Archive for the 'Ramblings' Category

I just came across a free fax by email service from TPC. It looks like it’s been going for a long time. Very handy when you come across a company who doesn’t have an email address or phone number!

When did paying for things by PayPal get so slow? I recently bought a couple of things off eBay and paid via PayPal. For days after I kept getting these payment reminder emails from eBay, but the website showed the payment as made. On closer inspection PayPal had marked the payment as pending. It seems now rather than doing an instant transfer PayPal uses something called echeque that takes 7-9 business days, that’s almost two weeks! It now takes twice as long as it does to write a real cheque, post it and clear into the seller’s bank account!

What’s really frustrating is that PayPal kept recommended to use a bank account rather than a credit card, or better yet keep money with them. But did they use the funds sitting in my PayPal account first? No. I assume credit card payments can’t be as slow, so I’ll be using them with PayPal in future, or better yet, another payment provider altogether.

Update: It turns out the e-cheque only applies if you don’t have a credit card registered. My credit card had expired, but I didn’t bother updating PayPal because I use my bank account. Once I updated it, the instant transfer option was back.

Last week marked my last day Runtime Collective (now Magpie). I had worked there for just over four years, and it was my first job after university, so I left with mixed feelings. Sad that I was leaving what I knew behind, but at the same time felt it was the right time to leave. It’s been a good four years, especially watching the company transform from a consultancy to an ISV. I had a great opportunity to work on their Search and Alert product from the get go, which helped me expand my programming beyond just the web and databases.

What made my mind up was when our London office was closed. The main office was always in Brighton, and try as we might, we never got the London operation going, the offices were just too close together. But so it’s not forgotten, I took some pictures of those final days.

Thanks to everyone at Magpie (past and present) for the chances they gave me and I wish them all the best in the future.

I’m currently playing around with Feedburner to track my RSS feed because I can’t use Google Analytics to do that. So I’ve redirected all the feeds to it. Let me know if this breaks anyone’s feed reader.

If you use Wordpress this post is probably redundant because the notice is right there on your dashboard, but just in case you haven’t seen it. Wordpress have released version 2.0.2 to fix a cross site scripting vulnerability. So upgrade now.

I’m confused. I’m not sure what I just attended. Don’t get me wrong, it was an interesting talk by Vint Cert (which I’ll write up tomorrow), but I thought I was walking into a recruitment event. I even have the pad of paper with www.google.com/jobs printed along the bottom. Maybe I’ve been spoilt by the investment banking recruiting events I went to during university, but this just seemed like a missed opportunity for Google. You’re struggling to fill your London R&D centre, you get a hundred or more smart computing people in one room, why aren’t we being told about the great place Google is to work at, and all the interesting things we will be working on?

There were between five and ten Google employees there, I didn’t get a chance to speak to one of them but from what I overheard they were talking about Google in general rather than what is actually planned for the London office. I think part of the reason why I’m so disappointed was that I wanted to be tempted from my current job. I wanted to see this great office (it is very nice), with excited people, working on interesting problems, but I didn’t. From what I’ve read in the press and their job listings, Google plans to focus on mobile Internet in London but nothing tonight confirmed that.

On the bright side I did catch up with several people from my old department. The other reason I went along was to see if I could find any potential hires for the positions at Runtime, but that was a no go. There were some other people scouting too, and I found out from them that after the dot-com crash the number of computing graduates has fallen and a lot of them (from Imperial at least) are getting hovered up by banks. I guess that is the problem Google is having too. Straight after university people join an investment bank, get paid a lot of money, then decide they don’t like the work and quit but aren’t willing to take the pay cut to join a software company. Annoying but the way it is in London.

Well, that’s enough ranting for one night.

Update: I was wondering why there weren’t any Imperial undergraduates at the talk (just postgraduates). It turns out Vint Cerf gave the same talk a few hours earlier at IC.

When Ocado first came out in the UK they were great. You could book your the delivery time down to the hour, they’d actually have what you ordered in stock and their software was really easy to use. So I used them a few times but eventually decided I wasn’t so lazy that I wanted to spend a fiver for the privilege of doing my grocery shopping on my ass. Actually I think I ran out of free delivery vouchers.

Since then they bombard me with offers trying to entice me back. From these mails you get a rough idea what they need their average customer to spend per week to stay profitable. If I recall correctly it was initially spend £50 and get free delivery (normally £5). This was close enough to my typical spend (£20-£40 depending on how hungry I am when I shop) to get me to spend above £50. This gradually rose over time until the offer I received today:

			For deliveries by 11/03/2006 Dear Mr Barr, March is already here, the year is flying by and we don’t want you to spend more time than necessary doing your weekly shopping. Place an order from the comfort of your favourite chair and we’ll give you a special gift and a little more time to do something else! Simply place an order over £85 for delivery between Monday 6th and Saturday 11th March and we’ll add a free bottle of wine to your order. We look forward to seeing you next week at www.ocado.com. Neil Jewsbury On behalf of the Ocado Team.

Spend £85 and get a free nondescript bottle of wine? No free delivery any more, I guess that was too expensive. Clearly I’m no longer in their target market, who spends £85 a week on groceries? I know I could easily unsubscribe but I do find how their offers are getting less and less enticing when they’re trying to get me to spend more money very funny.

Update: This week’s offer is spend £90 and get two bottles of wine! I thought when someone was getting desperate the offer was supposed to get better.

I was at Heathrow last night and as we were taxing to our gate I saw Concorde out on the tarmac. I first I didn’t take much notice, then I realised it’s been decommissioned for over two years and supposed to be in Bristol. No one else seemed to notice. Very odd.

I just saw this post on O’Reilly Radar, which refers to an article in the Guardian. Basically Tesco is going to start selling VOIP phones, and some people wonder if this is the start of the end of BT. Being in an office with VOIP phones, and using the Asterisk server that O’Reilly is pimping a book for, I can safely safe BT is safe for now. Mobiles on the other hand, they have a good chance at ending BT, especially if you could get a phone that routes calls seemlessly over Skype if it finds a WLAN connection. But everyone gets their ADSL connection off BT one way or another, so I guess they aren’t going anywhere.

That’s the current estimated jackpot in this week’s EuroMillions lottery. That’s a hell of a lot of money, definitely enough to put the rational part of my brain on hold whilst I buy a ticket. In fact the past few weeks, back when the jackpot was only £50 million I started paying what is affectionally known as the ’stupid person tax’. I know I won’t win, but there’s still that feeling that I could.

To drive the point home I came across a site that checks all lotto results since it started back in 1994. It works on the assumption that you play the same numbers every week. At first I didn’t want to stick in some numbers (family members’ birthdays) in the irrational fear that I should be a millionaire. The results were:

And that’s for a lottery whose odds are 14 million to one, so how come I’ve just bought another ticket for a lottery whose odds are 76 million to one? Stupid tax indeed.