NEXT.CO.UK

I needed a new pair of work shoes and a pair of jeans. Now being the sort of person who detests shopping centres, the crowds, the noise that large number of people who stop dead right in front on you. I thought ‘I know my sizes I’ll shop online’ I’ve bought loads of things online in the past but apart fro the odd T shirt or cycling shorts, never clothes.

I went to the Next website, found the shoes and jeans and added them to my basket. So far so good. I clicked the ‘Check out’ button, entered some details, one of which was my birth-date, unusual but it could just be another check for when you phone up. After wading trough the screens I was presented with an order complete type of page, hang on I’ve not paid! Huh!! what the f***! How have I just bought some clothes and not paid for them?????

It turns out I now have a Next credit account, whoa when did I agree to this? Seems its burried in the T&Cs you know the thing you supposed to read then hit the check box but nobody ever does. It seems that in this case I really should have. I’ve put the screen shots of the checkout pages below, they are not all there as I didn’t really want to set-up another account.

OK all I need to do is log into my account settle the balance and cancel the credit, it may affect my credit rating but there’s not a lot I can do about it now.

To log in it seems I need my customer number, hang on where is it, it’s not in any of the emails Next have sent me. There’s not even a reply too address, back to the website. I search the FAQs only to find that it’ll be sent with my order. Hmm I’ll have to wait.

Order recieved, they jeans look good BTW! and more importantly I now have my customer number so I head back to the Next website and logon. Hang on my balance is empty and I can spend up to £500! After some more FAQ searching I discover that “You will receive your 1st statement 10 days after your 1st order. Consecutive statements will follow on the same day each month when there is a balance outstanding.” so is that working or calendar days? and what is more “Service Charge - This is the charge made for the use of our credit facility and is calculated on a daily basis on the remainder of the balance on an account, taking into consideration any payments that have been processed. Items begin to accrue service charge on the day after the 10-day approval period ends, in accordance with the current rate.” so unless I’m right on it on day 10 I’m paying 26.49% APR – how much – wow that’s gotta be some kind of all time high! And remember I wanted to pay when I order, I’m lucky enough to neither want nor need credit to buy a pair of shoes and jeans, actually that’s not lucky I can’t imagine that there’s a significant number of people in the UK who do, therefore it’s normal but here I am owing money at 26.49% APR. I’m not your mum, what I mean is that I’m tech savy, hell it’s my job! But my mum on the other hand isn’t, she’d be worried by this kind of thing, she’d feel stupid for getting caught and think that’s she’s too old to get the web (she’s not BTW). I don’t feel stupid (apart from not reading the T&Cs) just angry that I’ve been tricked. Mum will worry about making the payment, she’s from the generation that were taught to ‘mend and make do’ rather than to borrow, have and owe.

As an aside one the delivery page I had the option of paying £3.75 to get a catalogue and free delivery on the order or £3.95 for delivery. So it’s 20p cheaper to get the catalogue. I chose the delivery charge rather than waste a the tree it takes to print a catalogue that I don’t need (having just bought something from the website). I don’t imagine everyone will make the same choice.

So there it is, if you’re thinking of buying from Next, you’ll be setting yourself up with a credit account. I don’t know about you but I feel that ppl should be sufficiently warned about this, it should be an ‘Important Information – by clicking here yada yada” not buried in the T&Cs. same with the re-financing adds that normally show a family with debt’s looking miserable, they re-finance and go on holiday, what they don’t show you is that they then spend the next 25 year even more miserable that there debt is going to last 25 years and they’ll end up paying back 3 time what they originally borrowed. Anyway that may become another blog post.

Advertising claims found to be true!

So I bought a DSLR, re-found my old passion for photography, nice huh! I was using a 2 Gb SD card and thought I needed more space just before going on holiday so picked up a cheap and cheerful 4 Gb card. The holiday was great thanks! and the 4 Gb card provided enough space. In the airport I spotted a SanDisk Extreme III card, hmm you gota say Extreme III like it’s a movie preview. I thought that they’d be very expensive and probably not that ‘Extreme III!’. Move on a few months and I stubble across the cards again and for only £25 all in think ‘what the hay’. So does it live up to it’s name? I devised a simple test, self timer for 10 continues shots on both RAW and JPEG (large), its a 10 Mp camera. The results JPEG was 60% faster, pretty good but RAW, so less camera processing and therefore more dependant on IO…..70% faster. I’ve just become a RAW user simply because the ‘Extreme III’ really is that good. Ok after me 1….2….3.. Extreeeeeeme 3!!.

If you want to see my pics there on flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/claycock/

1 week of snow

Here in the UK we’re doing what we do best  - coping. Coping despite poor planing and an endemic ‘it’ll do’ attitude. I’m not sure if this is something that just the UK suffers from but there seems little motivation to improve, to have considered all options, to fight for things being done properly. There are small enclaves of this, most of the people I work with but the norm is an attitude of ‘it’s not my fault / it doesn’t matter’

So to highlight this I’ve been busy with photo-manipulation software using the highways agency (lc for a reason) shamelessly breaking copyright, the court cost may cost me but the bad publicity it would generate (I have friends in the press) mean that I doubt they would follow this course of action. Unless they wanted to do 1 thing properly?

 

Phantom vibrations

I’ve had a mobile phone, of some sort, for about ten years. On my second phone and all subsequent phones there’s been a ‘vibrate’ option. It’s quite useful if your in either a very quite or very noisy environment as the ring tone isn’t! But something I’ve become increasingly aware of is false positives. It started when I was driving but as my car is very noisy and has a lot of vibrations ( 2 seat convertible). I’d feel what I thought was the phone vibrate but I had no missed calls. What’s worrying is that now I get these vibrations from my trouser pocket (yes I know where you’re going) more and more, even whilst writing this. So is this a symptom of getting older or just the fact that I use a phone more, it has become ubiquitous. I’d be interested to know if anyone else suffers from the phantom phone vibrations???

Devil makes work for idle hands

As an IT architect I often have to draw diagrams of the different aspects of systems. Often this can be quite dry as the customer expects a certain level of professionalism. Or do they, hmmm that’s a question for another post! So I decided to draw a fun physical model (edit – I’ve been reminded that this is of course an architecture overview diagram, no deployment units here!) of my home network and here it is….

Renaissance Simpsons

are at LimpFish

The real world

Just come across an atlas that sizes the geography by various things such as wealth or rail travel. Take a look at it: Article on the Real world Atlas

Rumours of my death!

One of the things I like about owning a Mac is the ‘cult of mac’. Its all quite bizzare and I’ve definatly become an addict, getting excited about the next release of OS 10.5, “ooh what cool new things will we be wowed with next”. I guess that’s the thing rather than praying for a fix to X, Y or Z OS X is so well designed and put together that each new release may fix a few bugs but it will have sweet OS candy, more reasons to lord it up over those poor MS users. 

A by product of all this hype and interest is the continuing speculation over Steve Jobs’ health. Given the importance he has had at turning Apple from an almost bankrupt company into one of the most successful,  with an ever growing fan, errm, customer base (once you’ve had mac you don’t go back) I find this quite worrying and in poor taste, so stop it NOW! If you don’t at some point the guy will pop his clogs and the cult of the mac will say……. “hmm this could be believable” or “I think those pics of the coffin are fakes, the shadows are all wrong”. Instead of ‘can you remeber where you were when you heard of Steve’s death’  it’ll be ‘when you realised it was true’

 

My resoution – when it comes to Steve Jobs’ health I’ll only believe what’s on the Apple web site. (Don’t you dare hack it)

Pass the Porsche Darling!

I was very surprised this morning to listen the the Chancellor of the Exchequer, A. Darling, explain how the current UK government is going to provide regulation to the financial sector. This will be to advise them on how to take risks and when things are too risky to walk away. Hang on a second, so the government is going to spend my taxes helping those morons in the financial sector how to do their jobs! These people have been overpaid to do exactly what the government if proposing to help them do. Their bonuses and pure greed has lead directly to the current financial crisis. Any fool saw this coming. The only way to resolve this situation is to make those whose job it is to decide what risks a bank should take, its financial strategy and the extent of its leverage personally responsible. Say ta ta to the Ferrari fool, you cocked it up. If I’d screwed up to the extent that the b(w)ankers have done I’d be out on my ear and rightly so. Oh and did you know that it was this Labour government that de-regulated the financial sector in the first place! So going to vote for them again are you?

AEBS in the UK

It seems that due to UK restrictions on the use of wide band WiFi 802.11n, I’m only allowed to use up 130 Mb/s. Despite moving to Japan, Austria, Estonia, Germany, Slovakia, Latvia and Spain I still have the problem but now I’ve moved to France and with a little extra tweeking I’m getting a reported 300 Mb/s c’est très bon, n’est-ce pas?