It leaves me wondering how Anna Bligh can actually put her name on these campaigns. I wouldn’t want to be associated with a party that has to so viciously attack their opposition on such personal levels, it actually turns me off any possibility of voting for Labor (even though I prefer the Labor candidate for my local seat to the LNP candidate).

The only conclusion it leaves me to draw is that the Labor party has no confidence that they can actually win against Campbell Newman, and that their only hope is to resort to personal attacks, rather than focusing on what they have done and plan to do.

Seriously, who looks better, the candidate and party that just attacks the other (maybe they have put forward policies, but if they have, I haven’t heard anything of it, all I hear about is Newman this, Newman that, honestly Labor, you are giving Campbell free advertising!), or the candidate and party that actually puts forward a decent set of policies?

Come on Labor, you’ve sold me on anyone but you, now trying selling me on you.

Check them out below, or click for bigger images on the Skate-Parts.Com website:

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After a bit of hunting around, I came across two options, one via PHPMyAdmin, and another that required shell access. On this particular server, I did not have shell access, but I did have access to PHPMyAdmin (though changes made there only seemed to actually take effect about 33% of the time).

Pixel Play had a great little run down of the necessary SQL commands to both put the site in maintenance mode, and to take it out of.

Enter maintenance mode via PHPMyAdmin

Simply enter the following SQL into the query box for your database in PHPMyAdmin to put a Drupal website into maintenance mode:

UPDATE variable SET value = 's:1:"1";' WHERE name= 'site_offline';
DELETE FROM cache WHERE cid = 'variables';

Exit maintenance mode via PHPMyAdmin

Just as simply, enter the following SQL into PHPMyAdmin to bring a Drupal website back online, or out of maintenance mode:

UPDATE variable SET value = 's:1:"0";' WHERE name= 'site_offline';
DELETE FROM cache WHERE cid = 'variables';

Maintenance mode via the command line / shell

Samat Jain has put up an article on running the same SQL queries via the command line. I won’t copy it in here as the background surrounding it is probably helpful, just check it out on his site.

• Deleted City – The Geocities that was. Very cool video!
• Your Story Ep 64: Mike Boyd – An entrepreneur I met a couple of years ago at @BTUB. I’ve been meaning to listen to this podcast since Ian posted it. I’ll get there soon.
• Android Wi-Fi Tether – Been looking into this as an Android phone is a possibility for my next phone.
• P3Designs Android Kernels – Relevant for the above Wi-Fi tethering.
• FamilyHQ Article – Interesting, I’ve been meaning to sign up and see what they’ve been up to here.
• FamilyHQ Sign Up Page – So I can jump straight to sign up, and so can you (if you want)!
• ADU Designers Toolkit – Templates and the like for designers, Australian based.
• Buying Cycles – An article on SitePoint by John Tabita about buying cycles and how they are relevant to design.

As this blog is on a sub-domain, my thoughts are I can just 301 redirect the entire sub-domain to whatever domain I end up migrating it to, which to my thinking should redirect everything that needs to be automatically. The other things to consider though is that then the name is not really relevant on a different domain, thus if people are looking for this blog in the future, it would not be where it previously was or named what it previously was.

This makes me think that perhaps a better option is to keep this here as it is and just simply make new blog posts more relevant to my fractal art and setup a blog on another domain to take over as the more personal blog. After all, the root domain is where I would be setting up the main site, which presently has just a landing page.

What do you think? Is moving it inherently bad? Is there anything else I should consider here?

If you haven’t seen them already, check them out:

In reading through the news articles and press releases, it seems to me like EFTPOS is spending money in the wrong ways. I’ve noticed their advertising campaign around this year as well about pressing CHQ or SAV and about how EFTPOS is the safest way and so many people use it, but the simple fact is, I rarely, rarely ever use it and that campaign hasn’t changed that. If retailers choose to pass on the new EFTPOS fees then I’m going to use it even less.

According to the press releases, ePAL keep mentioning their growth into the cash market and such, and their wording all seems to me like they are targeting cash as their main competitor. This doesn’t make sense to me. To me, it seems their main competitors should be Visa, Mastercard and American Express. These are the dominant players in plastic in Australia, especially Visa and Mastercard as they have debit card options available through many banks. These cards allow me to purchase online, or to sign for purchases if I can’t remember my pin, which happens given that there are 1 or 2 cards that I rarely use. If I use EFTPOS, I can’t purchase online and I must be able to remember my pin, if I can’t, then I have to use the credit card instead.

I certainly prefer to spend money directly from one of my accounts rather than credit, but EFTPOS just doesn’t make it as easy as they seem to think they do. Visa and Mastercard are much easier, especially with the new PayWave/PayPass technology.

From a merchant perspective, EFTPOS is certainly cheaper than credit cards. At Skate-Parts.Com it costs 1%-2.5% per Visa/Mastercard transaction depending on the type of card, plus 10c per transaction from the bank, plus a 50c transaction fee from the credit card gateway. So on a $100 purchase, that’s between $1.60 and $3.10. To accept American Express is slightly higher. According to the ePAL press release, this same transaction would be 5c. Under $15, say a $10 transaction, this would be between 16c and 31c for Visa/Mastercard and free with EFTPOS. There is a big difference there. Unfortunately though, EFTPOS is not available for online transactions or I would jump at the opportunity to accept it. Debit Visa and debit Mastercard’s can be used online though, which means the closest thing available to EFTPOS is a bank transfer, which is not as easy or convenient at all. I don’t really accept cash either. Even in our shop we don’t accept EFTPOS, because we would need to run a second terminal and this isn’t cost effective at present, and we don’t really do much cash there either. So there is not really any cash for EFTPOS to compete with. Only Visa and Mastercard debits.

I also see the move as a bit anti-competitive given that the fees, to my understanding will not apply to Woolworths and Coles, both of which are part of the consortium that makes up ePAL, and both of which who control an enormous part of the retail market in Australia across a diverse range of markets. Due to their ability to purchase at substantial bulk discounts they already have a competitive advantage over small businesses. By not having this fee applied to them, it puts them at an even greater competitive advantage. If however it simply means that Woolworths and Coles will not be passing fees on to customers than this is fine, but if they don’t have the fees at all, that hardly seems fair to other businesses.

Despite information indicating growth in the EFTPOS market, this move seems like it’s an attempt to extract money from the technology without really improving the service or providing any benefit to customers or merchants. The only benefit that I can see is to those behind ePAL, the banks and the retail giants Coles and Woolworths.

If the move included measures for online transactions, I think this adjusted fee scheduling would make much more sense. At this point though, I can’t even see any indication that there has been any thought go into making EFTPOS available online.

What do you think? What do you use more? EFTPOS or debit Visa/Mastercard? I’d love to hear some other perspectives on it!

Check out the video: