On previous posts I forgot to mention. Surveys were ordered by me via our lenders last week. Survey was done on friday a few days after offer. Results are in today so today is a busy day. Surveys all ok. Searches all ok. Draft contract is ok.

We give the thumbs up to our solicitor to proceed to exchange. We suggest a completion date of July 1st.

Then, there is another conveyancing oddity. These contracts seem to have a standard 10% ‘deposit’ that is paid to the other party should one party fail to complete following exchange. What could stop you completing? well there are a couple of searches for bankruptcy and some land registry stuff again that the solicitor will do on behalf of the buyer’s lender but only after exchange. This is bonkers. They wait until after you are commited to 10% and just before completion before finding out if you have a nasty surprise in store (perhaps you are a victim of ID theft and do not know it yet). Well, we do not need that kind of surprise thanks very much so I ask my solicitor how much to do these searches on my behalf and do them again after exchange on my lender’s behalf? I could barely believe the answer. £4. Yep, £4. So for £4 I can avoid having a nasty surprise that would put us in the hole for 10% of the purchase price. I order the searches. All clear as expected but you know what, I’ll be able to sleep now after exchange.

They don’t. Tomorrow is Tuesday. If we do not exchange contracts by Friday it may be impossible to get the boys into their new school before summer break and certainly any appeal will be delayed greatly. Neither are show stoppers and it’s true we may be being a little intense about the whole thing but a big part of our reason for moving inevitably is to benefit our children. Not having contact with their new peer groups before Summer is going to make nurturing new friendships over the holidays difficult.

At least the searches are ordered. Word from the council is these should arrive early next week, some 5 days within their usual ‘estimate’. So, with any luck and a following wind the vendor’s solicitor will return from holiday refreshed, invigorated and just gagging to sell us a house.

It’s going to be a long weekend. There doesn’t seem to be anything else we can do. The next stage is a draft contract from the vendor’s solicitor. All we can do is wait.

http://www.robinmalau.com/how-to-remove-rss-feeds-from-outlook-2007/

Shows how to remove RSS feeds from outlook 2007 when you think you’ve already removed them and can no longer see them under the RSS folder!

I’d followed all the guides, Googled myself half to death and everything, I mean EVERYTHING looked right.

My provisioning profile used a wildcard app id.

Eventually I decided that XCode may not be using the right profile even though it SAID it was and thats when I found this.

http://www.frogameleon.com/blog/iphone-sdk-codesign-error-a-valid-provisioning-profile-is-required-for-product-type-application-in-sdk-device-iphone-os-22

That post did indeed show that the profile was blank. This enabled me to get the right profile in use for the sample app I was working in. However, it still complained about the mismatch in the app id but this time the error message was a bit more helpful.

Although I never got this from any of the documentation, and even though I know the answer now, the videos and Apple’s documentation STILL doesn’t lead me to this conclusion, here’s what my problem finally was:

In my provisioning profile I’d used app id com.jobb.*

This has of course been prefixed with a weired id so it actually looked had an alphanumeric prefix before it along the lines of ABCDEF.com.jobb.*

Everything I read lead me to believe that my bundle id in the info plist for my app should be set to this.

Not the case though. The bundle name just needs to be com.jobble.appname

Although XCode has screwed up my project initially, fixing that lead me to this simple solution.

To test my new found oh-so-obvious knowledge I created a new app from scratch, set the bundle name to com.jobbl.testapp2 and built it straight to my phone without any problems.

So, a mere 6 months after I got my developer certificate I finally have the ability to deploy dev versions direct to the phone. Now I just have to go back to learning objective C and try to come up with some interesting App.

And, just as my friend Craig told me… the answer when I find it is so obvious and so sensible that I can scarcely believe I ever had the problem.

Perhaps this post will help someone. Tonight’s effort was three hours straight and there have been several nights spent on this problem. So, I shall retire to my bed bathed in the warm smugness of having finally figured out something that should never have needed figuring!

It’s great. It’s basically the same as Facebook but instead of the ability to type status updates you are only able to select from the following list.

• “I’m bored”
• “I’m drunk”
• “I’m going to get drunk”
• “I’m going to be bored”
• “I was bored, now I’m drunk and bored”
• “Facebaulk is so boring I want to vomit”
• “I wish I was drunk”
• “I’m going out”
• “I went out, it was boring, I’m drunk”
• “OMG I’m so bored!”

It also has an option to automatically pick one of the above and post it at 3am for those nights when you are just too bored or too drunk to actually type.

I think it’s a winner.

“How do you know it’s a hoax?”

Well, I don’t KNOW it is a hoax. I believe it is a hoax though. Because to believe it is true also requires me to believe that…

Criminals the world over have tried a slight variation on a theme and the would-be-victims have relayed their worrysome ordeal in such a way that it has found its way into a rich variety of email forms with a remarkable number of words and phrases in common.

Or, there is only a small band of dedicated criminals trying the same scam whilst globetrotting and, judging by the prodigious number of near-misses, being very bad at the criminal game while still being able to fund their travels. A “Whicker’s Gang” if you will. If an email comes to light where the victim is duped by a small group of elderly, charming men wearing horn rimmed glasses and smart blazers you’ll know I’m right.

Or, this is a crime pandemic that Interpol, The FBI, our own home office and regional police forces deem so unimportant that none of us have ever seen a poster, tv ad, crimestoppers, window sticker or a sign in a car park or an appeal from whoever that bloke is who says “Don’t have nightmares”.

Or, despite the fact that there are apparently several perpetrators, instead of rushing the victim and bundling them into the car they send just one of their number to go do it using some Ether and a dubious story. Lots of things to go wrong there. For one thing, Ether is heavier than air so you will need to give it a pretty good sniff to make sure it gets up your snozzle instead of meandering over the neck of the bottle and falling to the floor; secondly – and I expect to be put right by some medical type on the cc list, but what the hell, let’s live dangerously – my lay person’s understanding of Ether is that one gets high, possibly in an explosive and troubling way for some time before becoming compliant and finally, helpless and unconscious. Not very efficient on the abduction front is it?

So, that’s why I (and people who collect these things and put them on hoax slayer et al to help others) believe it’s a hoax. Because it just doesn’t sound plausible. Does anyone think it does sound plausible, really?

No offence to Alan Whicker by the way. I like him. I’m sure if one were to be abducted in the style of Alan Whicker it would be charming and he’d probably apologise afterwards. Of course he’d probably use sherry instead of Ether.