Most of today’s modern music either fits into 2 categories original or not very original now I don’t have a problem with a band taking some failed 80s hit and turning it into a catchy rap mix.

But I do have a problem with stupid crappy lyrics that basically ride an awful melody to nothingness. Let’s take today’s number 2 hit ‘Fireflies’ from Owl City.

If you read through some of the lyrics you will start to see what I mean.

(my comments are in bold)


You would not believe your eyes - If 10 million fireflies - Lit up the world as I fell asleep
Brilliant


Cause they'd fill the open air and leave teardrops everywhere.you'd think me rude
but I would just stand and stare.
Are you at a nudist beach?

I like to make myself believe that planet earth turns slowly.
It does Einstein - 1 revolution every 24 hours

it's hard to say that I'd rather stay awake when I'm asleep cause everything is never as it seems.
That’s some nice ryming

Cause I'd get a thousand hugs from ten-thousand lightening bugs as they tried to teach me how to dance.
I want what he's having.

But I'll know where several are if my dreams get real bizarre. Cause I saved a few and I keep them in a jar.
That line is worse than the lyric from Des’ree ‘It’s a sight that I fear most. I’d rather have a piece of toast’


Please no more Fireflies on the radio - please!

What does a world government and the climate have in common? Well quite a lot if you read the Copenhagen Climate Change treaty that will be held in December.

And the scary thing is apart from a few blog sites no one has mentioned anything - we are too busy arguing over the right to smack our children or how many minutes we have during coffee break when the real threat to your future and our children’s future could be one signature away.

I have read parts of the treaty that has been published online, and it reads like an obscure Shakespearian play.

My advice to Mr Key would be sit down with your smartest lawyers and read the damn thing; you may find the real devil is in the detail.


Climate Realists are putting to together an online petition to try and put some pressure on the government.
http://www.climaterealists.org.nz/node/1

A small clip from Lord Christophers speech at St.Paul
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMe5dOgbu40

Recently walking down Newmarket I came across some people asking me to sign a petition to support massive cuts in the CO2 produced by New Zealand of around 40%.

The Sign on petition is fronted by actors and not scientists or people’s opinions that we should actually take seriously.

How ironic, that actors are used to spread the “truth” about climate change. However someone might want to let these actors know about the inconvenient truth that the world has been very naughty lately and is not heating up, but has actually been cooling down since 1998.

I guess that’s why they are now calling it ‘climate change’ and not global warming – have you noticed that they have changed the terminology? Now any crappy weather can be attributed to it – are these guys smart or what?

WHY when people like me raise points for discussion are we immediately labeled ‘climate change deniers’ – burn me at the stake how dear you say the world is round?

There is a massive political agenda to push climate change down our thoughts, and so far the mass have bought it hook line and sinker. But slowly people are starting to wake up to what is really going on – 4c a litre TAX on gas to save the world, what a deal!

They have finally found a way to tax the air we breathe and unlimited amount of taxes can be applied to food, industry and travel in the name of global warming err um sorry climate change.



Please consider the environment before you print this blog.

Air New Zealand got a wakeup call on Sunday when a computer crash grounded their fleet and stranded passengers.

If Rob Fythe email is anything to go by IBM will surely be licking her wounds this week, however to make the boys over at IBM feel better I have put together a list of what I think are some of the biggest "oops" in recent IT history.

Number 5
U.K biggest computer crash in government history – a routine software upgrade caused major problems – a little over 80,000 civil servants were disrupted! - Like the routine software upgrade on the Pukekohe telephone exchange I guess!

Number  4
When software bugs and space rockets combine you can have some very expensive problems! A small software bug destroyed an Ariane 5 rocket in 1996. - Woops

Number 3
In keeping with power problems, in 2003 a massive black out was caused in North America by a race condition in some monitoring software. – Quickly reboot the system I am getting cold!

Number 2
A medical application that was not built within the specifications of the “Three laws of robotics” – and tragically killed 6 people when the radiation machine zapped patients with 100 times the intended dose!

Number 1
The Y2K bug – this sums it up best of what did not happen.

Remember roughly where a business was, but not the exact location? Can’t quite recall a number you heard on the radio?
Sounds like a job for 018!  - quote www.call018.co.nz

What if you know the exact name of the company? – Even the address and how to spell the company name and they still put you through to the wrong number – worse they put you through to a Strip Club in a totally different location!

Well that was the experience of a longtime customer of Stirrups Equestrian – for those of you who are not up to play with Equestrianism’s a ‘Stirrup Iron’ is the bit of metal on the saddle where you put your foot for balance while you are horse riding – ‘Stirrups’ is just the plural version of a Stirrup.

Now Stirrups has been trading for over 10 years – here is the listing in the whitepages  and they are listed in the yellowpages here.

A female customer rang up the 018 directory needing the number of Stirrups Equestrian and was lucky enough to be put through to the Philippines call centre.

This is where a fake American accented girl answered the phone. The call centre operator asked her to repeat the name a couple of times before the customer even spelt the name S-T-I-R-R-U-P-S and said the location of Newmarket.

Instead of being transferred to a horse shop – the Philippines operator put her through to a Strip Club in the more shady part of town.

Luckily the customer saw the funny side of the situation and managed to hunt down the correct number – but not using the 018 service.


Note:
Stirrups Equestrian is a hosting customer of ours and relayed the story to us – I said it was great story and asked if I could share it on my blog

Where the bloody hell are you? Website traffic is not something you can take for granted no matter how good or how much money you have spent building your website.
 
I had an email last week from one of my hosting clients. He has set himself up with a simple website.

He has built the website, but found he has very little traffic. Increasing website traffic is a topic I get asked about a lot. This blog will cover the basics and some terminologies to help you get started.

We all use search engines to find stuff, and those websites lucky enough to be in the top of our searches get all the traffic, whilst those on page 2, 3 or greater get very little. So getting your website higher in the organic ranking (organic is the non-paid searches) is where the hard work actually begins.

There are so many companies now that specialise, in this black art, called search engine optimisation (SEO) – unfortunately most of them don’t really have a clue about search engine optimisation!

If you are ever contacted by a company or web developer moonlighting as an SEO expert, that offers you improved search performance on search engines, then there is a simple trick you can do. To put them to the test – run a simple search in Google for their site using relevant keywords (not their actual company name). If you can’t easily find them then how are they going to help you?

Here are some tips that I give to clients keen on improving website performance.

Tip 1 Measure Everything!
I mean everything. Where is your traffic coming from? What keywords are being used to find you? What’s your bounce rate? What’s your average time on site? What’s the most viewed page?

Where is your Traffic coming from?
If you are a local company and only trade within New Zealand then why do you only have a .com address? Having a .co.nz will help you search in the local pages from New Zealand – some sites are excluded from the local search because they purely have a .com.

Is your traffic bouncing?
A bounce is where someone has clicked onto your site then clicked off very quickly, it usually means they have had a quick look and decided your site was not for them. Depending on your site, a high bounce rate is a cause for concern.

What is the average time on your site?
Sites like Geekzone will have a high average time on site – because they are informative and have a large volume of information for visitors. If you have an information website like the website mentioned earlier you should be look at an average time on site over 2 minutes. This means visitors are taking the time to read your articles.


Tip 2 is anyone out there talking about you?

There are a number of free directories you can add yourself to that will promote your site for example finda.co.nz. This helps with your exposure because more sites have information links back to your site.

Please remember it’s quality not quantity. Let’s say that the New Zealand Herald wrote an article about this blog , then the NZ herald being a reputable source of information would boost the page ranking of this blog, because it’s a quality link. Once upon a time it was possible to “link whore” yourself to the top, but now the Googlebot is much smarter than that. And those types of practices can get your website blacklisted

Tip 3 – Your website name is important

I wanted to call this blog article – “where the bloody hell are you” but as much as I would like to I know the indexing on Google would have been rubbish and you wouldn’t be reading it right now. The line “where the bloody hell are you” has nothing to do with search engine optimization!

Tip 4 – Make your website GoogleBot Friendly

They say a picture says a thousand words, but to a Googlebot a picture is meaningless. If your website doesn’t have any searchable content then you are as good as dead on a search engine. Talk to your web developer about making your content as search friendly as possible!

Tip 5 – Use these free tools from Google

Google Analytics
Measure your website traffic

Google adwords
To advertise your website on Google

Google adsense
To get revenue from your website (may not be applicable)

Google webmasters
Very helpful tool for more advanced users.

Google KeywordTool
This is very helpful for measuring your keywords

Good luck- Please feel free to comment. You can contact me at richard at 3bit dot co dot nz if you would like some more information.

Please don’t comment with links to your website as I will remove them – sorry no free ride on my blog ;-)

It is true for a large number of us working in the IT industry that we often neglect the most important machine that we control which is our own body.

Long hours, poor diet and lack of exercise doesn’t make for a very productive worker. So I have asked Kate from Lifespark Nutrition to write me 3 articles that you will hopefully find helpful. This is part 3 you can read part one here and part two here

 
   Lastly for great concentration levels and a boost of energy make sure you drink at least 8 glasses of water. Not coffee, energy drinks or softdrinks. Many people mistake the fact that coffee dehydrates you, which means drinking too much will only make your tiredness worse not better.

Next time you are feeling tired, try having 2 glasses of water as chances are you are just dehydrated. Save your money too.

      If you don’t like plain water, try adding a touch of lime or lemon cordial to it. Or drinking sparkling water.

      So if you are suffering from some of the symptoms mentioned, take the test for two weeks and follow these simple steps.

         1. Eat 2 serves of fruit and 3 serves of vegetables
         2. Eat 5-6 servings of good wholegrain carbohydrates
         3. Limit your intake of sugary foods
         4. Limit coffee, softdrink or energy drink intake (give them up for two weeks would be better)
         5. Drink at least 8 glasses of water per day. Have two in the morning when you wake up. If you exercise you may need to drink more.
         6. Get at least 7-8 hours of sleep, VERY IMPORTANT
         7. Have breakfast

      Even if you don’t suffer from symptoms of fatigue, eating well should be part of a healthy lifestyle to prevent health complications. Your body degrades every day; you can either reduce or increase the process-it’s up to you.

It is true for a large number of us working in the IT industry that we often neglect the most important machine that we control which is our own body.

Long hours, poor diet and lack of exercise doesn’t make for a very productive worker. So I have asked Kate from Lifespark Nutrition to write me 3 articles that you will hopefully find helpful. This is part 2 you can read part one here

Are you getting quality carbohydrates?

Do you eat white bread or wholegrain bread? Do you have chocolate muffin or bran muffin at morning tea? Do you snack on white crackers or wholegrain crackers? Do you just eat potato at dinner or include pumpkin/ kumara or brown rice?

Simple changes like this can help improve energy and concentration levels 10 fold. Carbohydrates are essential for proper functioning of the brain and the body. However, there are some carbohydrates that are like blood suckers, such as biscuits, donuts, muffins, slices etc.

One of their nasty attributes is to give you a sugar spike then make you crash a few hours later (which makes you go for the next sugar fix or energy drink). They have very limited nutrients in them which means your body wastes nutrients on digesting these things but doesn’t receive anything back- this can lead into downward spiral of nutrient deficiency causing tiredness , bowel problems (lack of fibre) and depression.

Quality or complex (meaning nutrient dense)carbohydrates on the other hand such as wholegrain bread and crackers, oats, bran, low sugar cereals, brown rice, bran muffins, kumara, pumpkin, baked beans, etc. are high in a range of nutrients especially B vitamins and fibre. B vitamins are essential for the central nervous system and help release energy from your food. Let me repeat…are needed in the body to help release energy from your food.

This means that even if you are eating regularly but you are eating foods low in B vitamins, you will not feel the energy from the food as there are no nutrients to help assist with this breakdown. Complex carbohydrates also contain high amounts of fibre. This is so important to flush your system out. Without good bowel movement toxins build up also causing fatigue. 

In these hard times its good to know that there are still investment opportunities where you can guarantee returns? Guaranteed like Blue Chip properties I guess!!!

How does sport arbitrage betting/ trading work? Well I could write a novel about how it works however this demo explains it really easily for you.

Here is my story about a company called TradeSmart Technologies Limited. (Go have a look at their website). It doesn’t work anymore so I feel somewhat relieved that I didn’t invest with them- however many people did. :-(

It all started back in early Feb 2008 when I got a call from an Australian using a blocked number. He told me they were based in Melbourne – and asked me if I could make guaranteed returns of 3% on every trade would I be interested? “Sure” was my reply – so they sent me the details via post.

A week or so later a slick document arrived via post telling me of all the benefits of PFD (profit from difference) Trading. I had a quick read and it really told me nothing – but I would find out over the course of the next month how the system works. A system that will make you part with a large amount of money!

And so it begins.

A nice Scottish girl rings me, asking me about the product and if I would like a demo – “Sure” I said ‘that sounds fine’, demo away. I installed a crappy dot net application. This application was poor – a first year programmer could have built a better looking application.

Great! I had a 30 second demo to prove it works, did it work? The demo looked like it worked but the demo was assisted over the phone, I didn’t really get to try it out and ‘sorry’ only one demo for me. Would you buy an 8,000 dollar car after a 30 second drive down the road?

So we move onto the hard sell.

“Ok Richard we only have a limited number of packages, 150 allocated to New Zealand” – Why is that I asked? “Because we don’t want to oversubscribe the product”. (Is that possible – this isn’t the stock market?)

Luckily I have a habit of always writing notes about my conversations. In my notes I noted down all facts and figures. She told me they only had 85 products left from the initial 150 that had been allocated and they were selling like hotcakes, with15 products sold that morning, so I better be quick! She said I could choose between 2 different packages the basic, or the more advanced package. The basic was around $8,000 AUD dollars, don’t ask how much the more advanced package was!

I asked her for a 30 day trial of the product so that I could see for myself if it worked.
She got angry and suggested to me that if she did this I could profit from the product and use that profit to pay for the product after 30 days! (To this day I can’t work out her logic in that argument, but that was it) I said to her that was a great idea, and I might just do that ;-).

So she changed tack telling me that after 30 days there would be no way of turning the product off once it was turned on. Yeah right! The product connects to their servers to get the live feeds. If this was true, that they couldn’t disable it; then this product really was written by a first year programming student.

In my conversation with her she informed me that this was an introductory product that would build up trust with their company so when the bigger opportunities came along I could invest in them. This was a plot straight out of Boiler Room!!!!

Our conversation ended shortly afterwards as I had managed to stump her on every argument and she basically hung up.

But it did not end there.

I was bumped up to a better high pressure sales person. Boy this guy was good. This guy could sell ice to an Eskimo! He rang me the following week and he apologized about the other sales rep- playing good cop I guess.

I began by asking how many products they had left in New Zealand? He informed me they had plenty of packages left. I asked him for an exact number and he said 452 products!

“So are you going to invest Richard?” – No I answered; please take me off your call list – Good bye.

Back then Tradesmart had no bad press that I could find about them on Google. The only sites I could find were sites that actually supported their product; however I was to find out later, those supportive sites were owned by them! I was part of the first wave of potential victims for this crew. Search them now and the first few searches are scamwatch results!

So why write this blog? Because I am now getting hammered by a new company selling the same stuff. The guy had the cheek to ask me if I had 10K of cash sitting in my bank account because he didn’t want to waste his time - dear god!

Hopefully they will stumble across my blog before they bother to ring me again ;-)

Is sports arbitrage a scam? No its not a scam, but the guys selling it usually are. It is in theory possible to bet on both side of a sports team, with different bookies (different odds) and make money – but the returns are small, the volumes have to be high and the trades have to be many before you can make any money. Also it’s highly likely that if one Bookie gets the odds wrong they will cancel the bet leaving you with one live bet and one cancelled bet!

With Tradesmart you have to spend real money with these guys to have the opportunity to make a little bit of money, and in most cases the profits are overstated and the risks understated. Also once you pay your money you are at the mercy of these guys. When they close up and leave, you are on your own.

My advice is if you have 10k sitting in the bank and want to invest it, then buy gold ;-)

On a side note:
I was at a party last year and got chatting to someone who was telling me he had invested in a product that guaranteed returns but wouldn’t tell me what it was (his little secret investment opportunity, I guess). I said “I hope it’s not Tradesmart!” ‘I managed to screw those bastards down to 6k before I told them I wasn’t interested.’
The blood drained from his face.

Sites compaining about TradeSmart

http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/tradesmart-technologies-c66225.html

http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/332/RipOff0332289.htm

http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/342/RipOff0342847.htm

http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/tradesmart-technologies-c59553.html

 

It is true for a large number of us working in the IT industry that we often neglect the most important machine that we control which is our own body.

Long hours, poor diet and lack of exercise doesn’t make for a very productive worker. So I have asked Kate from Lifespark Nutrition to write me 3 articles over the next 3 weeks that you will hopefully find helpful.

Eat your mind into focus- part 1
Whether you are researching a project, developing websites/ software or just playing a game, we need our minds to be clear and focused. This is where good nutrition comes into play. Many people in the IT industry overlook this crucial factor. Many believe that food is food as long as it fills the hunger gap. Very wrong. Ever wonder why your energy levels are lacking? Feeling cranky or depressed? Feeling unmotivated? Tired? What you put in your mouth has a lot to do with all of these. Ask yourself a few questions simple, commonsense questions :

1.    Do you get your 5 plus per day? This means eating minimum 2 pieces of fruit and 3 servings of vegetables PER DAY, not per week. Fruit and vegetables contain huge amounts antioxidants which fight toxins that we breathe in (from car fumes, smoke etc) and ingest (high fat/sugar, low nutrient foods). Fruit and vegetables also contain fibre, phytonutrients and a range of vitamins and minerals which can’t always be reconstructed to the same effect in a multivitamin pill.

How to get 5 Plus per day?

·    Have a piece of fruit with your breakfast,
·    Have fruit as a morning or afternoon snack or after lunch
·    Swap you ham and cheese toastie at lunch for a sandwich, wrap, kebab, pita bread filled with lettuce,  tomato, carrot, cucumber and a bit of protein (egg, tuna, chicken, ham, beans etc)
·    Have a Bowl of vegetable soup (potato doesn’t count as vegetable)
·    At dinner make sure you have two servings of vegetables. 1 serving is 1 cup of mixed vegetables or salad so you need to have two of these. Half your plate should be filled with salad, stirfry veges or steamed vegetables .

If I could recommend one change that you made in your life for the next 2 weeks is get your 5 Plus per day. Your energy levels will increase, you will help sooth any digestion problems, build your immune system and reduce levels of stress or depression. For more tips on how to get your mind ticking faster watch this space for part 2 of the 3 part series.