Glytch Blog

Intense Debate

2011-01-24T11:06:00.000Z

Updating intense debate comments

New Blog at FiddyP

2007-09-10T09:23:00.000Z

I've not posted on here for so long because of the move to my new permanent blog at
www.fiddyp.co.uk

please come and visit me there and see about my wordpress plugins, widgets, php tutorials and much more!

2007-07-26T17:53:00.001Z

Example Privacy Statement

2007-01-13T11:12:00.000Z

I searched all over for something to add to my latest campaign splash page "Save Your Driving Licence" and finally found this simple statement of privacy:

Privacy Statement

“Personal information collected by TheEmpireGroup is for the primary purpose of membership requirements and/or competition purposes. It will not be released for any form of commercial gain and will be maintained in a secure location as per the requirements of the Privacy Act."

Simple enough!

Code snippets shall appear here

2007-01-09T22:31:00.000Z

I've been doing many a coding session lately and I've learned an awful lot with php so in an aide to helping me in the future when I come up with a familiar problem I have decided to add snippets of php code here so I can come back and learn from myself...

today I had the error:

syntax error, unexpected $end in /blahblah

it was relating to php code in a webpage, turns out I forgot to close a while loop with a } curly bracket.

I wrote some code to keep a log of stats on one of my pages because the original 3rd party stats code I was using suddenly stopped working. I spent a while coming up with this code

remind myself for the future that if I am checking two statements in a while loop so it stops on and end of file OR flag to use && and not ||. if I use OR then the loop will execute if either is true. To stop the loop if any of the statements turn false I must use AND (&&). doh!

I wrote the code, got it working and put it in the page in place of the original 3rd party code and it still wouldn't show up!

further investigation found it to be when I had used an iframe> command, if you don't close it with /iframe> then html table code below it wont be displayed.

So I never needed to write any code! 'twas fun tho

Wireless Phones from Wirefly - ring ring!

2007-01-07T13:39:00.000Z

*** Paid Review ***

With the gamut of mobile phone operators on the internet today it's hard finding a supplier that can live up to their websites look and actually deliver a good quality phone on a realistic tarrif.

Wirefly is one such company and when combined with the reliability of T-Mobile handsets you can be sure of a good connection on the latest phones.

The process is simple, visit the site and click on the phone of your choice. Once there, enter your zip code to see what offers are available for that phone. For example, I chose the BlackBerry Pearl and entered in 90210 and it came back with a super deal of 1000 minutes for just 39.99 a month!

How can you be sure you will get the service you expect and not have your credit card details passed on to 3 levels of affiliates before it reaches the supplier? See all the certificates from Verisign, Trust-E and Scan Alert ? they're there only because the company you are dealing with is the company you are paying.

If you're not into phones then you must know someone who is, sign yourself up to their affiliate site and start making money just by recommending people to the site, once they buy a phone you will be rewarded with commission. sweet.

Buy Wireless Phones here

*** end paid review ***

See through (girls locker room) walls!

2006-12-13T21:26:00.000Z

Here's a nifty gadget for 'checking' if there is anyone in the bathroom.. It's a briefcase sized gadget that can map what's on the other side of walls.

The position of each subject is clearly indicated on the screen, and people can be tracked as they move, to build information on behaviour and room layout.

It's made by a UK company and is called a Prism 200, you can get one for a mere 35 grand (UK money so that's like a gazillion american dollars or something). I checked their website and they don't seem to have a wishlist facility like Amazon so it doesn't look like I'll be getting one anytime soon!

Want to come to England to get work experience?

2006-12-11T17:44:00.000Z

** Paid Review **

I know a lot of people want to come to the UK to experience the culture (and night-life!) but many find it hard to get a job placement simply because it's easier for most companies in the UK to hire locally.

If you're from another country and you want to visit England on a more than 2 week basis you really need to take a look at Intern Town. They provide a portal for people from all around the world to find a placement as an intern for UK companies.

An intern is an unpaid position but there are many great advantages to being one,

It will be an excellent addition to your CV.
It will allow you to explore an industry that you have always wanted to get involved with.
With some companies it is the ONLY way you can get your foot in the door
Employers will see that you're interested in their industry
Internships can lead directly to paid employment.
Some companies help by providing accomodation to interns
You may qualify for funding from your university
Employers may offer you a monthly salary if you show promise

If you know what skills you posses but you are not sure what type of job you are suited for then an internship gives you the chance to see what sort of jobs are available in a particular industry.

At the Intern Town site you can register for free and soon you could be like :

Andres from Spain -

I have really enjoyed my internship, especially as it was my first proper job in the UK. I had been working as a chef and kitchen porter before this but this is proper work.

or Steffie from Germany -

I have really improved my English. Moving to a new country and culture also makes you more independent. Because of the work, I have learnt technical English while having a lot of fun in the office. The internship has also given me great work experience (which looks good on the CV) and a chance to make friends abroad!

Intern Town also take registrations from companies who have internships to offer, companies have found interns to be a valuable asset to their workforce and many offer the right people permanent paid positions after the internship has finished.

Check them out at www.interntown.com

** end paid review **

The bloggenmeister

2006-11-20T10:04:00.000Z

hehehe, I've blogs galore missus!

What a merry time, my internet life and sites have took off and are almost under complete control. Time to list my sites (the ones I update at least once a week)

I have my lottery blog which has had a surge of new unique visitors these past two months due to my increased activity in offline promotion where my blog url has nice positioning. [PR5]

I have my xbox-360-videos blog which is getting more and more traffic on it due to my xbox 360 videos search swiki. I'm getting a click or two on the google adsense ads there. [PR0]

I have my VWD eLottery site which is also getting increased hits, my signup rate has risen nicely over the past month, the group signup rate has rocketed! That's what I like !!! [PR4]

I have my affiliate training portal site, I redesigned it recently and added some great affiliate training videos which are not only helping my team and other visitors to perform their PC duties better - they are actually earning me a few dollars a day in adsense! [PR4]

I have my Empire Group Forum site which I keep just for my downline members, templates and specific advertising ideas go in there for the whole group (NOT the whole world) to share. I might even put some advertising on there and open up a few of the forums to the public. [PR4]

I have my Mentoring For Free Blog which is continuing to get organic visitors each day, some good articles there that I wrote myself. I will be adding some more prospect capture there soon and continue to keep it updated with my mentoring efforts (which are much better! thanks Mr. Dlouhy) [PR4]

I have my Adsense Journey Blog which is mainly for me, I like to keep a record of what I'm doing with adsense even though I'm not steaming ahead and making a gazillion sites just for putting ads on. [PR0]

I also have my Glytch Blog which has been going for a while where I can put posts up that don't apply to anywhere else and it's nice to have a black screen blog (I know I know!). [PR4]

I have my 24-7 Income Generator site which has a simple front page but hosts the autoresponders and newsletter software for my various capture pages. I really must update the front page to a more recent competition! [PR3]

I have a single splash page for a Free Play Lottery entry for my VWD site, that gets me some nice prospects and is a great URL to have on promotional material. [PR3]

I have my Lottery Topsites page which is only a couple months old and already has 60 sites entered so not long before that goes up in PR and then I can add some subtle advertising on there and get it to become an automated coin cow. [PR0]

I have a The VWD eLottery mini-site that has had a few hits and was useful for pointing to prospects who were at work and therefore didn't have flash installed. [PR4] It is a mirror of my VWD Lottery Biz site [PR3]

So, not a bad portfolio of PR there! with a little organisation I could easily promote any site up to a decent PR using linking and relavant articles.

I might even go so far to get thumbnails of all of them to put up here (and now I've done the work of listing them all, I can put together a portfolio package).

Lalala, the geeketh within.

My kinda news bulletin

2006-07-28T13:50:00.000Z

Have you seen this guys daily videos?

http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/

I found out while stumble'ing on firefox at work. Now I will check back daily !!

OMG! win a mercedes for free?

2006-05-06T17:19:00.000Z

Or click the image to enter online, first time is FREE!

You tell 'em

2006-03-06T19:38:00.000Z

http://vervelsky.com/news/arabictv.asp

I don't care if you believe in stones, just don't throw them at me.
(Wafa Sultan on Arabic television)

I can't tell you how impressed I am by this womans eloquent interview on Al Jazeera television. She made so many good points that I had to watch it 3 times. It's in Arabic with english subtitles.

Sad but true and off to Venice!

2006-02-06T11:33:00.000Z

Just saw a picture here The WTF Blog
Hmmmmmmm.

on a happier note, I'm off to Venice! I'll be back on Friday to tell you all about it.
I'll be on this boat, if you are from Venice and see me, give me a wave!!

Biggest. Jackpot. Ever

2006-01-27T23:31:00.000Z

The famous Euromillions lottery has rolled over for an 11th time. It's set to go to over 200 MILLION DOLLARS (125,000,000 GBP or 185,000,000 Euro).

It's a definite world record, the biggest TAX FREE lump sum lotto jackpot in the world. EVER.

Head on over to My VWD Lottery Experience to see all the hoo-hah.

Heart disease and privacy juxtaposed

2006-01-24T23:38:00.000Z

I saw the word juxtapose the other day and I've heard it before and knew (at least knew-ish) what it meant and I swear I've used it in a conversation about a party that had it's fair share of pikeys and snobs. Dictionaries and the like define it as "place side by side" with some others going so far to say "especially for comparison or contrast".

So did I choose the write wording for the title when you consider a recent article at the TimesOnline?
It explains the problems of data privacy, not in the scary "ID stolen" light of recent news articles but how it hampers the medical research of heart disease. Scientists and medical researchers are prevented from having access to the information by over-zealous police and council red-tape. The data protection act, long as it is, does include a specific clause or exemption relating to "necessary and proportionate” medical research.

I wouldn't want just anyone to be able to access my personal medical details but what if the legitamate life saving research group wanted to search the now online database for trends in medication use and heart disease? I'm sure they wont need every detail of my medical record, the wonders of online databases allows you to search and 'pull out' only neccessary cross related fields, they don't need to know if someone had an AIDS test or considered suicide and so it wouldn't be included in the search for "medication" "heart problem" "male" "20-40".

I carry a donor card, maybe we should have a datadonor card. "I give my permission for my medical data to be searched and used for medical research by government licenced and independantly regulated medical bodies"

Privacy is great but so is saving people from getting heart disease.

Did I use the word correctly?

Links:
BBC health page
www.americanheart.org
www.bhf.org.uk

at gramps and anagrams place

2006-01-23T18:07:00.000Z

I've just seen some really nice anagrams over at grand-pa's place, they take a well known phrase or persons name and then rearrange it
My favourite is from Neil Armstrong...

"THAT'S ONE SMALL STEP FOR A MAN, ONE GIANT LEAP FOR MANKIND." - NEIL ARMSTRONG

The anagram:

"A THIN MAN RAN; MAKES A LARGE STRIDE, LEFT PLANET, PINS FLAG ON MOON! ON TO MARS!"

Check out his post for more, a really good one from Shakespear too.

Do you know the only London Underground station to sound nice backwards is Finsbury Park? ---
Krapy Rub Snif!

A poor imitation but it's better than muffin

2006-01-21T00:29:00.000Z

I spent a wee while putting this template together to simulate what the blog was like before when Charles did it.
I don't think I did too badly, it's just such a shame to lose that piece of work of his :-(. So solly charly boy.

now I have a copy of the template I can carry on with the changes.

oh, and the euromillions wasn't won by anyone again!! I won 4 times, but I haven't checked my own ticket yet....tremble tremble

ow , I killed my template

2006-01-20T20:55:00.000Z

oh dear, I killed my lovely template while I was trying out some google code.

poo.

What I would do with my share of the 80 MILLION

2006-01-18T16:51:00.000Z

I hope the euromillions folks got my letter about why I should win the rollover, I'm sure they wont let me down.

I sent a letter to Chris Chringle, Jack Frost, Tony Blair and the Wombles so I should be in for a chance yey!

Or, I could carry on playing through VWD and only need 5 of the 7 numbers to get my multi-million share!
Oh dear what would I do with so much money?

I could pay Joss Wheadon to make another Firefly series
I could buy David Beckhams foot, hah, see how many bendy balls you can do with a stump eh Becksy!!?
I could buy a Chelsea season ticket but only one of the cheap ones
I'd pay for an advertisement on the BBC explaining how the licence to own a TV is a waste of paper. (UK)
I'd buy me a monkey and teach it to sing.

A real laugh

2006-01-13T01:44:00.000Z

I've never laughed so much at a blog entry as I did with this one, definitely a blog to go back to...

http://fuggettaboutit.blogspot.com/

so good that's all this post is going to contain.

Not really a place for jokes but...best ever blond joke

2006-01-12T22:08:00.000Z

OMG what a funny joke I found through Delftsman's place!

Oh the wonders of the trackerless protocol

2006-01-10T23:27:00.000Z

Don't you just love the trackerless protocol? what, you don't know about it?
Azereus has it
Bitcomet has it
and others but I never tried anything other than the above two before, the problem is that they are exclusive to the program that you are using so an Azereus client can't download a file without a tracker from a BitComet peer.

What does it do? well, you know all those torrents out there that use trackers that are too busy to accept your connection or trackers that were run on someone's PC but now it's no more?

The trackerless protocol was designed so it doesn't matter if the tracker goes down, as long as someone has that completed download in their shared directory (set in the options) then you can download it just like the previous incarnations of p2p.
It never ceases to surprise me how many people have got the complete file of a really old torrent, you can be almost certain now that a once popular torrent will still be downloadable after a year, I have my own torrents out there that still show many seeds a year after I stopped seeding it myself.

Right now I am downloading a series of audio books to listen to on my way around leafleting the local area, I'm looking forward to catching up on some titles I have had my eye on for a while now. No more "not enough time" excuses, plus I get a sore neck reading a book (probably because I don't put it down for hours at a time).

Thanks to Akufu blog for setting me off on an audio book frenzy! You should check out the blog yourself, it's pretty new but deserves a read because of it's excellent articles written in a nice friendly way (and grammatically correct - wish I was more articulate!) . Plus Akufu is an original blog name which is refreshing, I wonder what it means?

Unoriginal blog names?

anything with "random" written in the title (google blog search reports 2,246,354 results)
same with "rambllings"
or even "rants"
"my blog" - lol, you don't say?!!

Original blog names?

Akufu
Bend it like a banana
Legends of a sun pig (the first blog I saw and liked way back in the day)
Diary of a fat boy
Pesky Apostrophe (better than an unexpected period) lol, I still laugh when I read this!

there's more but why don't you tell me in the comments if you have an original blog name....

My first Camtasia screencast
I made a Camtasia video of how I made a flyer for my lotto business (going really well!!! yey) and it had a great response, I even put it up as a download on some torrent sites and it's had 1500 downloads in 4 days! (good free advertising, yum). Click here to see the post on my other blog with the video...

Back once again like a renegade master....

2006-01-04T00:42:00.000Z

I haven't blogged here for a while because I've been sorting out my Lotto Blog and trying to organize a starter kit for some members of my marketing thing. Talking about marketing, I have been searching around for site submitters and such but all I seem to get are crazy claim filled hoo-hah sites. Did you know you can advertise your site to 2million places at the push of a button? no? where have you been? oh, and just pay $247 to this guy and he'll tell you all his secrets. blah

A mate of mine says he's going to advertise my free chance page with his tools, I said it had better not involve spamming but he assures me he knows what he is doing (lol).

I've done a bit more advertising too, a good 'ol blog (Diary of a fat boy) which tells all about making a bit of extra cash online (and there's a huge amount of boobies too!) He made me a banner and put it up for a couple of weeks and it had a great response! Last time I used banners, I had zero clicks from tons of impressions, this time I got hits, entries to the free page and even a premium signup! needless to say I signed up for another 2 months and he made me a new banner.

I'm using the old banner on BE, it's had over 30 clicks already which only says something about the type of people surfing there!
This is what it looks like...

I've also opened up an ebay account so I can sell the huge amount of crap I have lying about. Here's my first item ( I have got 4 of them)
Magic Eye TVLINK
I've seen others listed with a starting price of 5.99 so I put mine at 1.00 ! plus 1.99 postage. Even if I don't get more than the starting price, it'll earn me a whole 12 pounds (minus P+P). More than if I'd just left them in the drawer until they became obsolete! I haven't even got a Sky TV box so who knows what I would do with 4 TV Links!

I'm going to sell my Xbox Projector too but I think I had better build up some feedback before I list a large money item.

This is what it looks like, it's not bad and plays movies well. You can even flip the picture so you can tip it up and project it at the ceiling while you're in bed (oo-er!).
I bought if from China on an impulse and I've only used it for half an hour!

Sell it!!

New FireFox plugin from Performancing.com

2005-12-20T21:54:00.000Z

This is my first post from my Performancing.com plugin. What a useful tool! it opens up in a split screen so you can post to your blog while you are still on the page you are browsing, you can even copy and paste text formatting. This is awsome! I'll write up more on it after I play with it and post some messages to my wordpress site.

Latest Gadget - Kodak Easyshare printer and 4MP camera series 3

2005-12-19T16:51:00.000Z

My girl won a camera and printer setup in a prize draw (lucky!).

It was on the side when I got up in the morning, "who's that for?" says I.
"oh, I won it in a contest" says she.
"oh did I?" I exclaimed with great excitement, "I've never won a camera before!"
"you didn't", she says.
"oh :-( ", I say and sneakily move the box to somewhere else.

I couldn't wait to open it and play around with the printer, the packaging was good and I took all the pieces out and was going to fiddle with it straight away but instead, I put the pieces in their myriad plastic covers back in the box and went and delivered some leaflets only to run back because I was expecting a delivery of Christmas Presents for my friends.

When I went back and started to put the pieces of the printer together I realised that there was a plastic piece missing! A see-through moulded shape that fits on top of the printer that's supposed to hold the camera snugly, the camera still fit's on although it is a little wobbly.

I haven't had much chance to use it yet, I took a couple of pictures but mostly I spent my time looking for a piece of plastic which I could have sworn was in the box when I started, I even checked the rubbish bin to see if I had thrown it away. poo.

Next time I get something through the post, I'll wait until I'm properly awake before I unpack it!

At least I have a reasonably sized resolution camera, now I can take a picture for my show and tell on Charles's Blog, it wont be long before my shuttle-x and my white cat get shot (photographically speaking) and put up here!

When I get some more play time with my Kodak camera and printer I'll put a more detailed review up here.

Brain ache!
I spent the whole night with my head deep in php, I've been adding buttons and changing the layout of my lotto blog. I learnt how to query mysql, use WordPress template tags and why curly brackets are sooo different to normal ones :)

I should really let camtasia record what happens when I get in the geek zone, I have a 1280x1024 screen with a double height task bar full of buttons, photoshop, dreamweaver, firefox, bitcomet, bnbt easytracker, msgtag, googletalk, trillian, outlook and what can only be described as a mosaic of systray icons and I use them all!!

In fact, I will do it. I'll do a recording of my next lottery results post. That takes a few different copy and pastes to different apps!

gtalk and a long walk.

2005-12-11T23:27:00.000Z

Hey hey!! I've been super busy lately with my other blog and had a HUUUGE long walk delivering my new flyers.

CK was chatting about gtalk in the BE shoutbox, I saw all the messages to and fro-ing so I downloaded it and he was kind enough to let me add him as a buddy (what has he done? oh no! psycho brit stalker alert) :-)

It looks really snazzy and smooth like the gmail service, the invitation widget and add buddy was as simple as could be and the chat box that popped up when CK messaged me was slick. There's not much else to add. I'm sure the Google folk will think of nice new things to go in it like video conferencing so until then, wait and see!. I haven't bought a headset yet but I'll be going into the shops tomorrow to buy one. Until then, you can add me to your gtalk with my user id

BIG WALK & TALK!

ok so here's my flyer I *cough* made for my lotto thang, I got 5000 of the little buggers.:-)
I spent ages and ages looking for designs, something funny or eye catching and couldn't do it until, at the stroke of the witching hour, I saw a "my feet have turned into mice" cartoon and another couple stick man tangs so in the spirit of the internet, I swiped it. I tried to contact the author but he hasn't been active on the site the image was stored at for over 6 months.

I did searches for his username and so on, so in the spirit of the rules of acquisition, specifically #299 - thanks Joseph Rice for a great cartoon!

My adventures started in the local high street where I gave out a few hundred cards, it was bit tough going at first but I got into it and went home for lunch (pot noodle and bread). I ended up going into London on the train and gave a flyer to every single person onboard, did it on another one too! (give leaflets that is).

I ordered a whole load of gifts from shopboxuk , I've nearly got all my gifts for krimbo now, only my girls mum and daughter left (the most expensive!). I know my miss lovely will like her present, we were shopping and she picked it up and admired it, stroked it and then looked inside (eyes pop!) and quickly put it back so I went back the next day and bought it. great!

This is Mr. Brown! lol. I bought it for Kelvin (that's what my missus calls him). He likes that sort of thing!.
They've got a whole host of turds there, things like Plop Idol and The Turdinator! lol

It's crazy what will sell these days! I would have loved to get one of these so I could proclaim it was a shit present! :-)

Seasons greetings everyone, I know it's early but buggery poo, I love krimbo time!!

Thanks for the visits one and all, please leave a comment if you feel like it. I'll be putting this blog on BE soon and abandoning my Glytch Blog so all aboard!

25.50GBP Disc Printer Review

2005-12-05T14:58:00.000Z

I got delivery of my new disc printer from TDK today. I was really looking forward to this since I ordered it from EclipseComputers UK, there was a bit of a mix up with the order as their automated verification system didn't like my address. I emailed them and got a reply to phone them, the helpful person located the order, did a manual check and promised me the printer by Monday morning (2pm Monday so not bad seeing as this is London).

It was super simple to setup, it was harder to unwrap it than anything else. Once you remove the sticky tape that holds the drawer shut you have to wait until you install the software before you plug it in, once that's done it locates the drivers as soon as you connect the USB lead.

Pressing the eject button pops the drawer open and you can remove the cardboard filler and install the ribbon cassette, this is where I realised I should have read the description better! Impulse buying coz it was cheap :-) It's a dot-matrix printer with an ink ribbon capable of 200dpi mono.

Using the bundled label design software was a breeze, there's a walk-thru help window that tells you what each section does as you go to it. Importing images is a bit basic because of the simplistic image resizing method. You are better off, loading your image into Photoshop and resizing it there.

200dpi isn't too good for images and I found I needed to make it as simple as possible to even look ok, the first prints looked like they'd been rubber stamped on with not enough ink but changing to a bolder font made the text look good and increasing the darkness in the options fixed the image.

My phone doesn't take good pictures in low light but you can see it doesn't look too bad, not really what I was after but for the price I didn't expect miracles! It would be a good less-than-50- quid Christmas present for any geek in your family.

This purchase has just renewed my passion for a scanner/printer/copier/disc printer. I'm looking for one that doesn't have hugely priced ink and that wont take over my entire front room!.

Thanks to all that have visited even though I had only 1 post, it's great to have a blog just for my techy things and a big thanks to Charles for creating this great template.

Anyone out there had any experience with inkjet disc printers? Please leave a comment and let me know!

Gay guy has designs for a straight guy!

2005-12-02T23:12:00.000Z

Can you believe it? An email on what I like, a .gif sent by outlook and a few messenger to's and fro's and it's here, my new blog. Unbelievable!
The surrogate coder, blog birth daddy is C.Jordan from Bend It Like a Banana.

He's re-vamped my other site too and he just roks.

I'm off to a conference tomorrow so I'll fill my blog with all my info and links over the weekend.

yay first transmission!