That Net Site

RBA and Banks Interest Rates Gap

As per my post on the 4th of May the major banks are increasing the gap between the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) cash rate and the Interest rates they charge their customers.  Looking over the data from the year 2000 we can see how the rates gap has gone from a steady 180 percentage points (1.8%) difference to now a whopping 340 percentage points (3.4%) difference.  It is no wonder why the banks are continually making massive and quite obscene profits, especially as they continue to also charge excessive fees.

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Hi everyone, please be patient if I have not yet been able to respond to any of your comments, we have had some heavy storms through our location cutting us off with no power and other services.  Plus also local storm damage such as trees down over fences and needing to clean up before the next storm due tonight.

On top of that my health is an ongoing issue which more often that I would like makes it difficult to make the time to come online and answer requests for helps, especially in the SobiPro post.  I will get to your comments and questions, just be patient please or if you need more urgent help you may wish to ask for help on the SobiPro forums and take out a one month membership when you have all your questions ready to ask, then you can go through them all in that one month.

So again, sorry about my absence and the delays in responding but just note I do have them on my list of ‘when I can get to them’.  Thanks for your understanding.

The RBA rate drop vs what the banks are providing

The last few interest rate changes by the RBA since late 2011 and now in May 2012 has seen the banks move away from the RBA rate changes and go it alone and set their own rate changes, even to the point of lifting rates when there has been no rate change made by the RBA.

While the banks continually post multi Billion dollar profits they cry poor as costs to provide banking are now apparently higher now, even though we all seem to be paying larger amounts of fees to use their most basic services. Read the rest of this post »

I admit I was initially against the idea of the NBN mainly due to the overall cost and a feeling that the money could be used for much more, for example piping water from the North West to the South West of Western Australia, which would definitely solve our water issues in WA.  Now however I have grown to accept the NBN and now look forward to its installation…. whenever that will be.

Living in a rural location we are listed as not getting fibre to our town, even though another town only 34 kms away is getting fibre.  I made a case for our town to get fibre  to my local shire (Boyup Brook Shire) but I have not seen any action on this at all so it must be of no importance to the shire… well we will see once its installed everywhere else if it is or not.  Even if we were to get fibre in town our own property would still not be getting fibre.  Wireless will be our only option, which is still better than satellite. Read the rest of this post »

It would seem that I have a drought on making posts to my blog, not because of what I want to write about and if it is a more negative or positive discussion but more a case of being ill for much of the start of the year so that has resulted in fewer to no additional posts.  I have however read and replied to comments in existing posts when I have been able to.  If you have a topic you would like me to write about, then let me know and I will see what I can put together.  Keep happy everyone

Just a quick post to say welcome everyone to my site for 2012.  This year I hope to focus more on positive themes since I have had a couple of people provide comments to me that many of my posts are more tendered towards the negative rather than the positive.  Right or wrong I will endeavour to change that pattern and be more positive for most (if nor all) of my posts for 2012.  If you have a topic you would like me to write about then please drop me a line and I will certainly take a look at it if the subject matter is of interest to me.  Keep safe everyone and have a great 2012.

I am not really against javascript but I do prefer to not use it when I can do the same with other coding methods like html, css and php.  There are a lot of scripts and examples to enable the random loading of an image each time a page loads, however most of them use javascript.  While they work, they relied not only on javascript but also that the viewer of the page was running javascript. Many people turn javascript off for fear of being hacked, hijacked or something else, which for 99.9% of the time will not happen, but paranoia is there with quite a few .

I am still relatively new to php, but I am learning the more I play with it.  While learning I came across the rand function which gave me some ideas when combining it with an echo.  Could I use php to look for images in a folder, randomly select one of them and then display it.  It sure could and it is very easy to do, you can do it as an ‘img src’ or even css background. Read the rest of this post »

I know I have said it before but this time I will not be re-opening this issue again.  It has gone on too long and it is very clear that for everything that I have done and tried to do has been in vain with no positive outcome.  The only outcome has been an aggravation to my own illness and a letter from Rebekah O’Flaherty saying I can leave Telstra with no penalty if I am still not happy with the no positive news on wireless plans with Telstra.  Rebekah has made it very clear to me my quest will not yield any results, is being totally ignored and not taken on board and if I don’t like it too bad and leave.  Which would be fine if I could get a service from another provider, which I cannot.  Add to this my wifey’s request I stop the action with Telstra as it is causing my health to deteriorate further due to the stress and negativity from responses from Telstra and the way in which Telstra are treating me on their blog (that being no longer posting any of my comments).

So that is it, no more comments from me about this subject and no more feedback posts to Telstra.  It is clear they do not want my comments and have now chosen to dismiss any and all comments. feedback and questions from me personally.

The End!

I am not against anyone making money from their great work and the developers of SobiPro are no exception.  However I do believe that if you are providing a solution that is supposedly for free that it comes with some basic documentation on how to use the product.  However to access this basic documentation a ‘club’ membership is required which I feel is wrong, but that is only my view, yours may be different.  During my use of SobiPro I have been compiling a list of how to references on using the SobiPro Template framework and the template language (XSL) used.

UPDATE: Yesterday I decided to trial a Club Membership and bought a 1 month membership to see what the documentation was like, and to be honest I was pleasantly surprised and really do believe that a 1 or 3 month membership is worth it as the documentation is very good.  It fills the gap between what I already knew and what I have been trying to work out.  So if you can afford a single months membership I suggest you get it, or better yet a 3 month membership.  The only thing that they need to consider adding is an upgrade path from a Bronze to Silver to Gold which I think will assure ongoing payments by users as they notice the true value of the documentation. 

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I am not usually one to overly praise a template design but I must make a note of this one as in my view it is the most simple, visually nice and best administration template I have ever used since using Joomla (since it split from Mambo).  Mission Control by Rocket Theme is an elegant administration template that is very well layed out, easy to identify where each part of the admin side of Joomla is and far better for the novice user of any Joomla web site.  It is now my default Administration template for all Joomla sites I have, use and develop.

While the default and standard administration template for Joomla is fine it is more targetted towards a user that really knows Joomla, which for me is fine but for many others it can be daunting and even a little scary to use (based on comments from non Joomla users).  I have tried many other administration templates, including the Adminpraise templates which are quite good as well, however the Mission Control template is less cluttered, better layed out and just easier to use for the novice to even the most expert Joomla user.

I need to make a note I have been a great fan of Rocket Theme templates for quite some time, having a full paid membership with them for about 4 years, however I dropped membership earlier this year simply because they now solely use the Gantry system, which I personally don’t like.  That is not to say the system is not good it just means itis not good for me personally.  I prefer to have control of the framework myself.

The Mission Control template is absolutely 100% free and is available for both Joomla 1.5 and Joomla 1.6, hopefully they will continue to maintain it for the upcoming Joomla 1.7 and then 1.8, which I am sure they will.

Instead of me showing every aspect of the theme I think it is best for you to get it and install it yourself, try it out and I am sure you too will think that this is one of, if not the best admin template for Joomla so far.

Rocket Theme – Mission Control Administration template