The internet is the safest place of all to do business.  It gets a lot of flak from from naysayers about security, privacy, blah blah blah, but you’re safer buying stuff on the internet than you are queueing up at an ATM, ready to take your cash out.  Either way someone could hop in and steal your money, though it’s probably easier for someone to bash you on the head and take your cash at an ATM.  However, internet users still have to be wary.  One increasing problem to be vary wary of is Phishing.  Thing is, if you get caught out by a phishing scam, the only person to blame is you.

In case you don’t know what Phishing is, it’s basically spam.  Except instead of getting an unsolicited email about your soon to be favourite porn site or erection inducing drug, Phishing scams are created with one aim in mind – to get your bank details from you, and rob you blind.

I’ve seen a few phishing style emails pop into my inbox over the years, but todays scam was different from the rest – because of the total tininess of the catchment area the Phishers were going for.   I received a lovely email supposedly from KBC Bank telling me their ‘Billing information records are out of date‘.  I don’t have an account with them, so this email came as a rather big surprise.

Here’s the screenshot of said lovely surprise.

Funnier still was the ‘Reply to’ email address – usethelink@kcbbank.ie.  Clearly these scammers want to do everything they can to get innocent users to click on the link in the email, and bash their details over.

On one hand, this could work out badly for them – a less popular bank means less prospects – but on the other hand, KBC Bank customers might not have had an email like this before, so are probably more likely to follow it’s instructions and hand over their details.  These scammers are looking for your full name, passport number, date of birth, and address – more than enough to do serious damage to you.

Please tell anyone you know who is a KBC Bank customer about this phishing alert, and feel free to retweet it or share it on facebook so nobody gets caught out by this.

And please, please, please don’t get caught out yourself!

Not long ago, I blogged about the merits of Thesis Theme for WordPress.  I praised it for its configurability, ease of use, and search engine friendliness.  At $164 for the Developer option (which I bought), it didn’t come cheap, and updates and additional features for it have been coming thick and fast.  However, nothing could have prepared me for the shit storm that has been brewing for a while, and has finally unleashed itself on the WordPress community.  As it turns out, the developer of Thesis, Chris Pearson, has been building a business on the back of a GPL licensed piece of software, but the theme he profits from (Thesis) isn’t released under the same GPL licence – something which is not made super apparent on the Diythemes website.  Hey, if WordPress is GPL, why expect anything built on it to be anything different?

Matt Mullenweg (founder of WordPress) and Chris Pearson (Diythemes) have been trading blows for a while, and I was hoping some happy ending would happen, until I heard this exchange between the two.

All I know is, i’m moving away from Thesis to something else.

Update – 24th July 2010

Hurrah!  The whole fiasco has been sorted out – Thesis is now on a split GPL licence.  Looking forward to trucking on with a GPL Thesis, but hopefully the whole thing has been a great big lesson for everyone in the WordPress community.

If you’re an F1 fan, most likely you had your heart in your mouth during Sundays European Grand Prix at Valencia.  Mark Webber had a spectacular coming together with Finnish driver Heikki Kovalainen who drives for the Lotus F1 team.  Mark’s Red Bull F1 car had just come in for a pit stop, and was trying to pass Kovalainen for track position.  Even though the Lotus was several seconds a lap slower than the Red Bull, Heikki was determined to protect his position, and the following crash ensued!

The fact that Mark Webber walked away from this unscathed really is a testament to the integrity of the latest generation F1 cars.  Whatever about the first part of that crash, the second bit where he hit the tyre wall head on at high speed eerily reminded me of Mika Hakkinen‘s crash at the 1995 Australian Grand Prix.  Here’s the video:

Hakkinen was left in a coma after the crash, as he fractured his skull when he hit his head off the steering wheel.  Mark Webber would have suffered the same fate – if not worse – were it not for the HANS devices which are compulsory for all drivers in Formula 1.

Mark’s flip wasn’t his first though.  He flipped not once, but twice during the 1999 Le Mans 24 hours – once in practice, and once in qualifying.  And his team mate Peter Dumbreck had a similar flip during the race itself.  Here’s the aftermath of Mark Webbers flippy crash:

I think i’ve gone deaf.  After spending 45 minutes of a Tube journey – all the way from Covent Garden to Heathrow – listening to slurps, squelches, and flubbers in your left ear, wouldn’t you too?  And the source of these wonderful sounds?  A young couple (Daniel was the guys name, I looked at the tag on his oversized luggage), and his young, needy, and clearly very horny girlfriend.  As I sat right beside them for most of my journey to the airport I was treated, or punished if you’d like to look at it in a realistic way, to what amounted to a ravenous display of soft-core, David Attenborough style porn.  Well, me and around 50 other passengers, all of whom had the same look of disgust in their faces, all trying to concentrate on their Danielle Steel novels instead of the real-life version going on within eye and earshot.  Oh, all of this happened at around 9am on a Tuesday morning.  To hell with a glass of Tropicana and a bit of muesli, these two get their day kick started with a full on public romp.

Can you imagine what this couple are like at a different time of the day?  Or on a different day altogether?  What happens when they go on a night out and get a little tipsy on their favourite drink (note, it’s probably a ‘their’ in real terms too – i’m putting on firm bet on them mirroring each other, right down to their choice of alco-beverage).  No doubt their network of close friends is getting smaller and smaller as each day goes by, all becoming increasingly fed up of having their drinks spilled all over them after yet another cocktail bar coffee table romp gone wrong.

If I was single and hung out with these two, it wouldn’t be long before I’d consider hanging myself just to get away from them.

But why do some people act like this when they’re in public? Thankfully i’m not single myself (I’d be even more annoyed now if I was), but I don’t think i’ve ever been that touchy-feely with my new found loves, even when I was much younger.  I totally understand what it’s like to be in love – and especially in love for the first time – but do couples have to broadcast their fresh faced happiness in such a loud manner?  Have they not seen that clip of Tom Cruise bouncing up and down on Oprah Winfrey‘s couch?  Do they not know how silly it makes them look?

So, at the expense of asking way too many questions in way to short a timeframe, how do you feel about PDA‘s?  Are you a public couple molester, or a do you try to keep your passion confined to the bedroom, where you can really enjoy it?

Doesn’t everyone know how to take screenshots on Mac OS X?  For lifetime Apple Fanboys (and girls) such mundane tasks are par for the course – so please bear with me and read on if this is old news to you.  I’m a recent Apple convert.  Up until January 2010, my only interactions with Apple were on a Macintosh back in secondary school (1997), and my iPhone.  Coming from the wonderfully crashy world of Windows Vista was a baptism of fire, but where the hell was the ‘Print Screen’ button?  How the hell could I take a bloomin screenshot on this new fangled thing?  Here’s how.

• Before I get started, by default (I think!) your screenshots will be saved to your desktop, and as PNG files.  You can specify different locations for your screenshots, but I don’t know how – the desktop works just fine for me.

Ok, here goes:

1. Find your ‘Command‘ key on your keyboard – it’s the one with the Apple logo on it on newer Macs.
2. Hold down ‘Command‘ + ‘Shift‘.
3. If you’d like a full screenshot of the entire screen, hit ‘3‘.
4. If you’d like to select which bits you’d like to take a shot of, hit ‘4‘.  A lovely looking crosshair type cursor will appear.  Just click and hold, drag the crosshair over the area you’d like to take a screenshot of, et voila – your customised screenshot should be on your desktop.

If you’d like to stop your screen-shotting at any time, just hit the wonderfully handy ‘ESC’ key (top left of your keyboard most of the time).

Just to test/show you what I mean, here’s a full screenshot.

And here’s a ‘crosshair’ selected bit of a screenshot.

Someone I haven’t seen in a while – even before my move to London – is Conor Lynch, the founder of online / offline social networking business Connector.ie.  Which makes me feel extra bad, considering he seems to be turning into one of the most active networkers in Ireland!  I first met Conor in 2005 (I think), at the IIA Net Visionary awards.  We had planned to meet up  for a pint at the awards after some emailing back and forth, but the ‘pint’ at the awards turned into many more after Conor promptly won an award for ‘Internet Marketer of the Year’.  At the time he was heading up the online marketing department for Rabodirect, Ireland’s first online bank.

After the awards, Conor made a few moves through different agencies, from Cybercom to EightyTwenty Interactive, and worked with clients like Toyota, Coca Cola, Guinness, Aer Lingus, and Glanbia.  Not bad.  But then he decided to knock it all on the head and focus on his newest project, Connector.ie.

I have to admit, I thought he was mad!

As a typical ‘entrepreneur’ (I HATE calling myself that), I usually take a big long look down my big long nose at business ideas when they’re described to me.  I always look at the ‘damage limitation’ element of things – and look for the worst possible scenarios.  I was an eternal optimist when I was younger, but learned the hard way that even the best ideas – particularly those that are fermented all too quickly in your head – need some negative thought directed towards them so you can figure out if they’re rubbish ideas or not.   What can go wrong usually will go wrong, and it’s important to figure out in what position you’ll be should it all go tits up.

The problem I had with the Connector.ie concept was… it didn’t seem to have any way of making money.  I didn’t think there was a revenue model.  The Dragons on Dragons Den didn’t think there was a revenue model.  And, a lot of the time, it appeared to me that Conor wasn’t even sure of a revenue model himself.  At least if he did, he couldn’t get it across to the Dragons or I.

I should have known better.  Of course Conor had a revenue model being constructed bit by bit in his brain.   He seems to be able to create a buzz around Connector.ie, and manage to build a team of dedicated volunteers around him, eager to help him build his personal brand, and theirs in the process.  And he’s a digital marketer – one of the best Ireland has, apparently.

So, why not use those connections, experience of connecting, and digital marketing experience to train business owners and solo entrepreneurs to connect themselves?  Oh, and charge them for it.  Bingo!  The simplest ideas – despite a sometimes lengthy gestation period – are usually the best.

Today Conor seems to have turned his ‘big idea’ into an even bigger idea that makes money training small business owners the ins and outs of marketing themselves and their businesses online.  In an environment where companies are cutting back on advertising spend and starting at the source – axing creative agencies and planners – a service which teaches business owners how to market themselves online is particularly genius.

So, fair play to Conor for a great idea and a happy ending to his Connector story.  Actually, for him, it’s probably just the start.

Blacknight Solutions are a domain registration / website hosting company based in Carlow.  They’ve grown quite fast over the past couple of years, and according to Webshosting.info, have a massive percentage share of the Irish market when it comes to domain registrations.  And it’s easy to see why.  Their newest sales tool – dropped.ie – is a great way to search for and stumble across ‘second hand’ .ie domain names.  As someone who used to spend hours trawling the deleted domains list on the IEDR website to find little domain name gems, sites like dropped.ie are a godsend.

So, why bother even registering ‘second hand’ domain names?  Isn’t the domain name of the website you currently have not enough?

It depends on what you’re looking for.

Let’s say you’re a chauffeur drive / wedding car business based in Wexford.  The name of your business is ‘Jimmy’s Dream Cars’.  You have a website – jimmysdreamcars.ie – and get a bit of business from it, but most of your leads are from word of mouth referrals or magazine advertising.  How could an ‘online rebrand’ by renaming your website help you?

Pop over to dropped.ie.  Search for ‘wedding cars wexford’.  In amongst all the results (the search isn’t probably as specific as it could be, but i’m sure they’ll fix it up in good time) you’ll find a used .ie domain ‘wexfordweddingcars.ie’.  But why should you buy it?

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is one of the best ways to drive free, targeted traffic towards your website.  If you purchase ‘wexfordweddingcars.ie’ and your website is even reasonably well built and with a little bit of tweaking, you’ll have a far greater chance of appearing high up in Google’s search results for ‘wedding cars wexford’ if your website is at ‘wexfordweddingcars.ie’ instead of ‘jimmysdreamcars.ie’.  You’ll get heaps of great business enquiries from your locality that’s both targeted and – apart from the cost of the domain – free.

Sites like dropped.ie are also great for people like me, who are constantly trying to think of new business ideas to keep me going.  I’ve managed to find some fantastic ‘second hand’ domain names in the past.  One of these was ‘compare.ie‘ which I bought one day just over two years ago.

Before I browsed the IEDR’s deleted domain names list that day, i’d only briefly thought about the fact that Ireland didn’t really have any price comparison websites.  When I stumbled across ‘compare.ie’ in the list, it reminded me of that gap in the market.  I bought the domain name, had a think for a few months about what exactly to do with it, developed a site, and now it’s a successful business in itself with over 200,000 unique visitors per month, and one which i’m ramping up development on as we speak.  A new ‘Travel’ channel has just been completed, which allows you to compare flights, hotels, car hire, and even airport parking, and our new mobile phone and broadband comparison channels are well on the way to completion.  It’s a proper business, one thats growing, and one that pretty much only came about because of the availability of a great domain name!

So there you go – dropped.ie isn’t just a place for finding great domain names.  It’s a great place to help you ignite that spark in your head for your next great business idea!

It’s 2.43am and i’m back in my rented gaff  in Dalkey, Dublin, Ireland after my first Friday night out following my first two weeks living in London.  To be honest i’m gagging to get back to the UK asap to get back to what is now becoming a taste of reality after a big dose of Celtic Tiger horseshit.  We, as Irish, have been living the high life over the last ten to fifteen years, totally taking for granted our financial offerings from the EEC (now the EU of course), and the help so many states have given us since our formation as a nation in 1922 (1937 if you want to be pedantic about it), and we desperately needed a kick in the hole.  Now we’ve had it.

I just went out tonight in Dalkey.  You know?  The place where Edge from U2 lives, Enya, blah blah.  They really live in Killiney but Dalkey’s where it’s at, and the place that claims them as residents.  Damon Hill (the F1 Driver) lived here, as did colleague Eddie Irvine.  Neil Jordan lives here.  Lisa Stansfield lived here for a while when she was trying to kick the booze habit, and our wonderful Irish celeb economist David McWilliams lives nearby.

A hub of celebrity activity, and therefore wealth you may say?  12 months ago you may have been correct, but not so today.

There were no celebs in Dalkey tonight.  Just the regular inhabitants of an increasingly jaded south Dublin, drinking away their recessionary woes and pains.  Some of those out tonight are on the dole – of these, a huge amount enjoy being on the dole.   Why bother getting a job when you and your impregnated missus can gather every social benefit known to man, and come out with €40,000 a year for doing absolutely sweet fuck all?

And then we have the taxi drivers.

For so long the taxi drivers of Dublin have been trying everything to squeeze the last little cent out of the needy and financially raped Irish customer.  They even decided to lash a ‘fuel levy’ onto cab fares about six months ago when fuel prices went skyward for a month or two.  Clearly they missed out on the business studies part of secondary school, if they bothered to attend the education they were given for free.  You can’t peddle ice to the eskimos, specially when it’s already overpriced and you want to charge for keeping that overpriced ice cool.

In the past i’ve left the Queens in Dalkey – at a time when I didn’t live (rent) in Dalkey – and couldn’t get a cab home for love nor money.  Tonight… well, let me give you a visual perspective on my amusement.  Here goes: http://twitpic.com/apt0b

No, you’ve not just looked at a Carlsberg ad from 2004, you’ve looked at a posh south county Dublin suburb from summer 2009.   Twelve months ago, at 2am, each and every one of those taxi drivers in the picture you just looked at were in their leabas havin a little snooze – when consumers needed them most.  Now that they’re fucked like the rest of the country they’re bothering to queue up for business – as they should have done twelve months ago.

I’ve not lived in London long – in fact i’ve not yet moved full time – but what i’ve noticed is that London today is the exact same as it was 5, 7, even 10 years ago.  The dole is shit, the incentive to work is great, and the place is relentlessly buzzing.  I went for dinner at a French restaurant at Spitalfields market on Tuesday and it was jammed – I could barely get a table, I had to wait.  On a Tuesday!  Why?  They bothered their hole to cut their prices during a slow period, do two for one specials, and get people through the doors.

In comparison heaps of Irish restaurants have decided to simply half arsedly do ‘lunch specials’ at two courses for €23 (fuck off please, it should be a tenner) and give up, going out of business and leaving the banks with their bad debts and egg on their faces.

Hopefully in years to come the Irish will look back on the early part of the millennium and roll their eyes to heaven.  ‘What the fuck were we thinking’, they’ll say.  And hopefully they’ll realise for a little island in the Atlantic we had it good – very, very good – and we fucked it up.

Not our government.  Not world markets. Ourselves.

Sometimes it’s good to step back and appreciate what you do for a living. When I was younger I used to spend my days playing with my computer, and luckily I managed to find a career doing something that I love.

But then again, so did Bill Gates. Check out this cheesy pic!

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock the last week or so, you’ll have found it very hard to avoid the publishing of the Child Abuse Commission Report, and the public outcry that ensued.  The report merely confirmed what anyone with half a brain already knew – that schools and orphanages run by religious orders in Ireland were rampant with child abuse in several ways, be it rape, physical abuse, or emotional torment for the children involved.  However, the report did not name names, nor did it initially look like this would happen.  On top of this, the maximum amount the religioius orders could be held liable for compensation for was around €128 million – a figure agreed almost ten years ago.  Amazingly enough, even today the religious orders have not paid that full amount to victims of their child abuse.

Religious orders were given money by the state to run our schools.  More than enough money, as it turned out, than was adequate to look after the needs of the children involved.   Why then did children live in fear and poverty, in a situation not unlike that of the Jews in Nazi concentration camps?  Children – imagine these kids are your own – were made to work like slaves, were malnourished, were raped, beaten, mentally tormented, and several received beatings so bad they ended up with broken limbs and scars which would last a lifetime.

And who were the perpetrators of these crimes against children?  Who were these child abusers?  The very same people who would stand up on Sundays, tell us how best to live our lives in the most morally correct way possible, shove communion in our mouths, tell us it was the ‘body of christ’, and sit in darkened rooms and listen to our ‘confessions’.  I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those filthy priests were sat naked behind the confessional wall, playing with themselves as young parishoners told them sorrowfully that they’d had ‘impure thoughts’ and wished to repent.  No wonder fuck all people go to mass anymore.  Why would you?

What of the nuns?  If you read the Child Abuse Commission Report, you’ll find all sorts of insane abuses on their part too.  Anyone who says that the sexual abuse was limited to some ‘gay priests’ is sorely mistaken.  Young girls were forced to massage the breasts of depraved nuns, and were also beaten and tortured.  Both priests and nuns were found to have committed ‘digital rape’ according to the report.  If you’re not aware of what digital rape is, it is ‘When someone [rapes] a person using their [finger] or [fingers]‘.  So hundreds of priests and nuns were molesting children – boys and girls – on an epic scale.  Boys and girls just like the boys and girls you and I will cherish and bring up without smacking them or abusing them in any way.   I don’t have kids yet, but I do have an 8 year old niece who I love and adore.  It makes me feel sick that children her age and younger were having their childhood taken away from them in such a manner.  Thousands of children.  I count myself very lucky I wasn’t one of them.

The religious orders involved in all of this are criminals.  Not just the perpetrators of the crimes, but the people who have harboured these criminals for so long, and I include the vatican in that.  We’ve been listening to these abuser idiots go on for long enough about how world poverty is such a scandal, and we should be helping our less-better-off bretheren by donating to them in various ways.  At the same time the church was sitting on billions of euro worth of property, and priests and nuns were living the high life.

If you have any inkling of sympathy or support for the religious orders involved, just look at this video.  I have insane amounts of respect for this guy – despite the torment he endured at the hands of paedo priests, he overcame it and even managed to become the mayor of Clonmel for a time.  The video below speaks for itself.

I look forward to the day when the paedo priests and nuns are locked up and left to die behind bars – alone and outcast as they should be.