Well that was a shock! The Bank of England finished their two-day meeting this morning and announced a 1.5% interest rate cut. Even the most optimistic of analysts only expected a 1% cut and most people, myself included, thought that they’d play it safe at 0.5% instead. At 3% the interest rate is now at it’s lowest point since 1955 and and it is the largest single reduction since a 2% cut in 1981.
I only hope that such a dramatic and unexpected move will prompt some optimism and courage from the banks and the markets in general. It will clearly hit sterling hard but it is so important that banks start lending again, borrowing rates are reduced and as a result the economy gets a much needed kick start.
If the banks don’t pass this rate cut on to customers and the markets don’t respond positively then every senior manager in the commercial financial sector should be sacked. Bankers and traders have spent years bragging about their skills and nerve in the marketplace yet now that their mistakes have come back to haunt them, all of that courage and bravado appears to have evaporated. It’s time for them to stand up and grow a pair!
Having not posted for a while I came to post this morning and when trying to upload an image, the “Choose Files to Upload” button had stopped working. Clicking on it didn’t do anything. I assumed it was a problem with the PC at home, but the office PC had the same trouble so I did some investigation.
I initially thought it was a Server problem but everything looked fine and I hadn’t changed anything on the server so I started to look into other recent updates. It also seemed to be a very specific error rather than a general problem. Since Wordpress uses Flash for the image/media management I started to look into a possible Flash problem since I know that all my machines have recently had a Flash update prompted by an Adobe pop-up.
It turns out that there is a known issue with the upload mechanism and Flash 10. There is some discussion here and the solution seems to be to downgrade to Flash 9. However, since I only upload one or two images at a time, I chose to manually disable Flash in Firefox for any session in which I’m posting. Wordpress then reverts to the old basic way of uploading files. If you upload a quantity of files at once, this workaround may not be suitable for you.
To disable flash in Firefox for the current session, got to Tools –> Add-Ons –> Plugins –> Shockwave Flash –> Disable. Remember to enable it again for your next session.
Does anyone else like Storm watches? I used to until last month. I have two Storm watches and I love the designs in their range. However, this year my Stepson had one for christmas and it stopped working in June. His girlfriend had one in March and the catch broke in July and I bought my Fiancee one in August and the catch came loose twice, once she managed to catch it and the second time she didn’t and the glass smashed on the floor.
I took all three watches back to the nearest Storm shop , in Birmingham, a round trip of 40 miles and very expensive to park at. They replaced the catch on the one watch and kept the non-working one until they got a new battery in stock. The smashed one, they sent away for repair. I got a call a couple of weeks later to say that they would not repair it under guarantee as there was nothing wrong with the catch. No amount of arguing would convince them that I was there when the watch fell off and smashed on the floor and the catch had been secured properly.
Here’s a tip for any customer services bosses out there. When a customer has three of your products which have all failed in just a few months and they have taken a 40 mile round trip to bring them back for repair, YOU TAKE THEM AT THEIR WORD! Three Storm watches purchased, three failures. If my company had a 100% failure rate for a customer I’d be a lot more responsive to their needs.
Now, despite admiring their designs, I wouldn’t buy another Storm watch. It seems that they are just very nice looking but very poor quality products. Anyone else had problems with them?
Sir Philip Green, the retail boss who owns the Arcadia Group has hit out at the banks for being too keen to give out loans and credit. I have a lot of respect for Sir Philip since he’s succeeded with companies that others have failed with, none more so than BHS, but I’m sensing a significant amount of hypocrisy here.
Let’s look at the shops in his Arcadia Group:
- Burtons
- Dorothy Perkins
- Evans
- Miss Selfridge
- Outfit
- Topshop
- Topman
- Wallis
Has anyone been pestered every time at the checkouts of any of these stores to take out a store card? You can normally open them there and then and even get offered a discount on the shopping you have on the counter waiting to be paid for if you take the card out. To call the banks too eager to give credit is two faced and ridiculous!
I was busy working on something this morning and XP kept nagging me to restart because it had been updated. I’m sure the update was important but do I have to be nagged every few minutes to restart, particularly when I’d rather get what I’m doing finished first and then restart in a quiet few minutes later in the day?
Anyway, here’s the sequence of commands/options to stop it nagging:
- Start Menu
- Run
- gpedit.msc
- Local Computer Policy
- Computer Configuration
- Administrative Templates
- Windows Components
- Windows Update
- Re-prompt for restart with schedule installations
- Disable
All companies have audits carried out from various institutions from time to time, from annual accounts audits to Revenue and Customs inspections. However, since the beginning of September, I’ve had an RBS Invoice Discounting audit and a full two day Revenue and Customs VAT inspection at the manufacturing company and an HBOS Invoice Discounting audit at the packaging company. Today I’m in early to get ready for an RBS Invoice Discounting audit at the packaging company because they will be taking over the facility from the end of the year. That’s four audits/inspections in just over a month!
The Bank audits are just routine inspections of our records and systems to ensure that we are operating our invoice discounting facilities correctly. They are not overly burdensome but do require some preparation and take at least a full day to complete so there’s a significant overhead involved. The VAT inspection came out of the blue since we had a minor import/export inspection last year which found that everything was in order so I wasn’t expecting Revenue & Customs to bother us for a few more years. Any Revenue and Customs inspection is quite nerve-racking as not only are your systems and records “on trial” but as a Director you have some personal liability should anything be found to be amiss. Fortunately it went smoothly with only a couple of mistakes in invoice coding and a claim to input VAT disallowed resulting in a bill for £5k.
The input VAT disallowed was for a solicitors invoice from last year. Our Managing Director at the time left and was required to sign a Compromise Agreement which binds his termination package. A company is legally obliged to pay for legal advice for the employee signing a Compromise Agreement so it was invoiced to the company. It is not, however, according to Revenue & Customs, allowed to reclaim the VAT on this legal advice since it was for the benefit of the employee, not the company. I’m not convinced but it’s their rule so I’m stuck with it!
Hopefully, after today’s audit, I’ll be free for a while. I’m a little tired of having my companies poked and prodded with an inquiring stick, particularly in such a compressed time-frame as a single month. It’s not like business is easy at the moment as it is without the extra burden. Fortunately, I have a week off next week to unwind.
All I have to do now is to try and improve the cashflow which is still extremely tight in the current economic climate.
I came across a minor irritation today on a newly installed XP Pro PC. When I clicked “E-mail Inbox” on Windows Love Messenger, the IE7 window which opened was very small and if resized and then closed did not remember it’s new size.
Personally, I never use Internet Explorer and rarely use Live Messenger but it is well known that the two are attached at the hip I couldn’t be bothered trying to convince Live Messenger to open Hotmail in Firefox instead. I simply needed a way to get IE to open in a larger window, in other words to remember the size I had set it to.
After a not insignificant amount of searching, the solution was rather simple. It is not enough to resize the IE window which opens then close it, you have to:
- Resize the IE window (do not use the maximise button).
- Right-click on a link and open it in a new window.
- Resize the new window then close it.
- Close the first window.
Now when you open your hotmail emails from Live Messenger, it should open in a larger IE window.
A story on the BBC today reports that initiation ceremonies for students have now become more widespread in the UK. It’s another US import we could do without since it’s a copy of the fraternity initiations carried out there for years.
I’ve never understood why people would humiliate themselves simply in order to “belong”. It’s understandable for children to feel that they should fit in well with others, but as adults shouldn’t we have at least a little more confidence in who we are as an individual? Too many childhood emotions and discriminations are being carried over into adult life and it’s getting worse not better. The people taking part in these initiations seem oblivious to the fact that they are being bullied and far from resisting are actively volunteering themselves. I also assume that when they’ve been “initiated” themselves, they are more than happy to dish out the same or worse treatment to the next round of wannabes?
We need a lot more individual thinking in this world, less of the “me too!” attitude and a hell of a lot more tolerance of an individual’s right to simply be an individual. Aren’t our universities supposed to inspire the best and brightest? You’d think that those attending would have the intelligence to reject the crowd mentality but instead they seem to be no more individual than the gangs roaming our streets.
When I was at university, there never seemed to be anything like this need to belong to any group, it was just a like-minded bunch of individuals. Either that’s because I’m old or it’s because I was on a science and engineering campus and geeks like to be individual!
Update: There is now another article published which tells the story of someone who took part in one of the initiations. They actually still think it was a good idea and the article goes on to report that this is the feeling of a majority of the participants. Words fail me to describe these people and all I can come up with is sad, pathetic and desperate.
I seem to spend a lot of time on A Mind Lost complaining, but sometimes things just annoy me! The latest is Barclaycard who recently took over the credit card business of Goldfish which included Morgan Stanley, of whom I have been a credit card customer for years without a single problem.
The run-up to the changover was quite smooth, except that I had to be issued with a new card number (the old one was memorized years ago) and a new PIN number. What hasn’t gone smoothly however, is the online account management. Instead of transferring over the users from Morgan Stanley to Barclaycard’s system, everyone has to re-register with Barclaycard instead. The old facility was switched off last Monday, yet Barclaycard’s system only went live at the end of last week and has given me nothing but error messages or “sorry, too busy” messages since then.
There’s really no excuse for this. Barclayard knew how many customers they were taking on and they knew how many of those customers managed their account online. Where was their capacity planning? Only now does their registration error page make any mention of increasing capacity to cope with the extra load.
It’s not a good start for the new customers is it?
Update 01/10/08: On day 10, I’ve finally managed to register after four attempts today. It even let me log in once but I haven’t been able to repeat the feat. There’s also no sign of any record of cashback on the site.
One of the companies I am a Director of buys products from China and it is a constant battle to stop them short-cutting the manufacturing and quality processes to make more money. They will buy sub-standard steel, skip inspection checks and lie through their teeth to feed their greed.
It therefore comes as no surprise to me that, as reported today, there are 22 brands of Baby milk in China responsible for using the banned chemical melamine to artificially enhance the appearance of Protein in the milk. At the time of writing, 6250 babies are reported ill, 158 have acute kidney failure and 3 have died.
China has grown in recent years at a ridiculous rate. They are having to learn the lessons learned in other advanced economies much faster than anyone else had to and this is causing an enormous amount of greed. They clearly haven’t yet learned the lessons from last year’s lead-painted toy fiasco that if they short-cut the specifications for a product, it will go wrong and they will get caught out.
Any company which buys from China, and that’s a significant portion of all companies in the western world, has to make sure that it is on top of it’s inspection and quality procedures. Trust me, those procedures will be tested!
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