The Cactus and Succulent Plant Mall
Cactus-Mall Blog
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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
This Blog will note updates to the Cactus-Mall and other related websites like the British Cactus and Succulent Society and the Mesemb Study Group. I will give my thoughts on the current state of the Cactus and Succulent hobby and discuss topical subjects which I think need airing. I hope it can be used by others to give us feedback on the development of the now 10 years old Cactus-Mall and what you think of its usefulness and ways in which we might improve this.

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Neobinghamia climaxacantha

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