Froogle have recently launched in the UK and at work we’ve hopped on the bandwagon with me developing a froogle feed backend. You can view all of our products here or one of my favourite products here. Now….its party time.

Lloyds have re-designed their web presence and finally moved away from the very clunky table fest that is was before. It’s totally css and not a table in site now, nice. Not sure if I like the actual layout though, there is an awful lot of white space at the top and it never seems to quite fit on the “first scroll” of my browser.

John Peel has died from a heart attack while on holiday in Peru.

I got a mobile bill for £103 yesterday.
Apparently I was “on an old tariff” and was getting charged more than double the data rate than normal. Numpties…

I went to get my eyes tested on Saturday for the first time in at least four years. I was amazed to find that my eye-sight was not drastically failing. One eye had got slightly worse but only by 0.25 which is the smallest unit they measure in (apparently). I need some new frames anyway so I went ahead and got some nice neat ones and a free pair of sunglasses aswell. Thank goodness for credit cards, blimey glasses are not cheap!

Ben and I are at last having our super-cool flat warming this Friday from 8pm onwards. We’ll provide the snacks and mixers if you provide some alcohol 🙂 Drop me a line if you need directions or don’t know where the new flat is.

Well, I got the access logs from my parent hosting company (who were vey helpful) and it seems the first accesses all came from IP addresses assigned to Romanian ISPs. Pesky Romanians…. I’ve googled around a bit for this ‘zloboz’ name and came up with one of their scam emails here. It’s based off a different site but it looks like the same kind of scam, they must have hacked quite a few sites to base their pages at. It also looks like they didn’t have everything configured properly as there are lots of errors in the logs about php scripts being unable to write to local files. The numpties didn’t setup the file permissions properly! So, any information they did harvest from the silly people who filled in their details is lost in the void 🙂

Many, many thanks to James and his excellent Ripped Tickets service for letting me know that Beastie Boys tickets for Glasgow were going to be released. I didn’t even know there was a Glasgow gig! I quickly checked the Beasties site and saw there was a ‘fans only’ link through to ticketweb where you could buy them online. Two days before they went on general sale! I snatched two tickets up sharp-ish as the London tickets sold out in less than 24 hours. Kerry and I have been wanting to see them live for a while, it’s gonna roXor 🙂

This new programme on BBC2 look very interesting in our increasingly different world.

Our new flat has a phone line but it has never been activated. This means we have to get BT to ‘install’ a line before we can get it even activated. Ben called them up and they can’t send an engineer until the 5th of November. BT really do suck. So, no phone line for at least three weeks, then we’ll have to wait for it to appear on the ADSL register, and then we have the wait to get ADSL installed and then activated from force9. For the moment I’m surviving with brief doses of GPRS ‘net via my phone and bluetooth to my PC. Wonderful thing technology.

Urge to kill rising…….

Some little toe-rag had hacked into my site and was hosting some kinda ebay-credit-card scamming pages! Godamn! I was browsing my access logs (as you do) and noticed some strange hits to a directory called ‘zloboz’. Strange, don’t remember uploading anything called that. Uh-oh… I immediately deleted the files, which was really stupid thinking back as I could have seen what he was up to with the data. Anyway, I’ve since changed my passwords and checked the email accounts, aliases, databases, cron, redirects, everything. Just in case he’d left some sneaky stuff anywhere else.

Anyway, I’ve got the site backup from yesterday downloaded and I’m going to extract his naughty files and have a look at what he was upto. I’ll report my findings.

I finally got through to Lothian Buses lost property yesterday and amazingly they actually had my phone! I belted along on my lunch break today and got the pesky thing back. It was amazing how much I rely on it but don’t realise. All of yesterday I was saying “oh I’ll just text so-and-so”, “I’ll just give my parents a call” then going “oh, wait…”. I was also using the GPRS via Bluetooth to get on the net with my PC, no internet in the new flat yet. All I can say is thank you to who ever handed it in to the bus driver and thank you to Lothian for having an organised lost property service.

I managed to lose my mobile somewhere on the way to work yesterday. I suspect I left it on the first bus I got in the morning. I’ve been trying Lothian buses lost property all day but they seem rather tricksy to get hold of :(. So it’s email only contact for the mean time. Not having a landline or internet in the new flat is also complicating things.

Well, the move went reasonable well. Apart from the van rental company screwing us over on the morning… We went along to pick up the van and apparently they had ‘cancelled the reservation’, without telling us…. Very helpful! Jed and I then had to waste about two hours frantically calling around town to find another van. We eventually got one at Condor which was actually cheaper than the intial place. It took three trips to get all of my stuff over and we managed to fit in a very long (and expensive) trip to Ikea aswell. Many, many thanks to Jed for driving the van and generally being a top geeza.