Ethical Companies – The Blog

Nice one Gordon, keep it up

Steve

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** Same as original post plus update – Any money raised by this sale would be spent on a car, therefore I will consider exchanging the lot for a car **

As you may recall from one of my earlier posts I am soon to be moving house. As a result of this I need to clear a lot of stuff out, as I moving to somewhere a lot smaller (intentionally, I really don’t need a 4 bedroom house now). One of the things that needs to be cleared is a large quantity of brand new DVDs. So here’s the “offer”:

Over 4800 DVDs (mixed) for sale £2850. Add a heat sealer machine, 25 laptop bags, and some PC stuff and the lot’s yours for £3000 delivered to anywhere in the United Kingdom, can deliver to anywhere on mainland Europe as well for extra. There’s a list right here:

http://www.retrowarez.com/EthicalCompaniesClearanceList-Biddulph.xls

Please note I am not “open to offers”, the price stated is the price wanted. You can contact me on 01782 874945 or 07903 627086

Steve

PS this is a personal sale, price is “as is”, no VAT to be added, receipt would of course be provided for accounts etc.

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As you may recall from one of my earlier posts I am soon to be moving house. As a result of this I need to clear a lot of stuff out, as I moving to somewhere a lot smaller (intentionally, I really don’t need a 4 bedroom house now). One of the things that needs to be cleared is a large quantity of brand new DVDs. So here’s the “offer”:

Over 4800 DVDs (mixed) for sale £2850. Add a heat sealer machine, 25 laptop bags, and some PC stuff and the lot’s yours for £3000 delivered to anywhere in the United Kingdom, can deliver to anywhere on mainland Europe as well for extra. There’s a list right here:

http://www.retrowarez.com/EthicalCompaniesClearanceList-Biddulph.xls

Please note I am not “open to offers”, the price stated is the price wanted. You can contact me on 01782 874945 or 07903 627086

Steve

PS this is a personal sale, price is “as is”, no VAT to be added, receipt would of course be provided for accounts etc.

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Outnet £1 sale: The Outnet.com website crashes.

Fashion discount site Outnet.com decided to celebrate its first birthday by holding a £1 sale of designer goods.

Hmmm.  I can see the problems without reading any more, but whatever:

The sale went live via an newsletter invitation just before 7.30am this morning. Less than half an hour after the online sale started the Outnet’s servers crashed.

Quelle surprise.

I can imagine the scene, thousands of savvy fashionistas tirelessly clicking refresh in the hope that the website would come back to life. Except, it didn’t.

More likely to be a load of disgruntled eBay sellers trying to buy stuff to resell than “savvy fashionistas” (most of whom might not be up that early, lol !)

Theoutnet.com’s website, which is luxury fashion website Net-a-porter’s little sister, came back to life after 10am. The sale is now over.

Hardly surprising, once the penny dropped that this was a BAD IDEA.

While there are sure to be some lucky (and probably very smug) shoppers who will have managed to buy something successfully before the website crashed there are some who have been left very disappointed.

Ah yes, that’ll be the “wanting something for nothing” section of the buying public (those not buying to resell on eBay that is).

The website crash has already sporned a Facebook group named, ‘The Outnet stole my Friday’, for those disappointed by the sale the complain.

For heaven’s sake, you didn’t get a dress/handbag/whatever for a quid, get over it.  Also I would like to point out the dreadful spelling and English grammar in that last section were cut and paste from the reporting website; it makes my occasional grammatical errors pale by comparison

So today’s tip ?  Don’t have “sales” like this.  It’s plain silly, and if you do get customers there’s no guarantee they will come back, you may as well just throw £10 notes out of your nearest window.  If you really must have such silly sales then at least make sure your servers (and bank balance) can cope.

Steve

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“They don’t like it up ‘em !” – Lance Corporal Jack Jones (who had a liking for bayonet warfare in Dad’s Army).

Steve

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John Cleese takes a £3,000 taxi and Gary Lineker’s marathon trip to make Match of the Day as flight ban hits the stars.

I spotted this article over at the Daily Mail. Basically it’s about how the Iceland volcano and the resulting lack of flights in or out of the United Kingdom has affected some “celebrities”:

Elsewhere it was revealed that John Cleese has paid more than £3,000 to take a taxi from Oslo in Norway to the Belgian capital Brussels after becoming stranded. The Monty Python and Fawlty Towers star was in Scandinavia for a TV appearance when the volcanic ash brought Europe’s flights to a standstill. After checking all available options, he decided the only plausible way for him to get to Belgium – and then on to London – was to take a taxi. As a result, he yesterday began the journey, paying £3,300 as an advance fare for the trip. The 943-mile journey is due to take him more than 15 hours. He is being driven by a total of three taxi drivers who are taking turns at the wheel.

I can’t quite get my head round this one, personally I’d have got the ferry to Denmark, a taxi to Esbjerg, then the ferry to Harwich.  Harwich to London is easy peasy.  Perhaps the taxi was “quicker” ?  Never done the Harwich to Denmark ferry route myself so have no idea how long it takes.  Also, three drivers ?  What on earth for ? 15 hours isn’t that long, 943 miles isn’t that far.

Singer Whitney Houston, who was due to perform in Dublin as part of her Nothing But Love world tour, was forced to take to the Irish Sea on a less-than-glamorous car ferry. The 46-year-old star opted for the boat after the flight ban threatened to cause another cancellation on her tour, which has already suffered several cancelled dates due to her respiratory infection earlier this month.

Ah the poor thing, the “indignity” of having to use a car ferry, shame.  Myself I can’t abide the things but I still use them, mainly because I’m not “good” at tunnels and won’t use the Channel Tunnel.

On another note Gary Lineker drove from Madrid to Paris, in order to get the Eurostar.  Unfortunately he has got back in time to be on Match Of The Day

Steve

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Well it’s been 10 years and we’ve decided it’s time to move on. There’s a number of reasons behind this but primarily we no longer need such a big place, we’re a bit “out of the way” and we’re a long way from any family members, so we’ve decided it’s time to move. Not being the sort of person who procrastinates over these sort of things I shall sell the house ASAP and just pack up and go, rent somewhere at first then look for somewhere to settle.

As I’m intending to move to somewhere a lot smaller I need to consider space and there’s a lot of “stuff” here I need to sell on. If anyone is interested in the following, let me know:

• 3 Dell PC’s, all Pentium 4 something or other at least.
• 4 office chairs, black swivelly round and round type.
• 3 office desks.
• 1 Yamaha Organ.
• Glass dining table and chairs.
• And the house itself ….

The house is actually a bungalow, 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms (one is a wet room), living room, enormous fitted kitchen, large metal shed, off road parking (lots of it).  It’s in the Gillow Heath area of Biddulph, Stoke On Trent (ST8), convenient for Stoke On Trent and Congleton, Manchester is commutable, M6 not far.  We’re even in a cabled area so 50mbit broadband

If you’re in the market for such a property shout and I’ll arrange some decent photos.

I shall have a lot of memories from my time here, mostly good, but it’s time to move on.

Steve

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Well, not just eCommerce but websites in general. See the picture below (click on picture if nosey enough to see a bigger screenshot):

Now the reason this happens is because I entered gabrieleskelton.com into the URL bar of my browser (Google Chrome in this case) instead of www.gabrieleskelton.com Because this is in Chrome you at least get an idea of what the problem is but you won’t in other browsers.

You might be saying “so what” ?  Well it might not be such a big deal to Gabriele Skelton but could you imagine Play.com or Amazon.co.uk not working without the www ?  Let’s say you’re telling your mates down the pub about your brand new whizzbang website selling widgets at widgets.com, not EVERYBODY is as computer/internet literate as you are.  Not everybody knows you might have to put www in front, and when the site doesn’t work for them they just won’t try again will they ?  Look at the adverts for Play and Amazon in magazines and so on, no www’s in the advert, because their sites don’t need them, it’s unnecessary clutter.

If your site doesn’t work without the www then it’s easy, cheap and quick to fix.  On Windows hosts look in IIS under host headers, on Linux look in Apache; then just add the non www header.  Any decent internet technician can fix this in minutes (literally), and fixing it might just mean more sales.

Steve

PS I didn’t look to see if there was a widgets.com I just “made it up”, if the site does exist please forward advertising fees to ….

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Ok I’m 2 weeks late, but I never was conventional. Unless you’ve been in a cave you’re probably aware we have a new Dr Who on our TV screens, complete with a new companion. I was never actually a massive Dr Who fan, and although I watched it as a child I’ve not seen any of the Peter Davidson/Colin Baker era of the series, and whilst it was ok I’m not likely to find myself buying the DVDs and re-watching Tom Baker waving jelly babies around.

Like a lot of people though I found myself watching it when it returned to TV with Christopher Eccleston, and whilst it wasn’t bad I didn’t find Christopher Eccleston to be the best choice for the role. Then came David Tennant and the series came alive for me. Tennant’s character was very good and more entertaining (in my opinion) than the Christopher Eccleston series was. So I had mixed reactions to the announcement of David Tennant leaving, and not having even heard of Matt Smith I didn’t really know what to expect. However, I think he’s actually very good, and despite the criticisms levelled against (mostly before the new series started) him by some sources he’s doing a good job of it.

The companion, however I am not so sure about (yet). This may just be prejudice on my part as she announced in an interview she was going to be the “Doctor’s sexiest companion yet”, which I found to somewhat arrogant, and that put me off her. I’m also a bit peeved as one of my friends actually auditioned for this part and didn’t get it !

On the whole though I think it will be a good series and I wish them well.

“You’re Scottish, fry something” – The Doctor

Steve

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Today’s birthdays:

• Sarah Michelle Gellar – aka Vampire The Buffy Slayer.
• Robert Carlyle – From the disappointing Stargate Universe.
• Loretta Lynn – Coal Miner’s Daughter and Country and Western star.

Steve

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