" />
Weirdest Spam…ever.
April 20, 2009 3 Comments
This has to be the strangest spam that I’ve ever received - just this image and nothing else:
What the huh?
I can’t decide if it really is an image of a retarded Chinese choir, or if it’s just that they’ve all just figured out the sum in the middle after days of struggled logic.
Answers on the back of a postcard/dead squirrel to the usual address.
The best-laid schemes
April 13, 2009 2 Comments
So much for a nice relaxing yet productive Bank Holiday weekend.
Plan:
Thursday - Leave work, go for a quick drink with workmates (2 pint max), return home and chill for the evening.
Good Friday - sleep in, go to work for a few hours to get things done, return home, cook, work on websites.
Saturday/Sunday - spend as a normal weekend, write a long overdue blogpost for one particular site, reformat old PC, cook a nice Sunday lunch of some sort.
Monday - play poker.
Reality:
Thursday - Leave work, go for drinking session, get home at 7am.
Bad Friday - get out of bed at 3pm, put kettle on, things start to spin, go back to bed.
Saturday - spend day in bed watching Season 2 and 3 of How I Met Your Mother.
Sunday - venture out to shops to find Waitrose is closed. Retire home to eat bananas and bagel.
Monday - still plan to play poker in a few hours.
Happy Easter and all that.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day
March 17, 2009 Leave a Comment
…and all that.
I’ve been wished that a few today. Irish surname will do that I suppose.
Anyhoo, enjoy - this is what I woke up to this morning.
Being a celebrity - my pros for and cons against
March 17, 2009 Leave a Comment
I’m not a celebrity, not even a minor one, and this is mostly a good thing.
Here’s two reasons why it would be cool to be a celebrity.
1) I would be rich.
2) I would be famous.
More importantly, here’s three reasons why it would suck.
1) I am camera shy
2) I have a voice that’s perfect for silent movies, and a face fit for radio.
3) Being part of a celebrity family would suck - big time.
I think the only one of these points that needs clarifying at all is the last one, so I will do so. I’ll use the lovely Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal as my surrogate family.
Hell, I’ll just pretend that I am Jake Gyllenhaal and be done with it.
Jake Gyllenhaal topless
Here’s what one of my days would be like:
Wake up beside some hot brunette who I met the night before, haven’t got a clue what her name is.
Look in mirror - think to self ‘gosh I’m a hottie’.
Buy stuff online - think to self ‘gosh I’m rich!’
Go out - party with friends, get drunk, play up to the cameras that are taking sly photos of me.
Go home, a little tipsy, a little horny, but alone.
Sit down in front of the TV, unzip and whip out Jake Jnr, grab the TV remote and start flicking through the channels for flesh.
Bingo - land on a film of some sort with a smokin-hot-brunette all nekkid and writhing around on the bed.
Jake Jnr also appears interested and sits up for a better view - he looks scared so I should hold him, and stroke him for comfort.
Camera pans up naked smokin-hot-brunette’s legs, past the pleasure box, stops momentarily on the beautiful breasts and then - oh, no! OMFG. It’s Maggie! My sister’s in a film and Jnr is loving her acting skills.
This is bad.
It’s wrong on so many levels.
…should I stop?
Well…I’m nearly there and if I close my left eye I can block out her face.
It is a smokin-hot-body and all.
Yeah…I should stop.
Maggie Gyllenhaal - alas, not topless
Telnic launch .tel
March 7, 2009 3 Comments
Late last night .tel was launched. I’m not too sure how it’s being injected into the DNS, as some sites are live and others aren’t.
murphy.tel went live at 12:15 (ish) last night, but other names that are with my company still aren’t resolving - so not sure how long it will take for them to do so. sex.tel is live, and simply linking to BB-Online.co.uk - well done for getting that one Rob, but why you applied for 95% of the +2000 applications for that name I’m not sure. I’m intrigued, also, as to why info@sex.tel is showing as the email address - when that’s not going to go anywhere (unless I’m missing something critical about how the system works).
So, I spent a little time playing this morning and there are a few things that I think should be changed. Hopefully Telnic will listen to what people want and adapt the system as necessary in the near future.
I’m interested to see where .tel will go. I know it’s a completely new direction for a TLD, and is separate to the standard releases we’ve had over the past few years, but with anything that’s new people will innovate and use it to make money…it’s just a matter of time to see how people do start to monetize .tel.
So, let’s take a little look at the interface shall we?
Here’s the backend that you view when your registrar provides you with access:
It’s pretty standard.
Dashboard Tab
The ‘folders’ section on the left is where you add the subdomains you need. i.e. if I wanted michael.murphy.tel I would add ‘Michael’ as a folder.
Messages on the right pop up when you have a new friend request.
The map below allows you to specify a location on a per folder basis.
The main section down the middle is where you add the various records, and so this is the heart of .tel really. Let’s work through those:
Profile
If you want to you can set up different profiles, and choose the different contact information to show. i.e. ‘Work’ can be one profile, and when active you will see telephone numbers and email addresses that correspond to your work, and if ‘Home’ is another profile you will see home telephone and email when that is activated.
It’s been suggested that this can tie in to the profile you have on your mobile phone, so switching from one profile to another will also change your .tel status - no proof of this yet though (more on the mobile phone later).
Text Header
This is simply a little bit of text that introduces your .tel, or the .tel subdomain.
Text Header Backend:
Shows on the live site as:
Contact Information
This is where you list all of your sites, phone numbers etc and, if under the top level, you can decide whether to make the records private or not. It seems to take 10-15 seconds for changes here to appear on the corresponding page.
Note: Your registrar can ‘impersonate’ you from their backend so they can basically see your interface - they do not see any private information when doing so they can see and edit private records as well as public ones, so make sure you’re with a registrar you trust.
Keywords
Here you add keywords and addresses and such for search engines to fine you.
Privacy Tab
Quite simple, you create different groups and then you can specify which friends are in which groups, and what content each group can see. This way your private data can be viewed only by the people you want to view it. Friends can be added to several groups, as can your contact information.
Friends Tab
Simply a list of your friends.
If you remove a friend they do not seem to get told that you have removed them, and they will need to resend a friend request to you.
A few items that .tel could do better
Firstly, when you enter the domain into the browser it does not resolve that URL, it goes to the Telnic lookup; enter murphy.tel into browser and you get http://d1.webproxy.nic.tel/lookup/murphy.tel
It would be preferred if http://www.murphy.tel would resolve directly.
Secondly, I feel that private records should be enabled at the folder level, as mentioned in my previous post Don’t .tel me it can’t be done.
Thirdly, the backend has a lovely little map that you can browse and click on:
On the live system it appears as location record:
Surely you can show a map when viewed in a browser, and location record when viewed on another devide?
Fourth - why can’t we rename the folders? You can rename a subdomain, so isn’t this the same?
I entered two hyphens in my ‘purchase–products’ folder:
I developed content in a few folders under this one. If I then want to rename it to ‘purchase-products’ with just one hyphen, I have to create a new one, recreate all subfolders, move all content across and then delete that folder and all within. We should be able to simply rename the folder as required. Imagine you have thousands of records and for some reason need to rename the initial folder - you’re going to waste a lot of time in doing so.
Lastly - there is no option to make an address private. I want my friends to be able to log on and view my home address, but I don’t want this showed to everyone. The only location to add an address is in the keywords section which are all public, or in the Text Header which is again public. There is no specific place for this under ‘contact information’ which is where it should be.
Mobile Phone Software
I downloaded and installed the .tel software for a Windows Mobile Device.
I have only been able to log into it in the past week or so which is when the .Tel friends system seems to have gone live, and it finally accepted my username and password.
The program allows you to add a .tel domain to a contact in my address book, and is meant to have the feature to ‘lookup .tel’ which in all of my attempts cannot access the server, even when looking up live names.
I saw a demo of the system a couple of years ago and it ran extremely smoothly, with simple clicks to lookup a name quickly, and navigate tot he right place. Where is that software now? It’s one of the major selling points for .tel and I’m missing it.
Monetizing your .tel
As mentioned, it will be interesting to see how people monetize their .tel names. sex.tel, I imagine, can be hooked up to premium telephone numbers where the user can quickly browse for their favourite fetish and get hooked up to someone willing to discuss that in a matter of minutes and at a premium rate.
But what about the rest of us?
What about those who have a name and no possible way to tie it in to premium rate numbers?
How are you going to monetize something like cricket.tel?
I guess part of it depends on the name. Cricket.tel I have no idea…but a surname.tel can obviously be a directory, as can pizza.tel
Playing around with murphy.tel I set up a very quick area to purchase products via Amazon.co.uk using my Amazon affiliate ID. However, I’m sure that would result in extremely low traffic and click through, and users can simply go directly to amazon.tel who I’m sure will do it 50 times better. If you have a .tel that’s popular though, this may be an option.
Another method could be by placing sponsored links that pay you for a particular amount of click throughs.
Of course those with generic names could set up a directory - as I could by selling folders to people with the surname murphy….but is this in breach of the Telnic AUP? Well, I guess that depends how you do it. If you give away control to another party so that they are responsible for the updating of subfolders, then you can only do so if that person is - in the case of murphy.tel - a member of my family. Oddly, I can update those subfolders, and charge for it, as long as I assume responsibility for the updating and have permission from whoevers details I am using to do so.
What does this mean? Well, we won’t be having another .co.nl situation on our hands by the looks of things. Instead I can use murphy.tel to run a directory as long as I’m the one in charge of updating, or providing mechanisms to update.
So Brittany - it looks like if you want to start using brittany.murphy.tel we’re just going to have to get married!
Don’t .tel me it can’t be done!
March 6, 2009 1 Comment
Today should see the go live for .tel, the new domain extension run by Telnic.
I’ve been looking forward to it for a while now, and though I aim to get several names in the General Availability phase launched later this month, I thought it would be worth securing murphy.tel in the Landrush phase at the oddly high price of $275.
There are two things that looked promising about .tel for me, and that is for companies and individuals to share their data with those who require it.
From a company perspective it would work like this:
Acme Corporation register acme.tel
They populate it with information so that anyone searching for Acme go to acme.tel and find the relevant information. Perhaps the user is in London, so they can click on a link or two for Europe and then United Kingdom and then London, here they will get details of the Acme stores in London.
The URL they would be at would technically be as follows:
http://london.unitedkingdom.europe.acme.tel
This is all very well, but the idea, or so I thought, was to have data both public and private. So, a general member of the public can see the main contact numbers for the London office, but if you are a distributor, for example, you could set up a ‘handshake’ with acme so that you can see other details, perhaps an email or telephone number particularly for the distributor side of things.
I was dismayed to discover today, therefore, that you are only allowed private data under the top level.
According to the .tel userguide (Privacy section, page 21):
Private information is only supported in your main folder (yourname.tel), and not in sub-folders (social.yourname.tel). Anything put into sub-folders remains public at all times.
What the huh? Why?
So, anyone wishing to secure a name for their family, such as I did with murphy.tel, cannot then let their family members use the name as a decent tool for sharing information?
michael.murphy.tel could be used by me and spot.murphy.tel could be used by my make believe dog and have completely different information, but according to Telnic we’re not allowed any private information to be held under these records - only under murphy.tel
This seems extremely wrong to me and, though we may not have been mislead previously, I’m sure all indications were on how fabulous it is to be able to use .tel for regional purposes and the fantastic ability it has to show or hide any information you wish.
if .tel is going to take off, I think Telnic really need to reasses this issue and allow private data to be held on the ‘folder’ (subdomain) levels.
Very disappointing.
Flirting 101
February 23, 2009 4 Comments
Scene: lift going from floor 8 - floor 0, I hold lift door for INCREDIBLY HOT BRUNETTE who can’t possibly live in this block of flats because every other resident seems to have been born here when it was built in the 1930s. Girl to be known as IHB from hereon.
Flirting Win
IHB: Hello, thank you (super sexy lady smile)
Me: Well hello, you’re welcome (with emphasis on ‘well hello’ as if I was in Up Pompeii)
awkward pause - I furrow my brow.
Me: Sorry, I didn’t mean for that to sound so…pervy.
IHB: How pervy did you mean for it to sound?
Me: um…on a scale of 1-10 with 1 being friendly and flirtatious, and 10 being wanting to lewdly suggest the seriously kinky shit I want to do with you - I would say a 7.
IHB: Shame…if it had been an 8 you may have got somewhere.
Lift stops, she walks off leaving me to daydream all day.
Flirting Fail
IHB: Hello, thank you (super sexy lady smile)
Me: (Eating a banana so cheeks stuffed like a chipmunk) You’re welcome (bits of banana fly in her direction.)
awkward silence between floor 8 and ground floor
Me: (banana in mouth now swallowed, the rest remains uneaten) Hope you have a nice day!
I reach over to pull the door open for her (one of those old style cage doors) and stand on her foot.
IHB: OW!
She limps off leaving me and my half eaten banana feeling a little insecure.
Win or Fail - Guess which I did this morning?
Managing Multiple Email Accounts Using Google Mail
February 15, 2009 Leave a Comment
I manage quite a few domain names, and many of them require email - all of which I set up through the free services of Google Mail via their Google Apps. Their system has improved greatly over the past few years, and I can now manage all of my emails from my primary account - meaning I can easily send and receive to and from all accounts without having to log in to each domain name individually.
If you’re new to Google Mail/Apps and wish to do the same, then this post will hopefully get you on the right path. I’m going to cover the following:
Step One - How to set up a domain name with Google Apps so that you can run your email.
Step Two - How to then add additional domain names to an existing mail account so that you can send and receive via one interface.
Step Three - How to use labels and filters to organise your mail from the various accounts.
Step One - How to set up a domain name with Google Apps so that you can run your email.
You will need to do this step for all of the domain names you wish to set up Google mail with.
Start off by going to the free Google Apps sign up page - http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/domain/new
For the purpose of this tutorial I’m going to assume you have a domain name managed by a third party provider, but you are able to purchase a domain name via Google Apps, and that will do the Step One setup for you.
Select ‘Administrator’ and enter the domain name you wish to set up, in this case I’m going to use riddle.me
Now enter your personal details. The First name and Last name fields will default to the name that is used when you send emails using this domain name.
You do not need to enter organisation information on the same page, but may do so if you wish.
Finally enter the user information you wish to use. The username will be your actual email address that you will send and receive email from/to.
Read the terms and conditions you are signing up to and continue.
You’re now taken to the Google Apps Dashboard, a place where you will rarely need to visit in the future, but there are a few things you need to do on here in order to set up your mail.
Firstly, you’ll need to verify ownership of the domain name. Afterall, Google can’t have you setting up email on just any name now can they?
Click on Verify Domain Ownership.
Here you have two options to prove ownership of the name, and it depends on where your domain name is registered and the options available as to which you would like use.
Verification by uploading an HTML file.
This is the quickest method of activation, but you can only use this method if your domain name is set up with hosting space.
Open up notepad and copy the text shown on the dashboard page (the part that starts with google and features other random text and numbers. Save the notepad file as googlehostedservice.html and as type ‘all files’. Now upload this to the root directory of your hosting page and click on ‘Verify’.
Verification via CNAME record.
If you do not have any webhosting you can verify ownership by adding a CNAME to the DNS of your domain name. The process will differ depending on where you registered your name, and you may need to contact your domain name provider to set this part up.
However, if your provider does allow you to add CNAME records via the control panel simply add the google text shown (again, the one with random text and numbers) as the Left Hand Side of the domain name, and enter ‘google.com’ as the Right Hand Side. Make sure you are adding a CNAME record and not an A Record:
Depending on your domain name provider and how long they take to update their DNS the CNAME may be added instantly, or within 48 hours.
Use a DNS lookup tool such as http://www.kloth.net/services/dig.php to check when the CNAME is up and running:
Once you see the CNAME record resolving, click on Verify.
Activating Email
Back on the Dashboard page, click on Activate email.
You will need to be able to add MX Records to your domain name in order to do this step, so again you may need to contact your domain name provider to do this step for you.
Google have handily provided instructions for many hosting companies, so use the drop down list to see if your provider is there and follow the instructions. Essentially, you just need to add an MX record to point your domain name to google.com, and you only need to add the first one to get it working, but you are better off adding more for stability.
After all of the MX Records have been added, you can again verify via a DIG that they are resolving:
Once done, click on ‘I’ve completed these steps’ and Google Apps will go ahead and update things on their end.
Very shortly afterwards, your new email address on your own domain name will be working.
Log in to your inbox to see it in action by clicking ‘inbox’ at the top right hand side of the dashboard page.
Repeat this for all domain names that you wish to set up to use this service.
Step Two - How to then add additional domain names to an existing mail account so that you can send and receive via one interface.
Now that I have my new email up and running for answers@riddle.me I can start sending and receiving to that address…but I don’t want to keep on having to log in to this account to check my mail. I would much rather have the ability to receive mail via my primary account which is michael@murphyz.co.uk (which is also running via Google Mail).
Here’s how to set up the email so that I can do that.
Within the new email account, go to ‘Settings’ > ‘Forwarding and POP/IMAP’ - I’m going to specify that all new mail is forwarded to my primary account:
Now Save Changes.
This allows me to receive mail from this new address to my primary account, but what about sending also? Easy. Log in to your primary Google mail account and and go to ‘Settings’ > ‘Accounts’ > ‘Add another email address you own’.
Add the name and email address you wish to add:
…and now send the verification details.
As your email is now forwarding to your primary account you can just check your emails and a new one should be waiting for you with your verification:
Enter the code you have within the email and ‘Verify’.
Now when you compose an email you will be able to select the new email address from a drop down on the compose screen:
Voila, Step Two done - you can now receive and send email from your multiple email accounts.
Step Three - How to use labels and filters to organise your mail from the various accounts.
Now that your mail from another account is arriving at your primary inbox, it would be good to know at a glance which emails are from a particular account. Google Mail allows you to apply labels to mail as it comes in, and by using filters you can easily set any mail from your new email account to be shown as such in your inbox.
First off, go to ‘Settings’ > ‘Filters’ > ‘Create a new filter’ and enter the email address you just created in the ‘To:’ field. Also select ‘Test Search’ and you’ll see the verification email that was sent to you in Step Two filtered:
On the next step select ‘Apply the label’ and enter a new label using whatever name you wish for mail to be labelled as when it comes in:
Apply the filter to the existing conversation (the verification email) and then ‘create filter’.
You’ll now see the label beside your mail in the inbox, and this will be applied to all incoming mail from that account:
If you don’t want the mail to go directly to your inbox, you can play around with your filter options and have it automatically archived.
To view all mail for that particular account, you can just click on the appropriate label in the ‘labels’ box:
This will apply the filter and effectively just show you all of the mail that you have from the new email account.
So there you have it - you can add as many email addresses as you like from several different domain names, and control all of them quickly and easily via one inbox. No longer will you need to log in and out of various accounts to access your multiple web based emails, or remember several different passwords.
This post is also available via scribd.com:
Managing Multiple Email Accounts Using Google Mail
Kate Wins-a-lot
January 16, 2009 2 Comments
Was this a headline?
I didn’t see it, but seeing as how I’m writing this well behind anyone else it very well may have been. It certainly should be…it’s a damn good headline considering the lovely Winslet has finally won a couple of shiny Golden Globes (I have a few of those myself if you care to get your hands on them Kate?).
Here she is winning, pissing fat-lips Jolie off and accepting the award:
Yeah…I love you Kate - but that was a bit too much…a little bit too gushy.
You’re an actress, and a very good one, so you could probably put on a little performance there and just be…you know…normal. Rather than the apologetic annoying asthmatic pansy you turned into there.
In fact, I think you may have managed to annoy everyone enough to make sure you’re not going to be winning anything else in the near future. No-one wants to listen to that again!
Still…if you want to get your hands on 13 inches of well polished man next month - let me know…
…I’m sure I’ll be able to find a replica.
Design Update
January 11, 2009 6 Comments
I’ve finally finished the new look site, so this post is really just an attempt to see if the RSS still works for the /blog/ section.
It’ll probably update everytime I add something to the site, such as a new game review. Those shouldn’t appear under the actual blog link though, just under the RSS.
Any broken linkage, please let me know. Ta.
