AMXL

My letter to Ken West (feel free to re-use - it would be good if some
people sent it to Ken West, and others to Vivian Lees, Creative
Entertainment Pty Ltd, Lvl1/4 Osborne St, South Yarra VIC 3141). It
costs $1.80 to send a letter to Australia via NZ Post - if anyone finds

If there is one thing that makes me cringe every time I see it, it is how the greedy try to feed lies to the poor so they can exploit them.

The below video ("CO2 is Green, Contact Your Senator Today") was made by an organisation set up by polluters for no other reason than to try to lie to people that carbon dioxide emissions are good for the planet.

Kevin Hague has just posted about the LabTests problems on FrogBlog: LabTests problems no surprise. One thing which is not suggested in his post, but which would be a good idea, would be for New Zealand to get a public lab tests system.

It is really inexcusable that lab testing is ever private. When the government contracts out to private companies, it means that the government is paying that company to make a profit.

'Pay the polluter' seems to be the New Zealand government's approach to dealing with climate change.
When the environment gets polluted, we all have to pay the costs:

Since the October elections, the NACT (National + ACT) government which was elected has been moving to push its policy agenda at record speed. These right wing parties won majority control in the house of representatives by painting the existing Labour-led government as wanting to run a 'nanny state' which was taxing the country into the ground.

However, the types of policies we have been seeing are not really what the people have voted for. I'm sure that the people who voted for National didn't intend vote for most of the poor policy which has been pushed through. At least, I voted for Richard Worth (National) to be the Epsom MP, and I continue to be shocked nearly every day at what National is doing to this country.

I have found that information on the Internet about which companies provide good service, and which companies provide bad service, are always useful to me when making decisions about who to do business with. So I have decided that I will start posting examples of when I encounter particularly good or particularly bad customer service here, so that I can return the favour to other fellow Internet users. Note that many of the reviews I post will be negative. This is not because I sit all day in my darkened lair plotting the demise of the companies that incurred my wrath, but instead out of a desire to warn the public of companies which it would be best to avoid doing business with.

I have had the misfortune of dealing with a few companies with bad customer service (and the pleasure of dealing with some much more civil customer service representatives as well), lately, and so have a backlog of tales to report. However, I will start with the troubles I have had with the domain registrar OnlineNIC.

I am not a direct customer of OnlineNIC. I was actually a customer of web host Cleverdot, who sell domain names (in this case, my domain name amxl.com). However, Cleverdot is not a domain name registrar themselves. They instead resell the services of OnlineNIC to provide the domain name. The problems I am having arise when OnlineNIC have blocked my attempts to move to another registrar.

The National / Maori / Act Party government has apparently been continuing its trend towards environment destroying policies.

According to Russel Norman of the Green Party, the government plans to drop funding for recycling bins in public places. This policy comes on the tail of a litany of eco-unfriendly policies announced since the new government came into power late last year.

I got a letter from Google today with the pin used to verify my address (it took about a month to arrive) for the Google AdSense program (I had previously had ads on the earlier version of the AMXL, but Google started sending public service advertisements only because it had been too long without the address being confirmed).

This raises questions about whether I should have adverts on this site. This site is not intended to be a profit-making endeavour, and putting on Google ads also means that Google can track people. On the other hand, if it gets linked to from a high-traffic site, it would be good to recoup the bandwidth costs.

As a compromise, I have made it so it is easy for people who don't want to see ads to turn them off completely. In this article I discuss how I did this using Drupal.

I'm sure many readers will have experienced the feeling of coming back from a break and feeling disconnected from the world because you haven't been following the news. That's exactly how I felt after coming back from a brief trip away from home. One of the first things I did when I got back was to refresh my RSS feeds and see what had been going on around the world. The single most alarming news item upon getting back was about the escalating violence between Israel and Palestine in the Gaza strip.`

I recently wrote the page about my objectives for existence. In this post I discuss what the personal implications of this are.