Excellent read for all Moleskine fans: http://freelanceswitch.com/productivity/the-monster-collection-of-moleskine-tips-tricks-and-hacks/?utm_source=feedburner

I was well pleased to find out Endemol have chosen Anyclean to carry out carpet and upholstery cleaning services at the Big Brother House during the preparations for the new Big Brother season.

We deep cleaned all housemates’ mattresses to a very high standard. In this economic uncertainty why purchase new stuff when you can clean and re-use the old stuff?!? Wise decision.

Can I recommend you a really good cosmetics product? Actually I could recommend a whole website for your pure enjoyment – try Thracian. All products have been manufactured by a leading Bulgarian rose oil distillery. They are already very popular around the world with their fine quality and excellent recession prices.

Did you know that to produce 1 kg of pure rose oil, the distillery needs 5 tonnes of Rosa Damascena, the famous Bulgarian queen of roses? And by the way, the technical term for rose oil is Rose Otto.

Be safe!

Rispek!

I am wondering how could there be so many versions of this guy’s name.

According to some there are at least 12 different ways to spell the colonel’s name, including Qaddhafi (New York Review of Books), Qaddafi (New Republic), Gaddafi(Time), Kaddafi (Newsweek), Khadafy (Maclean’s), Qadhafi (U.S. News & World Report), Qadaffi (Business Week), and Gadaffi (World Press Review).

So what is it then?

I was quite surprised to find out that my blog bandwidth had reached its limit and my website was effectively not served to new visitors!?! What? It can’t be true. I had plenty of bandwidth available and second – my blog is not Ashton Kutcher’s hence my silly face.

The first thing that occurred to me was that someone was stealing my bandwidth. How? I had to find out.

A quick look at my ftp and http stats showed that a few Honk Kong users have shown particular interest in a couple of my images. They have linked to the jpg files from their porn forum signatures and bob’s your uncle :^). That forum must have had lots of users reading posts as nearly 6 GB were used to load these images in just a few days. Wow! And I was paying for the free lunch! No more Mr. Nice Guy!!!

A quick google search gathered me with some useful .htaccess file modification which does the trick I needed. I even got a little bonus. The script not only blocks any image files being served by http but displays a cheeky image to replace the ones being hotlinked. Here is the image that will appear from now on instead of the ones that were hotlinked:

I would like to thank the cheeky hotlinkers for displaying this lovely image promoting my blog. I wish them all the best! Meanwhile Hong Kong web surfers, welcome to humble my website. It’s nothing like the porn forum you’ve been actively visiting but I hope it can still represent some kind of interest. Enjoy!

For all the other folk I recommend you protect yourself with this .htaccess mixed modification courtesy of both David Airey and Techgyo.com:

———————————————————————————————-

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?mywebsite\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !google\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !search\?q=cache [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !msn\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !yahoo\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !bing\. [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png|jpg)$ /images/nohotlink.jpe [L]
</ifModule>

———————————————————————————————-

Please note you have to change “mywebsite” with your website name. Then create your cheeky jpg image, name it nohotlink and then change the file extension from .jpg to .jpe so the image can be displayed on the hotlinkers’ websites. As you can see I have allowed google, msn, yahoo and bing to serve my images in their search results. I have allowed the good guys and restricted the bad guys.

My memory is still full of countless courier war stories from them courier years. Life was different at the time. It was a different kind of fun. Like riding fast between two buses in the middle of Oxford Street heading to Portland Square…

Yeah, it was fun only when it wasn’t raining…hence the condition of my trusty very first London map. I think it was Collins London Pocket Map circa 1998. Every courier had to have one, even the most experienced guys. I was shocked by the amount of streets and closes and turns and alleyways I had to remember in order to learn my way around. Being a pushbike courier in Central London was not just riding about but getting from A to B using the quickest possible route. If you didn’t you’d earn no money that day. Simple as that. And at £2.50 a job I had to make quite a few deliveries.

I remember my first day as it was yesterday. I called mobile from Baker Street and Marylebone Road only to get a pickup from a package from 82 Baker Street going to SE1. Wow. What a hard day it was. I managed to do 8 jobs – a total earning of £12 that day. But more importantly I was willing to learn and perfect the knowledge of Central London streets.

Today, 13 years after, I am grateful to the circumstances that allowed me to learn all that London streets knowledge. It helps a lot every time I have to visit the City and the West End. And guess what, every time I drive through Soho or Mayfair, I have a burst of pleasant memories…which is kinda nice.

The title I am most proud of!

I never expected to have any problems with one of my current web hosting suppliers. Unfortunately I experienced recently some issues with my server with them. These things happen and I accepted I was a bit unlucky with the hardware.

The company is one of the top populars in this industry and I expected a quick rectification of any issues that were keeping my websites offline. Online chat support technicians assured me a reboot wold solve any problems. OK. Reboot. Server up. Cool. Me happy.

Next day – server down again. Me – not happy. This scenario repeated another 2 times. Same useless server.

After the last case (two days ago) I decided to stop communicating with the online chat support guys. I filed a support ticket. To my greatest surprise these guys came back to me with the following response: ” Your server is up and running, blah, blah, blah, this website of yours is up and running and the server is up and running ( all services running and responding as they should be)??!?!

What?!?! I checked server immediately and to my fullest surprise everything was down. The website they gave me as a working example was hosted on a totally different server with another hosting provider?!?! Duh!

I am waiting to see how they handle my case and will post updates soon. I won’t publish their name for now but may consider doing so in the future.

Rispek!
N.