Well done Tim, who passed first time in November with 8 driver faults. I know that this is going to have a major impact on his career prospects, and that makes it especially satisfying.
A really nice young guy who I am sure will continue to be a safe driver. And another who reckons he will do Pass Plus after Christmas… Mmmmm.
Well done to Muhammed, who passed in November with 5 driver faults. Another great guy to teach, who needed this test pass in lieu of his job relocating somewhat further north. In fact, he only stayed in Nottingham to take this test, that’s how close a call it all was.
One of the handful of people who have hugged me in all the years I’ve been doing this (it’s about 50:50 male:female on that score!)
A bit behind here, but well done to Jack who passed with 5 driver faults in November. He says he will be contacting me for Pass Plus, but I’ll believe that when I see it! Everyone says they will, but once they start driving they usually never bother.
He’s been a really nice guy to teach, and hopefully this will now enable him to get a better job to give him the leg up he is is looking for.
1&1 has been the victim of a DDoS attack and between 9/12/14 and early on 11/12/14 there was restricted availability to some services and website hosted by 1&1 (this included the dashboard features).
Yesterday evening at 9pm GMT an unknown third party initiated a DDoS attack on 1&1’s DNS infrastructure. The Domain Name System (DNS) is used to attribute internet addresses such as “1and1.com” to IP numbers, similar to a telephone book. During the coordinated attack, many widely spread computers (also known as bot net) sent several hundred thousand requests per second to our DNS servers. The attack resulted in reduced availability on some of our hosting services (such as shared hosting, MyWebsite, servers, e-mail, control panel). Our engineers swiftly identified the target of the attack and have initiated respective countermeasures, making the majority of affected services now fully available. A small number of our customers may still encounter limited availability of their domain names. We are prioritizing work to fully resolve the issue as promptly as possible and apologize unreservedly for any inconvenience. Please continue to check status-1and1.co.uk for additional information.
The issue is now resolved.
I noticed it Tuesday when my traffic approximately halved, when I had expected it to rise slightly from Monday.
Note that 1&1 servers are very rarely (if ever) all out, so it is wrong to say that 1&1 is “down”. It was experiencing technical issues, that’s all.
Here’s a brilliant story from Scotland. Susan and Carl Smith had just been married and a band was playing at their reception. At the same hotel, Roger Daltrey was staying prior to The Who’s gig in Glasgow. He heard the music, went in to congratulate the couple, then did a song with the band.
No one could believe it, and the married couple say it is something they will remember for the rest of their lives.