Archive for March, 2008

It’s here! it’s time to put my plan into action… I am proud to announce my new mini-website -

imgames where great players get paid

It’s a website to help me promote this blog and my uvme site, help sell a few products (when they get up on here!) and generally do a bit of ‘come and see fiddyp’ promotion.

There are oodles of prizes to be given away and there’s a multitude of ways to get your hands on them!

1. Play the game exclusive for FiddyP and get on the highscore table.
   (the top scorer on the given day will win a super duper prize)
2. Host the game on your site and have the winner come through you.
   (use the special code the site gives you to display the game on your site, if someone that plays the game on your site and wins a prize, you do too!)
3. Give the game page a thumbs up and review on Stumbleupon
   (any stumbleupon user can go to the game page on imgames and give it a thumbs up and review too. A random user on a given date will win a prize)
4. Invite your friends to play.
   (use the importer to invite your webmail contacts to play the game and they will receive a special link to play the game on the imgames site and if they win a prize, you do too!)
5. Just get on the highscore table
   (there will be spot prizes awarded to people that get on the highscore table at a published time, even if they’re in last place!)

Here are some of the prizes that will be available over the coming months….

Sexy Headphones!

Awesome iPod Speakers!

Laser backlit keyboards!

Fivers!

---

And here is the first game to be available.. It’s a simple game where you use the arrow keys on your keyboard to control the thrusters on a little underwater craft. Your fuel is limited so make sure you fill up between landing on the designated spots! You can play it by visiting the imgames site and see what other games are coming to fiddyp!

Just play the game and try to get on the highscore table, enter your name (and plug your site if you want) and email address (so I can notify you if you won) and wait for the prize to come in! There is a feed you can subscribe to on the main site and that will have upcoming prizes and spot notification times.

Please have a go and let me know what you think, it would be great if you can put the game on your site and give your readers a chance to win too!

Visit the game’s homepage and give it a thumbs up and review on stumbleupon for another chance to win a prize! For all the rules and prize details, visit the main imgames site where you’ll be able to invite your friends or even get your own code to show the game on your site. If one of the winners comes through your site (if you use the special code you get sent) then you win a prize too!

Popularity: 4% [?]

Oooo, I have exciting news! what started with a ponder on a wander by the river months ago has turned into something that has kept me up late at night for the past week. You see, I really like to run contests. I like the excitement it causes and I really like the interaction it creates. I want to take it to the next level. Just you wait until you see what I have got in store this weekend!

All I can say now is that real prizes and real money will be available to anyone and everyone who can use a mouse or cursor keys. All you need is a browser and internet connection. Hell, you don’t even need to register to enter. You will even have the chance to win real prizes by giving your own readers something really fun to do while they’re still on your blog, they can win prizes too and here’s the thing… if they win, so do you!

The site is called imgames.co.uk and it’s all ready to rock and roll, I’m just waiting for the nameservers around the globe to catch up with the change and it’ll be all on a dedicated server ready for the weekend. I hope you get a chance to see what I’ve got in store and come and pay a visit here or there on Saturday to see what has made me so red-eyed for the past week!

Popularity: 4% [?]

7th March 2008
I had an inkling to change my phone from a 35+ quid contract to a Three contract, I talked to the nice chaps at the local 3 store and was all ready to leave o2 and port my number to Three. That was a good idea until I phoned o2 to get my PAC code to transfer the phone number..

I talk to a specialist “retention team member” called Scott who told me his system said I was on an 18 month contract.. grr, all phone companies do this and I know I was out of contract. He did say that he could drop me down a tariff to £30 a month and that still had the same amount of minutes… tick tick BOOM! I exploded! how can I get the same thing for a fiver less, why have I been paying 35 all this time?

lol, I lost it a bit and demanded to speak to customer service so I can get a refund for all the months that I’ve been paying 35 for something that costs 30… A nice lady answered and ‘got to the bottom of it’ and gave me a £10 credit on my next bill (still nowhere near leaving and getting a PAC number).. back I go to the ‘retention team member’ who happens to be Scott again (from t’ north by the sounds of his accent (at least it was a UK accent!)). I tell Scott that the nice girly tells me I’m on a 12 month contract… he looks on his system and says, “nope, yer on an 18 month contract according to this”.

haha, all boom gone, left with quiet seething…

Somehow in my red mist of calm collective, a half an hour of conversation later and suddenly I’m on a new 30 day rolling contract with more minutes that my records show I use and added to that, I’ve got free broadband! all I have to do is leave Bulldog who control my line and go back to BT.. only then can I get the broadband fitted

it turns out that BT don’t have a record of my number after it was changed to Bulldog;

“there is no record of a phone at that address”

“but I’m talking on it now! there must be”

“no sir, there is no phone connected at your address”

“(sigh)”

As with all customer service places, if you’re not getting what you want, phone again and you get to speak to someone new!

“hi, this is jacky how can I help?”

“I need to come back to BT from bulldog”

“ok, what is the number?”

“it’s ……..”

(a few minutes later)

“Yes we can do that, I just did the test on the line and we will connect you on 11 march”

no line at this address indeed…

A few days later Scott called me up to check if everything was ok.. lol, I was obnoxious as hell on the line last time (as only people that call customer service can know) and to be fair, he stayed calm and polite the whole way through last time and this time I was in a better mood! He tells me he’ll phone me back on the 12th to get the broadband sorted.

11th March 2008

Existing broadband goes off! halfway through a download… no matter though, I used my PAYG Three skype phone as a USB modem and had a decent enough connection to doofernow.

12th March 2008
New line is back to BT. I call up o2 to see if I can speak to Scott so I can get the ball rolling as soon as possible. He was busy so I talked to a barry white soundalike who was able to read what had gone on before and within a few minutes told me my order was under way. yey! now the horrid wait for the actual connection to happen. will it be quick? will it take a bleedin age like that time once way back?

Text messages galore from o2.. your username is this, your details are that etc…. your router has been dispatched…

14th March 2008
Router arrives! yey! I check the DSL status on my current router and it doesn’t show anything, boohoo. It was too much to wish for anyway

15th March 2008
I noticed the dsl status lights were doing something when I got up but I was too busy this Saturday and I promptly forgot about it

16th March 2008
Sitting at my PC browsing at not super broadband speeds (but still not horrendously bad like the stone age of dialup) I suddenly remembered to check the line again. Lo and behold, a dsl line exists, it’s trained and it’s clocking in at a supposed 10MB

I didn’t have a BB access username so I phoned customer service (after office hours) and was quickly told that I should use my o2 router first because the access doesn’t need a username.

clunk click - bloody quick!!

sorted with Broadband for free. I did a few small tests and was able to get a stable 1.6mb/s for some things and a 60kb upload speed. did I mention, for free? lol. I drop £20 a month off my mobile phone bill, I go to a 30 day rolling contract so I am not tied in. My previous broadband and phone bill of £37 a month gets replaced by one for 0.00 and a tenner for BT .hahahaha.

All because I wanted to leave my mobile phone company and migrate to another. Thanks to the quick wits of Scott and his Jedi mind trick training from o2, I am saving nearly 600 quid a year and have actually got a faster fatter internet!

My advice is to phone your mobile phone carrier and tell them you want to leave, you see how many hoops they’ll jump through to keep you in!

Popularity: 4% [?]

Some major additions to uVme have been made recently! There are now two more payment options for players to add to their playing account - Paypal and Netteller. This should make things a lot easier for those wanting to wager on games when they get good enough (or sending a challange to FiddyP and beating me!)

Another great thing is, you can now challenge for free. Signup to the site for free and you can send challenges to me or other folk you know by searching for their name on the pre-game screen and then send a challenge worth 0.00 .

If you haven’t seen it yet and you enjoy playing games, register for free by clicking the image on my imgames site and choose any game, once you see the game preview page you can select to play for free or put FiddyP in the search box and challenge me to a free game. (be gentle with me!)

I have some fantastic plans for imgames that are so nearly ready for action, I have the coding mostly done and the support site nearly ready. All that will be left will be the launch! (this is still top secret! I’ve pumped some serious cash into these plans, you are going to be blown away when you see it! there’s going to be prizes galore for readers here and a chance for you to get something for you and your own readers)

Subscribe to the Fiddyp feed and be the first to find out what’s in store for Fiddyp and imgames

Popularity: 4% [?]

I can’t believe what I just did….. I mistakenly restored an old backup of fiddyp… grrrrr.

I have just moved to a dedicated server and its really helped the load times, I got everything working and then did a backup. “sweet” thought I…. let’s set up a scheduled backup… two wrong clicks later and I realise that it’s restoring the old back up. dammnit all to hell on a bicycle!!!!

Luckily, I managed to retrieve the last two posts I made by copying the source of the feed in google feedreader, amazingly, that still held the last two posts I made. Shame I missed the comments though, I’ll have to see if I can find a list of the entries of the Euromillions rollover contest in a history somewhere and get it from offline mode….

silly silly me!

edit: I just realised that I can reconstruct the comments from my email notifications. I just got all the entries back on the euromillions contest post from a page view in the history, i’ll put the remainder up when I get over my heart attack!

newedit: I tried to change this hosting to exclusive IP on a dedicated server and I lost another couple of comments (sorry Sharon). I have had the most frustrating day playing with this server. I feel an indepth rant coming!….

even newer edit: I think I’m changing too many things and not giving it time to work! I am now going to leave the nameservers as they are, leave the IP of the hosting the same and just sit back and wait for a few days for everything to settle. sorry for any interuptions to normal service.. I’m trying to get everything up and secure on a fast host so I can get my new plans in to gear and not worry about bandwidth affecting download times and other schtuff..

seeya soon!

Popularity: 2% [?]

I keep a track of who installs commentluv by monitoring pings that come in to the plugin page when a new blog activates CommentLuv. I do try and make a comment on each one but some slip through the net due to immense workloads that take priority.
I am taking a bit of advice from Revellian about blogging karma and having a regular spot for linking out to blogs I have seen. What better way to promote CommentLuv and reward those that use it?

The first blog on this list will be Kens Trees, he has a photo blog about his effort to grow bonsai trees from seed. This looks like a blog that has some longevity, it takes bloody ages for a tree to grow so I hope that Ken will keep his blog going for some time while he documents how Willard the Dawn Redwood grows.

Another blog I know you will enjoy is Stephen Hopsons blog, he’s a qualified deaf pilot! Among his posts are some real thought provokers like this one about not giving when you know you should

A great Philippino blog to check out is BendzG, a blog for juicy oriental gossip and much more besides! It’s great to see CommentLuv being used on so many international blogs!

If you have a blog that uses CommentLuv and want a mention, leave me a comment somewhere on any of my posts and I’ll give you a mention in the next CommentLuvvers post. If you want to see more blogs that use CommentLuv, be sure to check the sidebar for the latest people to activate the plugin.

Popularity: 3% [?]

edit: contest is over, the lucky star numbers were 4 and 8. no one won this time! keep coming back whenever you hear there is a euromillions rollover because I run this contest for every one!

Due to the Euromillions rollover there’s a chance for you to win these great headphones from Vmoda.

Just leave a comment with your guess for the lucky star numbers to be revealed this Friday 14th March. You need to give two different numbers between 1 and 9. If you match your guess with the lucky star numbers drawn on the Euromillions then you win!

Good Luck!

p.s.There’s a way you can be guaranteed to match both lucky stars on the Euromillions draw, it’s called elottery and I win a prize every week because I’m a member (who happens to get extra entries just for being a good affiliate!)

p.p.s This is a regular contest for whenever there is a rollover on the Euromillions. Subscribe to my feed and keep up to date on all the contests happening at Fiddyp!

Popularity: 3% [?]