Discounted chocolate in days gone by

Posted on by February 5, 2012
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The free oyster money has reminded me of a vending machine at the Students Union at Reading which, one of the games group discovered, would treat the fifth 2p coin given to it in any one transaction as a 10p.

So, stick five 2ps in it and you'd be credited with 18p, not 10p. This sort of discount got me breaking my 'no less than 70% chocolate' rule.

Presumably either news of this 'feature' didn't spread too far or the machine didn't give a decent report of its activities, because there was never a report to the Buildings & Finance Committee (which I was on as Treasurer of the lighting crew) about any discrepancy.

I wonder if the machine is still there.

Oh no, the supply of free money has dried up

Posted on by February 5, 2012
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If you use pre-pay oyster on London's transport network, you've probably seen the news that if you set up 'auto top-up' (when you're using the Underground and the balance goes below a fiver, £20 will automagically be extracted from your debit or credit card and put onto the card) then they'll give you £10 off the first payment.

Well, should their website not work properly and the auto top-up fail to be set up – and it has been rather unreliable recently – then it will give you this 50% discount more than once.

Result!

Unfortunately, it's just set mine up correctly this time. Poo 🙂

Hmm, tomorrow I'll see what happens if you cancel auto top-up and then ask for it again…

The main drawback, by the way, is that you can only 'collect' the money you've topped up by putting the card on a ticket barrier – i.e. an action you'll be charged for – at an LU station rather than from a ticket machine, or indeed, on a bus.

That's twice BT have done this

Posted on by February 5, 2012
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Work has a phone line for an alarm system to call out and go 'help help, the place is being burgled!!'. It also doubles as the line for clients' internet access (we reckon that as the alarm is off while we're in the building, we might as well use this line!)

Sometime around last weekend, it stopped working, and we – and the alarm – couldn't dial out. Dial tone and emergency calls, yes, anything else, no. Almost as if we had outgoing calls barred (incoming, yes, outgoing, no).

BT reckoned all was hunky-dory, but after a week (the earliest appointment!) did something.

Today, we get an odd dial tone and the PCs in the café won't dial out.

I put a real phone in… and discover lots of messages on 1571 (a service we shouldn't have) for someone with an Asian name. Including a 'Hello, we've just installed your new line, love BT' message.

I dial my mobile and, yep, the 'wrong' number is presented. BT have swapped a pair of wires somewhere, and we're getting their calls and presumably they're not getting anyone calling them (incoming calls barred, remember).

Sigh. Exactly the same thing happened last year when our fax (and staff internet) line got swapped with someone.

Still, if anyone wants to call their friends in Australia, or just rub a random Aussie's nose in the Ashes result :)) we have a phoneline that will be good to do it on. Be quick, because they're promising to fix it tomorrow, no honest, really.

Gosh, Google is seven already

Posted on by September 27, 2005
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I remember using it when it was very much in 'beta' (a habit they've kept!) following a recommendation on cix.

At the time Alta Vista – which was then something like www.altavista.digital.com – had been the most useful search engine, but had recently started taking money for good placings. Ooops. Once this was realised, its credibility vanished.

AV's low-crap interface had become a lot more complicated too. Like Yahoo, it wanted to be a Gateway – ker-ching! – not a search engine, because how would you make money from that, apart from accepting bribes for top rankings? Ooops.

So Google came along at exactly the right time. It produced very good results, very quickly, with no fuss.

The things that experienced AV users missed at first – the ability to say 'give me a page with this AND (that OR that)' or '.. starting with this' – turned out not to be a problem because it was so fast you could do two Google searches in the time it took to do one AV search.

And the results were almost always spot on… before people started gaming their algorithms anyway.

I'm not at all surprised 'google' has entered the language as a verb.

Gasp – Ebay buys Skype

Posted on by September 12, 2005
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… for between 2.6 and 4.1 billion dollars. (The actual price depends on future performance)

That's a minimum of forty million times Skype's forecast earnings this year (371 million times last year's actual earnings!)

I know Ebay is rich (it made $371 million dollars profit last quarter) but for a business that's not that hard to get into and for which Skype does have lots of users but is not in a dominant position in the way that Ebay is for online auctions and which has Google gunning for it… gosh.

I don't know if they've reached amazon.co.uk yet

Posted on by August 22, 2005
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… but I've just noticed some people on the .com have a little "badge" on their customer reviews.

I've seen the "top n reviewer" ones. This one is new to me: "real name" and means that the user name is – gasp – their real name. (To be more precise, the name on a credit card, which is apparently the same thing.)

What drew my attention to it was that it actually says is "REAL NAMETM".

Yep, Amazon are claiming a trademark on "real name".

I just love Thomson sales calls

Posted on by February 5, 2012
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As well as their paper directories, they're dead keen on selling internet advertising.

Apparently, they can GUARANTEE #1 placing on google.

The first sales droid wasn't too clear on how they'd do that, and never did fax over the exciting information promised.

But this afternoon's one – she's about the third in the past couple of weeks – did eventually fess up that they're talking about AdWords, although they don't call it that, rather than genuine listings.

I demonstrated to her that we're already #1 on the genuine listings for both our current (having edged out a site devoted to forthcoming theme park ride – 'Secret Weapon 5' – anyone apart from H-L know what that's more famous as without googling it?) and past names, and said that in any case we had zero interest in paying Thomson any money…

"Well, I'll give you another call in eighteen months, and you'll wish you'd paid us then!"