Film: The Golden Compass

OK. I haven't read the book upon which this film is based, however, I knew it was a popular-book-to-movie job, so set my expectations accordingly.

I was not disappointed. Err. That is to say - my expectations were appropriate - it was a load of total crap.

Having not read the book, it was bloody hard to follow (pardon my french), and frankly just awful. The Polar bear looked good - and thats about the most positive thing I can say.

Max Payne was almost a better movie. Well. Maybe not quite that bad - but you get the picture!

Windows Vista: NotePad - GoTo greyed out

This irritated me until I figured it out. Bit of a blond moment. Oh well.

If you are running Vista, and use notepad (e.g. view source of a web page to hunt down a glitch), you may discover that CTRL+G doesn't work - and the GoTo menu option (view menu) is greyed out.

If this is the case, turn off word-wrapping (format menu), and it'll be re-enabled. Doh.

So, that was Christmas..

.. and now back to work! Oh well - at least one more day off this week!

Hope you all had a very Merry Christmas..!

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everyone!

The mince pies are made - only the mammoth task of the 3 course family Xmas dinner remains.. wish me luck!

Do you pay VAT in Jersey?

I just noticed that one of our eCommerce websites seems to attract a little bit of traffic for queries such as "do jersey pay vat", and having had a quick look at the information which comes up for said search, thought I would write a quick post.

If you are selling TO Jersey from the mainland, the answer is NO. Jersey is outside of the VAT area (as are all the Channel Islands), so ideally you should take the VAT off (nigh impossible for people to claim back afterwards). I personally avoid buying from any retailers (online or otherwise) who do not do so.

If you are buying FROM Jersey, then there should be NO VAT charged on orders upto £17.99 in value (Small Value Exemption). Orders above this ARE liable to VAT, although very technically speaking it could be construed that it is the duty of the recipient to pay said tax - typically merchants will collect it from you at checkout and pay it (e.g. when goods are dispatched from Amazon's merchant in Jersey). If you are buying from an eCommerce site in Jersey, do check how they handle VAT on high value goods, though - you don't want to get a bill from HMRC!

There you go, thats the situation nicely cleared up!

Now you know, go to visit Jersey Craft Shop - they don't charge VAT on anything 17.99 or under!

Google, over the last week!

Ha, just when you thought I'd stopped boring you with tales of my google traffic. Some of the highlights of the last week have been:

wildfire grill jersey uk and wild fire grill jersey uk - slightly random keywords (use the UK radio button folks!), but my blog seems to rank top for them. Oops. Oh well, at least I wasn't too nasty! In fairness, I have heard some better things since, and we may go back for another go.

jerseysoup and jersey soup both showed up - again just variations on a theme. Can only assume that this is people look for information about the Jersey Soup Kitchen - either that or some odd local recipe?

All the others were the usual ncs2prov, site-to-site-vpn, proset and ncover (plus validation summary and updatepanel) queries!

TestDriven.NET, Visual Studio 2005 - No Xmas Cheer!

Ha. So, this morning (early, I hasten to add), I settled down to start work, only to find that Visual Studio 2005 had very thoughtfully eaten TestDriven.Net. I had a lovely greyed out "test with" option against my test project.

Oh well. A quick re-install of TestDriven, and we were up and running (after a mis-click on UAC permissions panel due to tea deprivation killed the first install).

Lets hope that is today's major frustration out of the way - although I still have food shopping to do, and urgently need to find some duck pancakes..