Mr Daz becomes an affiliate of More Than Insurance

If you remember a few weeks ago I applied to the affiliate scheme for Direct Line Insurance, the company who paid out the wrong person after my car was stolen and then recovered, and placed a stolen car marker on it refusing to release it for over a year. Consequently my car was in limbo while I continued to pay the loan on it and Direct Line refused to speak to me, save for to insist I hand the car over to them.

Well they refused this website’s entry into their affiliate scheme, which at least shows they pay attention when someone is going to ridicule them some more.

Royal & SunAlliance on the other hand, owned by More Than Insurance, haven’t been quite so careful. I’ve just been accepted into the More Than affiliate scheme, so can monetise my Royal & SunAlliance blogs with More Than adverts.

In case you’re unfamiliar where Royal & SunAlliance come into this, they’re the company who should have fixed my car after it had been recovered, and still haven’t done it some 15 months later.

If you would like a full recap on just how Direct Line Insurance and Royal & SunAlliance have cocked up simply read all of the blogs under the stolen car tag.

Michael Jackson Thriller costume for Halloween

If you remember last Halloween I bought two costumes, not sure if they’d both arrive in time. I bought a Michael Jackson Thriller jacket on eBay and a Jedi Knight Star Wars costume from Cloth Ears.

I decided to wear the Jedi costume, as it was marginally more expensive, and that proved to be a wise choice (as the photos in last year’s Halloween blogs show).

Well this year it’s the turn of Jacko and the Thriller costume. Now, I only have the Thriller leather jacket as I didn’t buy the full costume pictured here, so I’ll need to find some red trousers from somewhere, and a mullet wig… who do I know who has a mullet? Hmm…

Any road, it’ll be a good night and I will no doubt end up drunkenly busting some Thriller dance moves at some point, so expect the photos to make it here eventually.

Google Penalises Blogs

As the SEO Ninjas reported yesterday Google have been penalising websites all over the Internet in terms of their visible PageRank. Some sites have been hit as hard as dropping from a PR10 to a PR6. Perennial Google victim John Chow, who due to a previous Google punishment doesn’t even rank for his own name, has dropped from a PR6 to a PR4.

The popular theories for these punishments range from selling paid links to simply removing Google’s Adsense (not much chance of me doing that ;)). It must be said though that even with PageRank penalties such as these it shouldn’t effect your SERPs at all.

The fact that MrDaz.com is unaffected is actually slightly offensive. Why haven’t I been penalised? Ah well, never mind.

Adsense Ad Management

Google are making changes to their Adsense in the next few weeks to allow you to update ad styles from within the management console. This means you’ll no longer have to open up Dreamweaver, notepad or remote directly into a server to edit the code. This is great because it means the Adsense ads will be as easy to update as Affiliate Window’s widgets and CJ’s pools, giving more control from a single place.

I’m looking forward to this. I need to change all of my ads to incorporate full custom channel reporting so I’ll wait for this new system to roll out first.

Schools tell parents their kids are fat

It was revealed yesterday that plans are afoot for UK schools to give the parents of over weight kids a letter telling them they are fat.

I’m wondering if this has been thought through properly. I mean, first off how demoralising would that be for the kids? The teacher gives them a letter to hand to their parents that reads something like:

Dear Mr and Mrs Lucking,

It has come to our attention that your child Adam is fat. Please stop feeding him chips.

Regards,

Stoke Comprehensive

So you see? That’s not going to fill the kid with confidence. Secondly, do they not think the parents are aware their kids are fat? Where do they think all the pies are going?

Stupid bloody government idea.

So much anger, so little time