British Programmer living in Andorra

When a webmaster needs to move from one domain to another he or she needs to employ what is technically know as a 301 server redirect. Most people are familiar with an error 404.  This is a "Page Not Found" error code that is understood by your browser. There are many errors in the 400-499 range, and they all mean something (kinda expected) went wrong on the client you were connecting with.  There are many others but seen less often; for example, error 401 is "unauthorised" - maybe your username and password sent was incorrect. You can see all the well-known error codes on this site: http://www.restapitutorial.com/httpstatuscodes.html Status codes in the 300-399 are "redirection" codes; not errors.  They instruct the viewer (either a robot like Google's indexer, or a normal person using a browser) that they should in future not bother loading the original page, but go directly to the new page. Why might you want to redirect visitors to...

Andorra is outside the EU. The UK is currently inside the EU! That means if you get something delivered to Andorra from the UK you don't have to pay the 20% UK VAT. You will have to pay just 4.5% IGI in Andorra. The simplest method I have found is to order the item and have it directly transported to Andorra. Someone like the NA Grup (You see their trucks regularly around La Vella town) are good to the transportation. http://nagrup.com/ Thomas there speaks English. That way the selling company in the UK can simply not charge you any VAT on your Invoice as they have a delivery address outside the EU. The delivery can get expensive, so you might consider doing it yourself. In which case: The key phrase you are looking for the UK retailer is "VAT retail export scheme". You won't be able to get anything by mail order, eBay or any other internet retailers doing it; you will have to pick up whatever you buying in person. If they are member ...

Andorra is a very safe place.  You are likely to get it back. However, you might not.  I was skiing up a Pal (Vallnord) and was using my phone - a lovely shiny Lumia 950 with Dual SIM - about £600 retail - and must have mislaid in the toilets.   Looking back I think I left it on the sinks. Anyway I got to the car, realised my error - but by the time I got back; it was gone. I went to the office to report the loss, they have a log book there.  I then drove home.  When I returned I asked my wife to ring the phone - it was ringing, but no-one was picking up. I'd setup find my phone; so went to the website and this is what I saw. The phone was now at the town-end of the cable car!   I was hopeful that someone had picked it up and was returning it to the office at that end... But then why were they not picking up the phone? A while later it was further down the road - so that's it.  Someone (probably a spanish youth) has decided the phone...

Normally you have to drive on the right in Andorra. Duh. But us old Brits, well, we are bit quirky, so we drive on the left. If you want to feel like you're back in Blighty there is a 80m strip of road you can get your fix of left hand driving. Unfortunately the fix will be to just look at the cars driving as not anyone can drive here; you will need a pass for one of the blocks of flats on there, haha, as it is residents only. It's near the big ferriteria/freezer store, and Parc Central. At the end of that road is the bus station (soon to be closed).

So I started using Stack Overflow as a user back in 2013 – I’d lurked before, but never contributed. The collapse of the traffic on B&B UK meant that I’d finally taken the plunge and learnt .net.  This was a blessing in disguise, now 3 year later we are producing (together with MVC) the best website/applications I’ve ever made.   Anyway.. So I was playing around with some Java libs and this happened. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/148968/windows-batch-files-bat-vs-cmd/17024700 Well.. actually it didn’t.    I noticed within a few days that I must have been mistaken and it didn’t make any difference to the amount of memory. The thing is.. with SO you need some reputation to “highlight” questions – get them answered sooner.  You can’t pay or bribe or offer favours.  Nothing but reputation.  So I was getting a few pluses..  And my family needed me.  So I just left it.   Clock, Clock – Even though’...

Frustrating times here. " If you believe you're a citizen of the world, you're a citizen of nowhere. You don't understand what the very word "citizenship" means." -          Theresa May Conference Party Speech 2016 Well I tell you Mrs May.  I am a "Citizen of the World" and I am affronted by your narrow minded, xenophobic views. My mother was born in Finland to a family that had emigrated there from Sweden.  My Father was born in India to an Irishman and his French Indian wife.  I grew up in London but was able to freely move to nearby my wife's family in Spain when my children were born, and have had the privilege of moving to Andorra and enjoy all its advantages. We've not stopped either – I look at the World with unlimited vision.  If my business or my desires take me – we will move to wherever we are made to feel welcome and can contribute. Where I can tell you I won't be going, or considering set...

OK, this is a pretty bad day.  Normally I have a couple of pages but sometimes it comes like a tornado.  Today it seems themusiczoo.com has been targeted. It is not a brand I’m familiar with in Europe, but maybe better known in the US.   The Receipt(numbers).zips will contain a virus payload that will encrypt my documents and then the hackers will expect an anonymous randsomware payment by bitcoin to unlock it all.   As you can see I run a @catchall address on my old karlomeara.com and bendecko.com domains – companyname@bendecko.com etc.   Most of these aliases have been scraped from websites e.g. the paypal one – that one, for example, on an old site where I offered some products for sale:  It is used in the Url sent to PayPal.   Others, like the LinkedIn alias, were not.  I was aware of a leak from LinkedIn years before it was in the news – because I could see Spam like this addressed to the my LinkedIn alias ...