nct

My car is due its NCT on Wednesday morning. I had a look at the NCT website and they publish their test stats, showing how many tests took place and the pass rate. What I found really interesting was that it doesn't change from one year to the next. Take a look at the graph I did comparing their data and the consistency between years:

I have about exactly 51% chance of passing first time. If I fail, I will have about exactly 90% chance of passing.
It will be interesting on Wednesday if I am in the lucky 51% or the unlucky 48% (±1%)

bye bye rte

On Friday I handed control of all the RTÉ twitter accounts back to RTÉ.

After what happened in the previous post, I didn't want the same happening to all the other accounts. I counted that there was over 15,000 people following all the different accounts I had running. So after a quick tweet or two to Mr. O'Shea, I found who I should be contacting about the transfer of details.

I got a two sentence email back from them four days later:

Dear Darran,
Thank you very much your email. We are happy to take over the ownership of these accounts and will appreciate if you send us all necessary details.
Best regards,

After over two years of providing the service and not abusing the names or the accounts for my own gain (quite easy to embed my own advertising into the feeds) or just holding onto them and doing nothing with them, all I got from RTÉ was that two sentence, poorly written email.

I sent over all the log in details and after a couple of days downtime the accounts have started spewing out news once again. Already there are problems with their new account feeds, which I would have picked up on and fixed straight away... lets see how @RTE_WebDesign handle it :-)

P.S. Can you change the email address on all the account or I might forcefully take them back!

worldscouting on twitter

So I created the Twitter Account @WorldScouting in July 2008 and had a custom RSS Feed to update it from January this year with any World Scouting News from the WOSM Website. It gained a number of followers, from the emails I received, over 1,350 Scouters started following the account. I even noticed that there was a link on the official scout.org website to follow them on Twitter, linking to that account.

This evening I received an email from Twitter themselves:

Hi
It has come to our attention that your Twitter account:
http://twitter.com/worldscouting
is in violation of the Twitter Rules:
* Trademark: We reserve the right to reclaim user names on behalf of businesses or individuals that hold legal claim or trademark on those user names. Accounts using business names and/or logos to mislead others will be permanently suspended.
In this case "trademark" is the issue. To avoid confusion regarding brand and/or official affiliation with the business/company in question, we've removed your profile from the site.
Thanks,
Twitter Support

That is fair enough... I put my hands up, it was me, I broke the rules. However my issue is the way this happened. Was it a request from WOSM to close the account or did Twitter come across the account themselves and act on their own? Was I given a chance to answer why I did it and if I wanted to transfer ownership over to WOSM?

A few weeks ago I did notice that a new account has been set up as @worldscouting2 and that account seems to have taken the place of my @WorldScouting. This new account has a classy new low resolution JPG instead of a PNG as an avatar giving a poor quality effect. They also don't capitalize their name properly (@worldscouting should be @WorldScouting)

That's only a little thing that annoys me, but the biggest annoyance is the fact that over one thousand people on Twitter who were getting frequent updates and retweeting them (over 140 retweets) now have no idea that the account that they were following does not exist anymore and they have to re-follow the new @WorldScouting to start receiving updates!!

My message to the guys in Geneva, I'm sorry I provided a service that you didn't offer at first. It wouldn't have been very hard to find out who ran the account. A quick tweet with "@worldscouting who runs this" would have gotten a reply from me. I would have happily handed over the log in credentials and you could have kept all the followers, after all I am a good Scout! Instead you went running to cut off the head, losing over 1,350 followers!

(On a side note, this gives me food for thought with all the other accounts I have... might go on a deleting spree!)

avoid ryanairs credit card fees

Mr. O'Leary will love me for this but I just booked a flight and saved paying the 5euro each way/per person charge for using my credit card. It is simple and here is how:

1. Head over to entropay.com and sign up. Create a virtural card and leave it at that for the moment.
2. Start booking your Ryanair flight.
3. Don't add any extra's or bags, just pay for the flight and the web check in fee of 5euro each way/per person.
4. When you get to the payment screen, select Visa Electron and watch as the total doesn't increase!
5. Head back over to EntroPay and load your card with the required amount, down to the cent. You will be charged a loading fee, but I will talk about that below*
6. Copy the details of your new virtural card and paste them into the Ryanair website where they ask you for your Visa Electron Card (I used my own address).
7. Click Pay!
8. Once the flight is confirmed go back to the main Ryanair homepage and click manage your booking using Option 3. You can then choose to add more bags or extras. You can use your main Credit Card now as it won't be charged the 5euro handling fee!

*EntroPay charge a fee of 4.95% to load the card. Booking your flight without bags etc will cut down the EntroPay charge as it is a percentage of the amount you are loading. You can pay for the bags with your normal credit card without any fees once the flight is booked.

Please note, this method is only beneficial if the cost of the flight and online check-in is under 202euro per person (404euro for two people etc..), mine was 77.32euro. I believe my maths is sound. Here is what I just paid for my flight using EntroPay:

I know it is only a 6.17euro saving, but because it is Ryanair it is even more sweeter!

On a side note, it has been a long time since a post here, but there have been many over on tumblr! I am also in a position to talk once again about the Amazing Teaching Council of Ireland.... but that's another post!