Gary Writes A Blog

On Thursday night we went to see “The Blue Man Group” as Maria’s birthday present from me.

If you haven’t heard of them, it’s hard to explain, but it’s a mixture of rhythms, colours and performance. It was fantastic and well worth it!

Last Saturday, me and Maria ran one half each of Hindertimmen, a local race through the forests behind Stockholm University.

I think we did quite well, our combined time for the 11Km race was 1h 11 mins and 17 secs.

Here’s some pics and my GPS thingy…

Last week, the main website I work on was hacked.

While my system behaved exactly as normal, deep down in the file structure, the hackers had built another website that looked exactly like the Italian Post Office’s Bank.

They then used another unrelated to me system to send an unknown number of emails to people in Italy, telling them they had to log into their bank for some important information, but taking them to their/my page instead of the real bank.

This is what is known as a phishing scam.

The bank realized after a couple of days, and quickly had our site completely taken down. The good parts and the bad. Even the famed Google got in on the act, sending me an email asking me if I was aware that I was pretending to be a bank.

Thankfully, my webhosts are superb and I was back online within a couple of hours. HOWEVER, these ne’er do well Italians will cost me several weeks of work, rebuilding the system to stop any further attacks. Not my idea of nice people.

What is super interesting though is now I have some statistics on the number of people who click through on these scam emails.

When I removed the malicious files, I installed a little tracking code that showed how many people actually tried to come to the address. The results are frighting and show why the hackers do this kind of thing…

In the space of the 5 days since we closed them down, the page has been requested 372 times from unique people. Even though our page now looks nothing like a bank and has nothing to do with banks, we have still had 2 people actually set up accounts on our page using their bank log-in details.

With scams like this happening 24 hours a day around the world, goodness knows how much money individuals and banks are losing.

Neil was across here for the weekend and we had a nice time together, interrupted only by having to go out and run around the forests of Lidingö for several hours.

Yep, it was the (in)famous Lidingöloppet, the worlds biggest cross country race (in terms of participation, according to the organisers).

Last time I ran this in 2007 it was a struggle to say the least. Although my legs are telling me otherwise, it was a better experience this time and I managed to scrape in under three hours.

Neil did well again, coming in 3734th place with a time of 02:48:05. Although last time in 2007 he ran it in 02.47.35. That’s 30 seconds more, you must be getting old Neil!!!! 😉

My 2007 time was 03.19.45, but this time I came 4865th with a time of 02:54:56, so I must be getting younger!

Here’s some pics of me and Neil finishing taken by Maria at the end line:

The race that nearly killed me a couple of years ago was called the Lidingöloppet and somehow I find myself 9 days away from it again and once again out of shape.

Barbara suggested that I should go to the forest near her house and run something called the Ursvik Extreme. Problem was that I couldn’t find the woods for the trees. By the time I found the trail, I was already knackered.

Wish I hadn’t found the trail, as it lived up to it’s name and I had to walk big parts of it and never actually got around the whole thing. This was no “once around the lake before tea-time”.

Was good to practice on that kind of terrain, but now even a couple of days later I am completely knackered.

A good mate of mine made this video about Poland and it’s relationship to the EU. It’s class…

You may have noticed a change in how Google is working this week after the launch of Google Instant. Basically it works a little like predictive texting, as you write in your search query, it predicts what you are searching for and starts showing results based on those predictions even before you have finished writing it in.

For people like me who have small, niched websites, this is something we will have to rapidly adapt to. There is a real danger that it will favour the “big guy” and the most common search terms instead of allowing/forcing people to build long tail keywords that the niche players live off.

Here’s an example:
Let’s say that you have a company that helps people patent stuff. There is a lot of competition to get to the top of the search engines for this niche and you have realized that you cant compete for the search term “How to Patent” so you have instead built a website optimized for “How to Patent an Invention”.

90% of searches are for “How to Patent” but 10% are for “How to Patent an Idea” and you currently rank No.1 for that and you get enough business to have a nice little company.

Now Google instant comes along and before people have even had a chance to type in the words “an Idea”, they are already presented with a list of websites that look suitable, so they are off clicking on those and your company is down the tubes.

All these predictive tools in Google will in my opinion tend to favour larger companies who rank better for more common keywords than the smaller companies basing their strategies on long-tail keywords.

Adapt or die! Will be interesting to see what happens.

Here’s a little clue of where I have been for the last week…

We went to the AIK vs Levski Sofia game last night at Råsunda.

Even though it was a 0-0 draw it was still fun and we were sitting in with the 100 or so Levski fans. Return match is next week and I hope that AIK can win away from home and that Dundee United who lost 1-0 to AEK Athens last night can also win away. Then we might have a Dundee United team playing in Stockholm!

Me and Neil at the Scotland game at Råsunda Stadium last week. Me and Maria and my Mum and Dad will be going there again tonight to see AIK vs Levski Sofia in the Europa League.