Foreign Perspectives

Less than clear on almost all of the pre-paid travel cash cards sites is what happens when the card expires. In the case of the Post Office card it’s even worse as there’s a customer services line which doesn’t offer any option even remotely like “press X to renew” and Post Office branches have no idea what happens either.

In fact, nothing happens. Your card expires and you’re left unable to access the money. No replacement card comes out, there’s no notification or letter asking what you’d like them to do with the money.

What you need to do is to call the customer services number (on 0845 850 0077 or  +44 207 490 9717) and select the “change my details” option. That puts you through to a real person who can renew your card after you’ve gone through a number of security questions. Well, a LOT of security questions, for most of which your answer will probably “I don’t know”. Things like “what amount did you first load your card with?”, “what date did you last use your card?” and various other questions along those lines which I’m sure few people will be able to answer.

Once you get through that they block your existing card so you’ve no access to the money for, in theory, up to a couple of weeks but in my case for three days. The replacement card has your name printed on it but is otherwise identical to those issued in the Post Office branches; the expiry date on mine is only 18 months on rather than the 2 years that you’re supposed to get but since it’s free that shorter period doesn’t really matter.

One of my objectives in doing the web applications courses was to provide the knowledge to let me do a bit of a revamp of the various accommodation listings sites that I run.

Whilst it’s early days, this weeks session provided an increasingly necessary minor improvement in the data entry form for the site. As with seemingly most HTML code, that minor change in the code will provide a substantial improvement in the look and feel of the website. So far, I’ve only been able to apply it to the more recent coding but I’ll be retrofitting it to the remainder in due course.

That’s probably going to be how the course changes the overall look and feel flow from the computing courses initially… minor changes in code with big improvements for the users of the sites.

Over the last year or so the amount of junk mail I’ve been getting has completely pulled away from my ability to cope with it. Going through anything up to 1000 emails to find anything that was worth reading was just too much and that was after the junk mail filters had done their work.

So, I’ve decided to approach the problem from several different angles.

Step one was changing all the email redirects that I use to go to my bulk mail mailbox which has the strictest junk mail filtering enabled. That thinned out the junk mail considerably  but there’s still quite a lot.

Step two was setting up a brand new mailbox. I’m now in the process of changing the redirects one per day to this mailbox. So far, the mail has remained reasonable but that’s because I’m starting off with the email addresses that were largely personal; when I get to those that were advertised in some way I’ll have to work through the legit ones and change them to something else.

Step three has been in progress for a while alongside the above and consists of deleting the redirects that I don’t really use. Unfortunately, one of these has the problem that it collects a lot of valid email and it also collects an awful lot of junk mail so I’ll need to wade through it all sometime and notify the legit people.

Step four is thinning out the non-junk mail that has also grown to such an extent that it’s unmanageable. Over the course of over 10 years there’s a surprising amount of email subscriptions that build up!

Bit of a hassle but I suppose that trying to stick to the same email for over 10 years was asking a bit too much when initially email addresses were much more visible on the Internet.

One of the least well promoted things in the OU is that we’re eligible to apply for the student card issued by the NUS.

At first sight, forking out £10 or so for the card doesn’t seem like a great plan but what makes it worthwhile is that as well as being a student ID card this card also gives you lots of discounts too. So many in fact that I usually find that it’s paid for itself within the first month or two.

On the whole, the discounts are from companies who you’d expect to have a significant number of student customers which means that many of them aren’t of major interest to the mainly mature students from the OU. So, for instance, I don’t see myself ever using FlatMatch. On tbe other hand, I save about £5 a month on my Fitness First membership and Wendy regularly gets 10% or 20% discount from Peacocks and New Look plus there’s the useful 5% off Amazon and free delivery from £5 too.

If you’re not sure whether it’s worth it for you, you can have a look at the discounts on their site first.

Separate from this, but potentially even more valuable are the student discounts available for Microsoft products (up to 100%!).

Wedding dresses are a bit of a peculiar kind of purchase, aren’t they?

After all, few people would spend anything like the amount of money on any dress never mind a dress that’s intended to be worn only once, would they? Yet, of course, destination wedding dresses are very much a purchase that people aspire to, pretty much regardless of the cost involved.

They’re slightly odd also in that they generally aim to have a strong hint of tradition whilst also trying to be quite fashionable at the same time. That’s not an easy combination to manage which, of course goes some way to explain the high prices for these dresses.

Make sure you make the most of your purchase experience… chances are that it’ll be a long time before you get that much attention when buying something.