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Ongoing problems with MFC

2019-09-20T12:32:00.001+02:00

This is another post regarding my ongoing problems with MFC which is a South African company and does motor vehicle financing.

On a daily basis, I get phone calls from them regarding the monthly vehicle payment when the monthly payment has been done and the proof of payment has been sent.

Every time such a call comes in, it is either nobody on the phone or it is this "Hold the line please..." voice until minutes later someone finally is on the call. This then gets followed by at least three different identification steps which are becoming rather tedious when they should have on record for years that I am the only person answering the phone on that number.

This has been going for months and I have the distinct impression that their systems are very messed up and never up to date. Since they are part of Nedbank, I would expect the data communication between MFC and Nedbank would work perfectly, but even payments into a Nedbank account has issues at times.

Clearly there are several problems that nobody is actually looking at and the customers end up having to deal with the trouble that the bank should actually sort out.

Do not ever use MFC to finance your vehicle! Here are several reasons from personal experience.

2018-11-14T16:09:00.001+02:00

I have been helping someone to finance a vehicle and in this case, I am not actually paying anything, but the vehicle is under my name until it is paid off (big mistake as I found out).

The whole mess started right at the beginning with MFC messing up with the initial debit order and the payments then being a month in arrears. According to MFC, it is my fault, because they started with harassment calls daily until payment is made.

Each call from MFC is also starting with a multiple step verification process which gets rather annoying. Why they do not take note that certain phone numbers are only answered by a single person, is beyond me since then the calls can be streamlined. Sending complaints is not resulting in anything either.

Months later, they finally offered that I should send in writing the details of the person who is doing the payments so that that person can be contacted directly. In the end, that was done repeatedly and MFC still called me because the vehicle is under my name and they are not allowed to contact anyone else. Why this was made an option in the first place, I do not know. In the meantime, there were also some account managers from MFC involved in the process. This story went on for about a year.

Recently, there was a situation where the payment was done on 7 November and I was getting calls twice a day from MFC after that date. Somehow, they could not find the payment in their records. On 14 November it was decided to reverse the payment which takes five days, meaning that payment can be done the earliest on 22 November, possibly 23 November. In the meantime, the twice-daily harassment calls continue and I have to repeat the same story to every person calling.

Between 7 and 14 November, I was also told to send a proof of payment, but I was never told an email address where to send it to. In the meantime, the harassment calls kept on coming.

In the end, I am always the one getting punished every time MFC makes yet another blunder.
If I ever have to advise a motor vehicle finance company it will be in the line of: "Anyone else except MFC!"

It also seems very much like that the call centre staff takes notes, but nothing ever happens with those notes on the account since nobody seemed to know between 7 and 14 November that a payment has been done on 7 November and that I mentioned that on multiple occasions. Even more reason for me to get more and more angry with MFC. Their system seems rather disjointed and probably antiquated and there is some incompetence somewhere.

Small Trove clubs are doomed

2017-12-21T10:17:00.002+02:00

When Trion introduced the Trove Adventures update it was supposed to improve clubs. To some extent, this has happened, but things were introduced that kill clubs.

These features coupled with members not bothering to log in or actually complete adventures is what gives the huge clubs a massive advantage. Members of the huge clubs get faster to the better fixtures and club levels. The members who care, end up flocking to the clubs that advertise a club level higher than 1.

The club killers are the following features:

1. Being able to change your displayed club only once every 24 hours. This also prevents being able to see any club messages of any other joined clubs of the total of five clubs.

2. Club levels take a long time if only one or two members of a club make an effort, especially if those members are only casual players who only play one to two hours at most per day.

3. Fixtures are the main causes of clubs being killed. They provide bonuses, but to upgrade them or to buy new fixtures, a club level of 4 is needed and a lot of Clubits.

Nice features are:

1. More member levels and being able to set permissions.

2. Fixtures bonuses if the club is big.

Expected side effects:

1. More players stopping to play Trove.

2. Even more dead clubs.

3. Possibly some more "elite" clubs appearing eventually.

The incompetence of Nedbank MFC

2017-11-23T11:21:00.000+02:00

A bit more than one year ago, I was involved with helping my tenants to buy a small motor vehicle. In this case, the financial organisation involved is MFC which is a division of Nedbank.

The problems started in the very first month after initial payment where MFC messed up the date of the debit order and tried to withdraw money on a date when there was no money on the account. This had repercussions down the line because of being behind with payments according to MFC when in the meantime, the debit order happened before salary was paid into the account. Multiple attempts to correct this debit order date have failed. Payments are done manually every month since then.

Another major annoyance is when asking at the bank, the bank says that payments are up to date, but MFC calls me about payments being in arrears. This is a timing issue as far as I can tell. The arrears amount suddenly showed up even when the statement shows payments were done.

Lately, MFC has decided to call me daily, always a different person on the phone. After a verification process, I end up having to tell that person the long saga. A few times I have been told to send an email to a particular email address to get a consent form. I tried that four times over months with no response while the calls keep on coming. The consent form is needed to allow MFC calling the person who does the payments.

Recently, I started sending complaints, sent inquiries and emailed the specified email address daily. After three days, I suddenly had three people responding by email. Even after sending the third party details, I still end up getting daily calls.

All that MFC seems to see is that payments are in arrears. That monthly payments happen, seems to be ignored. They also do not seem to be happy with the plan to pay more monthly in order to get rid of this mysterious arrears amount. They call me daily about payment, while a plan is in place to sort out their mess, but they punish me for it.

If I had known that MFC has an antiquated silo system and does not stick to their own system, I would have avoided them completely.

Update 15 January 2018:
The call center people have yet again started calling me weekly. Nobody seems to tell them about the consent form that I filled in and sent.

Original publish date: 23 November 2017

Linux live DVD screen resolution too high

2017-02-15T11:34:00.000+02:00

Recently I got hold of a new graphics card after my old card died from overheating. The new card is a NVidia 1060GT with 6GB RAM. It can handle 4K, but my screen cannot.

My big problem is now that the live CDs/DVDs of different Linux distributions all switch to a resolution that is far too high for the screen. Nouveau also complains about an unknown chipset.

A text only distribution like Arch Linux does not have this issue since it does not switch out of text mode.

I have tried various options like modeset=0, nouveau.modeset=0, nvidia.modeset=0 and others, nothing worked.

The following Ubuntu bug report mentions NVidia Pascal chipsets. It looks like I need to get yet again the latest distro to get past this issue.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1602340

Hopefully the latest distro will work. I have used Mint lately which is based on Ubuntu. As long as I can get access to my data, it does not matter what distro is in use.

Regular fitness levels

2017-01-13T11:25:00.001+02:00

As I am getting older, I realise that staying fit is quite important. Fortunately, I travel on foot daily between home, train station and work. This forces me to travel close to 5km daily. In the evenings I usually also cycle a bit just to train other muscles.

Recently I was on a two-week vacation. This week I got to see just how unfit I have become. Today I finally have several sore leg and back muscles. With time, this will not be a problem anymore.

Lesson learned: Do regular exercise, especially while waiting for something else to finish.

Getting really tired of all of this phone terror by marketers

2015-09-15T16:34:00.001+02:00

The number of calls centre calls that I have been getting have been becoming more and more lately. Everyone wants my time and money. The more of these calls I get, the more aggressive I become towards those people and that also gets me to really force those calls short. The fact that they use a long and slow script does not help matters.

Due to the number of calls coming in (which includes my own after hours business), my daytime work employer asked me to switch off my phone or make it silent because the calls are too disruptive. All of these repeat disruptions are not helping my stress levels and these greedy companies are helping towards my low patience for these calls. Lack of money and stress related to that does not help either.

Basically it comes down to the fact that many businesses need to change their way of marketing and making their account signup method more transparent since it is easy to get onto some product subscription of some company, but it is a nightmare to get out due to customer service details usually not published.

Windows 10 issues with rollback and resulting issues

2015-08-25T11:49:00.001+02:00

Recently I had the opportunity to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10. Initially the new Operating System worked fine, but there were a few smaller problems as expected.

A couple of days after e installation, I suffered from what is known on the Microsoft Community Forums as the "Fatal Start Menu Bug". This also cased several Windows 10 apps to not work either or really slow while everything else was still fast. Several buttons on the taskbar were also affected and just as useless. Search did not respond either. Rebooting or the solutions provided on the forums did not help at all. The problem has been already existing in January 2015 on the technical preview.

Fortunately I had the habit of letting everything that I install to dump shortcuts on the desktop and then send them into a folder to avoid clutter on the desktop. At least I had access to most installed applications this way.

Restoring back to Windows 7 sort of worked. I was asked to activate Windows again and one or two smaller issues were not quite as I left them. There were also some file system errors and the Windows 10 file system check only takes 4 minutes.

About two days after returning to Windows 7, I booted up the machine just to find network and Bluetooth not working at all. The network status just showed "Identifying..." even after disable and enable. The troubleshooter was useless, Windows updates was not an option. Ethernet and Wifi did not work at all.

Windows Repair was attempted multiple times and when that failed, I tried to install Windows 7 in order to overwrite the files to patch up what the file system issues might have destroyed. The installer refused to install, so I decided to wipe all partitions on the first drive and start from scratch, just to find that the installer could not install to a fresh primary partition. I am suspecting that this is because the second drive of four is also bootable. This means the installer is rather stupid and the same installer is used for Windows 10.

Since I needed Internet, I installed Ubuntu Linux which had Internet already on the Live DVD before even installing. The other idea was to at least try and sort out the partition table this way. A day later, I tried again to install Window 7 with the same problem. After that I installed Linux Mint which worked fine as well.

Two days ago, I got hold of a Windows 10 ISO to try and get past the Windows 7 installation problem. Since I have an original Windows 7 DVD set, I was expecting to use my Windows 7 code since I did qualify originally to do the original upgrade in the first place.

The Windows 10 ISO never even got me as far as the partition list due to some super generic error message about some media drivers that are required, but no information about what. For Windows 7 I had to install motherboard, Ethernet and USB 3 drivers afterwards. A friend of mine with a new motherboard had the issue that his drive chipset is not supported and he could not upgrade to Windows 10. The Windows 10 installer could not even tell me what the real issue is.

My theory about the Windows 10 release is as follows:
The Operating System was released in August to the public to have enough users for the Christmas sales to keep business partners and shareholders happy. The product at the time of writing this is still very unpolished and buggy.

Update:
It turned out that the Windows 7 installation to install to the HDD required unplugging various USB devices. Why this caused such problems makes no sense. Windows 10 still did not want to install from the DVD and the message about some media thing was rather cryptic. Why I could then install Windows 10 from the upgrade provided on the desktop is a mystery to me.

How convenience is killing society

2015-03-27T11:38:00.000+02:00

As per human nature and also the most common denominator in mathematics, nobody wants to do more work than required. This can be seen as efficiency and also becomes convenience.

The convenience factor is meant to simplify things and hopefully also get a more likely action from people since they would not do things that are tedious or a little bit too much effort. The problem with this is that once a new level of convenience becomes the norm that people want more convenience.

This new level of convenience in reality introduces relying on others due to delegating everything and also introduces lazyness which in turn also causes more people becoming obese and even more lazy. What does not help is a lot of these people then complain about everything and that things are not quick enough for them or not cheap enough. etc. They later on even start complaining when they get something for free.

To make matters worse, this reliance on others also causes the following problem with websites, product packaging, books and other things: reading is becoming too much work (even little bits) and pictures are needed for everything. This is one of the reasons why we have these horrible trends with software where there are these super large tiles that do very little instead of simplicity and yet complex functionality and letting users actually do useful things. Basically everything gets dumbed down more and more.

All of the above comes down to too much reliance on getting anything done and people do not actually want to think for themselves anymore where in the end the basic things need to be repeatedly explained in the same conversation. This gets rather frustrating for individual and businesses if people want something, but they could not be bothered to make an effort like giving specific enough information to be helped for example.

Imagine how this goes with adults who expect to have everything done for them If they have children, their children probably end up like that as well or worse. The term "spoiled brats" comes to mind.

Basically my message is simple: Think for yourself and make an effort to improve your own life instead of expecting that others can do it for you.

Google Analytics enhanced ecommerce tracking nightmares

2015-02-23T22:17:00.000+02:00

This post is a rant since I am not finding the information that I am looking for.

For many years I have been using Google Analytics and it was wonderful. Now with the Universal Analytics I am having severe problems with ecommerce and enhanced ecommerce (ec) not showing anything in the reports. This same thing happened on two different projects.

Going three or four times through the documentation for normal Universal Analytics did not seem to help. Everything was exactly as per documentation, the data got posted, but the report shows zero. Forums turned out to be useless and the same with all those wonderful articles that tell you about everything, but not the real way to actually implement. My patience on the matter is now very low since I have been fighting for days with this.

Using Google Tag Manager brought up the same thing where there is plenty about dataLayer, but nothing really on what actually links it up with tags, rules and macros in regards to names, uppercase/lowercase spelling etc.

I am seriously getting the impression that everyone either knows how to do it or not at all and the documentation assumes things since the examples are never complete even when marked as complete. How about just posting an actually example that actually works? I do not want to see posts like "it is so easy" and similar nonsense. Not all of us deal on a daily basis with this stuff and do not have the time to go through hundreds of pages of documentation about very few lines of code, but no clear answer about why the reports keep on showing zero. It does not help that the clients are pushing for data and other things also need urgent attention.

Yet Another Content Marketer (YACM)

2014-08-19T12:50:00.000+02:00

The online entrepreneur world seems to be evolving around those so-called "lifestyle entrepreneurs" who seem to show off how wonderful their life is and how amazing their products are and just buying their products will sort out everyone's problems. Unfortunately in the real world not everybody can or wants to do content marketing. Many people also simply cannot afford these expensive online courses that are marketed as "cheap" and "valuable", etc.

In the past, I have subscribed to several newsletters of these marketers just to see what they are about. Some have sort of useful articles, but many were just seriously pushing their products. Often they had offers with a huge percentage off the price which still turned out to not be affordable for me. In the end most of those courses turned out to be content marketing and not actual useful services that people actually need.

The type of headlines that these people typically publish are things like (made up for this post):

You only need to buy my course
Look at my amazing product
I will teach you to be successful
Limited space, join my webinar now
80% discount for a limited time only

In the end, a lot of this is just to pull buyers and the buyers will very likely not end up being able to use most of the content supplied due to their situation.

Dramatic guide to why Age of Wushu should be uninstalled

2014-04-23T23:31:00.000+02:00

For a few days I have tried the game Age of Wushu.

Artistically the game has some interesting art direction and depicts ancient Chinese housing style and the lifestyle in general. The training phases were detailed with step by step instructions of what to do in order to proceed on to the next phase. Eventually the player ends up choosing a school at which point the first awkward things show up.

The first awkward thing for school choices were that there was talk of eight schools, but there were only three representatives. The other school options were only given later with the warning that the choice cannot be changed after that point in time. I was wondering why three had preference over the remaining five.

After deciding on scholars, the quest system left me hanging a bit about what I was supposed to do or where to go due to several dead ends. After running around in circles, I picked up some loose ends to continue.

From this point onwards the annoyances started becoming rather obvious. Some Chi quest right from the beginning was still cryptic and a related item was taking up a slot of the little bit of bag space that I had. Having to keep items for crafts and life crafts as well did not help.

While doing some quest near the Scholars school, I noticed my health suddenly going down which turned out to be starvation. Very conveniently the health was going down pretty fast and I had to use HP improvement herbs as soon as their cooldown ended to stay alive which was a major annoyance.

The next biggest annoyance turned out to be getting back to a market just to find out that I cannot buy food even though I had Liang and Wen currency. It turned out that I needed unbound silver of which I had none.
Where was the tutorial about this particular detail?

The documentation about money said something about having to kidnap some player for which I first had to buy something somewhere. There is also a cooldown on kidnapping to avoid abuse. Having health going down constantly while having to figure out where and what is not what I consider fun. It also turned out that none of the NPCs sell food and that only one of the 50+ players at the market sold one food item which was overpriced. At this point in time I started getting really annoyed.

Searching for the word "food" in the help section came up with zero results, so I checked on various forums where they say it is so easy to quickly buy food from players which I have tried just to find there are currency issues and availability issues.

My next attempt at getting food was to go to the chef to learn cooking while my health was still running down and I had to restock HP herbs a few times already since the stacks can only take 30 per bag slot. The chef mumbled something about training and wanted to give me some items. Then I got a message about not enough bag space. I got rid of some medicine and tried again just to find there was still not enough. In the end having five free slots was still not enough. I had two slots free in one of my other bags that can only take clothing items or only other specific items. The clothing bag had plenty of space at the time. Conveniently the system did never tell me how many slots were needed. Health was still going down and cooking could not be learned to start doing basic cooking tasks.

The next attempt to get food was hunting since I had already acquired that skill from an earlier quest. I got hold of some meat from a wolf, but could not cook it. For the basic cooking tasks I needed rice. There was a farm right next door to the hunting place. Ploughing did not work, the tool tip text said right click which did nothing, I tried to left click as well a few times and even drag the skill to my button bar which just opens the window. Health was still busy going down. This now came down to having to try and figure out where I can get seeds and maybe plant something, but I running dangerously low of health replenishing herbs and headed back to town. At this point in time I was really highly annoyed about the entire mess and not a single mention in the tutorial and help system about what to properly do to at least get started to fix the mess. The tutorial basically just leaves players hanging over a huge chasm.

In town I ended up back again at the chef to try my luck again with the cooking since farming would have taken too long to figure out and wasn't working for me sine no additional messages popped up either. The chef was not really helping much this time either. I even exited the game to watch a video about farming just to find that the farming interface was shown full of stuff and quests were involved to get there for which I did not have time or bag space. All of this was going on while health was going down and none of the forums were useful.

After talking to the chef yet again to maybe buy some stuff, I was told that my money was not enough when something was listed as 100 Liang and I had 236 Liang. At that point in time, I just really had enough and uninstalled the game. Whoever built that tutorial section ended up becoming lazy and basically ruined the game for many new players. I also read about a case where there is no way to remove credit card details.

If I see any titles from Snail Games USA in future, I will seriously avoid them just because of this stupid food issue. The error messages are often too cryptic and basically wrong, the help section basically leaves out some of the most important parts required for daily use of the game, the tutorial started out really well and then just died a horrible death without a hint of the really important stuff, VIP stuff gets pushed with too much which basically means paying real money.

Age of Wushu was for me basically like leading the player up a gentle slope and then dropping the player down a vertical cliff into a bottomless pit.

Public transport in Cape Town has yet again issues

2014-04-03T15:51:00.001+02:00

The state of the public transport in Cape Town is becoming worse and worse.

A bit more than two weeks ago there was a derailed train. The official press release says there is an "infrastructure problem" and nothing about yet another train set out of service and hours of waiting. The derailing came from other sources and from yet another source I heard that the driver said that a wheel came off. The press release just said that it will take up to 14 days to fix. Nobody utters a word about when the damaged train set will be running again r how bad the damage is. People need to know more details to plan accordingly. This is also why people stormed the Metrorail management offices.
There is of course that well known public secret that Metrorail is lacking engineers which means this was bound to happen.

Yesterday morning I heard about an unplanned MyCiti bus driver strike. Yesterday evening a diesel engine stood on the tracks because it ran out of fuel from what I understand. The tracks are shared between industrial and commuter trains and commuter trains have a schedule and a lot of people are affected. This kind of bad planning is not acceptable on a shared system. I was on the second train stuck behind that diesel engine and there was of course no announcement about what is going on. A lot of people were angry about this mess.

Engineering updates to make Starcraft 2 (patch 2.1) better

2014-02-12T14:44:00.001+02:00

As of writing, Starcraft 2 patch number 2.1 has been available for a while. I must say that my ADSL connection is not extremely fast, but it is not horribly slow either, some people with fiber optic would consider it slow as 2MB (about 96kbs download speed).

Based on my connection speed and user experience, I recommend that the following changes should be made to Starcraft 2:

1. Download progress indicator for the map list. Just a spinning animation does not tell me anything since the connection could have stalled and I do not know how long I still have to wait.

2. Have some internal checksum system for the map list, especially for Blizzard maps, to avoid repeat map list download if nothing has changed.

3. If the game crashed due to stalled connection and like in my case I was in a multiplayer game with a friend then I would like to be able to reconnect to the game or at least spectate it if there was a record that I was involved in the game. This actually happened in a custom game when some other application decided to start downloading massive patches in the background.

4. A mute or volume control for that annoying voice about base being attacked. The noise spam gets worse as there are more players and especially with Zerg this gets rather annoying and is a really good reason not to play 3vs3. There are several forum entries on the Blizzard forums and it seems like Blizzard has not bothered sorting this out after two years and then they put out ads to ask for people who are passionate about gameplay and quality. Apparently annoyances are not a quality issue.

Windows 8 updates forcing a reboot, not cool at all

2013-10-14T09:53:00.002+02:00

This morning my PC at work with Windows 8 decided to forcefully tell me that my PC will be rebooting in 15 minutes due to updates and a timer running full screen. At least I had a close option to save my work, but I suspect that the timer would keep on going.

This is most intrusive and I am highly annoyed with this tactic. I should be allowed to choose when I am going to reboot for updates and not get forced into it. What if this happened during a presentation in front of an audience? This makes me glad that I never bothered getting Windows 8 for my home PC since I bought Windows 7. I am not happy with some things of Windows 7 either, but that is another matter.

Windows 8 has so many other annoyances that I would like to avoid as well which Windows 7 did not have, but this reboot forcing is yet another intrusive tactic. I understand that this is for security reasons most likely, but if the system was designed properly and not just a face, then this tactic would not have been needed.

XAMPP Apache HTTP server port 80 blocked on Windows 7

2013-09-04T22:36:00.000+02:00

For testing websites on my local PC I use XAMPP and with it Apache HTTP server which is configured for the standard ports of 80 and 443. Recently I had a rather persistent case of the webserver just not starting because of something already using port 80. This is on Windows 7 64-bit.

This hunt to get Apache started on port 80 was a long story including a weird error in the log of port 443 being used over port 80.

At one point in time the log files did not get populated either. It helped to start Apache using the XAMP provided batch files to start Apache. This actually showed the error including that logs could not be written.

All of the usual suspects were checked and mostly were either not installed or the suspect services had been previously disabled. This included IIS, SQL Server. web publishing and routing services, etc. The list went on. Eventually I killed most services and processes that could have been remotely related to this and still no luck.

The cause of my problem in the end was this which was still ticked:
Allow Remote Assistance connections to this computer

The next day I checked for the same setting on my PC at work where Apache is running successfully with XAMPP on Windows 8 and found that the checkbox was ticked. The funny thing was that I do not remember that the actual service was actively running. Now I wonder why that remote assistance was actually using port 80 to begin with when Microsoft already has two or three other software pieces that use this port and it is standard HTTP. Going to my localhost address with a webserver (default port 80) was useless. I really wonder why someone implemented this.

Beggars are becoming more on the streets of Cape Town

2013-08-01T22:46:00.002+02:00

This is an ugly topic, but someone has to say something. This will also affect tourism, investors and other industries, but something has to be done.

The last couple of weeks and even months I have noticed how more and more beggars are asking me for money. This is not just me, multiple other people have told me the same thing:
The beggars on the streets of Cape Town are becoming more!

Since I do not have deep pockets and am paying a lot of taxes, I am asking what is the local and national government doing about this? All that I do see is that taxpayers and commuters now get taxed at least 30% on petrol and this is most likely going up. This in turn affects food prices and eventually jobs which will add to the unemployment problem and even more beggars. The rich are getting richer and the rest just struggles and gets poorer. Top make matters worse, I have heard that electricity prices are now also going up again.

Usually this kind of thing gets followed by yet another squandering for useless things of government funds for which the struggling taxpayer yet again foots the bill.

Obviously it will be a 100% guarantee that nobody in government is going to put some minimal support system in place for these beggars because that is political suicide, a black hole for finance and a huge project which nobody wants to touch with a very long stick. In the end this just stays unmentioned but everyone knows about it. Nothing get acknowledged would be the standard procedure here about something being done.

Add to this mess the issue seen a few weeks ago about the toilet system for at least 80000 houses that was promised and never implemented or implemented in a totally impractical way using a temporary system meant for camping on a weekend and not multiple years of daily use. Obviously people just had enough of this mess and promises but totally under delivered.

Add to this the usual top level fat cats that get paid bonuses and extra bonuses for more or less doing nothing but supposedly performing well, while the people doing the work are slaving away and getting minimal pay and horrible working conditions. Do not forget understaffed and not properly equipped.

Something needs to be done soon before even more people end up on the street.

Different employment criteria

2013-04-16T23:15:00.002+02:00

Recently I was multiple times shocked to hear how some people that I know decide on who to hire. It is about what language the person speaks, he/she has to have had many more years work experiences and diplomas so that the diplomas would have to have been studied for during early high school. Then I heard criteria about absolutely minor non-trivial things about why the person should or should not be hired. This is even because the person might be from a small town or has been to a certain school that the person is not being considered for a position. The whole thing was rather shocking. This is for an organisation of between 20 and 30 people.

From someone who employs over 300 people, I have heard the following advice:
Hire people with the right attitude and do not really worry about skills. He mentioned that if he just hired according to skills, that they left pretty soon after and then additional time was needed to hire and train yet again more people which turned out far more costly than training someone with hardly any skills. This was according to the motto: Skills can be acquired, attitude cannot and bad habits cannot really be removed once ingrained.

Why it is important to get your website working well on mobile devices

2013-03-07T13:16:00.001+02:00

Being a small business owner as well as a website builder (mostly technical) and owner of an entry level Smartphone and tablet PC has taught me important things about building a company website:

Make sure that the core functionality of your website works without having JavaScript enabled. The reasons for this are as follows:

A lot of people where I live own basic Smartphones which often have JavaScript disabled by default. BlackBerry phones in particular are like this. Most of these people do not know about JavaScript or how to enable it.
Limited memory capacity: I had a case when I used to own a BlackBerry phone that a website would not open because it was super heavy and the phone ran out of memory. The site had lots of scripts and other busy stuff.
Device performance when scripts take up too much processing time. This gets so bad that the device responds slowly.
Let the JavaScript libraries load late, that way the page starts rendering early. Scripts can usually wait a second or two. Some scripts also take a long time to initialise while the user already tries to do something that relies on them to be ready. The best is to not having to require them in the first place.

Allow the interface to change and re-arrange based on screen size. This also means hiding huge banners if a small screen size is detected. The min-width and max-width CSS options help.
Example for a wrapper inside of CSS:
@media only screen and (min-width: 650px) { }
This is very important and is for all devices: Compress, minimize, cache, etc.

Let the browser cache images for months since they normally do not get changed once they have been created. The same applies to JavaScript libraries, CSS (once finalised) and other files, but be careful if your content changes, then that should not get cached.
Minimized CSS, JavaScript and HTML is always good to keep downloading times low. The browser also has less parsing to do if there are no extra spaces. Also consider that people with entry level mobile phones are also not able to afford bandwidth and you do not want to get rid of customers due to slow download on a simple device.
Get rid if any extra image data like comments, camera details and EXIF data. This information is totally useless unless you have specific image gallery sections that use this data. For interface images, you sometimes get lucky and strip off between 15% to 30% off the file size. Smaller files download faster and are likely to stay in memory longer due to more free space for extra files before being age flushed.

Make sure the fonts are big enough for mobile devices and the interface looks good on a low screen resolution. Many websites look good when designed on a high resolution, but when switching to a lower resolution, then the ugly parts show up. The other way around is much easier. This also means your button text should not be too long or too short. These interface limitations are very likely to cause clutter and confusion, so you have to possibly break your site into smaller components and check each one individually. These components should be able to flow below each other or do something else on smaller screen resolutions without the user having to zoom in five times, preferably no zooming at all because zooming makes people give up quickly.
Keep it simple: For search engines your pages should be specific, the same applies to the average user browsing your website. Too many call to actions (CTA's) will just be distracting and are overkill for low resolution interfaces. Enquiry and registration forms should remain simple since anything that looks remotely complicated will let users have second thoughts.
I can recommend a book about web usability that I have read in regards to this: Don't Make Me Think

Another bad behaving IP address to block

2013-02-28T16:54:00.000+02:00

Yet again there is some bad bot behaviour on my website. This time it comes from the IP address: 14.18.25.69
The behaviour seems to be a bot due to trying to use the external URL from Google Tag Manager as a URL on my website. The 360Spider already got a 418 HTTP response code today due to its nonsense.

Based on my quick research, the traffic comes from China. See:
http://myip.ms/info/whois/14.18.25.69
http://myip.ms/info/whois/118.85.207.18/k/3309037677/website/center.189.cn

Very suspect website traffic

2013-02-26T14:06:00.000+02:00

Adding a mailing script and some logging to the 404 page of my website revealed the scary world of security hacking attempts, spammers, unwanted bots, old links and hopefully no missing files.

The Baidu spider started generating traffic going to URLs that do not even remotely exist on my site which in particular involves sign up, join and membership pages. This was later on followed by some three level deep news URLs and my website is only one level deep. Other bots started becoming an issue as well, but they did not keep going as long as Baidu did. At least Baidu is a big search engine, but the traffic makes me think that someone was using the search engines to scan my site to get access to sign up forms for spamming and other reasons. Since Baidu does not know of the URLs, it was most likely sending the bot to check if the URL is valid. If that is the case then I am happy that I was made aware of these attempts. They all got 301 redirects for their effort.

Another series of visits that I had was a blatant attempt at trying to breach security by looking for various standard updating URLs like WordPress and other CMS systems to try and identify what I use for my website plus possible breaking in. Due to custom system and security through obscurity, all of those attempts failed horribly and the 301 redirect list got extended. The CMS login is now also extended to three passwords and only three attempts to log in.

Another recent case that I had was URL's from other sites where "http://" gets stripped out and the rest gets added to maybe get lucky. My entire website is using full URLs and this was already happening when I used relative URLs.

The user agent string recorded for this was:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; MDDR; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Tablet PC 2.0); 360Spider
IP Address: 101.226.166.243
HTTP Accept Language: zh-CN

Activate-A Mercedes-Benz tablet device app

2013-02-20T13:45:00.003+02:00

Mercedes-Benz in South Africa has launched an app that work on iOS and Android tablet devices. It does not seem to be an option for entry level Android phones since I tried to get it. Part of the app requires checking in at certain locations. The app is supposed to show how the Mercedes-Benz A class car will look which is most likely going to be on certain locations like road, parking lot and others using augmented reality to experience that type of lifestyle. Currently I could not yet test this part due to having to get home first to install the app and then drive to these location.
To install the app, search for "activate-a" (without the quotes) in the app store. The app does require registration and works for Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg areas.

Really weird website traffic from Baiduspider

2013-01-26T10:25:00.000+02:00

In the past couple of days, my website got some really traffic from the Baiduspider.
This was all for pages that my website does not have which even included Yahoo news articles. My website currently only has one single news page and not a three level deep structure.
What became even more odd is this search for sign_up, signup, link-resources, register, join, member, membership and other files and folders like that. Not a single one of these requests was actually for a page on my website since I had everything else renamed for logging reasons.

The user agent of one of these page not found cases is:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Baiduspider/2.0; +http://www.baidu.com/search/spider.html)

What articles do not tell you about starting your own business

2012-09-18T13:12:00.002+02:00

There are many articles online as well as books about starting a business. In particular with articles, I have found that they often assume you have plenty of money available to pay salaries, advertising, premises, stock and other related items. None of them really cover what you should do when you are starting right from the bottom with super limited amounts of money to try and make a little bit of extra income to get through the month.

What these articles conveniently do not mention either is how expensive advertising is, especially print media and how difficult to see if the advertising actually might have limited use or just be a waste of that super rare cash. The articles often throw around words like "startups" and small businesses, but they really imply having millions in funds and multiple employees, but no mention of when you have to start from home and are starting up small.

The articles also assume having access to a huge market that just happens to want your services from day one. There is also no mention how long it can take to get a customer, how to have competitive pricing that does not leave you poor, etc.

A very casual gamer view of what is wrong with Guild Wars 2

2012-09-17T13:54:00.003+02:00

English: Picture of Guild Wars 2 Français : Image de Guild Wars 2 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Recently I got hold of Guild Wars 2. Notably I have very little time for playing games and never seriously got into solo farming in the first Guild Wars game due to slow connection and the whole grind for not getting much. I have played Guild Wars for roughly four years, but it got rather stale for me. These days I have far less time and patience.

Yesterday, I finally got my first character to level 8. In the new personal story system (I like the idea), I so far had two cases of encountering a character in the instances that I cannot possibly beat even when I try repeatedly. I do not have the patience to try this kind of thing ten times with the same outcome. For me that seriously starts putting me off a game and even getting close to uninstall if the situation cannot be solved. The previous game also had some rather annoying and partially stupid quests which were easy for the hardcore gamers that live these games.

What does not help in the instances is that the character gets adjusted to the difficulty of the area which is normally fine when you are a high level character in a starter area. In this case it makes the situation impossible to overcome. End result: My interest for Guild Wars 2 already had two knocks and I have not even bothered trying to create other characters because I know that I will encounter more quests like that.