Well, it’s all about the legislation. There has been renewed interest in the legislation considering banning the use of credit cards to pay for gambling debts. Personally, I think that bannig it is incorrect. It should instead be treated as another form of a cash advance. I am reminded of an accountant friend of mine (yes, they do exist) who told me that it’s illegal to use one credit card to pay off another (without an agreement). Basically it’s all about credit, cash and debt.
Using cash for a bill means you owe nothing after the transaction.
Using credit for a bill means you owe something after the transaction.
Using credit to pay for a pure credit transaction is just plain cheating (and the banks and law says so most of the time, and in most places).
Using credit to pay for gambling debts is nothing more than an extension of the previous point. You should not be using credit to pay for what should be a cash transaction only; because the last thing you want to have is people owing money to ‘easy’ firms when they should really be owing money to ‘hard’ firms.
Sarcastic statement? somewhat. I’m a bit of a pragmatist on things like this. The only problem is that I don’t believe you should be cheating by laying off a debt for a month when you should be paying money for it.
New power brick
Next business day does mean next business day.
Finally got the pictures uploaded for the wedding
It was a bit of a trial. The images were too big, I didn’t have a correct php configuration. An update to the gallery was borked, so I was missing some fields. All fun, really.
Some of my pictures from Dermot and Lindsay’s wedding are now viewable.
Oh My Aching Livers (Dermot & Lindsay’s Wedding)
It was Dermot and Lindsay’s wedding over the weekend. It was a great event, and I’ll get to uploading my pictures as soon as is practical. They’re a bit larger than usual and ADSL really puts the capital A in Asymmetric. 100mb upload to come soon, and tomorrow I’m helping someone clean out their house.
stagolicious
Forgive the poor speling and the poor grammar. Last night was young dermot’s stag party. We spent the afternoon shooting things in Wicklow. I think the reverend should have been there, he would have probably beaten us all (embarassing, sonsidering that we are a bunch of computer gaming first person fools.
Windows media player 11 – album art
Interesting thing that Windows Media Player 11 does to the artwork on albums you possess is to place them in a cache directory under %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Media Player\Art Cache\LocalMLS. Each one is names after a guid, which is probably generated for each track in the collection.
I’m just wondering how difficult it would have been to use a hash of the image data as it’s file name, and storing the hash in the media library instead of the pointer to the guid. This way when you have duplicate images (typically 10 per album), they are not replicated into the cache of images.
The other complaint is that I’ve got a bunch of black album art images. It’s completely odd, as they seem to be completely ok inside in the file – other tools have no difficulty in examining them, and show correct icons. Maybe I should feed this back to them – after all it’s a beta of media player 11.
bye bye barry
Here I am listening to David Bowie; hoping to hear from Finbarr ‘Barry’ O’Flynn, but knowing that nothing we play willl ever amount to listening him back.
Post 4th
We just had our fourth of july burn some food and enjoy ourselves thing. Burned animal with added spices. Just the thing on a medium-warm day like ours. Then there was the mandatory sing at the flag thing by the kids. I got one shot of Athena, but that was the extent of it.
Communication is key to a successful relationship…
When buying something from the internet I appreciate being informed of things during the process. When ordering something that requires the dispatching of a physical item, then you need to ensure that the customer can safely determine what the state of their order is at any point.
There are two normal mechanisms to support this. The first is an order status page. This page contains information about the state of the order. For example, when a company accepts the order it is flagged as ‘Accepted’. Once someone is taking the item and putting it into a box it should be placed in the ‘Processing’ state. When it has been given to the delivery company a state of ‘In transit’ would be appropriate. When the delivery reaches the destination and has been signed for, then a state of ‘delivered’ would be appropriate. This covers the company, who can be happy that the order has been satisfied, and the customer who can see what state their order is in.
Some companies would combine the Processing and Dispatch state, some companies don’t have confirmed delivery. These things need to be factored into the equation.
For companies that don’t maintain separate account pages, you have the status email. This is sent out once the item has been dispatched from the company. This allows the customer to feel some connection to the order that they have made without needing to confirm the location of their item with a customer service representative.
A few simple steps and you can help your customers feel happier with your service, and as a result more confident in their feeling that you are not some fly-by-night operation.
As the tag says, communication is the key to a successful relationship, be it business or personal.
Hippies, you’re all a bunch of hippies
Naah, I just thought I’d put in a title like that to grab a few eyeballs. The brother is going to the Munster Biarritz game this weekend in Cardiff. He got flights to London and is travelling up with the Brother in law for the game. Outrageous price to go to Manchester for the weekend – something in the range of €300, so the mammy has delayed her trip to visit the uncle until early june, where it’s a much more reasonable €140. I’m not going to the game, as there aren’t any spare tickets. If I’d known that Liz was in the US this week, I could have connived to get the ticked to Brian in New Zealand who promised to come all the way to see the game if he was guaranteed a ticket. That would have been silly.
I’m about half way through the evening course I’ve bene taking. It’s interesting. Some things I knew, some things I didn’t, but overall educational to have everything you need lined out in front of you. When I couple it with the Maths grinds for the niece, I’m busy in the evenings, and more than a bit tired. It will be a matter of time before I’m too tired to watch my favourite ‘Boston Legal’ on the telly. Maybe I should stop watching it pre-emptively; or even record it.
Mark, sorry for not getting in touch sooner. I’ve been distracted and just haven’t gotten back to you.