When you make a payment through PayPal which involves a forex conversion, you have the option to use either the “PayPal rate” or the “Visa/Mastercard rate”.

Using the PayPal currency conversion from USD to ZAR, the transaction would’ve cost me R3,990.00. Using the Visa / Mastercard currency conversion, the transaction cost me R3,835.23.

That’s about a 4% difference.

If you deal in financial transactions at all (and really, even if you don’t), you’ll understand that that’s HUGE!

4% is more than the fee PayPal charges a receiver to receive the payment. And even with the rate I was charged through Visa/Mastercard, there’s some fat in there for the issuing bank who makes a cut on the forex.

Evidently PayPal is making some really nice money on forex transactions…

I’ll wait to see what I actually get charged on my statement (there could be a rate fluctuation due to the delay between auth and settle), but this definitely warrants a little more investigation.

EDIT (19 May 2013): The transaction has now cleared on my statement, and true to what someone said might happen, the charge on my statement was higher than the auth charge initially indicated. The amount on my statement is R3,986.29; hardly different at all from the R3,990.00 that would’ve been charged with the PayPal rate. I’m going to try this a few more times and see what happens, but is seems that, effectively, there’s very little difference between the rates and the PayPal rate has the benefit of being predictable.

Bit of a pain (as others said it would be), but I jumped through the necessary technical hoops, and this blog is now on self-hosted WordPress again.

It’s interesting to note that when I first started blogging, I insisted that I own the content and the site and went with self-hosted WordPress, but the maintenance thereof became a hassle and I got busy. Then Posterous came along and the “post by email” feature was a godsend, so I duly migrated.

But as with all things which Twitter seems to acquire, they’ve killed Posterous, and hosted WordPress has become such a slick and seamless-to-update platform, that maintenance thereof is really no longer an issue.

So I’m happy that I’m back in full control of my domain and my content again; lesson learnt.

Cheers, Posterous. Thanks for the platform! It rocked while it lasted.

And to Twitter, stop killing/maiming everything good you touch! TweetDeck, Posterous, Ribbon… You’re leaving a lot of digital detritus in your wake.

M&G’s spelling faux pas’ turn racist

Ha Ha! I know how easily this happens, but it’s quite funny to see it happen

FireFox’s inline spell checking has saved me many times from a similar fate of broadcasting my blunders to 1000′s!

I then resorted to ACSA’s website which I remember having this information, but their websites are currently down… *sigh*

Resorting to phoning ACSA, I ended up with the following number for flight information

086 72 77 888

This is ACSA’s automated flight information line and I was pleasantly surprised that it was able to provide me with the information I needed promptly and efficiently!

It uses a voice recognition system to guide you through choices which made no mistakes and was above all, fast.

While an 0867 number may be premium rated, it was no doubt far cheaper and definitely faster and less painful than holding for Kulula’s contact centre!

Now if ACSA they can just get their website working…

If you are using symbolic links to ZIP files on your server, they will download fine in Firefox but not Internet Explorer (IE) if you are using GZip compression in Apache (mod_deflate).

To fix this, turn off compression for ZIP files (which should not need to be compressed further anyway) by adding the following line to your Apache configuration file(s) in the appropriate location:

# Don’t compress ZIP files
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI .(?:zip)$ no-gzip dont-vary

That will stop ZIP files from being GZipped and help IE to not fall over itself…

Hope this saves you some time.

Every time I login to Telkom’s eServices site to get my phone bill, I am met by this smiling face, which is in an of itself a pleasant sight, but I am constantly perplexed as to what gender the figure in the photo is!

At first glance, they look male… but then… I look again and the fair complexion, short spiky hair and hint of pierced ears give one pause for thought… it could easily be a female with short hair…

I then vacillate between the genders until eventually I give up and log in so that I can stop thinking about it!

What gender do you think this person is?

Afterthought:
Perhaps that was Telkom’s intention in the first place; to have an image which all their clients can connect with on some level. A person who appears to be non-gender and non-race specific.

ABSA’s latest warning on their Internet Banking homepage takes Internet security perhaps a touch too far!

While I sadly am working for most of the day, the warm rays are motivating me to get off my ass and go for a run!

Chappies is looking well inviting…

F*ck you very much, Brian Hlongwa!
F*ck you for wasting the tax payers money on something this stupid!
F*ck you for complicating the names of these 3 hospitals!
F*ck you for the ludicrous “clean break from the past” that these name changes represent! (Please explain how Johannesburg Academic, Pretoria Academic and Coronation have anything to do with the past?!?!)
F*ck you for not hearing the DA’s objections!
F*ck you for alluding that people who would object to these name changes are not of sound mind!
F*ck you for stealing air from the intelligent people in this world!

You incompetent, money-wasting a$$hole!!