only I had to do it myself and present them with an invoice for reimbursement. Not a problem I thought, I’m a landlord myself so sounds reasonable.

Anyhow, I telephoned SWALEC, who controlled the electric, and asked about getting the chavmaster 2000 meter removed and a normal one put in. They said it was no problem, and could be done within a few days. Excellent, we’re onto a winner. I then asked about the invoice for the landlord. ‘No problem’ the girl said, we’ll get one sent out to you.

All seemed fine, dandy, ship-shape, Bristol fashion and every other naff phrase meant to express satisfaction with the circumstances. The meter was replaced, job done.

Several days went past. These days turned into a week, and no invoice. I telephoned SWALEC again, this time getting through to a Scottish call-centre rather than the Cardiff one to which I previously spoken (not sure if this relevant, just setting the scene) and a rather blunt chap told me they don’t do invoices.

Errrm… what now? I explained the situation, that I’d been told one would be sent out and why I needed it. He wasn’t having any of it; they don’t do ‘invoices’ or ‘bills’.

Despite my protestation that I had already been informed (before I signed up, funny that) that an invoice would be sent and that I needed one for the letting agent he just kept repeating ‘we don’t do them’. I then asked that I, as a landlord also, would need the bill or invoice in order to submit it for my self-assessment if it were my house, as my landlord will no doubt also need to do and, yep, he repeated again ‘we don’t do those’.

How are SWALEC allowed to take money for a service and not provide a receipt or payment or invoice when requested?

Finally a manager agreed to send me a letter detailing what I have paid for and what I paid, although it won’t include VAT as she can’t work that out so, if my landlord is VAT registered, they can’t claim that back.

You can get a bloody receipt at a car bot sale, never mind from one of the largest energy providers in the UK.

Worse yet, when I tweeted about the debacle as it was happening I received a reply from @SWALEC almost immediately. Seems if you have a problem you need to go public, rather than phone up to complain. Phone calls can be ignored. Anything you’re told can be denied. Twitter is the way forward.

Internet

You must be logged in to comment with that email address

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If you’ve been trying to comment on a WordPress blog and you’ve come across this message:

You must be logged in to comment with that email address.

It appears to be a problem WordPress hosted sites are having at the moment. There is a thread on WordPress about this, but the WP guys themselves haven’t commented or said they’re working on anything.

Personally I suspect it’s not an error, or a problem of any kind, but instead some anti-spam security they’ve enabled to prevent people from spamming websites with comments using certain email addresses.

Anyhow, if you’ve seen this message today or yesterday, or your website’s visitors have reported not being able to comment, this is why.

Internet

MySQL server has gone away – where has it gone?

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For reasons best left alone at this stage, I operate a Windows 2003 Server and have chosen to install PHP and MySQL on it so I can use WordPress. Together with an ISAPI Filter, I can do everything on there that you can do on an Apache Server (more or less). The trouble is… well, the trouble is Microsoft really. Whenever something goes wrong you’re on your own looking for why, and end up trawling through forums and websites where everyone pretty much says the same thing… why have you installed PHP and MySQL on a Windows Server?

The latest Microsoft-astrphe came when all of the WordPress sites went down, with the error message of ‘cannot establish database connection’. Upon attempting to access PHP MyAdmin, I found that too had failed and I couldn’t login to any of the databases. The error message spat out here was:

#2002 Cannot log in to the MySQL server

Oh dear.

This website offered some useful advice on checking whether the connection to MySQL was working or not. After following their advice I found that, in fact, it wasn’t. The reason given for this was, rather distressingly, outputted as:

“MySQL server has gone away”

This is indeed a worrying message. After searching online for solutions, this website proved helpful. But where has the MySQL server gone? Where are the databases? And we have now lost all of them?

I then tried to use the Microsoft Web Platform Installer to see if it could create a new WP install, and a new MySQL database. After following all the usual steps, it failed. The excuse given included the line:

“an existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host”

I then upgraded the version of PHP on the server, hoping that would have an effect. It didn’t. Looking at websites that talked about editing the php.ini file, or editing files within PHP MyAdmin also proved unhelpful.

Finally, the solution presented itself. Due to the stupid way that Windows Servers tend to be partitioned, and the fact that the MySQL, SQL, Logfiles and various other important stuff resides on the C Drive, the space on the drive had reduced to such a degree that the MySQL Server had decided enough was enough, and it was off. This may sound stupid, or simplistic, but that was indeed the case.

After a few moments deleting as many Logfiles as I could afford to lose the MySQL Database reappeared, as if by magic, and all of the sites worked once again. So, if you are also running PHP and MySQL on a Windows Server and you’ve found that, suddenly, your website cannot connect to the database, before you go foraging around on forums and attempting to upgrade PHP or meddle with the php.ini file, just free up some space.

So much anger, so little time