off-it.org

I got just 57 minutes to blog! In fact i’ve got just 57 minutes to do anything online!

Why? Well the we recently swapped electric suppliers. We moved from the dreaded Npower To what appears to be the more dreaded EDF Energy .

After waiting in all morning to have my meter swapped over from a token meter to a key meter.  The engineer finally turned up. He got here 5 minutesbefore his deadline which wasn’t so bad. Shame i had to sit in all day waiting for them to arrive though.

Once he got here, there was instantly a dispute. I called EDF yesterday and asked if the credit i had on my meter would be transferred to the new shiny key meter. I was assured it would be. So i thought “Great”. That was until the engineer finally got here. I told him about the credit swap over. To which he informed me was impossible as the meters come preinstalled with just £10. (I had £23 in electric before they arrived.)

Obviously this caused me to get rather stressed and kick a door or two. (Which the engineer guy didn’t like one bit.)
The outcome of it all is that my meter is getting fitted. The new key with £20 of creit is being mailed recorded delivery to our flat for Monday.  Until then we have just £10 to last us the weekend.

Time to wait for the meter to be fitted.

Cya soon.

The world of business in the proxy world is a non stop war between proxy owners, and proxy filtering software companies. If your unsure of who these companies are then let me list just a few:

LightspeedSystems

Websense

BlueCoat

There are many more as well. in fact the list is almost endless.

What War?

If you have no idea about what war between proxy owners and filtering companies i am on about, Then this probably doesn’t affect you in the slightest and it will either bore you rigid. Or make little to no sense.

The way it works is like this. Proxy owners such as myself along with hundreds of others across the world. Create proxies for users to get access to their favourite sites. Or to help users in news censored countries get news about the world as well as put their news out into the world.

Web Proxies are also used by teenagers at school who want to check their comments and other Myspace related stuff. This also includes office workers who want access to sites that are restricted at their work place.

The filtering companies have software installed across many schools across the world. All these schools and office blocks signed up for the service.  So where does that leave proxy owners? Well we have to use whatever we can to make the sites we create undetectable. Or at the very least harder to detect by the automatic spiders that crawl web pages constantly retrieving links and either banning access to them from anywhere that has their software installed. Or leaving them be.

So every time we make a move to enhance our users experience and stop our sites from getting blocked. They make a move to find our improvements and block them too.

So whats the future of proxies? Invitation only? Paid usage only? Or is the answer as simple as changing our techniques constantly to keep them guessing at what exactly we are doing.

Personally i say change the techniques and keep them guessing. Why? Because thats what these companies get paid for.

And as a side note. Lightspeed banned this site too. No idea why. Maybe they just don’t like me.

So summer has been on its way for quite some time. Or so i have been led to believe. Living in the UK its often hard to believe what the weather channel / Weather person has to say.

But now the weekend has disappeared, its dragged the clouds with it, revealing a beautiful looking summer! I must say…. About time!

There’s no doubt that summer time won’t last long here.   In fact as any fellow Brit would know. We’ll be lucky if it lasts a couple of hours days weeks.

What does summer have in store for Britain then? Or should i say what does Britain have in store for summer? Well as usual there will of course be plenty of people sat in the pubs enjoying their refreshing beverages. Most will undoubtedly be sat outside drinking their beers. As the smoking ban put a major buzzkill on visiting the pubs.

Others will be enjoying the great British summertime by spending days at the beach and enjoying their family holidays. If you live anywhere near a beach in the UK. Then hurry up and get prepared to have an enjoyable time at the beach (Or the pub).

Many will be having a BBQ either in their backgarden. Or someone elses. BBQ’s make the summer more enjoyable. There’s nothing more enjoyable than drinking a cold beer and ripping meat from the bone when the suns beating down.

And people that are alot like myself, well we’ll be sitting and chilling away from the pubs but enjoying the summer. Possibly visiting the odd BBQ along the way. I’ll also be spending countless hours in front of the pc doing whatever it is i do.

So that brings me to you. What have you got planned for the summer? Maybe your going on holiday for a week or two in the summer time? Or maybe you have a party or 3 planned. Or maybe your one of those people that are planning to have a BBQ!  Leave me a comment (they give me something to read) and let me know what you’ve got planned.

If you thought Myspace were an unstoppable force that hit the internet, Then think again.  It appears they’ve just lost one of their domains, Myspace.co.uk !

Yep if you visit the site, All you get is a blank page. Wondering,”Why?” “What happened to Myspace?” Or something else along those lines?

Well it was never really theirs to have in the first place. In fact it belonged to a small to medium sized ISP in Stockport here in the UK named Total Web Solutions.

Luckily for Total Web Solutions, an appeals panel heard their case and they now appear to have the domain name back.

Managing director Paul Fallon says:

“We refused to be bullied by one of the largest media organisations in the world,”

“This has been a very stressful case for a legitimate medium sized ISP to have to take on - but we had to defend our reputation and to stand up for what was right.”

If your interested in the full details. They are available here in .pdf format