With some good luck, the bar staff had seen the car after it happened, seen it drive off and taken down the license plate and make and model of the car. I was also fortunate to have a number of witnesses who came up to me and told me bits of what happened and left contact details. And potentially hopefully, I was told CCTV footage should be available from cameras in the car park. So I spent the remainder of the night being very pissed off, waiting for the Police to show. Unfortunately they did not. They did ring back and say to go to my local station to report the incident, and pick up a self claim form.

So I filled in my report form, called the insurance company and made a start on all the boring stuff after a car accident. I was asked to take my car for assessment in Lye which I did. The initial prognosis from the engineer was it was close to a total loss. It took another few days for the insurance company to confirm this to me, and then a few more days before it was collected.

There is some good news coming from this. I took out some additional policies on the car, one for a Hire Car in the event of a write-off, which gives us a car for 3 weeks to use. Very helpful for getting around to car dealerships. And one for Top Up Cover, to pay out an additional sum in the event of a write off. We also had GAP Insurance, that covers us for the difference between the value of the settlement, and the loan settlement amount. Although it looks like we won’t need this.

So at this moment, I am waiting, hoping that the other driver will now accept liability, and my insurance company can claim their costs back off them, and I can get my excess back. And that the Police pursue the issue and that the driver is held accountable in some way for the trouble s/he has caused me.

And now, we’re getting a new car, which I’m actually excited about. We’re getting a Mazda, a brand of car I never thought I’d own, nor be able to afford, but its a lovely little car, feels great to drive, and I look forward to driving around in it.

I am usually sceptical and cautious over the additional policies they sell with car insurance, but in this case, it seems to have paid off.

Another wonderful feature is the Reports you can get. On the Overview page, you have access a couple of PDF reports of your finances, showing current balances, income and expense levels over a number of months, as well as charts breaking down your spending. These are perfect to review or share with a spouse to see how spending is going, or even take to the meeting with the mortgage advisor or bank manager.

The final piece of the puzzle is the iPhone app. It lets you login and view this information with a native app (Buxfer has an app but its just a Webkit view to the mobile website), keep track of bugdets, view alerts, notifying you when you’ve had large transactions you want to monitor, as well as maintain the Cash transaction log. This is basically a separate account that is filled with cash values when you mark another transaction as a ATM/Cash Withdrawl. To balance this account, you need to enter in all the purchases you make with that cash. Its a great way to monitor that spending you don’t see on bank statements, when you buy a coffee with change, or a few groceries with a tenner. However after my first import, I had £50 in my cash account which I have no clue where I spent so can’t categorise. If you accept that downfall, and just put a debit in to zero-out the account, then you can track your spending from the day you start using it.

So does it come up to scratch with Mint.com? Well I think so. The fact I get push notifications when it picks up a large transaction is great, or when my balance drops too low, the fact I can track my little purchases easily is great, and its very nice to be able to see a overview of my financial situation in one place.

If you can get past handing over your bank login information, then this is a great service to use.

Travel Details

I booked my flights and hotels individually as I couldn’t find any decent package deals that suited our length of stay and travel dates. It seemed to be cheapest for us to travel on a Saturday evening, and we stayed for 5 nights.

Flights: I booked them online direct through American Airlines’ website. It was easy enough to do.  You are given a choice of seats in coach, and using SeatGuru.com, I chose the apparent best seats available. We sat near the back, in the first row of 4 seats in the middle. It means your screen and table are in the seat arm rest, which is kinda nice, although my iPhone headphones didn’t work with the headphone socket. Meals were average, expected for coach travel, so you may want to bring something yourself.

Hotels: I booked mine on Expedia.co.uk, getting Nectar points in the process. We stayed at the new Holiday Inn in Long Island, on 29th St. Its about a 10 minute subway trip into Manhattan, only a few minutes walk from 39th Avenue stop on the N/W lines.

Getting Around: We opted for the $25 week-long travel card when we arrived, and certainly got our use out of it. The subways are clean, and were surprisingly pleasant. Carriages seemed more spacious than the London Underground, and people were all kind. We only took a taxi ride once, mainly to avoid getting drenched by rain late at night. I think the cost was fairly reasonable considering we drove from the East Village, over to Queens/Long Island.
We also did a fair amount of walking around the city, rather than getting the subway a few blocks. It wasn’t too bad at all. Once you work out which direction the roads go, navigating gets easier. Best to remember avenues run north to south, and streets run east to west.

Airport Travel: We drive to Heathrow, parked at a nearby airport parking place, for £53 for the whole trip. They provided a coach to your terminal, and picked you up when you get back.  We flew to JFK, and from there, once through border control (having an photo and thumbprint taken) we rode the Airtrain ($5) to Jamaica Central where we caught the “E” to Queens Plaza. This dropped us on 35th Av/29th Street so it was a few blocks walk to the hotel from there. We did the same going back, although when we go again, we’ll probably get a taxi to the airport as we were supporting a few extra bags, and pretty worn out.

Attractions: We went to the Empire State Building (nice views, long queues, as in 5 before you even got upstairs), Museum of Modern Art (bit of a disappointment for us) , American Museum of Natural History (nothing like Night at the Museum but still very good), walked through Central Park, took the Staten Island Ferry to see the Statue of Liberty (free), walked down 5th Avenue and did some shopping, went to Times Square, Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, 2 of the 3 Crumpler shops, went to the financial district and saw the site of the Two Towers, and probably some other stuff I forget. Overall, most stuff was good. The ESB was $20 per person, and offered audio tours. We didn’t bother as we just wanted to see the city. The MoMA was too modern and irreverant for my tastes, although the photography section was good. Central Park was gorgeous. It was totally safe, really nice, and we stopped for a drink and snack by one of the lakes.

Meals: We ate breakfast at the hotel about 4 times, which cost about $30 a day for the two of us. Not particularly cheap but it was good food. We had a lot of quick foods for lunch, ate at the Candle 79 vegan restaurant one night. They were really pleasent and very accomodating to us, and other patrons. Not a bad word to say about them.

Tips

1. Plan your journey from the airport to your hotel. Find the local subways stations, and if its more than a few blocks, get a taxi. We wasted 20 mins going in the wrong direction before finding the right road to get to our hotel
2. Buy a travel card. It will save you money.
3. Don’t believe all New Yorkers are rude and in a hurry. Everyone we met was kind and friendly, and really helpful to everyone. Someone stopped in the street to ask if we were lost. Lovely people.
4. Get a Travel Money Card from the Post Office. Its easier and quicker than Travellers Cheques. And take some cash with you. You’ll need it for the Airtrain/Subway.
5. Get a decent map.
6. Plan where the things you wanna see are, and plan days around particular areas. We spent a lot of time going from one part of the city to another.
7. Don’t forget the prices you see are EXCLUDING sales tax. This is about 8% so you need to take that into account.
8. Tips. Tipping is fairly generous so read online or in a proper guide to learn the right tipping etiquite.
9. Plan at least 5 nights. Since we arrived so late, we pretty much had 4 and a half days for a 5 night stay.
10. Have fun. Don’t try to carry too much. Drink plenty.

So thats about it.  Let me know if you have any other questions. But you will love it, and like us, probably want to go back really soon!

Jude Alex Wheeler

Originally uploaded by domster83

Quick post here to say welcome to my new nephew, Jude Wheeler. He came into the world on friday at about 11.30 and joined his brother Reuben. Mother and baby are all fine. Looking forward to seeing him in the next few weeks.

Also just wanted to mention I’ve started a 365 on Flickr, that is a photo a day of me, not necessarily my face, but I’ll be in that photo somewhere. I’m hoping to learn some new techniques and get on with photoshop along the way. Check that out here

2009 will be a bigger year for blogging for me. I’ll try and do at least one a week if I can, and get more interesting for those of you who read this. 

So what will 2009 bring for me? Hopefully a new house, hopefully a few less job changes and a bit more job security. Hopefully I’ll be able to clear some credit card debt. I may even go so far as publishing some figures on my debt and how I get on with it month on month. Nothing too detailed, just total numbers. 

I’m also hoping to get some more photography into my life, and a bit more travel if I can. I’d like to broaden my cooking horizons and take a stand on a few things in life. How will this all go? God only knows. Best intentions don’t count for much really.

Either way, whether or not the changing of the year means anything, its always a good excuse to make some new changes. Not resolutions as they hold as much value as a paper balloon, but perhaps the promise to myself to make things a bit better for myself and others around me.

And whatever you wish for and aim towards in 2009, good luck! Let me know how you get on.

• Vegan/Vegetarian cafe
• Recording studio for musicians
• Office space for small companies/design firms that need somewhere cheap and easy to work
• Bloggers cafe/lounge

The last item is the one I thought the most about. I have an idea that I would love to get open one day. Allow me to expand if you will.

The idea is a basic one. Its a coffee lounge that’s more aimed towards the home workers/mobile workers, the people who work from laptops where ever Wifi is available. Its a place where there are plenty of large tables to sit down at, comfy seats, power sockets, wifi (perhaps free). And you could expand that really. Have lockers for people to put their laptops if they need to pop out for half an hour, offer printing facilities at a small cost, offer PO box services, allowing people to get packages delivered.

The theory behind this was that people who can work anywhere, may not want to work from home, they might want to spend it somewhere else, with other people, but still be able to get everything done that they need to. You could come here and spend the whole day working away, get food and drink, and get that project or web page sorted.

Now this may not be a great idea. But the theory is to play on not the people on their way to work, but the people who want to sit and work in a friendly environment, where they can feel safe, and be surrounded by similar people.

I suppose my hopes are that some of these buildings could be reused and help to build up a strong sense of independence in Birmingham, where small businesses can get a good start. It could be a hive of artistic, musical, creative thinking folks. You could have community centres for groups to meet, have a flea market for people to swap and sell things to people who would appreciate them.

I realise that this is difficult to get started. You need capital to buy these buildings, make sure they’re safe, kit them out with all the necessary gear, and of course get the work out to the people you are targetting to get people to come. I would like to build on this idea if possible.

If anyone has any ideas, suggestions, or information that would be useful, please do leave me a comment.

As I said before, I’m currently impending redundancy, and this week, we reached the end of the consultancy period. What does that mean? Well they are now at free liberty to give us our 30 days notice at any point. There has to be some formal dismissal hearing, and then 48 hours, but basically we’ll be going soon.

What does that mean for me? Well of course I’m looking for a new job. I wanna take this as an opportunity to get out of my industry and into IT. So I’m spending my time looking at IT Technician, Help desk jobs, anything that I can get for a good starting job, where I can do hardware and software repairs, and if possible, some travel.

I think I wanna get into network admin. At least that’s what I feel like I wanna do so I’ll follow that path unless my heart says otherwise.

So if you’re interested in hiring an aspiring IT Technician, who is A+ certified and working on his Network+, then please drop me a note and make me an offer.

Otherwise, I’ll keep trawling those online job search sites, and watching the hours tick away at work, as the share price drops, as well as my level of concentration and focus.

Until then, I’ll be working more on the new site, perfecting the theme for launch. Which hopefully won’t be too many more weeks away.

And speaking of that, is there anyway of getting my posts on the old blog to auto-forward to the new blog? Maybe not but worth asking. I’d just like to drive traffic away from the old, and make sure I’m still getting visitors to the new one for the same searches. Leave me a note in the comments.

So what did I do today? Well besides checking my account to see that I had been paid, I read some of Getting Things Done by David Allen. I also looked on Flickr and on some blogs for Moleskine ideas.

I got my first Moleskine at Christmas and haven’t actually done anything with it yet. But today I started on that. I printed out  a handy year planner, as well as setting up some pages. To keep in line with GTD ideas, I’ve got my Next Actions page, Someday/Maybe lists, as well as a Douglas Furs page where I have made some notes about the band. Have a look at the photos below.

I’m gonna try and keep this up to date as best I can, and use it as much as possible. At first I felt bad about using it for such reasons but then I saw some photos on flickr of peoples piles of Moleskines and just thought “Well I can get another one a year down the line”.

For me, this means that I will get my 1 month notice either in March or April. During that time, we’ll have to pass on our group schemes to Manchester as they all get centralised up there. And then we will probably have to clear out the office, so relocate files, remove the literature supplies we have, the desks, computers, switches and servers, phones, chairs, and everything else. Everyone else in the office is in the same boat, so we’ll all be looking for new jobs.

I guess I’m in a slightly better position as I’m already looking for new jobs in IT. But everyone else will have to adjust to the fact that we’re being fired, and then get into job searching mode.

In terms of redundancy pay, since I’ve been there for 19 months, I should get about 5 weeks pay, which isn’t fab, but its better than nothing and it should tide me over till I can get another job.

In the mean time, I’m sure business will dry up, and the attitude in the office will be low. No one is going to have the spirit to work particularly hard, which will make things more difficult.

So over the next few months I’ll be blogging a bit more about my job, and keeping you reader(s) up to date with the comings and goings of my job. And of course my hunt for a new job. For now, I’m just dealing with it, and thinking about my trip to Athens that I will probably never get.

For information, it took me abotu 25 mins to go through the 90 multiple-choice questions, and then another 20 to review them. I passed with a 875/900 so a whopping 97%! Pretty good eh!

Well thanks to New Horizons on Edmund Street for putting up with me. Or at least taking my money for the exam!

From here, its job searches. But all thats gonna wait till the weekend.