I like gadgets - devices to perform a specific function/purpose, to make my life easier, more enjoyable, or just different.

I’m not alone in this - which is why every high-street has a gadget-shop of some kind.

Sadly the human brain is wired so you can only think one of:

• “bling” is fashionable
• technology is clever
• voting Liberal Democrat is a good idea

Sadly, those always on the lookout for stupid people to buy utter crap for lots of money (aka snake-oil peddlers or marketers), have decided to once again combine tasteless “bling-bling” and hi-tech wizardry into the absolutely F-ing stupid concept that is …

The Google Vanity Ring

Yes, now you can look an utter prat and billy-no-mates at exactly the same time, simply by (more…)

Tags: gadgets, The Google Vanity Ring

(or at least cause an epileptic fit)
Chuck together

• One dark room
• 100 helium filled balloons
• 100 white LEDs
• Some string and servos
• Music by a Kraftwerk Addict

This simple formula of light, sound and acrobatic bubbles by designers “Electric MoOns” is either a masterpiece, or an experiment in causing people to up-chuck - you decide …

Electric MoOns Atom Dance Video

Tags: ballons, led lights, dance, acid techno, video

“Punchable” is how the tabloids have been describing online scammer Liam Young of OXYUK.

For those that missed his entry into the Big Brother House here’s the video summary …
Habitual Liar Liam Young Enters The Big Brother House

And for completeness sake, here’s link to the video of the lttle bollock-sucker getting evicted from the Big-Brother-House …
Liam Young BB Con Artist Gets Booted

Well, C4’s Big Brother series has started again, with a selection of Endemol hand-picked “characters” to represent a cross section of the UK’s up-and-coming lads and lasses … presumably some attempt by the program makers to “appeal” to a new audience, as the viewing figures continue to decline.

One of the contestants (HouseMates as they’re called) is getting oxycuted by blogs and forums - Mr Liam Young of OxyUK / OxyTechnologies / OxyMorons etc…

I bumped heads with this pOXY muppet back when he was 16, claiming

We currently serve over 70,000 UK customers, and over 10,000 users from worldwide locations

which actually translated into

I’m a shitty little unknown affiliate for Lycos and I get paid a few $ if you sign-up under me

see Liam Young of OXYUK.Ltd

the following day he’d moved the few real clients he had and magically transformed into being a HostGator reseller
Oxy just a HG Reseller

18 months later business is going so well, on some forums he’s claiming 2 million domains on his servers, and on others he’s begging for $2 support jobs … Please employ me

You’d think someone with millions of domains, would be a Nominet member (www.nic.uk) rather than just a 1und1 customer … http://webwhois.nic.uk/cgi-bin/whois.cgi?query=oxyhost.co.uk

After getting shortlisted for the role on BB as an entrepreneur, he then reappears on the same forum that banned him for his bulshit last time - WebHostingTalk.com, asking How to lie about Turnover

The general thread on WHT is good background …
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=660543

---

Various forums are all now getting cross-posted to each other, the now (almost) infamous Liam Young Big Brother Celebrity Hijack Lier Housemate is getting discussed over on DigitalSpy

As yet unconfirmed - and I REALLY am not going hunting for evidence on this - but there are multiple posts and comments about Liam Young doing himself Anal’y with a glowstick dildo - *nice* !

The DS:BB thread is already over 5 pages long, and currently if you’re not a member shows multiple adverts for gay dating agencies throughout the threads on Liam - do they know something we dont perhaps ?

*edit* I just checked back after fixing a typo and the DS:BB thread is touching *twenty-nine* pages !

#3 Serverbeach

During a storm a power feed failure lead to the ServerBeach datacentre to switch onto generator power.
Sadly at SB the generators didn’t cover the aircon units, just the servers.
Internal temperatures quickly soared to 60+ degrees in the DC, meaning everything had to be immediately shut down to save the building catching fire.

Time for a design rethink lads ?

#2 Rackspace

Rackspace gets a lot of business out of their ficticious claims of 100% uptime, yet regularly suffer outages (as do all hosts).
In one peculiar incident a truck drove into their transformers, causing everything to switch to generators (like Serverbeach)
The RS back-up generators unfortunately lacked the proper cooling needed to sustain the power creation and so were pulled offline, taking all the websites with them.

The fanatics on the live-chat tried to lie about it, but the news was already public knowledge

#1 DreamHost

No list of DC fvckups could be complete without the multiple outages at DH - and my personal fave of 2007 the datacentre is on fire.
Apparently after a power problem, DH switched to generators which then caught fire. This tends to mean power stops
Servers start to go down, email stops, websites vanish - and not just a few - a serious number of customers found themselves without their hosting in the fire-prone DC, leading to several hundred angry clients posting negative feedback on the DH-Blog

Does no-one in the US actually *TEST* generators ?

We’ve had a number of calls this week from clients regarding domain names and competitors “reserving” existing client domains in alternate extensions.

The bunch behind the latest round of the age-old scam are Main Stream Tech who trade from :

• www.streamlineltd.co.uk
• www.mainstreamtech.co.uk
• www.loovar.co.uk

and many others.

They’ll claim their address is

23 Castalia Square

Docklands

London

E14 3NR

Phone 0870 850 282

But thats just a forwarder to another address Wales that’s just a forwarder … you get the idea.

If you’ve been approached by any of these scumbags and sold something under VERY false pretences, immeditely report them to

• Trading Standards
• Nominet

And then contact your bank - and get the payment you were conned into making stopped.

The basis of this (recurring) scam is:

You’ll get a phonecall from a slick salesperson …

Hi, my name is (made-up) and I’m from (official sounding non-existant organisation), we deal with (large number) of business domain names and hosting.

The reason for the call is we’ve just taken an order from
[ one of your competitors / another local business / a domain squatter]
(select as appropriate)
for domains similar to your existing domain/business name.

You have xxxxxxxx.co.uk and we have been asked to register: xxxxxxxx.com/net/org/biz/info/mobi/eu/ch/mx/tw etc

At the moment these domain have been “reserved” and placed on hold for an hour, to give you opportunity to object. Often these domains are registered in order to
[ damage your business / steal your customers / ruin you reputation ]
(select as appropriate)
and you have this one opportunity to stop that from happening by buying the domains yourself from us now at (vastly inflated price)

If you want to stop this person registering your domain, we need to take your name and card details now, and can block the existing registration attempts.

Followed by lots more pushy sales tactics, attempts to sell you 10 years of hosting, offers of “free years” (for example pay for 5 years and we’ll register the domain for an extra year free for you) etc.

This current bunch of fvckers bounce around from host to host (as they get each of their reseller accounts cancelled) so any hosting they sell you isnt going to be online for long.

Sadly *LOTS* of people regularly fall for this scam, which is why it’s so popular - my advice is *NEVER* buy something from people who randomly call you up !

For a quality domain regsitration, forwarding and hosting service, which doesnt cost the earth and will still be in business this time next year, visit OthelloNames.net

So things look like they are going from worse to downright abysmal for the many beleagured registerfly clients.

What should have been a realtively painless excercise in admin contacts migrating domains away to a new supplier, with ICANN assistance if the RF systems failed, looks like an ever growing c*ck-up, with class action suits, domains getting deleted, and complete pandemonium.

Many of the RF-Refugee camp are switching to equally poor “cheapo” domain companies, litterally jumping from lifeboat to the next titanic in my opinion, selecting Yahoo, 1&1 and others for their new domain home !

An ever growing FAQ has appeared on the ICANN blog, and all those looking to exit RegFly are advised to read :
http://blog.icann.org/?p=85

Remember OthelloNames.net are offering FREE transfers until the end of May for anyone stuck in this fiasco - use Voucher Code RegisterFly at the checkout to get 8.95+vat off our usual costs.

Newcomer to the web2.0 scene, and quite obviously looking to cash-in on the social discussion (group-blogging) concepts is
myLot.

With a slightly different take on the “value of a user”, and knowing they need to play a very serious game of catchup, myLot are prepared to pay you a SMALL amount of their revenue (derived from PPC SE results etc) for your posts and discussions.

Obviously the plan is to bribe millions of users with pennies each to sign up and then flog the whole thing to Goooogle for millions, but at least if you’re going to waste/invest time in one of these modern equivalents of a bulletin-board, you might as well get paid to do it !

myLot User Profile

In a 2 week long madcap race against reality, registerfly has managed to change hands twice

• first back to the original registration company that started it
• second by US Federal courts handing control once more to K Medina
  - the man now (in)famous for spending his customers money not on the renewals they paid for, but on his much needed liposuction instead.

But all good stories have to come to a close, and last night ICANN pulled the plug on the beleaguered registrar with:

http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-2-16mar07.htm

So, no happy ever after in this woefull tale of the domreg company run by a big fairy … several thousand domains already lost by distressed and angry clients, and now a rescue-plan has to be enacted for the remaining 800,000 domains. No more RegisterFly - in 14 days they’ll have to rebrand as RegisterWalk.

From tomorrow until the end of March, our OthelloNames.net Domain Registrar, will be offering free domain transfers and as much assistance with domain recovery as we can to any RegisterFly refugees or anyone looking to move away from their existing registration companies.

Just enter voucher-code RegisterFly on the order to get your domain transfer for free.

Well, the RegFly issues continue, with their official response being basically …

Thank you, your call is important to us, we’re hanging up on you now, as a method of improving our customer service. Goodbye.

Read the full details at :
ICANN Announcement 2/March

In the wake of the Registerfly.com fiasco ICANN anounced that they are going to use their powers and nuke RegFlys Accreditation.

RegisterFly have 2 weeks to solve the customer complaints issues or face termination.

ICANNs letter to them includes a comprehensive shopping list of complaints filed against Registerfly over the past two years and multiple failed attempts to get the company to meet its obligations.

Registerfly’s conduct has fallen far short of both its responsibilities to the public and its agreements. We therefore provide this formal notice of breach of Registerfly’s Registrar Accreditation Agreement with ICANN.

reports ICANN

900,000 domains currently cannot be managed, transferred or renewed - and over 20,000 domains has been lost already.

Yet another example of why “cheap” does not equal “best”

(more…)

Finally we get more than 75% of the old content transferred into our shiny new Etomite CMS based website. All PHP and friendly …

So in order to speed up the process of testing and tidyup we’ve put the new site live, and awaiting the flood of client complaints about the new templates and colour schemes.

In all seriousness we do actually read and appreciate peoples comments about the website and services, so any comments on the new style and content of www.Othellotech.NET would be much appreciated - just submit errors and suggestions into the support system at HostAssist.co.uk and the web mistress will read, decide appropriate action and process accordingly.

The remainder of the ordering and product functioanlity should be live by the end of February

Yes, internet marketers have finally been recognised as some of the dumbest people on the planet.

So in order to part a few more of them from their wallets, already largely emptied by the purchases of out-of-date SEO tricks and secrets and insider information which really condenses down to if you want to guarantee entry into a search engine, pay for it …

So, Google Announce Training Sessions on how to open an AdSense account.
(more…)

So, since publishing the last few blog entries for the edification of the masses, we’ve seen a massive upsurge in spam, where we are getting the bounce messages, as it puports to be from us…

A cursorary glance at the headers show that the spam is actually being generated by a number of exploited boxes all over the globe, but being sent out with :
(envelope-from XXothellotechX [at] ourdomain) where XX X are just 3 random characters
hence the replys/undeliverable messages get back to us.

Has all the usual hallmarks of being a Peter Fvcksh!te Macrae weaselboy job - nice to see he’s becoming a useful part of society - let just hope the cvnt never breeds.