Gold Coast Real Estate Agents Suck

Life

Claire and I live in an apartment/townhouse at the Gold Coast, with people on both our side walls and above us. We’ve been in our current apartment since December 2004 and we’ve discussed moving into something different.

That idea got put onto the hot plate this week when I called our new on site managers and asked about what I needed to do for them to move out. That discussion lead into us exchanging information about our apartment and her finding out for the first time that it is actually for sale. She was a little shocked about that, since the real estate agent hasn’t informed her nor have they been going to her to get to get a key for our apartment to show people through it.

Being a little confused by the whole thing, she started calling around to find out what was going on. We were very surprised to find out that our apartment has in fact been sold for over a month now and that the Gold Coast real estate agent didn’t think it important to inform the body corporate managers or the current tenants! You can probably guess what is coming next, the new owners intend to move into their new investment in about two weeks.

With that much notice, we’re now hunting at a fairly rapid pace for a new home to move into at the Gold Coast somewhere. We’re not interested in moving into another gated complex, nor are we fussed on sharing walls with people again. Our neighbours in the last two and a half years have been far too inconsiderate to want to go through that again, so we’re looking for a standard house.

We’ve submitted an application to a nice four bedroom house in Pacific Pines, cross your fingers we get it.

Google Acquires DoubleClick

Advertising, Internet, News

April 13th saw Google finalise a deal to acquire online media and advertising heavy weight DoubleClick Inc. The announcement from Google states that they’ve purchased DoubleClick for USD$3.1 billion in cash from San Francisco based private equity firm Hellman & Friedman along with JMI Equity.

The interesting thing here isn’t that Google have purchased yet another monster business but that they are one of the biggest forces in the online advertising landscape. DoubleClick currently service a different type of online advertising client than Google, so the DoubleClick business will definitely complement Google’s online advertising strategies. More importantly though, Google gain all of the technology that DoubleClick have been developing which focuses strongly around rich media advertising. I expect it won’t be long before we see Google start to aggressively roll out rich media advertising into their current products such as Google Video and YouTube and subsequently into the wider market as well.

Interesting times ahead for online advertisers, the internet landscape is changing yet again.

Removing Indexed Content From Google The Easy Way

Search, Websites

Google are constantly improving their services and during April they updated their Google Webmasters Tools; this release relates to removing content that has already been indexed by Google.

Google have supported removing content from their service for a long time, however the process was often slow to take. With the recent addition of the URL removal into Google Webmasters Tools, its now possible to process the removal of a page quite quickly.

As with everything associated to Google Webmaster Tools, the web site to act on first needs to be verified. Once verified, there is now a URL Removals link under the Diagnostics tab. The removal service supports removing URL’s in the following ways:

  • individual web pages, images or other files
  • a complete directory
  • a complete web site
  • cached copies of a web site

To remove an individual web page, image or file – the URL must:

  • return a standard HTTP 404 (missing) or 410 (gone) response code
  • be blocked by the robots.txt file
  • be blocked by a robots tag

Removing a directory has less options available, it must be blocked using the robots.txt file. Submitting http://mydomain.com/folder/ would remove all objects which reside under that folder including all web pages, images, documents and files.

To remove an entire domain from the Google index, you need to block it using a robots.txt file and submit the expedited removal request. Google have once more reinforced the point that this option should not be used to remove the wrong ‘version’ of your site from the index, such as a www versus non-www version. To handle this, nominate the preferred domain within the Google Webmaster Tools and optionally redirect the wrong version to the correct version using a standard HTTP 301 redirect.

Cached copies of web pages can be removed by setting the <meta> robots attribute with a noindex on the given page(s) and submitting the removal request. By using this mechanism, Google will never re-include that URL so long as the robots noindex <meta> data is present. By removing the robots noindex <meta> data, you are instructing Google to re-include that URL, so long as it isn’t being block by alternate means such as a robots.txt file. If the intention is to simply refresh a given set of web pages, you can also change the content on those pages and submit the URL removal request. Google will fetch a fresh copy of the URLs, compare them against their cached copies and if they are different immediately removed the cached copy.

After submitting requests, it’s possible to view the status of the request. They will list as pending until they have been processed, denied if the page does not meet the removal criteria and once processed they will be moved into the ‘Removed Content’ tab. Of course, you can re-include a removed page at any time as well. It should be noted that if you remove a page and don’t manually re-include the web page(s) after exclusion, the removed page(s) will remain excluded for approximately 6 months – after which they will be automatically re-included.

Being able to remove content from the Google index so quickly is going to come in handy when certain types of content are indexed by accident and need to be removed with priority.

Bad Kitty

Animals, Life

Today, Claire purchased the a pack of Spacebags – the vacuum able plastic storage bags. After giving them a good run with some of our infrequently used items, Claire was nothing but impressed and wanted to show me them immediately.

We walked into the spare room and Claire was shocked that the bags were no longer collapsed and thought that she must not have sealed them correctly. Upon closer inspection, it was revealed that Princess decided that this new contraption needed to pass the claw test.

You guessed it:

Kitty 1, Spacebags 0

Naughty kitty, naughty.

Deafening Silence

General

For quite some time now, one of our cars has had an annoying drumming sound coming from the back of it. We’ve had it serviced two or three times since the noise started happening and I’ve asked the mechanics to track it down and each time they’ve come up empty.

At one of the first services after the noise started, I suggested to one of the mechanics that it might have been a faulty tyre. At the time, The mechanics said that was very unlikely and I agreed but pointed out that one of my older brothers has had it happen to him; so it might have been worth a look. They looked over all of the tyres and didn’t see anything wrong and the wheels have been rotated and balanced numerous times without it being picked up as well.

Since the noise started, Claire and I have put around 40,000Km onto her car and the rear tyres have worn sufficiently to warrant replacing them without doing it prematurely. After having a new pair of Yokohama tyres fitted today, I was pleased to find that the drumming noise we’d become so accustomed is now gone.

It was so unfamiliar to drive the Mazda today without the noise. I couldn’t stop commenting to Claire today while driving around how strange and fantastic it was to have the noise gone; feels like we’ve got a new car again!