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Month: August 2005

Ahhhh… code!

I’m literally just about to start working on some code for backstage.bbc.co.uk. This will be my first bit of coding for backstage.bbc in at least…

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My issues with PayPal

I was recently contacted by PayPal to take part in customer satisfaction and feedback survey.

Funnily enough, despite being a multi-million dollar profitable company, and wanting over 45 minutes of my time, they were not offering any remuneration in return. And don’t forget, customer feedback and satisfaction analysis like this is worth a massive amount to any company.

With the above in mind, I don’t normally take part in such requests (although I did once call up a consumer research company that was facilitating such survey to ask where I should send my invoice to. After some confusion at their end I informed them that as a consultant I usually charge people for my time, and their request was no different to any other. But that’s probably because I’m a stuck up bastard.)

However, I have a couple of gripes with PayPal so I thought I would do it anyway. And lets face it, PayPal are one companies that are so big and so dominant in their sector that they generally work on economies of scale to the point that they are happy to piss a percentage of their customer base off, knowing that people will still be forced to use them and that there isn’t much choice anyway (Roll on this new Google payment gateway, I say!).

So here’s what I wrote:

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Excited to be going to Shanghai and Tokyo…

Sofia and I try to visit Asia once a year. We’ve not quite managed to stick to a once-every-12-months trip, but I’m pleased to say we’ve booked a holiday to Shanghai and Tokyo.

We’re both really excited as it will be our first trips to China and Japan, and neither of us quite knows what to expect. However I’m hoping Tokyo will be a great indicator of future technology, and Shanghai should be a great indicator of a massive future economy waiting to be tapped into.

However, the main purpose of the trip is to attend the Chinese F1 Grand Prix. We’ve done the Malaysian Grand Prix a couple of times, and so we thought it would be good to do a new one.

We also wanted to attend the Japanese Grand Prix too, as it takes place a week before the Chinese GP. However tickets were practically sold out and accommodation near the circuit was impossible to find. Never mind, perhaps we’ll do Suzuka next year.

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