Cactus-Mall Blog
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Another big task
You may think things have gone quiet on the cactus-mall front. Unfortunately I have been presented with another large slice of unprofitable but essential work.
eBay have decided at fairly short notice to drop Commission Junction as the tracking system for their affiliate programme. This results in my having to change all eBay affiliate links on about half a dozen websites. Since this generates a fair bit of income for us it is essential this is completed as soon as possible. It is particularly annoying that although eBay want all this work done by the end of the month they have not even got all the necessary modified tools available yet and the documentation is even further behind.
Typical! ¶ 5:30 PM 0 comments
eBay have decided at fairly short notice to drop Commission Junction as the tracking system for their affiliate programme. This results in my having to change all eBay affiliate links on about half a dozen websites. Since this generates a fair bit of income for us it is essential this is completed as soon as possible. It is particularly annoying that although eBay want all this work done by the end of the month they have not even got all the necessary modified tools available yet and the documentation is even further behind.
Typical! ¶ 5:30 PM 0 comments
Friday, April 04, 2008
MAIL PROBLEMS
My main mailserver PC refuses to connect the network (either local or Internet) this morning. This is limiting my ability to send or recieve email. I am working on fixing it.
¶ 12:14 PM 0 comments
Thursday, February 28, 2008
MSG PayPal account
The MSG PayPal account has finally been unfrozen. This does not reduce my intention to limit use of their 'services' to the absolute minimum.
¶ 8:05 AM 0 comments
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Paypal problems continue on MSG account
We are still no nearer to solving the freezing of the MSG PayPal account.
In spite of numerous emails and faxing documents the MSG PayPal account is still frozen.
I have blocked all further payments to this account and closed another PayPal account. Uses of the PayPal virtual terminal by three customers will no longer be advocated.
This organisation apparently has a death wish and will find that that they may contract even faster they have grown. PayPal and its parent company eBay think that their monopoly postion protects them from normal commercial competition. PayPal apparently moved from the UK to Luxembourg to avoid the regulation of the UK's FSA and now don't even employ UK lawyers to avoid legal papers being served against them. So much for the Common market.
I am afraid PayPal's behaviour is yet another example of the sickness infesting USA business and I fear that the current USA government and any possible sucessors will be too weak or too unwilling to sort this out. ¶ 9:05 PM 0 comments
In spite of numerous emails and faxing documents the MSG PayPal account is still frozen.
I have blocked all further payments to this account and closed another PayPal account. Uses of the PayPal virtual terminal by three customers will no longer be advocated.
This organisation apparently has a death wish and will find that that they may contract even faster they have grown. PayPal and its parent company eBay think that their monopoly postion protects them from normal commercial competition. PayPal apparently moved from the UK to Luxembourg to avoid the regulation of the UK's FSA and now don't even employ UK lawyers to avoid legal papers being served against them. So much for the Common market.
I am afraid PayPal's behaviour is yet another example of the sickness infesting USA business and I fear that the current USA government and any possible sucessors will be too weak or too unwilling to sort this out. ¶ 9:05 PM 0 comments
Monday, February 25, 2008
A busy weekend
We had a very busy weekend.
It started on Friday evening, with a Zone 12 (Sussex) committee meeting here. Unfortunately 4 members of this already very small committee were unable to attend. The prime business discussed was the forthcoming Derek Desborough memorial lecture to be held at the usual Crawley meeting place on the 13th April starting at 1pm. Graham Charles will be giving two lectures, one on Copiapoas in habitat and the other on South American habitats under threat. Tickets including afternoon refreshments (available from us) and including refreshments will be £4 booked beforehand and £5 on the day.
On Saturday evening we were speaking at Woking branch. It was very nice to see a strong attendance. It seems that the new cactus display at Wisley is having a very positive effect on this branch and there were 4 members of the Wisley staff in the audience.
On Sunday there was very rare occurrence of an MSG 'organisers' meeting. This was primarily to organise the MSG event taking place in Banstead on the 27th September.
The MSG has also managed to get its act together and will be having a stand at the National Show. The staging time makes this quite difficult to organise and we are relying on people arriving early enough on the Saturday morning to put the stand together. We will be totally involved in BCSS publication sales and won't be able to assist. We need volunteers from the MSG membership to both bring plants and man the stand during the day.
MSG membership continues to look healthy with renewals and new members substantially up on last year.
We finally had an unexpected visit from John Gander who stayed with us overnight on his way back from the Northampton Zone to Cornwall.
I have finally got my new computer operational and now have two systems on my desk. This is much much more powerful than anything we have had previously and I finding extremely useful to have access to two systems at once, although remembering which mouse to use sometimes confuses me. We now have a total of five systems and more redundancy than I have ever had before.
We have finished the migration of a new customer (the first since we moved to the new server www.cactiguide.com. This is a very large system which we are pleased to provide hosting for. ¶ 5:41 PM 0 comments
It started on Friday evening, with a Zone 12 (Sussex) committee meeting here. Unfortunately 4 members of this already very small committee were unable to attend. The prime business discussed was the forthcoming Derek Desborough memorial lecture to be held at the usual Crawley meeting place on the 13th April starting at 1pm. Graham Charles will be giving two lectures, one on Copiapoas in habitat and the other on South American habitats under threat. Tickets including afternoon refreshments (available from us) and including refreshments will be £4 booked beforehand and £5 on the day.
On Saturday evening we were speaking at Woking branch. It was very nice to see a strong attendance. It seems that the new cactus display at Wisley is having a very positive effect on this branch and there were 4 members of the Wisley staff in the audience.
On Sunday there was very rare occurrence of an MSG 'organisers' meeting. This was primarily to organise the MSG event taking place in Banstead on the 27th September.
The MSG has also managed to get its act together and will be having a stand at the National Show. The staging time makes this quite difficult to organise and we are relying on people arriving early enough on the Saturday morning to put the stand together. We will be totally involved in BCSS publication sales and won't be able to assist. We need volunteers from the MSG membership to both bring plants and man the stand during the day.
MSG membership continues to look healthy with renewals and new members substantially up on last year.
We finally had an unexpected visit from John Gander who stayed with us overnight on his way back from the Northampton Zone to Cornwall.
I have finally got my new computer operational and now have two systems on my desk. This is much much more powerful than anything we have had previously and I finding extremely useful to have access to two systems at once, although remembering which mouse to use sometimes confuses me. We now have a total of five systems and more redundancy than I have ever had before.
We have finished the migration of a new customer (the first since we moved to the new server www.cactiguide.com. This is a very large system which we are pleased to provide hosting for. ¶ 5:41 PM 0 comments
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Some problems resolved
We have installed a new flat screen monitor and are back to having a safety margin of a backup computer. I have ordered parts to finish of our new upgrade computer and that ought to be fully operational within a few days.
Finally a number of awkward technical problems have been solved and the support load resulting from the server migration is showing signs of tailing off. We have new mini migration to cope with in that the server will be migrating to pHp5/MySQL5 sometime next month. This does result on some work being needed for some sites but the number is a fairly small proportion of the total.
We have some further problems generated by PayPal which is affecting the MSG account. In the past I have always promoted PayPal as a good solution for small organisations accepting on-line payments. After having the MSG PayPal account frozen for no apparent reason I am having strong doubts. The methods for unfreezing the account on-line simply do not work and lead you round in circles, emails are ignored. We eventually spoke to a real person at PayPal who requested the faxing of various documents, but nothing has yet happened after three days. Looking around the net reveals that PayPal is getting a terrible reputation for doing this. I suspect they have grown too big too fast and think themselves invulnerable to competition. What they may not realise is how much harm a bad reputation is doing their future business. I had no lees than three virtual terminal systems which may have come about in the near future. I don't think I can now possibly advise organisations to trust all their credit card business to PayPal. Anyone operating a PayPal account I would recommend to keep no more than the minimum balance in the account.
We don't have a lot of money frozen in the account but I would suggest that if you are sending money to the MSG you use the direct credit card system for the moment. ¶ 10:28 AM 0 comments
Finally a number of awkward technical problems have been solved and the support load resulting from the server migration is showing signs of tailing off. We have new mini migration to cope with in that the server will be migrating to pHp5/MySQL5 sometime next month. This does result on some work being needed for some sites but the number is a fairly small proportion of the total.
We have some further problems generated by PayPal which is affecting the MSG account. In the past I have always promoted PayPal as a good solution for small organisations accepting on-line payments. After having the MSG PayPal account frozen for no apparent reason I am having strong doubts. The methods for unfreezing the account on-line simply do not work and lead you round in circles, emails are ignored. We eventually spoke to a real person at PayPal who requested the faxing of various documents, but nothing has yet happened after three days. Looking around the net reveals that PayPal is getting a terrible reputation for doing this. I suspect they have grown too big too fast and think themselves invulnerable to competition. What they may not realise is how much harm a bad reputation is doing their future business. I had no lees than three virtual terminal systems which may have come about in the near future. I don't think I can now possibly advise organisations to trust all their credit card business to PayPal. Anyone operating a PayPal account I would recommend to keep no more than the minimum balance in the account.
We don't have a lot of money frozen in the account but I would suggest that if you are sending money to the MSG you use the direct credit card system for the moment. ¶ 10:28 AM 0 comments
Saturday, February 16, 2008
A horrible end to a horrible week
It has been a bad day today following up on a very difficult week which had far too many problems.
Today computer hardware problems have caught up with me bigtime. Over the period of the server migration period a few problems have occurred which I largely ignored as not being too important. One disk drive went down in a more modern computer I am building to replace an older one. Another developed funny video problems which I treaced to overheating as it only appeared after the computer had been on all day. I solved it temporarily by leaving the case open and ordered another fan to fit when I had a moment.
This morning when I started up, one computer screen went phut - it is pretty old and I suspect the power supply has failed. After checking the fuses, I switched it out for the screen on the spare computer. I thought I better get the fan fitted on the overheating machine. Went in easily but the computer instead of loading windows properly came up with the helpful message that it was ok to turn the computer off. After much fiddling and cursing I eventually found the video driver was corrupted. Like most windows problems once you have found the problem all sorts of other things have gone wrong and it took me 4 hours to get the system back into a usable state. Some things still remain to be fixed, but it is essentially operational.
I am now back to three working systems which is the minimum I need to operate everything. A new screen is on order which should get me back to the position of having a 'spare'. ¶ 5:12 PM 0 comments
Today computer hardware problems have caught up with me bigtime. Over the period of the server migration period a few problems have occurred which I largely ignored as not being too important. One disk drive went down in a more modern computer I am building to replace an older one. Another developed funny video problems which I treaced to overheating as it only appeared after the computer had been on all day. I solved it temporarily by leaving the case open and ordered another fan to fit when I had a moment.
This morning when I started up, one computer screen went phut - it is pretty old and I suspect the power supply has failed. After checking the fuses, I switched it out for the screen on the spare computer. I thought I better get the fan fitted on the overheating machine. Went in easily but the computer instead of loading windows properly came up with the helpful message that it was ok to turn the computer off. After much fiddling and cursing I eventually found the video driver was corrupted. Like most windows problems once you have found the problem all sorts of other things have gone wrong and it took me 4 hours to get the system back into a usable state. Some things still remain to be fixed, but it is essentially operational.
I am now back to three working systems which is the minimum I need to operate everything. A new screen is on order which should get me back to the position of having a 'spare'. ¶ 5:12 PM 0 comments
