Web Blog of Greg Mathews

Wow it has been nearly a week since I have posted, and in that time I have not dropped as much as normal and I have NOT experienced any withdrawel symptoms.

I was thinking that I would be eating my christmas dinner pining over dropping but guess what, the thought never even crossed my mind and I was so surprised to find that even on Christmas day I received over 170 drops on me.

OK so Christmas is over but things are still not back to normal in our household and wont be until the kids return to School on Monday, but when it does I am seriously considering trying to develope an EC type of site. If anyone has any suggestions, or even idea’s on how best to manage the credit system so there are not too many credits floating around at any one time then please leave a comment.

I do hope you all had a great Holiday week and I wish you all a Happy new year

Greg

Just a quick post to say ‘Merry Christmas’ to everyone who celebrates it.

I won’t be dropping much tomorrow, 25th December as I will slaughtered if I even attempted to get near the computer.

Greg

Many years ago, before many of you where probably born, I saw a movie on TV call ‘Bugsy Malone‘. Wow I thought it was great at the time. A few years ago I watched it again at some obscure time and on some obscure channel and thought I want it on DVD. I hunted for it and found it. I still loved it, now my kids loved it and when I first got the DVD they couldn’t turn it off.

It was on TV again yesterday, and although we still have it on DVD I made a point of watching it, and yea I still found it more entertaining than many of the top movies out today.

If you don’t know the film, its a Gangster movie where the whole cast is just kids, including a 12 year old Jodie Foster, and instead of real bullets they use “splurge guns” that cover the victim in cream. I bet the kids had great fun making it and the film crew had a nightmare of a time.

I really don’t know if this is my favorite movie ever but it is one kids movie that I enjoy watching with the family and could (do) time and time again.

I am not happy today, I am sat here in about 4 layers of clothes as I have had to turn the gas off.

Why?

Well yesterday our oven decided to pack up on us. It has been given us the odd warning I must admit.

I took the measurements of the housing, the width and height and measured the depth from front of oven to wall. We then procedeed to the local electrical store to get a replacement. We told the assistant our predicament and that we wanted to take one away and she told us which where in stock.

We chose one, she charged my debit card and then phone the store room to bring it through to be told the only one they had was damaged. She then offered me a smaller, cheaper oven with the remainder refunded. I said if I had wanted the smaller cheaper one then I would have chosen that in the first place so she offered to refund the payment to my card.

I was not happy with that, I told her that if they gave me a full refund it had to be cash as although they take they manage to debit my bank account instantly, when a refund is applied it takes 3 or 4 business days to be refunded to my account and therefor refunding my card was NOT an option. Ah guess what she said we can’t refund in cash.

A manager was then called over, I told him that, as they have sold me a ‘damaged’ item they are bound by law to offer me a replacement of equal or higher value. Unfortunately I knew they did not have any available to take away (have dozens on show but about 4 in stock). I was getting so annoyed that Tracey took the kids to wait in the car:) The Manager went away and came back offering me the one on display with a discount which will be refunded to my card. I told him that he ‘has me by the balls’,  A full refund means I can’t go elsewhere to get one until the refund hits my account and unless I go for the cheaper smaller oven I have no choice so I took it.

We get home, I remove the old oven (which is electric) and smelt gas. It turns out that the gas feed to our Gas hob has a connection that is a bit loose. I did tighten it up but I was not happy so felt I had to turn the gas off. Legally here in the UK you have to have a registered gas engineer out to do any gas work, even minor.

OK so gas is now turned off, we needed to put the new oven in position at least so it’s out of the way, Fits in snuggly except for the fact it is deeper than our old oven, and even though the depth to the wall is enough space, the Gas pipe to the hob is away from the wall slightly so stopping the new oven going all the way into the housing unit.

I spoke to a gas fitter, who I only know in passing, this morning, unsuprisingly he is ‘rushed off his feet’ today but has someone else in the area this afternoon and will see if he can fit us in. I do hope so as a lot in the building trade finish for Christmas today and trying to get someone else before Christmas out is going to be near impossible and/or cost a bloody fortune.

When I do get the fitter out, I hope he can move the gas pipe without having to rip out the kitchen units, if not then I need to decide whether to go ahead with that or get an electric hob, which then needs wiring by a qualified electrician legally adding more expense which we could do without this time of year.

Oh the fun of Christmas, don’t you love it?

Update : I called someone else out as I hadn’t heard anything by lunchtime, fortunately I cought them just as they where about to close, someone was here with half hour, fixed everything including moving the gas feed and the oven fits just nice. It cost £70 but I suppose it could have cost a lot more.

Greg and family happy and warm again.

No, I am not giving up on EntreCard but there appear to be more and more people that are lately.

There are always people that drop out but over the past week or so it seems a day does not go past when I come accross at least a couple of bloggers that have decided to leave or are thinking about it.

Some of the reasons given are what really concern me:

1. Poor Management, yes it does appear that those running EntreCard couldn’t organise a ‘Piss up in a Brewery’ but I’ve noticed a lot of those giving this as a reason all mention the fact that another blog has been removed from Entrecard and they believed the reasons given by that blogger and therefor think Entrecard are in the wrong.

I am not saying that any one blogger has lied about what brought on the deletion of their account, but how many have all the details, do we know if Graham from Entrecard discussed this with them and neither could agree? do we know if something has happened previously between EntreCard and the blogger? Have we seen Graham publically winge about the blogger he has deleted?

2. Poor systems, this is a major contention with me, the EntreCard servers are not upto scratch for the job and Graham needs to seriously look at his network of servers, assuming he has more than one server. I realise that he doesn’t make much from the site but again that is due to Grahams lack of planning and marketting and/or decision not to have to much advertising.

We all know that at times servers require maintenance and upgrades etc and we can accept downtime but please, any good organisation would give it’s users some notice or at least a ‘under going maintenance – do not drop’ message on their site, but EntraCard fails to do this every time. I wasted time dropping on 100+ blogs the other day because although the widgets continued to function the database didn’t so none of them where logged.

This is more than likely going to be the reason I leave if I do leave.

3. Slow blogs, there are a number of  blogs that are members of EC that take forever to load, many ’cause of the flash and video ads they display and some when they do they don’t fully load. This is annoying but sorry to say it this is what happens when people host for free. There isn’t much that can be done about this and has nothing to do with Entrecard so why leave because of it.

4. Out of date blogs and blogs without  widgets, it amazes me that the amount of people that have time to drop on 300 blogs a day but can’t update their own blog more than once in a blue moon, and why do people take part in EC and not show the widget? come on people update your blogs so they are worth visiting more than once every now and again.

5. Time, there isn’t much that can be said as this is a genuine reason in my mind, slow blogs along with EC server going at a crawl some times it can take forever to visit and drop on those you want to.

Are you considering leaving EntreCard? would you take part in a similar site if things where done differently?

OK I have just upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.7, and first impressions look good. The back end, the bits you readers don’t see is alot nicer than previous versions in my view but I have not yet gone through everything.

I thought I would use svn to upgrade but it didn’t appear to work as I expected but it did work although it did install without any loss to the blog which is the main thing.

So Vodafone turned me down, their loss. I walked into the O2 shop yesterday and walked out with a Blackberry Bold on a similar tarrif.
I love this phone, so much so I am writing this post on it. I admit I couldn’t post with it all the time as it takes too long but it will be usefull I am sure.
I was so suprised at how easy the keyboard is, I am not good with small keys but so far I have not hit too many wrong keys.
Compared to my old Motorolla razr the Bold has so much on it and I am going to be playing for days:)
My wife, Tracey, is not so impressed as I have not put it down yet and the beeping it was doing as I played last night was disrupting her telly time.
OK it’s time to play again LOL

I am really pissed at the moment.

A few years ago my credit record was not great but early last year I decided to change all that while I could. I paid off a couple of old CCJ’s that I had, and cleared all of my debts apart from the mortgage.

Today, looking at my credit report online it looks good, and it states :

Factors that are having a positive effect on your score
You make all your repayments on time and in full – no accounts have been paid late in the past six months
You are on the electoral roll (registered to vote) at your current address
You have made two or fewer applications for credit in the last six months
The outstanding balance on your credit accounts (excluding your mortgage) is low
You don’t have any county court judgments and you have not been declared bankrupt in the last six years

Factors that are having a negative effect on your score
There are no negative factors currently affecting your score.

So why is it that when I try to get a Blackberry Storm from VodaFone they knock me back based on my credit report. I asked the woman on the phone what was the reason as my report is good and she said, it is marked as to be referred, or something, and I would need to phone back with a Credit report reference so that can look into it. I did that and called back and this time a different woman said she would need to create a new account and then when the system comes back ‘to be referred’ she will then refer me to another department. So I gave her all my details again, double checking as we are going through it and was then told the card details I was giving was not in my name (which it was) and that the system has this time rejected my application and I can’t reapply for 3 months.

I was not happy and the girl transferred me to customer services, who then in turn transferred me to another department and I had to explain again the situation. The woman now on the phone confirmed I had been rejected and could not reapply, I asked why then the first time it was marked as ‘refer’ NOT rejected. She asked me again for my name and address and was then able to see records of my first phone call. She has claimed that she will look into it and call me back today, that was at 9:30 this morning and she has said it could be any time until 6pm, for some reason I am not holding my breath.

If after more than 18 months virtually debt free with all my payments being made on time every month why can’t I make a simple purchase?  Why did I bother clearing all my bad debts? was it worth it?

Yes, I have decided to let go of YzooSearch.com, it and its predecessor yzoo.co.uk looked after me for a couple of years earning far more from adsense than I had ever expected or seen before. It cleared all my debts apart from the mortgage, it renevated the house and it has paid me a salary into next year. I even got a Christmas card from Google last year.

For the past year though Google has refused to index the site, apart from a month or so in the middle of the year so traffic to the site has been far lower this year.

As many of the long standing readers will know, I did have the site spread over about a dozen dedicated servers at one point just to cope with the traffic but during the past 12 months I reduced this down to 4 but even that is costing me more than what the site is earning now.

It has been like having an old car, it’s your baby and you have had some great times with it, but it is starting to cost more and more but you just can’t see it go to the scrap yard.

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I was talking to someone earlier and it made me think. Yea I do that some times.

Each year most people who celebrate christmas might have a christmas card list and send cards to everyone on that list. Then out of the blue you receive a christmas card from someone not on that list, what do you do, do you add them to your christmas card list and send them a card or do you just leave it? It could be someone you know vaguely or know but do not like too much, or maybe you just forgot to add them to your list.

The same, to an extent could be the same about entrecard. You have done your dropping for the day, maybe you limit your self to x number of drops or y hours a day, but then you receive a drop from a site you have missed for similar reasons as the card list. Do you quickly go and drop on their blog? do you make sure you drop on them tomorrow? or do you just do nothing?