I’m a tad surprised that none of rss news feeds I subscribe to have picked up on this story yet:

a local Gym owner here in the South checked his Facebook account only to greeted by an advert from a personal injury claims company inviting him to sue his own company!

An example of targeted advertising that went wrong, presumably the ad server had picked up on the name of the Gym from his facebook profile, put two and two together and came up with five.

BBC South Today video story here...

Of late I’ve been using various APIs for one reason or another, and as most are irrevocably linked to your email address it doesn’t take long before you see a message informing you that the email address you’ve entered is already registered to another account.

Gmail to the rescue with it’s username+ feature.  For example – if I’m fredbloggs@gmail.com I can also be fredbloggs+tesco@gmail.com, those messages will still land in my inbox, anything after the + is ignored by Gmail’s incoming severs but still delivered to your account, usually enough to fool those API engines.

But wait. there’s more: I could also use f.r.e.d.b.l.o.g.g.s.@gmail.com and any combination of dots ‘cos Gmail ignores dots before the @ symbol.

So …fredbloggs@gmail.com and fr.edb.log.gs@gmail.com will all be delivered to my inbox.

I’m guessing our chums at Mountain View did this so you could identify which vendor you deal with flogs email lists enabling you to work out where all those blue pill emails emanate from.  If truth be know chances are most spam is probably a result of your friends & colleagues who cc’d (rather than blind cc’d) you in on some inter-office gag but hey..

I popped round my Mum & Dad’s this eve, Pop’s 77 and very much an eBay fanatic.  He’d lost his web connection with the Netgear router I’d given him so decided to use the router his ISP had sent to him some time ago but never used.   Make sense, if you central heating pump packs up you fit a new pump and bish bash bosh you have hot water and heating again, a no brainer as they say.  So surely, swapping out a router should be the same process?

Nope… the new router needed a username and password ( both of these  were recorded in something resembling  Klingon grammar) to be keyed in and a bit WiFi config for good measure.    So there are set-up programs that 8 times out of 10 will do most of the set-up but those 2 times out of 10 mean that tech-savvy old farts like me could easily ditch the day job and do this sort of stuff for a respectable living.

Where’s all this dribble leading to? I overheard Deborah Meaden being interviewed on the Steve Wright radio show recently saying that despite the current economic climate there are still opportunities out there to make the big time without neessarily having to be be ‘inventive‘,   so find a product that’s being serviced poorly and offer the same thing but do it a whole lot better for example.

I see silver surfers like my Dad and home broadband in general as such an opportunity, there are folks out there who’d be prepared to pay a  premium for a system that ‘just works’ .   At the moment most needs can only be serviced economically by cheap overseas call centres but those unlikely to inspire loyalty meaning it’ll always be price driven rather service level driven, it’s a vicious circle.

Kind of wish I was 34 rather than 54 ‘cos I’d be banging on the Dragon’s door (lets’ face it the banks have no idea what they are doing) and perhaps most of this looks great on paper but is easier said than done … but the bottom line is we aren’t even close on the broadband service-wise, Sky broadband is about the closest I’ve seen as they use UK call centres and pre-program routers.

Alan Sugar was right on the money with his Amstrad emailer phone (or whatever it was called) with what looked to be near zero support costs, trouble is…Sir Al launched it 10 years too soon.

(End of rant….)

If (like me) you’ve been try to get Stephen Ollis’s WordPress plugin for Google Latitude working and failing miserably check you badge number in the html code, mine has a - in front it.

<!– Google Public Location Badge –>
<iframe src=”http://www.google.com/latitude/apps/badge/api?user=-8716246790221957302&type=iframe&maptype=roadmap”  etc. etc .–>

Kutos to Steve for tracking this annoying little critter down.

Something I’ve yet to test but was featured on the latest Frequencycast podcast is the Flatenna, a simple little add-on on to WiFi routers and dongles that have external  antennas.  The design is the same as any direction antenna like a TV aerial or satellite dish, you’re just concentrating the energy in a particular direction rather than everywhere (omnidirectional).

At £8.17 delivered looks like a bit of bargain to me.. must order one up..

Well if you are ever unfortunate enough to be involved in Automobile accident you’ll be well looked after here in  Hampshire!  The dearest and I came across  a car just outside Romsey that had managed to land on it’s roof and trap the driver.  I was very grateful to the fact that I’d recently renewed my H&S Workplace First Aid ticket so all the stuff I’d learnt kicked in automatically,  although most of what I did was just reassuring the chap, keeping him talking  and preventing a barrage of well wishers  saying ‘are you all right mate‘ even though he was clearly trapped and upside down.

Blue lights started to arrive within about 10 minutes, by the bucket load.  First there was a regular ambulance, then another, then a ‘Trauma team‘ then an emergency doctor vehicle (with 2 Doctors), then TWO full size fire engines, then a Fire chief, and I just lost count of the Police cars (see above).  To cap it all the Air Ambulance hovered above though didn’t land (I’m guessing there were too many emergency vehicles in the way?)

Meantime the dearest had great fun donning a Dayglow jacket and directing the traffic until the traffic plod turned arrived!

So this evening the dearest and I decided to pop out and see the new Star Trek Movie. No doubt some critics will pan this movie just like they did Mama Mia (yeh right..) but as someone who watched the original Star Trek series in the late 60’s first time around (in black & White on BBC 2) I was suitable impressed, it ticked the the right boxes for me and, an old fart who even today watches at least 5-7 Star Trek episodes a week mostly on an iPod Touch in bed (SAD or what?). 

The movie was disturbingly dare I say historically correct including a reference to Jonathan (Admiral) Archer with the notably exception that Captain Pike should have wound up a paraplegic (though it’s not hard to see why the Director used a bit of artistic licence in this case.)

Looking behind the scenes (corporately referred to to as underpinning) what also impressed me was when I typed in Star Trek the Movie to Google the first hit showed me how where the movie was playing locally and how to buy tickets.. an excellent example of GIS engines strutting their stuff .  It doesn’t always have to be a colour map that shows me how to get somewhere, it doesn’t have to be a set of driving instructions, this time it was just a finger pointing to where the movie was playing and how I could queue-jump the great unwashed by purchasing tickets online with my flexible friend, that’s all I needed.

I’m guessing the younger generation might say “yeh.. and your point is..?” but to me (to coin a rather corny phrase) is the power of GIS though these kids who will be paying my pension in 15 years time would expect nothing less….

Treated myself to a new toy this week, a Kinetic Real Time Virtual Radar receiver – a nitty little box that receives position information (mode S) from commercial airliners and presents it to a home computer not unlike the AIS Ship Tracker I mentioned back in January.

Because most of the Aircraft I’m receiving are at over 5,000 ft the height of my receive antenna isn’t critical, in fact at just 10 foot on the garage roof I’m tracking aircraft about 75 miles away.  A number of enthusiasts around Europe are doing likewise so some of us foreward the flight data on to OpenATC, an online database that combines our data allowing web visitors to view flights via Google Maps, Google Earth and pretty much any GIS app  that’ll talk kml (flight-sim authors take note!) .

OpenATC deliberately delays our data by 5-10 minutes for obvious security reasons but it’s still great fun to try,  Just point your browser over to OpenATC and hit the FIND button leaving the search field blank for a random selection of 100 flights.  Focus on the ground refreshes rather than the aircraft icon to get an idea of jut how fast 400+ knots is!

(P.S. If you live in the South and fancy a demo of the Kinetic SBS1-e receiver pop into Martin Lynch’s store in Chertsey and tell Chris Taylor that Phil Bridges says Hi…)

I can only assume there must be radio hams working at Google as the current Google logo (April 27th) shows Google in Morse code.  Could it be that April 25th marks Marconi’s birthday so the nearest Saturday is adopted as International Marconi day where hundreds of hams set up stations at points relevant to Marconi’s life?  If this is the case here in the Forest the local radio club set up a station at Lutterlls Tower near Lepe under the call GB5LT.

(73 de G6DLJ )

Lunchtime Update:

Ah, seems it’s Samual Morse’s birthday (today) Google is tipping it hat to then, a good week for Radio hams none the less.

Can’t say I’ve ever really followed football but the news today that Southampton Football Club are going to be deducted 10 points because the club owners have gone into liquidation is nothing short of criminal.

If a frail old lady collapsed on the street you wouldn’t expect a Policemen to come alone and pinch £10 from her handbag, and then just walk away, yet to me this seems to be pretty what the Football Association has done to Southampton Football Club.

Isn’t it about time about time the Football Association got off it’s arse and started helping football clubs, especially the smaller ones and those in trouble by setting up contingency funds from clubs where players are making more in a week than many folks earn in year?

Judging by the way the FA cripples clubs in trouble now I know what FA really stands for….