Getting annoyed and seeing a newt

This morning I scanned in some more pogs, did some cleaning, and started to prepare tomorrow's pog website update.

In the afternoon I finished preparing tomorrow's pog website update and re-did a video for my photo tips website. Clare and Billy were removing blanket weed and some of the Canadian pond weed from the pond, and found a nice little smooth newt, along with a few dragonfly and damselfly larvae.

In the evening I watched an episode of Kamen Rider with Bils, and uploaded the video I'd made earlier to youtube.

Getting the video done was very annoying. First MS Expression recorder didn't record the mouse cursor properly. (It recorded a fake cursor plus the real cursor. The fake cursor changed throughout the video, sometimes it was a pointer, sometimes it was a hand, and other times it was an hourglass.) I have had a similar problem with other screen recording programs in the past, in that they didn't record the real mouse cursor. But normally MS Expression recorder has been OK.

The next problem was that MS Expression encoder failed to encode the file about 3 times. And it takes a long time to do the encoding each time. Eventually I found a setting that it would encode the file at - CBR 1 pass.

I went on youtube to upload the new video as a replacement for the old version, but couldn't find a replace button. Doing some googling, it turned out that it didn't exist. You can only add new videos and delete old ones, not update old ones. Very strange decision.

So I uploaded the new video as a new video, and updated the link in my blog article to the new video's URL. I went to the video manager to delete the old video, but there was a message on the new video there, saying that it was too long. I clicked the link for more information, and followed the instructions to verify my account to allow uploads longer than 15 minutes.

But after verifying my account, the video was still removed. It seems that youtube just removes the video automatically, so you have to re-upload it after your account has been verified.

So I uploaded the video again, and updated the link in my blog article again to the new video. Finally it seems the video has uploaded OK. What a palaver!

Another annoying problem I had today was with paypal. I wanted to pay for something I bought on eBay by credit card. But paypal only had paypal balance and e-cheque as payment options. Doing some googling, it turned out that paypal don't let you pay by credit card when your paypal balance in the currency to be paid is greater than 0.

So after checking the paypal fees with withdrawal, (which are thankfully zero), I withdrew the GBP balance from paypal. With that done, and paypal showing my GBP balance as zero, I refreshed the payment options page. But it still only showed paypal balance and e-cheque as options.

I had to restart the ebay checkout from scratch, and then paypal did show credit card as a payment option. Very annoying how these websites just go out of their way to make things complicated and take longer than they should.