Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Places’ Category

One of the first shocks that you get when you start your own business is the extra cost of business accounts. Whilst the list of charges for personal accounts is usually fairly short, there seem to be untold numbers of things that banks feel the need to charge you for as a business. 

Now, you would sort-of expect that they would charge you if you’re depositing large amounts of cash in that there’s obviously work involved in handling it. You probably also know that they charge a percentage of your credit card sales too and that there’d be a charge for the credit card terminal too. But setting up the terminal? Providing the software for it? Surely not? 

Well, if you plan on taking everything from your own bank, yes, you probably will be charged for setting up the terminal and you probably will be charged for the software required to run the thing too (anything up to $500). Not only that, but try accepting card payments online and you’re potentially talking another $500 for the software that you’ll need to accept those payments too. 

That’s just for the standard Mastercard and Visa acceptances too. Add American Express or anything else and you add to your costs yet again. Even commonly used things such as the ability to process customer not present transactions is generally seen as another opportunity to charge you. 

What the bank won’t be too upfront about telling you is that you can get a merchant account from a separate organization. There are increasing numbers of these outfits around and the market competition is driving prices down with the likes of First Data providing free setup, free point of sale software and 24/7 service (something that, quite surprisingly, isn’t always provided by the banks) and things that you might expect to be standard but usually are billable such as reprogramming of the terminal.

 The Albert Clock is one of many Belfast monuments that were named after aspects of Queen Victoria’s reign, in this case after her late consort, Prince Albert. As you can see there’s a life-size statue of him right there on the west face of the monument which was completed in 1853.

Whilst many would blame the lean of the tower (which is quite noticeable) on too many bomb explosions around it, in fact it’s actually due to it being built on soft marshy land and the passing traffic over the years.

Although presently a little away from the centre of the city, the enormous number of developments currently taking place nearby seem likely to make this a much more central monument in a few years by which time the current regeneration of the centre and the docks area will have been largely completed.

One of the best ways to see Paris is from a cruise down the River Seine which runs right through the city.

There’s quite a selection of cruising options of course. Day cruises let you see the sights but don’t have quite the romance of the evening cruises.

Now, you might think an evening cruise would cost a fortune but, whilst not exactly cheap, they’re far from being the ripoff that they could so easily be and you can have dinner on an evening cruise for under EUR 100 which is pretty good value considering that you get a good meal with the cruise thrown in.

The evening cruises usually offer a choice of early and late. The later cruise is by far the best option as you’ll have the chance to see all the illuminations as you have your meal. For a truly fantastic evening, July 14th is hard to beat as that’ll include the Bastille Day fireworks but even on a normal evening you’ll see things like the Eiffel Tower illuminations.

Sainsbury likes to portray itself as a customer oriented family-friendly store but one policy that they’ve recently introduced in the Forestside store in Belfast is distinctly anti-family and the implementation of it is very anti-customer.

As you’ll have noticed, I’ve posted next to nothing over the last month. A total of seven posts vs what would have been a more normal 30 in fact.

That’s because I’ve been over in Northern Ireland trying to sort out some administration since June 5th and only got back home on Friday evening.

Now, I wasn’t expecting there to be much change in the traffic on my websites but the blog is different. The most commonly held belief is that you need to post at least once a day to keep up the traffic. That seems reasonable: after all, blogs, for the most part, cover “current events” in some fashion so without the regular updates, the traffic on a blog is bound to drop off quite quickly, isn’t it?

Well, the funny thing is that the blog traffic didn’t drop at all by any meaningful amount. The number of hits showed very little change at all nor did the adsense income. The number of subscribers via Feedburner dropped about 10%. The number of incoming links as counted by Technorati went up.

So little was the change that it has me wondering if the best strategy would be to build up a blog over six months or so then start a new one.