Unfurl the flags, roll out the red carpet, put your hands together, give a warm welcome to and other celebratory idioms of a similar nature ….

At long last, we can finally and officially welcome to the world: Gates of Praise Bookshop.

Those of you that have been here a while will know we’ve had some problems along the way and some of them I’ve documented but most have been left where they belong, in the trash. All I can say is thankfully we have now officially launched the online bookshop … some 6 months later than planned.

The battle I face now is in ensuring the Church continues to take the responsibility of the site seriously. One of those is in stock management and already it’s been pushed to the back burner. In the Church they use Sage for everything from controlling the stock to salaries, etc., and one of the first things I did was to sit down with the developer and discuss how we could integrate the shopping cart with Sage. In the end we settled upon using a third party tool supplied by DatalinkUK which has varying levels of integration. However, I’ve been told this will now have to wait until some time next year! Arggh!

The other aspect that needs serious consideration is the creation and rotation of banners to help advertise specials, new books, etc …

Anyway – despite the battles ahead please join with me in celebrating our newest arrival.

My TV got damaged last week and my contents insurance covers it on a “like for like” basis.

Well it’s pretty hard to get large size analogue TV’s now if not impossible, so the insurance company found a similar spec LCD TV and gave me a budget of £400. Not a huge amount of money for a new TV, but then I’m not fussy and not after a monster.

A quick scout round the web brought me to the Panasonic TX-32LXD80 for a budget beating price of £391.47. The newer model of it, the TX-32LXD85 was £430 or so. A few more clicks and I was satisfied that the Panasonic was the best bang for buck out there as well as being the most reliable. So off to the shop to have a little look and a chat with a member of staff.

All looked good and I just needed the money from the insurance company to arrive. I was stunned when that arrived the following day so I took a jaunt back to the shop to spend it.

Imagine my surprise, no lets call it shock when I saw that the price was now £499.99 – an almost £110 increase. Found same member of staff from the day before and was told “that happens all the time” which I had no grounds to challenge but doubted very much. I very nicely asked if she could go check with the manager if I could have it at yesterdays price or at least with a significant discount. Just as she prepared to go find the manager I added that I had the cash and was looking to spend it now and that their sister company still had it at the old price (I didn’t add that it was out of stock).

Not surprisingly the answer was no I couldn’t have it at the old price. I then asked why the replacement for it was cheaper and again they couldn’t answer.

Here’s my take … under UK law a product has to be listed at a specific price in a certain number of shops for a certain period of time (I forget the exact details) before one can legally state it is now on sale and the original price was XYZ. Or 30% off, etc … So what I think they are doing is paving the way to advertise the model as having 30% off in the near future, because and lets be honest here, how many of us actually check the original price when see a sale one? Or do we just see the 30% off tag or the seemingly large reduction?

I’m in the process of writing to the company to express my distaste at the price increase especially considering we are mid credit crunch, jobs being shed and leading up to Christmas. One would think they’d be desperate to find sales …

Oh, and the name of the company – Currys.co.uk and it’s sister company PCWorld.co.uk

More anon if my letter produces any tangible result.

More links I like:

Meltmail – cool name, cool tool. Pump in your email address, pick a time period of 3, 6, 12 or 24hrs and it generates a melt mail address for you. You then use this to register for free software, forums, whatever that you suspect may spread your address further than you planned on. After the pre-determined time your melt mail address disappears and so does your real address from their system.

The Do Lectures – in their own words: “The Do lectures are all about getting a handful of speakers together in one place, in the hope that they may inspire you to go Do something. To give you the tools and the desire to change the things you care about.”

In a similar vein:

TED – Technology, Entertainment, Design and agin in their words: “The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).”

Taste Kid – wondering what movie or book or band to listen to next?  Then pop over to Taste Kid and enter in the name of one you like and it’ll produce some suggestions. Hover over the question mark next to each suggestion and you get a mini-review.

This was kinda cool – in a very geeky way I guess.

Tonight in work I had an issue which was eventually narrowed down to being a fault with DNS. Now, I’m fairly good with DNS stuff but the answer to this one had me stumped so the original change engineer was contacted. After a run down of the problem and what I thought the issue was he’d soon found the problem – a typo in an A record, well more accurately a mis-spelling but the end result was the same.

Anyway, he quickly changed it and somewhere in the ensuing conversation uttered the words “watching it propagate” … well I know that DNS needs to propagate but didn’t realise you could watch it almost in real time. So of course I asked … and he pointed me at DNSWatch.info where you can pump in the IP or do

main name that you’ve just changed and by refreshing the browser window you can literally watch it reach the various root nameservers.

As I say cool geeky and perhaps just a touch sad!

I am linkaholic … I tend to amass huge quantities of links in the mistaken belief that one day I’ll be able to pass on a vital link to somebody whom needs it.

As I rarely do that, I am instead going to start sharing my favourite links on an ad hoc basis through this forum in the hopes that it will add to their discoverability by others or it may just provide the answer to that all important query you have … anyway, without further ado here are my current

Links I Like:

Imovio iKit – click on the iKit logo. All seems like any other *nix based netbook but at a predicted £99 it’s half the price.

Hyperspace – Phoenix (as in the BIOS people) are developing instant on access to items such as web browsing, email, voip apps, etc. This looks uber cool and would go hand in hand with netbooks.

PCW report on a RISC survey that shows the UK as the geekiest country in Europe?

Zyb is a fab tool for managing your mobile contacts, calendar and SMS. It does more but I like it just for the management aspect and it’s free.