Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Unfair bank charges – how to reclaim

What to do when your bank zaps you for penalty charges (click on post title for full story).

“The Defendant has imposed charges of £30 each time the Claimant has exceeded his overdraft limit. These charges represent a penalty and do not accurately reflect the defendant’s administration costs. Further, they are contrary to the Unfair (Contract) Terms Act 1977 s.4 and the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999. para. 8 and sch. 2(1)(e). Further or alternatively, they are unreasonable within the meaning of the Supply of Goods and Services Act 1982 s.15. The charges the Claimant claims are £30 on 01/06/06, £90 on 02/05/06, £60 on 01/12/05. The total charges he is claiming are £180. The claimant claims interest under section 69 of the County Courts Act 1984 at the rate of 8% a year from the dates that each of the charges were made, a total of £6.01 up until 08/08/06 and continuing interest at a daily rate of £0.39. AND THE CLAIMANT CLAIMS £180, interest, costs.”

Reuters Photo Fraud

Reuters Photo Fraud: “
The recent discovery that the Reuters news agency released a digitally manipulated photograph as an authentic image of the bombing in Beirut has drawn attention to the important topic of bias in the media. But lost in the frenzy over one particular image is an even more devastating fact: that over the last week Reuters has been caught red-handed in an astonishing variety of journalistic frauds in the photo coverage of the war in Lebanon”

My bet is on theory D:-
Reuters photographers and editors are intimidated by Hezbollah, and publish Hezbollah’s propaganda out of fear for their lives.

We all know the first victim of war is truth.

Ellee’s New Blog

Well after a lot of graft and steep learning curve (and a 23km walk to her house) I managed to get Ellee’s new wordpress blog up and running today. Really cool to be able to import her old blog with its over 200 posts and amazingly over 700 comments , all imported without a glitch (apart from small problem with wrapping around images).

For the technical out there I used:-
Tiga 1.0.1 theme as Ellee wanted three columns.
FlickrRSS plugin to get the rather smart random array of piccies along the top of the posts.
Giraffe AJAX calendar for fast moving between posts by date.
Akismet comment checking system to kill SPAM and pingbacks without moderation.
Role Manager for allowing different users to have different roles.
Subscribe Me to give all those rather neat RSS buttons etc
Ultimate Tag warrior so Ellee can tag her posts easily.
Sidebar Widgets to make it so easy to move the content of the sidebars around.
del.icio.us widget – doesnt seem to be working 🙁
Google search widget.

We also enabled the option to create posts directly from flickr. Which given elle’s passion for super large photographs should be really cool.

How to swap a paper clip for a house – Home – Global – Times Online

For those of you reading this article in The Times the link to Kyles website is this http://oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com/

Pretty cool taking:

1 paper clip + 1 free blogger account = 1free house

all within a year, Congratulations to the mayor of Kipling Canada for been so blog savvy (although he should fire his web team for that awful flash fron end!).

Thanks to Nick for the link to The Times story