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Cornish Pasty Tax

Posted 2 months ago admin Food / UK

Cornish PastyWell, I was quite shocked to read that the UK Government are considering subjecting Cornish Pasties to 20% VAT.

Currently hot takeaway food, such as pies, sausage rolls and pasties, sold in supermarkets and bakeries, are not subject to VAT.  However, in the 2012 Budget the Chancellor of the Exchequer has proposed a review to reverse this.

The Cornish Pasty has such a rich history in the county of Cornwall that this feels like a real kick in the side of the people who are involved in the industry not only for those who sell them but the businesses who supply the ingredients, such as farmers.  In fact Greggs the Bakers lost 5% off its share value as a result of the news.

The government who are proposing this say it is a way of ‘simplifying’ the tax system and will raise over £160m a year by 2016.  The industry is now considering how to respond to the proposal and hopefully the government will fail at initiating this.  The result of the proposal will mean a potential loss in jobs and this will be extremely unacceptable in this economy.

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Still Boxing Day?

Posted 2 months ago admin Canada / Vancouver

The BrickThe Brick is a Canadian store selling household furniture and such, quite a nice place, lots of choice and knowledgable staff.  Never bought a thing with them but they seem nice!

We went to their website in our hunt for that perfect dish washer, to prevent those dish-pan hands, and saw they still have their Boxing Day sale on!!

So, could it be the case that they have forgot that Boxing Day is in the Christmas season, and its coming up to Easter now, or maybe they haven’t got a web designer to update their website.  If its the later then maybe I can help!!!

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Solly’s Restaurant Review

Posted 2 months ago admin Canada / Food / Vancouver

Solly'sWe only thought that Solly’s was based in one location so we were pleasantly surprised to discover one where we were Sunday morning.

Solly’s is a Jewish family bakery and deli, they are based in three locations in Vancouver.

We decided to have a Smoked Salmon on a poppy seed Bagel and a Pastrami sandwich.  I don’t normally eat bagel’s as I don’t like the chewy kind, most of the ones I have had, but Solly’s are not tough but a little crunchy.  It had been so long since I had good smoked salmon as well. The pastrami was the best we have tried in a long time as well, it was really sumptuous, and I definetly go back to have that there again.

The ambience was good, not overly posh, very clean.  The staff were friendly and patient but didn’t have too much interaction with them.

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First REALLY Bad Customer Service Experience 2012

Posted 2 months ago admin General

Dear Sears Canada, what on earth were you thinking?  Do you not care that unhappy customers will post their dis-pleasure with your company all over the internet? Why not tighten up your processes to ensure that this kind of feedback is minimalized?

Despite our friends telling us NEVER to use Sears Canada we did go ahead and buy something from them, and of course we regret it very much, why didn’t we listen to them?

When we went to Sears to buy a new Dish Washer and all seemed to be well, we thought we got good advice and there was no problem initially purchasing the machine.  It was a top of the range so it was important for us to get things right.  They installed the machine, no problem, but when we went to use it realized they had delivered the wrong one!  We asked Sears what happened, they took some their time to get back to us, they said the wrong label was placed on the machine in the store.  We asked Sears to replace it with the right model with no extra charge, that part was fine, however, they wanted to void the first payment then charge us again, even though the amounts were the same.  Why didn’t they just do that paper work internally, why did we have to deal with that with potential additional charges on our credit card?  We ended up with charges for two dish washers on our credit card totalling over $3,600.  It was a complete mess so we decided to tell them to forget the machine and just void all transactions, and take their machine away.  Despite them making all the mistakes they didn’t want to void the transactions until they had taken the dish washer away, they are the ones to be trusted, not us, they screwed up!  Pathetic.

Sears, you will never see us in your store ever again, and for others who do go in there, please be very careful and don’t trust them!

UPDATE: 18 March 2012

Sears offered us a $25 gift certificate as an incentive to get us to go back shopping in their store, what a joke!  It would take more than that to go back there.  We are hearing of other horror stories relating to Sears, including one poor person who got delivered the wrong Sofa and has been waiting over 5 months for the correct one to be delivered.  Shameful!

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Worst Customer Service Awards 2011

Posted 4 months ago admin General

My awards are for those companies in 2011 who have performed quite badly at customer service, in other words, they have plenty of room for improvement!  The following three companies I would say are level pegging for bad service, they tie at 1st place:

HSBC UK

This bank introduced their secure key system, a calculator looking for device which gives a new access number each time a customer logs into their bank account.  The actual premise of the device is sound and I don’t have any problem with improving security, however, the way the introduced it and the customer service relating to it was pretty dreadful. The bank gives you a certain time period, from when they send it out, to start using the device, problem is most overseas customers don’t receive it in a timely manner denying them access to their money.  Many customers have closed down their accounts and gone to other banks as a result. They had to sent my device to me three times before I received one!  When complaining to their customer service department they had little sympathy about denying me access to my money.  They should have sent the devices out by a faster route, mine came via surface with only a UK 1st class pre-paid envelope, but it’s quite obvious from their attitude they couldn’t care less about their customers.

UPS

Unfortunately UPS is the preferred delivery service of Amazon, for certain items at least, otherwise I wouldn’t use them.  In one circumstance UPS put on a hidden charge that they didn’t inform the person who sent it to me, reading through blogs and other resources this is common place for them, and hold the package hostage or send it back from where it came.  On another occasion not only did they deliver a package to me to the wrong address but to the wrong city and just dumped it on a door when a signature was required.  UPS’s answer was “oh, that shouldn’t have happened” with no effort to resolve the issue.  The company has mind boggling bad customer service.

Virgin Mobile Canada

I will be a little more gentle with Virgin since their product is actually quite good but I can see why they received poor ratings of their customer service before.  Obtaining a new device and contract was painful at every single step.  I could not order the phone on their site due to their technical errors, when the order was made I was missing paperwork, it took over an hour to activate the phone with staff having no clue what to do, their website and online billing was down all the time, unable to add frequent “friends/callers” to my plan, received no contract despite promises (and finally told there wasn’t one, just terms and conditions).  Having said that I did receive personal attention from a named person to resolve problems, something you don’t really get from a company these days.  Even if the problems weren’t resolved immediately they did go through the motions of making some considerable effort to address them.  At the time of the difficulties it did look as though they were merging their systems with Bell, their parent company, with lots of hiccups, if they had been honest about that I think more people would have been patient with them.  Anyway, I am certainly more pleased with them than I was with Rogers.

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Holding Hands in Public

Posted 4 months ago admin Gay / USA

On our trip to New York we went through Chicsgo OHare Airport twice, both times we had interesting experiences.

En route to New York we were stopped by a flight crew member who thanked us for holding hands. He said he does it all the time with his partner and said its a way of pushing for acceptance in the US. I was so thrilled that he came up to us, it really made our day! However it is somewhat a sad reflection on the US that holding hands isn’t common place or better equality laws in place to ensure the country is a safe and welcoming place for couples to do that!

On the way back home from New York a lady approached us to try and sell us some new United deal. We didn’t say anything but she recognised us immediately as a couple and I don’t recall us holding hands as we approached the area, but we may have been! Now that was not only savvy of her but also the fact that she wanted to sell us the deal as a couple! I guess it’s a feather in the cap for United for recognizotion of same sex couples.

We held hands pretty much all the time throughout our visit to New York and no one said a bad word or threatened us in any way. We did have a couple of “surprised” looks but they seemed to be from tourists rather than locals. It is a shame that same sex legislation hasn’t progressex as much as we’d hoped under Obama but it seems public/society is moving forward quicker than politics can keep up.

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36,000+ Love Stories

Posted 5 months ago admin Gay / Immigration

Every day I learn about a new love story where a couple has gone to extraordinary lengths to be or remain together.

As time moves on the world is getting smaller. It is fairly economical to travel to new places with competing travel bargains that can be found on the internet. Meeting people in your own neighbourhood is now a thing of the past, thanks to the internet and social networking tools it is easy to meet those from different countries and cultures. While at the political level between countries there all kinds of stuff going on such as diplomatic relations, trade negotiations, wars, and so on, at the “regular citizen” level we are understanding from the relationships we make with other cultures that people are basically the same every where; they shop, have families, try to make a living, worried about finances, eat, worry about health and of course fall in love. Love is the strongest thing that binds two people together.

When falling in love it would seem the most cruel and malicious thing to do to keep those two apart from each other. The world is full of constant turmoil that seems never ending however when you are with the person you love all can seem much brighter with the world.

There is a group of people who are forced to be apart by the cruelest of discrimination and that is lack of legislation in immigration law. How would you feel being apart from your loved one due to politicians hate towards your culture? A change of law would not effect any other people’s lives, except for those who are bought together to like any other family, with exception to the diversity, money and experience they bring to the country.

We’ve seen it all before, how politicians have discriminated against people of colour, women, whites marrying blacks, Asians, rich and poor and of course, the group I refer to in this post, gay people.

Many countries already respectfully treat gay people in all parts of the law and have equal rights across the board including immigration, however, that is not the case for one of the world’s largest super powers, the United States of America.

What next for gay people to be treated equally like other families who are tax payers? 2011 bought some minor progress with Don’t Ask Don’t Tell being lifted, however it’s a long way to what they have to achieve. 2012? Hopefully there will be something more positive to report. In the meantime, this Christmas, couples continue to endure the agony of separation.

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Favourite Commute

Posted 5 months ago admin Canada / UK / USA

Having lived in three countries and moved round quite a bit I have experienced different types of commutes on various public transport systems.

My favourite commute has got to be from Woking to Westminster.  When the train arrived in Woking it was virtually empty, or the train used to start from there, the journey time was just perfect that I could read a chapter in a book.  This was the period in my life where I read the most and I found that relaxing at the start and end of the day.

My second favourite commute was from St Pancras Station through to Holloway Road.  Well, two stops on the London Underground isn’t too much to complain about but I adored the shopping centre at St Pancras especially the French bakeries and Marks & Spencer, what a treat it was to pick up an almond croissant at Paul’s some mornings.  Arriving at Holloway Road was a bit of contrast, quite a frightening area.

Another commute which I enjoyed was from our home in Denver down to the Auraria Campus.  It was an easy journey, everyone was polite and if I got off a little early had access to some nice shops of downtown.

My current commute is….ok, from Kerrisdale to Burnaby.  The best part of it is the scenery, certainly some gorgeous views of the mountains.  However, the two bus rides are too short to read anything and even if I could the buses are to bumpy to focus on the words, all one can do is to stare out the window.  The area of Burnaby where I work, although home of some film studio’s, isn’t that pleasant.

My least favourite was the journey from Upminster to Westminster.  The service that c2c provides now is vastly improved when I was travelling on the companies predecessor in the late 70′s/80′s.  It was a very crowded line with many delays which left some bad memories for me.

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My iPhone Apps

Posted 8 months ago admin iPhone / Technology

Just had the iPhone on the Virgin Mobile Canada network for two weeks now and I’m already filling it up with apps. The Blackberry just wasn’t working out for me, hardly any apps compared to the iPhone or Android.

So following are my top apps:

iphone4News
The two must news apps I was looking forward to, BBC and The Guardian, which have extensive coverage of the news, especially The Guardian which I particularly enjoy it’s style of journalism. I really wanted the New York Times but the subscription cost was totally outrageous. I have a number of others including Reuters, CBC, Denver Channel 7 News, Independent UK etc but they aren’t that great in my opinion. I am also using MobileRSS to aggregate my feeds from Google Reader. The Onion app is also a must but the adverts are a bit of a nuisance.

Social Media
I have more than one Twitter account therefore HootSuite is an important application for me and I believe it works well. It initially sync’s with the web version but when making changes to either it treats itself as separate entities, as far as I can tell. I have all the other social media applications such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Foursquare and Linkedin. I am not sure why the Facebook app gets a lot of criticism as it seems perfectly fine to me. Gist gives the ability to aggregate social media by person or company and gives the ability to write notes on them, although this sounds very cool I don’t use it as much as I thought I would, it has a very disorganized feel about it.

Productivity
I use the Remember The Milk app as a simple reminder tool, the free account syncs once a day with its web version which is sufficient for my use. I am using a free tool iSAM Mobi Lite to connect with my SugarCRM installation, this is basically a “viewer” of my data, to update data the paid app is required at $29/£14 which is quite expensive but probably cheap for those working in a sales environment. The other alternative is an app for ZohoCRM, the cost is $3 a month which isn’t too bad but it has a few limitations. I installed EverNote but haven’t used it that much, I didn’t really use it much on a computer but I thought I would install it, seems ok. Spreadsheet, very similar to Excel, is probably the most useful app I have installed on the phone and has the best usability out of all of its competitors. I use Tungle Me so people can view my free and busy times, and book a meeting with me, very useful website, and their app is quite good too; I am not sure, however, that many people know enough about this program to make it that worthwhile.  I installed the Moleskine app, it is ok, but I really do enjoy their paper products more and can’t see myself using a phone based version much.

Graphics
Some of the graphics programs I am really enjoying are Instagram, PS Express and Camera+. Instagram tarts up photo’s you take and places them on your social media, although fun at first I think I will get bored of it quickly. PS (PhotoShop) Express is great, certainly some useful utilities for modifying photo’s I take. Camera+, which enhances the Camera app on the iPhone is very good, ability to zoom is wonderful as is some of the editing options.  I also installed the Flickr app but I don’t use this service that much, maybe a fad for a while.

Travel
I heard of Tripit via the iPhone and then started to use it on the web, I am really not sure about advertising when I am going to be away but there are some useful features on there such as the extent of their flight details.  Since I am going to be travelling WiFi Finder will be useful as I don’t want to use any regular data on my phone.  There are many free subway maps to various cities and have installed those.  Although I am not going to a non English speaking country just yet I still installed Google Translate which is a really cool app.

Shopping
Not many apps in this category but have installed the Harrods and Target apps, Harrods being the more superior of course.

Fun
I am not really a games sort of person but I did download the Star Trek tricorder which is very cute.  I bought the Snood game for $0.99, I have played the computer based version of the game and it is so addictive.  Actually Snood gets very bad ratings in iTunes but I think its still very cool. I installed CloudReaders which is a great app for viewing comic files in cbr and cbz format, however on an iPhone they are difficult to read, but they have done a great job with this program. The Comixology Pull List app is brilliant to monitor forthcoming comics and “Pull” them creating an easy to view “shopping” list.

Utilities
As I have many passwords to manage I am using mSecure, this is working out well for me, and the look of it is pretty nice. I have NeoReader for scanning QR and Bar Codes, a useful app which I will get some minor use out of.

Business
I have been using Oanda for currency exchange information for many years and its iPhone app is brilliant. In this section I have also installed bank stuff such as the PayPal app.

Reference
Although I have rarely used it I think that the Wikipedia app will be useful from time to time as will the Dictionary app, as I get older I have some difficulty with spelling and often look up a word just to ensure that I have its spelling right.

Flights
I have the apps for British Airways, American Airlines and United, all which seem to be ok.  I found an app called Skyscanner which searches out those great flight bargains, but haven’t used it much to comment on, it might be useful at a later date!

Vancouver
I have installed some apps giving local information.  The public transportation company called Translink have been working on improving their mobile presence, even though not an app, just a web based tool, it is ok.  The app doesn’t work well on my Blackberry at all, and their are some basic features which other transit systems have and they don’t, a little disappointing.  An individual has come up with an alternative called TransitDB and it is brilliant, I use it all the time.  Taxi Now is a really nice app to order a Taxi close to you.  Street Food gives details of vendors in the Vancouver area, and maps them, gives details of their hours of business etc, I probably won’t use it that much but they did a good job on the app.  QuakeAware is one I found by accident, giving details of Earthquake Awareness in your local area, some hints and tips about preparation.

So many apps on my cell already, enough to keep me amused for the time being!

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Tell Obama: Enough is Enough

Posted 9 months ago admin Gay / Immigration

I was so incensed and upset by a story of how the Obama administration wants to separate a family yesterday it was difficult for me to articulate myself properly as a result.  My reaction was that of being stunned, dismayed, and outraged.

Why does Obama want to separate a happily married couple?

Imagine this:

  • Couple have been in a loving relationship for 19 years
  • They got married 7 years ago
  • They are worthwhile members of the community, pay their taxes like everyone else, have their own business and employ people
  • They haven’t broken the law
  • One half of the couple has a challenging illness
  • The other half of the couple is a major caregiver

There is no valid reason from the points above that justify separating this couple.  So why is this happening?  Simply because they are a gay.  I ask myself what kind of barbaric Government does this to a couple?  It is clear discrimination.  Immigration is a federal law of which gay people are denied 1,300+ benefits right now.

Read the story of Bradford and Anthony here.  The couple were also interview by KTVU in San Francisco.

In its simplest terms the couple applied for an I-130 visa to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, they were denied based on the law set out in the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).  As a result of being denied the Australian has been asked to leave the country by 25th August.  In line with couples who have had their deportations put on hold this couple should also have some kind of repreive until Congress repeals DOMA.  It is totally inhumane to separate this couple and Obama needs to intervene to resolve this issue quickly.

Take action by signing the Immigration Equality petition right now.

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