Over the past few days in Britain there has been a story about a gay couple who were thrown out of a pub for kissing. The pub has strategically avoided saying it is because the couple were gay but whether or not that is a problem is down to their own prejudices... however, they have missed a massive marketing opportunity by reacting defensively and clamming up about the situation. Their one representative, according to the news articles, seemed to be saying that they would have stopped a straight couple from kissing as well but this is not a positive for their business and is clearly just a stab at appearing to uphold equality values. Many local people were outraged at the gay couple being booted out so organised a 'kiss-in' where, reportedly, 700 people agreed to participate. Seven hundred people! FOR FREE! Due to this overwhelming protest they have closed their doors and will make no money tonight and have probably become unpopular with the locals because they have caused so much trouble.

So what should the pub company have done?

First: Regardless of why the particular landlord kicked out the couple they should have made a public announcement apologising for the pair being thrown out and either stating their rules clearly (if they do currently have rules that are fair on this issue) or send the landlord off for "training" then stand an open invite for all couples to come back. This would have kept them open today by negating the need for the protest entirely.

Second: If they didn't do my first point or if that didn't work they should have shut shop earlier this afternoon, bought a lot of love-heart balloons and whatever valentine's day leftovers they can find and decorated the pub. Following this they should then have posted on the Facebook group for the 'kiss-in' an apology for the misunderstanding and openly invited them to join in on this ad-hock late valentines evening. They should have also contacted local papers (plus the BBC) to make an open invite to all couples.

They would have had a LOT of interest, a LOT of revenue, a fantastic public image and probably won a huge amount of customer loyalty.

The stories:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-13087715

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-13096519

I was going to write a program to act as a life counter and I considered adding other features but then I realised that there was no need to go to all that trouble for a simple life counter when you have Excel/OpenOffice installed. I just spenta few minutes listening to some random dubstep throwing this together. It looks horrible but hey, you can spruce it up.

MTG Life Counter.xls (25.00 kb)

This ancient saying seems to, for a lot of people, be a complete mystery but it means “be the example.” At first this may seem a little complicated but it is essentially a suggestion to act in the way you would like others to act or how you believe it would be best for others to act.

For example, if you believe in peace above all else but you get aggressive because your sports team doesn’t win the game then you are not “becoming the path.” If your sports team lost and you were angry but knew that you were angry, understood why and consciously decided to accept it and move on you would be on the path to – and ‘be’ the path to – enlightenment.

In the same vain, if you believed in preserving life but chose not to save yourself or others in a crisis then you would not “be the path”. If you were under attack and chose to retaliate to save yourself and understood your decision to do so then you would “be the path”.

It is a very simple concept that is shrouded in thousands of years of mysticism. To grow beyond simple needs and vengeful desires you need to acknowledge, decide and move on.

Quite a while ago I made a pretty simple Excel spreadsheet to help me manage my finances and its proved very useful. During the past two years I have spent time living on my own where I had to sort out my utilities bills, food, insurances and so on so this really helped me keep track of how much money I was spending and when I was spending too much! I think this might be useful to other people so here it is, attached to this post with example data, if you think it'll help please feel free to download and make a comment 

Instructions

I'm sure there'll be a lot of similar things out there but I think the one I've made is very simple to understand. In the "Bank Balance (Detail)" worksheet you simply paste in a downloaded version of your bank statement. Most banks let you export the last 3 months of data in CSV format but you might need to organise the columns first. Col F is what's going OUT of your account while Col G is what's paid IN and H is the final balance.

The Graph will automatically populate for the area I've selected but you can change this by right clicking the graph and choosing "Source Data" then selecting a larger/smaller area under Series - Values. If you use this spreadsheet for a long time like I do then it'll be helpful to make a new graph per year.

The first worksheet is where you type in the information from your payslip and your regular outgoings then it will tell you if you're spending too much or too little. If you're just playing around with the income then I recommend taking a look at the Salary Calculator which gives a good approximation of how much tax and national insurance you'll pay at any given income.

Public Demo.xls (49.50 kb)

Beware of TV Licensing!

I'm so annoyed at this that I just have to say something. First off you go to http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/ and discover that the license costs £145.50 which you can pay in monthly instalments of £12.13... or so they say. When you actually start paying the license you discover that for the first 6 months they take double this amount so you actually pay for the full license in just half a year. It does tell you this but only if you read the information on the website very carefully! If you don't realise this is going to happen it can be quite a shock but once the first 6 months are over they go down to charging you the ~£12 every month so in one year you have paid for 18 months of service.

I have moved since getting the license and no longer require it so I am due a refund as I've paid for TV time that I am not going to use but, as you would expect, getting a refund is not easy. First you have to fill out an online form https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/update/refund/applyForRefund.aspx which will then tell you to print it but I don't own a printer! So I needed to contact them which you can only do online https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/contact-us/index.aspx but that tries to divert you from actually getting any answers and lands you in just the FAQ section. You have to click through another step to send the question off to their support department but I've done that several times already and tried calling their call centre. That's the best part... When you dial their help line 0300 790 6131 you get about five levels of an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) each saying "Press 5 for other options" but none of these mention refunds so you finally get to "Press 2 for everything else" which then says "All of our operators are busy, please try again later" THEN HANGS UP!! What a terribly run business! It is standard for companies to make cancelling and getting refunds difficult but it shouldn't be and there should be legislation against it.

For anyone that has reached this article trying to find out about TV Licensing here is some information (copied directly from their contact form):

By phone

Call centre number: 0300 790 6131
Minicom number: 0300 790 6050

Opening hours: 
08:30 – 18:00 Mon-Fri 
08:30 – 13:00 Sat 
Closed Sundays & Bank Holidays.

By post

TV Licensing, Bristol, BS98 1TL

If/when you need to get a little more serious with the TV Licensing issue here is all of the complaint information (copied from their complaint's section):

See http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/about/viewcontent.aspx?id=AB7&iqdocumentid=AB7 for more info and addresses to write to if you need to take your complaint up even further.

So here it is... I finally have some blogging software set up.

I spent ages trying to get WordPress working but PHP was having none of it. Not one little bit. It should wouldn't talk to MySQL at all! So I uninstalled PHP, MySQL and deleted WordPress then found this gem of a system called dotnetblogengine. So far it seems to be really good and as it is an open source .NET application I can modify it should I ever need to :)

I do intend this to be a technical blog but we'll see what happens.