I am not a consumer!!!

According to Nominet, and I quote "Adrian Kennard is not a consumer"

They do not explain that assertion, but they have decided that they will now publish my home address on one of my domains and prohibit me from opting out because I am not a "consumer".

Their own rules do not use the word "consumer" at all, they reference individuals.

I am clearly a consumer, and an individual. I buy the domain from Andrews & Arnold Ltd, and am invoiced for it at my home address as an individual and pay for it from my personal bank account. You do not get much more "consumer" than that!

The domain in question (find.me.uk) has O/S maps I downloaded when they were made free. No adverts or pay for click or any such. My placement of the maps on there is not a business of anything commercial. It was a fun exercise to do the O/S maps.

Even so, they have not asserted that I am using the domain for something commercial, they are asserting that I am not a consumer, which is total nonsense. And just to be clear, this is not a complaint about the .me.uk part, which requires the registrant to be an individual. It is for the whois opt-out. Very odd indeed.

What gets me here is that they just published my address without asking. It is not that secret (Companies House have it), but that is not the point. There is no consultation, no warning, no checking anything, they just make a decision and change the whois - done - published. If there was some reason they thought the whois was wrong somehow, they could have asked - should have asked. They didn't.

Basically, whatever the reason was for this, it is clear that nobody can actually trust Nominet to respect the opt-out, and so A&A will have to recommend customers use a correspondence address even for opted-out personal domains.

This is the email:-

Hi Adrian Kennard,

It has been brought to my attention that your find.me.uk domain name is registered to Adrian Kennard and is also opted out of our WHOIS facility.  To qualify for the opt-out you must be a 'consumer' i.e. an individual who has registered and is using the domain name for a purpose unconnected with any business, trade (this includes the registration of domain names for monetisation purposes, e.g. pay per click advertising etc) or profession.

As Adrian Kennard is not a consumer, I have removed the opt-out from the domain and the associated address details will now be visible on the WHOIS search facility.  Please note that any email or telephone details will not be made public.

You will now be unable to set the opt-out through our Online Services.

You can find more information about our WHOIS policy and carry out a WHOIS search by visiting http://www.nominet.org.uk/go/whoisfaq

Argos: Can't tell difference between an invoice and a credit note!

We got some things from Argos. It was actually a pile of mobile phones for testing voice SIMs. It came to more than £100.

Having got the phones I asked for a VAT receipt. The order ticket does not have the details of VAT rate, or amount, etc, so is not good enough to reclaim VAT.

Now, in most shops, this is simple, they can either print off one, or hand write one. It takes a couple of minutes, and you have the VAT receipt. Without it you cannot reclaim the VAT, so losing 16.66% of what you paid. Obviously one could hope not to be picked up on a VAT inspection, but we do things right, and it is generally no hassle to do things right.

He went away for about quarter of an hour, and finally came back with a hand filled out Credit Note!

For those that do not know, a credit note is the opposite of an invoice/receipt. It says the goods have been un-sold and the money (and VAT) are to be paid back. If we, as a business, have a credit note, we have to pay the VAT part of that to HMRC.

So, now, technically, instead of just being unable to claim £40 of VAT, I should actually pay HMRC an extra £40 of VAT.

I pointed out his mistake, and he went away. He came back and was absolutely adamant that this is all he can give me, and his store support people he called confirmed it is valid and legal and not a mistake. He said he is not allowed to issue a manual invoice. He also could not issue an invoice from his tills.

I argued, and showed him the The Value Added Tax Regulations 1995 on my phone, but still no luck.

I am at a loss now - I have advised HMRC that Argos don't know the difference between a Credit Note and an Invoice. I have also asked how they want me to handle the VAT. This could result in Argos getting a VAT inspection, with any luck.

In the mean time I have sent a copy of the Credit Note to Argos and asked for them to pay it. After all, it is a legal document stating that they now owe us money, and for which there is no record of any payment having been made. They chose to issue it. They were adamant it was not a mistake. So a nice gift from them. We'll see what happens.

Update: those regulations have been amended, but the legislation.gov.uk site does not keep them updated, which is a nuisance. The do have a way to list changes though. The amount for a simplified retail receipt was changed to £250 in 2003, and a general option for a simplified receipt up to £250 was added in 2012. However, the order slip they provided did not meet even those requirements (not showing VAT rate), so I was still right to ask for a VAT receipt (even a simplified one), and giving me a credit note was completely wrong.

Update: Argos say on their web site that to get a VAT receipt you should email them. I did, the reply is that they cannot send one, and I should ask in the store. oh what fun!

Uber: Late nights in London

I live in Bracknell, which is about 40 miles drive from London. Unfortunately there are a lot of events in London which means I end up in London in the evening. Until recently this has been inconvenient and/or rather costly so I have not been going to a lot of events. This has rather shown me the importance of these events for business, so I decided I should start going to more of them. This leaves me with a dilemma of how to get home...

Option 1: Last train

The obvious answer is to catch the last train. There is a direct train Waterloo to Bracknell, and the last train is around 23:30. It is slow (takes an hour), and for some reason SWT tend to lock the toilets, which is a pain if you have been drinking all evening. Of course this means watching the clock and leaving early. It is usually packed, and I decided long ago the only way to be vaguely comfortable, and have a table and power socket, is to go 1st class on that train, which is £21. Typically you need a taxi or tube or bus to Waterloo at around £5, and then a taxi home at the end for another £5. Of course there is a danger that you doze off, miss the station, and end up in Reading at 1am. It is, by far, the cheapest option though.

Total Cost: £31
Downside: Clock watching, leaving early, don't fall asleep.

Option 2: Hotel over night

Another option, which is usually sensible for two day events and I have done in the past for events I know will end late, is a hotel for the night. The issue is that a London hotel is at least £120, and more likely £180. You still need to get to the hotel (£5), and then from hotel to station in morning (£5), a train (£21) and taxi to work from station (£5). I normally get to work soon after 7am, but would be in much later if staying over night in London.

Total Cost: £156+
Downside: Taking overnight bag, not sleeping in own bed, late for work, expensive.

Option 3: Black cab home

What I ended up doing, before I stopped going to many events, was getting a black cab home. This is simple enough in London, though I have had problems on some occasions if not near a major road. I have had cabs around £150, but they got more and more expensive and now around £170. It does mean you end up at home in your own bed, and can sleep in the taxi, which is good. This was getting way too expensive. On top of which you usually are expected to give a tip, and getting a VAT receipt is a nuisance when you just want to get to bed.

Total Cost: £170
Downside: None really apart from the cost.

Option 4: Uber car

Last month I had a rather good dinner at the National Liberal Club with Jullian Huppert and a few friends. At the end of the night I was about to get a cab home, having resigned myself to the fact that this was a very expensive evening already (supporting Julian's re-election campaign), when John Benson said try Uber. He clicked the invite button, I followed the link, downloaded the app, put in card details and asked it for a quote to get home. It said £65! So I said yes, and it said 4 minutes and showed me where the car was on its way to me, registration number, name and picture of driver. The driver knew exactly where I was by GPS from my phone, my name and my mobile number. I got in, fell asleep, arrived home, job done. Quite specifically on their web site its says no need to tip him, all charged to the card. As I walked through my door my phone dinged with the emailed receipt from Uber. I have used it again, and again £65 and only 3 minutes wait. It just works!

Total Cost: £65
Downside: Still more than a train, but if there are two of us it is a no brainer.

Overall I have to say I am impressed, and it starts to make these events much more available. It is even cheaper than getting a hotel for a two day event if I get a car home and train back next morning! I far prefer sleeping in my own bed and not having hassle of taking an over night bag to an event. I can go with just myself and my mobile phone, which makes a change.

They also do a referral scheme where both of us get £10 credit. Just go to
uber.com/invite/wp7ru or use code wp7ru.

I'll be in London tonight, with two colleagues, making this cheaper than getting a train home as we can share one car.

Zebra ZXP8 Contact Station

[update: See later blog post for more on this fiasco]

I am very disappointed with Zebra. We ordered one of their ZXP8 card printers. It is, overall, a good printer, and one of the few that can cope with printing on SIM cards.

Most printers try to print directly on the card. This works with a smooth blank plastic card, but not well on the rougher surface of a SIM card. The ZXP8 prints, instead, on a transfer ribbon, and then does a pressure/heat transfer on to the card. This allows it to print right to the edge of the card and cope with the cut outs and contacts found on a SIM. It is not perfect, but very good for the job.

Like most commercial card printers it has encoding options which are add-ons at extra cost that allow you to encode the card in some way. The main options you would expect are magnetic encoding (the mag stripe on the back), contact encoding (like chip and PIN cards, or SIM cards), and contactless encoding (like Oyster cards).

The ZXP8 offers three encoding options which (a) magnetic (b) contact station, and (c) contact and contactless (mifare) encoding.

As we only needed contact cards for SIMs I ordered the "contact station". FYI, they also list the interfaces on the unit as Ethernet and USB only.

When we got the printer we could not figure out how to use the contact station. The applications said contact station installed but in other places said "encoder: none", so it was confusing. It also had no serial number in the config, or serial number for the print head, and various other obvious omissions, so we assumed it was an error.

It has taken 5 months of various emails back and forth, and us installing some windows software and running tests and all sorts to finally get the answer that the "contact station" does not actually talk to the card at all.

No, the contact station is simply the contacts to connect the card, that are run to a 9 way D-type on the back. No electronics at all. A 9 way D-type is not one of the listed "interfaces" in the spec. But they knew this from the serial/model number and could have told us on the very first email we sent. 5 months to tell us is crazy.

Now they want nearly £500 for the upgrade kit, and the reseller was prepared to send that to us. We have the service manual we found on-line and it is simple enough. But guess what, they won't sell us the upgrade kit. We have to pay another £500 and send it back to them (for weeks?) to have it fitted.

The answer? Well, a 9 way D-type we found in the build room; one of the cherry keyboards with card reader from the skip (had coffee tipped over the keyboard but card reader worked still); a soldering iron; a raspberry PI. And now we have a card reader attached to the printer. Probably under £100 of parts even if bought new. But it works, and we can buy the parts again if we need. Just so annoying. MacGyver would have been proud.

In short I feel let down by Zebra

1. The advertising is misleading - if you only want contact cards you would naturally assume the "contact station" is the option you want
2. They took 5 months to tell me, and even internally their staff did not know that the contact station was so pointless. Nobody said [waves hand] "These aren't the encoding options you are looking for".
3. They won't sell the upgrade kit.

Not the way to do business really.

P.S. Yes, as this bodge is likely to be permanent now, I will 3D print a case.

Update: Zebra have said, on this occasion, they will send someone to install the upgrade for free, if we buy the upgrade itself, having agreed it was very misleading. So some progress.

&

In XML and HTML you have some simple escaping rules that you have to follow. In XML the rules are even simpler, you just have to escape &, < and > which are presented as &amp; &lt; and &gt;

But some many people get this wrong, and we routinely get parcels addressed to Andrews &amp; Arnold Ltd, or as per the picture ANDREWS amp ARNOLD LTD. I think we have even seen Andrews &amp;amp; Arnold Ltd once.

It is not rocket science.

It had caused no end of issues for us having an & in the company name. BT took ages to get the XML ordering right as they injected the company name in XML they sent on to their Openreach division so orders went in but did not progress normally and nobody in BT knew why.

We even have fun trying to send OTA messages to mobile SIMs to set the operator name to A&A. It keeps coming up as A&amp;A on the phones.

Anyway, I now have UK company 08921585 which is &AMP;AMP; LTD.

But even UKPLC who do company formations insisted on emailing me about company &AMP; LTD, even in plain text emails!

I may have to set it up as a consultancy on XML.

Do you want to round up your bill and donate to some charity?

I was quite surprised that, paying at the supermarket yesterday, I was asked if I wanted to round up my bill and donate to some charity?

I have just handed the cashier £80 for a £62 something bill, and had no idea if she meant round up to £63, £65, £70, £80 or what and was, to be honest, fooled by the question.

I said "no", but obviously that makes me look like a meany infront people I was with. I am sure that is the whole idea to guilt people in to handing over money.

There are, of course, many good causes who may deserve charity, but anyone trying to guilt me in to handing over money just puts me off. After all, it is not like I don't give a shit load to the government to make everyone's life easier one way or another.

What I was kicking myself for was that the obvious retort only came to me a minute later as I was walking away. This is always the way, isn't it?

I should have asked if they would like to round down my bill and I'll send what I save to a charity. That would put them on the spot and having to say "no" and I could say how "uncharitable" they were.

I'll decide when, who and how much I give to charity and not because I am bullied in to it at a supermarket till, thank you.

BT refusing to fix a fault?

BT have a rather strange system where, if there is an order on a line, they will not fix a fault on the line.

This has always struck me as an odd state of affairs but BT have refused to rectify this. Obviously some types of order mean a line stopping working briefly (e.g. rejumpering). But there are many types of orders that do not mean that, and even re-jumpering type orders have a date on which they are done but BT will refuse any fault report any time before, even if the order does not start for many months.

This came up before where we had bulk migrations from 20CN to 21CN, which are an order on the system, but were set up a week or two in advance of the actual work. This problem for us is that the bulk migrate is free, but canceling one of the migrates and re-doing later cost money. BT were insisting that in order to fix a fault while such an order was pending we had to cancel the order, hence incurring costs (to BT) later to reinstate it.

That nearly came to county court claims then, but it was eventually resolved by a combination of fewer 20CN bulk migrates left to do, and BT internally not putting in the migrate order until the last minute making the window for refusing fault repair much smaller.

Still, it was not a proper fix. The issue rarely comes up these days as the only orders we tend to place are to be done ASAP, or install orders where there cannot be a fault (for us) while waiting.

Now we have one unfortunate customer that has had a fault (total loss of service) for nearly two weeks now. He has an open order to move to another ISP which will not happen for 4 more weeks, but his line has a fault now.

It has taken two weeks of solid arguing, and then threats of county court action, to get BT to do anything. They even sent engineers who could see the fault but said they could not fix the fault as an order was open.

We were told that we have to get the other ISP to cancel the order so BT will fix the fault. This is crazy talk, and of course we are not going to try and ask another ISP to cancel their order. Why would we? Why would they listen to is? And asking our customer to cancel his order with another ISP is crazy too.

BT need to fix this fundamental problem - it is quite possible for a fault to exist and need fixing on a service which has an order pending for some time in the future.

I suspect this specific fault will get resolved (it may have been today already), so once again we will not get BT to fix the underlying problem. One of these days it will get to a county court claim and maybe then BT will realise that they have a broken system that needs properly fixing.