Diary

I think it has been a week since my last diary post. Quite a bit has been going on.

There were 2 tournaments on this week and as one was in Europe and one in America we have had tennis almost all day. The trading has been good although Thursday wasn’t an easy session overall. It isn’t long before the US Open starts at the end of this month and then the French Open is only a couple of weeks after that.

I had an email from the CEO of the SMTP service apologising for the delay in responding. They have authorised my domain. You may remember that they had rejected me initially and then refused to discuss it when I explained that the reason they gave for rejection was incorrect. I contacted their boss via Twitter. He did reply and asked me to send him details so he could look into it. I sent over the information but after 3 days he had neither replied to or acknowledged the email. I sent him a professional email and a little more shitty Twitter reply saying something along the lines of his lack of basic courtesy meant he and his business were a bad fit for my requirements. I didn’t expect to hear from them.

The surprising thing is that once you’re accepted their customer service is excellent! There have been a few teething problems as they tweak settings to get all emails delivered but their customer support guys are available on live chat straight away. I’m on a free trial for 30 days but I am very happy with the service so far.

The party house quietened back down after a couple of days. We’ll see how they are this weekend. The weather is cooler so sitting outside might not be as appealing. The heat made sitting in the office all day a little uncomfortable. I’ll invest in some sort of air conditioning for next summer. I’ll buy it during the winter when it’s cheaper. I’m always looking for value! I’ve had to make do with the office fan and I nicked the bedroom one too. After a while though in 34 degree heat the fans are just moving warm air around.

The Police turned up at the door yesterday morning. They wanted to take statements from both of us about the neighbour’s daughter being snatched 3 months ago. Three months! That took an hour and a half.

I’ll probably trade the Lexington matches tonight. Good luck if you get involved.

Stay safe. I keep wondering if we are still saying “Stay safe”. Things seem to be back to some sort of normal. I think we will have some degree of social distancing for many months.

 

It’s great to be back! As there is only WTA Palermo on this week it was a fairly gentle way of getting back into the swing of things. Also the fact that the first match started at 3pm gave me plenty of time to remember things like how I lay out the trading tips email and where I save the files to.

The Telegram room was nice and busy all day. Plenty of people signing up and the trades went mostly to plan.

Towards the end of the day came my only real irritation of the whole day. I pay for a dedicated IP to send the trading emails out. It isn’t cheap and they keep upping the price a little. I had found an alternative company who claimed they could provide the same service without a dedicated IP. Obviously that meant a huge reduction in price. I had gone through the sign up process. Changed DNS records and submitted my domain for approval. They rejected me! It seems they had looked at my domain and decided that I would be using the emails for marketing and therefore risked spam complaints.

The email said that if I thought they had assessed the domain incorrectly I could contact them and work with them to solve the issue. Fair enough. I emailed them on Sunday night explaining that there was zero risk of spam as the recipients had paid to receive the emails. I wasn’t trying to sell them anything as they had already paid me! I don’t use marketing emails. All my marketing is done on social media or on the blog. Twenty four hours later I had received nothing from them. I went on their chat support and told them the problem. The guy claimed that they HAD replied to me but they got a “soft bounce” response. I asked what was in the email. He said that they had rejected my domain. I sad that I had received that email but when they read my reply it would be clear that they had assessed it incorrectly.

He insisted that they had replied saying that they understood my business and it was rejected. I asked for a copy of their reply. He pasted some pidgin English text that I reckon he had just made up. I suggested that if they were unable to send an email to a gmail account when sending emails was sort of what they DO then it wasn’t a good first impression of their company.

I asked if they had a customer complaints department. Oh no we don’t have anything like that!. I have emailed support again but think I am wasting my time.

i took the dogs out a little early last night. I might avoid that time of night. We were walking down out street. there was a car parked half on the pavement and I saw someone walking up the street towards us. I held up the dogs to let the other person pass the car first. I didn’t see who it was until he was just before the car. It was the brother of one of our ex neighbours. His brother blames me for ruining his life. To be honest if I did ruin his life then he deserved it. I don’t know if I have posted about it on the blog in the past. Basically this 18 year old was a wannabe gangster. Thick as pigshit. He tried to give me some grief over the course of a few months because he thought I had reported him to the police for something. I hadn’t. Anyway I was waiting until I got him on his own but he always had some cronies with him. One day Sue was walking to Tesco and this prick and a mate decided to threaten her. Thankfully she had Charlie with her and they backed off very quickly.

Sue told me when she got home. Obviously my first reaction was that I wanted to break his legs. There was no proof of what he had done or the hassle he had been giving me. He wasn’t worth getting locked up for. I wrote a note to his mum. I explained what her son had been doing and that if he or she expected me to do nothing about or to him then they were wrong. To her credit, 2 days later she kicked him out and he was staying at the YMCA. I didn’t even know they still HAD YMCA’s!

Anyway his younger brother was crapping himself as he got nearer. He ended up tripping over his own feet and almost smashing his head on the car door. Judging by the state of his face he does that a lot. I walked on, laughing. Round the corner I saw the red lit up collar of Jacko the Corgi. I started shortening my dog leads as the little twat was bound to bounce over and wind them up. Not this time though. There was a car parked in the middle of the road. He had full beam on and was blocking the junction plus blocking anyone coming in either direction. Jacko’s owner was keeping him on the opposite pavement. We walked past the car as we were going up the side street that he was blocking. The driver looked pissed. As we went up the side street I hear a loud noise and a fully grown fat bloke came down the street on a skateboard. Fuck me we’d only been out 2 minutes! Is every mong in Worcester out tonight?

They’re all crazy out there. Stay safe.