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I'm having a fairly crap time with poker money at the moment, lol, (as I believe they say in the vernacular). It's hard enough winning the damned stuff, but now I have a battle to actually get it into my accounts.
Pacific Poker: Cheque ordered August 24th. Not yet arrived.
Party Poker: Cheque ordered August 20. Arrived August 28. Paid in September 1. Presented by Citibank NA to Barclays London on September 7. Lost by Barclays Corporate on September 8. Money taken back out of Citibank account on September 10. Fucking great.
This is the second time that this has happened in three months. Coincidence? Seems to be stretching it. So what on earth is happening to the cheques? It isn't taken out of the Party account with Barclays. It just gets lost "somewhere" in the banking system.
So now I have to argue with Party Poker about not charging me $35 "stopping fee" (a fee charged by Barclays to stop the cheque. Er, hold on, but it's Barclays that has LOST the cheque....). I've taken the offensive this time, saying that not only should I not pay the $35 stopping fee, but I want the $5 withdrawal fee refunded too, plus $35 + $5 compensation for the hassle involved.
So that's quite a few grand once again "in limbo". Bleeaagh. Perfectly handleable in the long run. Just a pisser. I guess that financial officers in small companies cope with this as part of everyday life, but private individuals kind of expect banking processes to be seamless and simple. Losing two cheques out of three (the July one managed to get through) does seem to be a fairly poor percentage.
++++++
More cheerful stuff, Birks. Beautiful day today. Walked into Blackheath. Browsed around second-hand bookshop mainly to enjoy how much was being asked for books that I already had on my bookshelf (surely a 400% mark-up in that shop, I reckon).
Succeeded in installing Sim Card, email client and web client on my new toy the Palm Tungsten. Since that Palm is "old" technology, this took more than a little trial and error. I gave up on Opera Mini because I couldn't for the life of me get the apparently correctly installed Websphere Environment (some piece of IBM JavaVM shit) to work, even though it claimed to have been installed correctly. Prob doesn't work with the Palm OS installed on the Tungsten, is my guess. However, I found another browser that appears to work. Not as pretty as Opera Mini, but, hey, all this stuff is virtually free. Even the Sim Card cost just £1.21.
The odd thing about the Tungsten W is that it has no mike or speaker (or Bluetooth). You have to connect via an earpiece and speaker on a cord (like you see lots of people using on the street anyway). Hell, this was cutting edge in 2003....
The lack of Bluetooth did surprise me, but in effect this is a Blackberry Phone (minus speaker and microphone) for fifty quid. All I want to use it for is data input/output, so, well, hey gabba gabba.
++++++++++++++
Did a dummy run tonight of my main course for next week. Delish... if a bit more of a winter than summer dish! Hmm, and perhaps the Birks "delish" was based somewhat on the fact that it had potatoes in it.....
+++++++++++++++
I'm using Google Chrome much more than IE7 recently. Its major strength is speed of page-opening. I'm not so keen on the general layout. But IE7 can be horribly slow.
+++++++++++++++
My ongoing annoyance at McAfee might be ended. Rasaad at work told me I could get NetProtect from BT for free with my BTInternet account. And, yes, I can. It took me 20 minutes how to turn off McAfee's "Auto Renewal" of your protection, something which they had the nerve to tell me was in place "because of customer requests". Yeah, right.
I shall try NetProtect on my laptop and see if it interacts nbadly with any of the poker stuff. If nothing goes wrong, then I'll put it on all of the machines.
_______________________
Pacific Poker: Cheque ordered August 24th. Not yet arrived.
Party Poker: Cheque ordered August 20. Arrived August 28. Paid in September 1. Presented by Citibank NA to Barclays London on September 7. Lost by Barclays Corporate on September 8. Money taken back out of Citibank account on September 10. Fucking great.
This is the second time that this has happened in three months. Coincidence? Seems to be stretching it. So what on earth is happening to the cheques? It isn't taken out of the Party account with Barclays. It just gets lost "somewhere" in the banking system.
So now I have to argue with Party Poker about not charging me $35 "stopping fee" (a fee charged by Barclays to stop the cheque. Er, hold on, but it's Barclays that has LOST the cheque....). I've taken the offensive this time, saying that not only should I not pay the $35 stopping fee, but I want the $5 withdrawal fee refunded too, plus $35 + $5 compensation for the hassle involved.
So that's quite a few grand once again "in limbo". Bleeaagh. Perfectly handleable in the long run. Just a pisser. I guess that financial officers in small companies cope with this as part of everyday life, but private individuals kind of expect banking processes to be seamless and simple. Losing two cheques out of three (the July one managed to get through) does seem to be a fairly poor percentage.
++++++
More cheerful stuff, Birks. Beautiful day today. Walked into Blackheath. Browsed around second-hand bookshop mainly to enjoy how much was being asked for books that I already had on my bookshelf (surely a 400% mark-up in that shop, I reckon).
Succeeded in installing Sim Card, email client and web client on my new toy the Palm Tungsten. Since that Palm is "old" technology, this took more than a little trial and error. I gave up on Opera Mini because I couldn't for the life of me get the apparently correctly installed Websphere Environment (some piece of IBM JavaVM shit) to work, even though it claimed to have been installed correctly. Prob doesn't work with the Palm OS installed on the Tungsten, is my guess. However, I found another browser that appears to work. Not as pretty as Opera Mini, but, hey, all this stuff is virtually free. Even the Sim Card cost just £1.21.
The odd thing about the Tungsten W is that it has no mike or speaker (or Bluetooth). You have to connect via an earpiece and speaker on a cord (like you see lots of people using on the street anyway). Hell, this was cutting edge in 2003....
The lack of Bluetooth did surprise me, but in effect this is a Blackberry Phone (minus speaker and microphone) for fifty quid. All I want to use it for is data input/output, so, well, hey gabba gabba.
++++++++++++++
Did a dummy run tonight of my main course for next week. Delish... if a bit more of a winter than summer dish! Hmm, and perhaps the Birks "delish" was based somewhat on the fact that it had potatoes in it.....
+++++++++++++++
I'm using Google Chrome much more than IE7 recently. Its major strength is speed of page-opening. I'm not so keen on the general layout. But IE7 can be horribly slow.
+++++++++++++++
My ongoing annoyance at McAfee might be ended. Rasaad at work told me I could get NetProtect from BT for free with my BTInternet account. And, yes, I can. It took me 20 minutes how to turn off McAfee's "Auto Renewal" of your protection, something which they had the nerve to tell me was in place "because of customer requests". Yeah, right.
I shall try NetProtect on my laptop and see if it interacts nbadly with any of the poker stuff. If nothing goes wrong, then I'll put it on all of the machines.
_______________________
