Last Sunday, our friend, Gordon, took some photos of me and Katie for our wedding invites. He’s been putting some up on Flickr as he’s been editing them, and I wanted to point to this one, which I really like. And that in itself is surprising since because generally I don’t like photos with me smiling. But this one’s nice.


Credit: eightball

If you’ve been following my tweets, you probably already know about my car. If not, read on.
Two weeks ago, we were at our usual Monday night pub quiz. We arrived at 8 after picking up some groceries. The quiz started at 9pm as usual, and at about 9.10, they made an announcement, that slowly filled me with dread. “Would the owner of a Toyota Yaris…” Please don’t be me “…registation AB01 XYZ come up to the front please”. At that point I nervously stood up and walked forward. My initial thought was I was somehow parked in someones way, but as I saw the face of the bar staff, I felt worse.
“Is it bad?” I asked
“Pretty bad” she replied and I walked outside.
What I was greeted by was my car, pushed into the side of a white van parked next to it, with a huge impact dent in the drivers side back door. At first I couldn’t believe it, having just had the front door fixed after someone reversed into it. The following few minutes were mixed with shock, process logic and reports from onlookers. While my car had a big dent. the other driver was no where to be seen. They had driven off.

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.

If you live in the US of A, you have Mint.com, a website that integrates with your banks to pull together all your account details, giving your a portfolio overview, and detailed view of your finances. If you live in the UK, Mint.com doesn’t work asit only supports US banks. But we do have some options.
I had been using two services before, Kublax.com (now offline) and Buxfer.com. Kublax actually went out and pulled in data directly from UK bank accounts, once you hand over your login details (yes I was dubious but went ahead – they only had read-only access). Not long after I started using it, the site shut down after being unable to make money from it. So I went back to Buxfer. Buxfer does support the direct bank integration, but like Mint, only works in the USA. I had been using the site for a few months, downloading QIF files from my banks and then importing them into Buxfer. I loved the ability to see the overall value of my accounts, including loans I was paying off, see charts for wealth levels during the month and years. It was a great service.
It could still be a great service, but after some downtime last weekend, I did some googling and found out that the since guy who built the site was now working for Facebook, and so it seemed unlikely there would ever be any new features or ongoing support.
I couldn’t risk losing data on someone else’s terms so I exported all my transactions to QIF and deleted my account.
The replacement I found was Money Strands – it seems like a fantastic replacement for Kublax. It takes your online banking login details and pulls in all your accounts, balances and the most recent transactions (no way at the moment to import history). It then categorizes your transactions into a number of groups and topics. If the right tag isn’t there, you can add your own, as well as changing untagged or incorrectly tagged items. With that, it builds you a few budgets for groceries and Bills. This immediately helps you keep an eye on what you spend, or hope to spend in a month on a given area. I made some changes to my budgets and now can see how my spending is going throughout the month.

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.

When I left education at the age of 18, I spent some time doing odd jobs, picking books in a warehouse, cleaning shelves, and working on the checkouts at Sainsburys during the Christmas period. Clearly this wasn’t going to be enough to pay the bills and live on, so I got a job with Norwich Union, doing pensions admin. 3 years later, I was still there, but a move to Birmingham pushed me out of that job. To make the transition easier, I took a new job in pensions again, working on the sales side of the business later.

Cut to 20 months later and I was being made redundant from my job. It was 2008 and the economy was on its way down. My employer cut me, and everyone else in my office, loose. I took this as a chance to make real change of career, and managed to get a job in IT, an industry I wanted to work in for years, since before Norwich Union. I took a contract job doing installations for the NHS, and did that for 4 months before getting a more permanent job doing desktop support for a private firm. I did that for 2 years, the first 18 months of which were rolling 3 and 6-month contracts. During this time i had pursued other jobs, in case my manager decided I was superflous.

And that takes us to today. Next week I start my last full week of work for this company before I leave to pursue a similar job, in an industry and role that I think could hold a lot for me. I’ll be joining a new company as their first technician, performing Mac desktop, laptop and server installs for their various clients. Needless to say, I’m very excited. I’ve been a Mac user since 2004 (2003 if you count my first iPod) and working mostly with Windows up until now, I see how painful it is to work with, so I’m very excited that my new job is working with and support Macs.

I honestly cannot wait to get started. This is a great chance for me to gain formal training with Apple and experience working with them, as well as having a hand to shape the future of the company, and define my own career path. Not only will I be doing on-site installations for clients, but I’ll be building the backend systems to help improve the workflow, creating predefined images for companies to use, making workflows and scripts to help administer and integrate with existing systems.

All this starts in October. I’m taking some time off between jobs, using up some annual leave, and going to see my folks for my birthday, and just relaxing and unwinding between careers.

I’m really grateful for the chances I’ve been given by the people I’ve worked with, and have learnt a lot from them, and hopefully taught them a few things too.

I’m hoping this will allow me more time to blog here. I’m also working on a new project, which I hope to have launched in the next month or so. It could turn into something, or nothing. But its probably worth the time investment. So stay tuned for more.

I can’t believe its been so long since I updated. What has changed? Well besides from not doing nearly as much photography as I hoped to continue doing, my job became permanent, we’re looking for a place to live and more importantly,

I got engaged!

I proposed to Katie on her birthday after a lovely tapas dinner at Bar Estilo with her parents. I got down on one knee, and just asked her straight. She was shocked, surprised, felt faint and needed to lie down.

We celebrated the following day with a champagne lunch at Selfridges in Birmingham, then relaxed for a long weekend off, as we told our friends and family.

Needless to say, we’re both very happy and have begun the long process to plan our wedding.  We think it will be next year in late August or early September but need to find a venue before we can set a definite date.

I wanna say thanks to all those who wished us well on Twitter and sent us engagement cards.  I will try and do some progress blog posts as things go on, maybe share some wisdom with those reading this.

…I started this project on Flickr and it finally comes to an end. Its been fun. Its been hardwork. I’ve been late uploading, sometimes very late.

And this is the final piece

So how about some stats for the project?

Started on 2 January 2009
Finished on 10 February 2010
365 photos (obviously)
61 in black and white
26 outside
5 in New York, New York
Took over 1600 photos
7 with Katie
4 with mirrors

I had a lot of fun. Hope others did too.