Firetop

Finally arrived in sunny San Antonio Bay at 5am this morning, two hours later than scheduled, thanks to a two-hour delay in baggage loading at Gatwick airport and a very long taxi queue at Ibiza Airport. We were just grateful that the flight took off at all as many had been cancelled at the North Terminal, most others were delayed by an hour or two. Queuing to get into the departure lounge at Gatwick was as long as the queue getting into JFK arrivals, took about an hour as everybody gets body searched now, and even shoes have to go through the scanner (watch for the increase in veruca transmissions). The plane had its fair share of drunks slapping the backsides of the air stewardesses but that´s to be expected I guess on a flight to Ibiza. (more…)

Sometimes I get asked why I decided to call my company Firetop Ltd; there were two factors influencing this decision. Firstly, I needed a name that was applicable to getting people to the ‘top’ of search engine results, since this was the original web marketing service provided through optimisation techniques or pay per click advertising. ‘Fire’ ‘Top’ seemed to be suitably gimmicky, memorable and short for typing. In addition I was able to register the relevant company and domain names whilst purchasing firetop.com from a ‘wizard workshop’ guy in the US. The reason a ‘wizardy’ guy owned Firetop in the first place does tie in with the second influencing factor. (more…)

A few years ago, a colleague of mine had his laptop computer stolen from his suitcase on a flight into the UK via Heathrow airport. Since then I’ve been extra cautious about what I put into suitcases destined for the main baggage hold. I’m not sure I would ever have considered it safe to put expensive electrical equipment into my main luggage anyway, but this example reinforced my usual pessimistic instincts.

In June I spoke to a retired baggage handler who had many tales of what went on behind the baggage carousels at Heathrow airport in the 1970s; theft of passenger items or duty free goods wasn’t at all unusual. So when the government introduced new security rules on hand luggage last week, forcing anything other than wallets and passports to go into the main hold, it looked like a recipe for disaster. It is now reported by the BBC that 10,000 cases have gone missing inside five days.

(more…)

Watched another Amazon DVD rental film yesterday - Flight 93. The story of the passengers onboard Flight 93 on September 11th who stormed their aircraft after it was taken over by terrorists, albeit with tragic consequences when they crashed into a Pennsylvania hillside. I should say ‘allegedly stormed’ because there a quite a few conspiracy theories floating about suggesting that the plane might have actually been shot down by US fighters on an intercept order, but conspiracies follow everything to do with 9/11 don’t they… and there’s no doubt from telephone recordings that the passengers did mount some kind of bold struggle to regain control of the flight. (more…)

Online Advertising Operations (Ad Ops) describes the section of a company responsible for the efficient deployment of online advertising onto a website. These are the people who obtain the ad creative from advertisers, load it into ad servers such as DoubleClick, monitor the campaign on a day to day basis and track the performance. All too often this seemingly unglamorous series of duties is overlooked by both marketing and advertising staff alike. But, without the right group of people working busily behind the scenes, even the best planned web campaign may not get the volume of coverage intended… or worse, it may get too much exposure to the wrong audience. We online advertising operations people are to be cherished; we’re technically savvy online marketers who know how to sell what we deliver – online advertising. (more…)

The price of electricity with Scottish Power seems to have gone a bit crazy of late, so I thought I’d revisit uswitch.com’s online comparison service to see how much money we could save on the annual household gas and electricity bill elsewhere. The answer was - not a lot, but what I did come across was the ‘npower Juice’ deal with Greenpeace. Switch to that plan and in exchange for every unit of electricity you use, npower will feed the same amount of electricity from renewable sources (wind, tidal and solar) into the electricity network. (more…)

A few months back I spotted the unusual sight of a white squirrel skipping around Dorking’s churchyard. At first glance I thought it was a Sainsbury’s carrier bag blowing about, but soon realized that it was a more unusual member of the Sciuridae family. Suzie_Q managed to catch the sighting on her mobile camera a few days later, but the quality isn’t great I’m afraid. Upon looking up these white freaks, I found some information that said the odds of a white squirrel being born are 1 in 100,000. However, I also found some information that said they often live in small albino colonies (which would seem to contradict the 1 in 100,000 statistic). (more…)

Running your own streaming radio station online or ‘SHOUTcasting’ sounds like fun, install SHOUTcast software on your server and away you go? Wrong… like anything popular music related you need a license to broadcast copyrighted materials publicly - or face a fine upwards of $10,000. Just installing SHOUTcast on a server can be tricky with increasing numbers of web hosting companies demanding to see license information before they authorise its use. However, there’s a bigger problem for UK residents and that is the absence of any current licensing agreement. UK residents can however broadcast legally TO the US if they’re willing to fork out the dollars for a license - how helpful! (more…)

An update on the frustrating downtime this morning. I upgraded the server last week to include a more robust managed back-up system, this meant the folks at Rackspace had to move the server to a new location (with a new IP address). I asked them to do this at midnight this morning to minimise inconvenience for all. However… they forgot to update all of the IP addresses on the domain A records so they were still pointing to the old server IP address up until about 7:30am when I contacted the technical support staff to identify the problem. (more…)

This week I discovered the fantastic Drum ‘n’ Bass channel on Digitally Imported - yet another fantastic Internet radio stream from these guys. It might have been available a while; perhaps it’s only my recent ‘Global Gathering‘ trip down memory lane that’s prompted me to go ‘old skool’ and pay attention to it. I was wondering where the domain ending ‘.FM’ came from, since .TV is managed on behalf of the islands of Tuvalu (which incidentally are sinking due to global warming). (more…)