Wednesday, February 04, 2004
Well, what a week, real snow, but just enough to tempt the boy child into thinking he might be able to go sledging, but then it all disappeared by the weekend. I'm longing for a winter holiday. I went on a ski trip once, but due to a slipped disc the previous year, couldn't actually ski, but I still had a great time. Anyway, now the snow's all gone, and in it's place we have floods, but not round here though, the Irwell is generally OK, probably because it rains all the bloody time anyway. The other rivers are just soft part time efforts, the Irwell's well hard.
House purchase is on a pace, survey's done, money from the other house in is the bank, endowments are cashed in, and for the first time in a long time, we have no debts! Credit cards are totally paid off, no overdraft, no loans, and currently anyway, no mortgage (though that will change in a few weeks hopefully). Now we're trying to set up insurance and assurance in case of the worst. It's quite depressing finding out how bad a risk I am, having high blood pressure, back problems, both parents with diabetes and one dead of heart failure at 62. These people are professional gamblers - they know the odds better than anyway, and they're giving me very short odds indeeds.
We're even going to have enough over to buy a car - probably outright, so we've been round the Mitsubishi showrooms looking at Spacewagons - a beautiful car, and with enough room for us, the kids and grandparents, or alternatively, with all the seats out, ideal for trips to ikea and/or the tip. Group 12 motor insurance though, which is a bit hefty, and I have no no-claims bonus, being as how I've been living in Holland where you can cycle everywhere.
I'm looking forward to negotiating over the price of the car, after all those right car - wrong car programs where they drive the salesman down so much they're weeping, we've got cash after all. I've worked out all my lines, and I've found 3 places which have got the car I want, so I can be choosy.
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House purchase is on a pace, survey's done, money from the other house in is the bank, endowments are cashed in, and for the first time in a long time, we have no debts! Credit cards are totally paid off, no overdraft, no loans, and currently anyway, no mortgage (though that will change in a few weeks hopefully). Now we're trying to set up insurance and assurance in case of the worst. It's quite depressing finding out how bad a risk I am, having high blood pressure, back problems, both parents with diabetes and one dead of heart failure at 62. These people are professional gamblers - they know the odds better than anyway, and they're giving me very short odds indeeds.
We're even going to have enough over to buy a car - probably outright, so we've been round the Mitsubishi showrooms looking at Spacewagons - a beautiful car, and with enough room for us, the kids and grandparents, or alternatively, with all the seats out, ideal for trips to ikea and/or the tip. Group 12 motor insurance though, which is a bit hefty, and I have no no-claims bonus, being as how I've been living in Holland where you can cycle everywhere.
I'm looking forward to negotiating over the price of the car, after all those right car - wrong car programs where they drive the salesman down so much they're weeping, we've got cash after all. I've worked out all my lines, and I've found 3 places which have got the car I want, so I can be choosy.
Find the cheapest credit cards, loans and mortgages
Thursday, January 15, 2004
WooHoo! Bought a new house this morning, we saw it on Tuesday (only the 3rd one we looked at), and went back this morning to see it in daylight, then made the offer, and it's been accepted. Now we just have to see if we can get a mortgage, we've got a financial advisor coming round tonight, and he's going to advise us. Altogether thinks are going too badly (touch wood) with our financial affairs. We have credit cards (thanks to our friendly neighbourhood bank manager), and it turns out we haven't needed the loan yet, as we're happy(ish) with our cheap and nasty cars, the year's insurance was higher than the cost of either car.
My next task is to find myself some life assurance, as we're not going to go for an endowment mortgage again, this might be tough being 40, overweight, with high blood pressure and a history of heart disease in my family. Maybe this is the time to go on a crash diet, the last few goodies left over from Christmas are dwindling now, and the new house has got tons more room, including 3 cellars, so I could set one up as a home gym, and finally start using my rowing machine.
When I've tried using it in the living room, both children inevitably want to come and climb on and play boats, which doesn't help.
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My next task is to find myself some life assurance, as we're not going to go for an endowment mortgage again, this might be tough being 40, overweight, with high blood pressure and a history of heart disease in my family. Maybe this is the time to go on a crash diet, the last few goodies left over from Christmas are dwindling now, and the new house has got tons more room, including 3 cellars, so I could set one up as a home gym, and finally start using my rowing machine.
When I've tried using it in the living room, both children inevitably want to come and climb on and play boats, which doesn't help.
Find the cheapest credit cards, loans and mortgages
Tuesday, January 06, 2004
Well, it's growing, we now have 55 sites using the DMOZ database and therefore showing links to Moneysupermarket. Though it turns out that we missed out on the last import of the DMOZ database by Google in November.
My own quest to become number 1 for the search term "Chris Smith" seems to be going nowhere fast. I'm not even in the top 100 as far as I can tell, and it's so boring trawling through the pages to find where you are. I blame 'the gay MP' Chris Smith. He might as well change his name to 'Gay Chris Smith', even if he retires from politics, he'll always be 'gay ex-MP', or perhaps he'll make it to the top and be 'gay PM Chris Smith'. Of course, then I'll have no chance of being ranked highly at Google.
If you do put a link out to this site, then please make it's got the words 'Chris Smith' in the URL somewhere. You can use the name as the linked text, or put it into a TITLE attribute of the <A tag>.
As I'm suffering from more back trouble after a relatively long pain-free period, I'm going to enrol in a Pilates class tonight, though I'm not sure how swashbuckling is going to help. Which reminds me - finally, my all time favourite piece of radio has emerged as (appropriately enough) an MP3. Radio 4 makes me feel proud to be British, and there's not much else that does.
Here it be, me hearties, a tale of pirates bold who sails the Spanish Main armed only with swords and a SWOT analysis, aarrr!
Find the cheapest credit cards, loans and mortgages
My own quest to become number 1 for the search term "Chris Smith" seems to be going nowhere fast. I'm not even in the top 100 as far as I can tell, and it's so boring trawling through the pages to find where you are. I blame 'the gay MP' Chris Smith. He might as well change his name to 'Gay Chris Smith', even if he retires from politics, he'll always be 'gay ex-MP', or perhaps he'll make it to the top and be 'gay PM Chris Smith'. Of course, then I'll have no chance of being ranked highly at Google.
If you do put a link out to this site, then please make it's got the words 'Chris Smith' in the URL somewhere. You can use the name as the linked text, or put it into a TITLE attribute of the <A tag>.
As I'm suffering from more back trouble after a relatively long pain-free period, I'm going to enrol in a Pilates class tonight, though I'm not sure how swashbuckling is going to help. Which reminds me - finally, my all time favourite piece of radio has emerged as (appropriately enough) an MP3. Radio 4 makes me feel proud to be British, and there's not much else that does.
Here it be, me hearties, a tale of pirates bold who sails the Spanish Main armed only with swords and a SWOT analysis, aarrr!
Find the cheapest credit cards, loans and mortgages
Monday, January 05, 2004
Well, the move went as well as expected, i.e. I spent days incapacitated because of my back. Next time we're paying for proper removal men.
We're finally free of all that Dutch stuff now, at least I hope so, but knowing Dutch bureaucracy, I'm not entirely convinced. At least though, in Holland, they have a decent website for finding a house. Here in the UK, it's appalling, there are a couple of big websites but they're both crap. More at the BBC website.
Estate agents don't seem to have taken to the web at all, which is surprising. In my long career on the internet (8 or 9 years now), I remember various conferences where speakers would tell us about the future of the WWW. Usually house buying would come up as an example. We were told that when buying a house you'd simply tell your intelligent agent what you wanted, and it would trawl the web for you and provide you with not only photos, but videos, maps to your place of work and/or school for children, the crime rate, the occupations of your potential neighbours.... All this on your web enabled fridge.
I got quite overwhelmed with all this stuff. I used to kid people telling them about a project I heard about which was the web-enabled toilet which would analyse your 'output' and contact either your virtual doctor if it found a serious problem, or your supermarket to adjust your diet if it found you weren't eating enough fibre. It would also connect to your personal agent which would nag you about eating more fruit, or drinking more water.
Most people believed me, and I'm sure that before 9/11, someone was actually working on such a device.
Anyway, I did expect that the web would have enabled me to find a house efficiently by 2004. Instead, it seems most estate agents still want to send you their entire listings by post whatever you want.
No single estate agent is going to produce a useful site, no-one cares which agent they use when buying a house, it's the house that matters. I don't want to trawl around 20 different sites each week to check them.
All I want is one single database of all the houses, with sufficient detail in the database so I can sort them by a couple of criteria such as number of bedrooms, price and area (and by the way you arrogant London nazis - 'The North' is not a sufficiently small area for a meaningful selection).
Before I came back from Holland in June I went to a meeting of newspaper websites where the above mentioned Dutch site - www.funda.nl, which is owned and run by the association of Dutch estate agents - gave a presentation. The gist of this was - every single house placed with an estate agent in Holland is on our site, so we don't need newspapers anymore - Byee. Not advertising in newspapers would save them thousands of pounds of course, so it would also make sense for the newspapers to launch such a site before the estate agents get together and do it. Meanwhile the buggers insist on phoning me! What is this, the 80s?
Anyway, enough ranting. My SEO work continues, and after finally getting my employer's site Moneysupermarket into DMOZ, it's fun to see that it's finally propagating around the web as people download the DMOZ database. They don't do this very often though a new version is available each week, mind you it's a humungous size. I downloaded it once, and because it's not actually a database, but a weird type of XML, you have to have specialist programs to parse it into something useful, so I'm not surprised.
Today there were 54 sites who were using the copy of the db that we're in, I'm intrigued to see how this will grow.
Find the cheapest credit cards, loans and mortgages
We're finally free of all that Dutch stuff now, at least I hope so, but knowing Dutch bureaucracy, I'm not entirely convinced. At least though, in Holland, they have a decent website for finding a house. Here in the UK, it's appalling, there are a couple of big websites but they're both crap. More at the BBC website.
Estate agents don't seem to have taken to the web at all, which is surprising. In my long career on the internet (8 or 9 years now), I remember various conferences where speakers would tell us about the future of the WWW. Usually house buying would come up as an example. We were told that when buying a house you'd simply tell your intelligent agent what you wanted, and it would trawl the web for you and provide you with not only photos, but videos, maps to your place of work and/or school for children, the crime rate, the occupations of your potential neighbours.... All this on your web enabled fridge.
I got quite overwhelmed with all this stuff. I used to kid people telling them about a project I heard about which was the web-enabled toilet which would analyse your 'output' and contact either your virtual doctor if it found a serious problem, or your supermarket to adjust your diet if it found you weren't eating enough fibre. It would also connect to your personal agent which would nag you about eating more fruit, or drinking more water.
Most people believed me, and I'm sure that before 9/11, someone was actually working on such a device.
Anyway, I did expect that the web would have enabled me to find a house efficiently by 2004. Instead, it seems most estate agents still want to send you their entire listings by post whatever you want.
No single estate agent is going to produce a useful site, no-one cares which agent they use when buying a house, it's the house that matters. I don't want to trawl around 20 different sites each week to check them.
All I want is one single database of all the houses, with sufficient detail in the database so I can sort them by a couple of criteria such as number of bedrooms, price and area (and by the way you arrogant London nazis - 'The North' is not a sufficiently small area for a meaningful selection).
Before I came back from Holland in June I went to a meeting of newspaper websites where the above mentioned Dutch site - www.funda.nl, which is owned and run by the association of Dutch estate agents - gave a presentation. The gist of this was - every single house placed with an estate agent in Holland is on our site, so we don't need newspapers anymore - Byee. Not advertising in newspapers would save them thousands of pounds of course, so it would also make sense for the newspapers to launch such a site before the estate agents get together and do it. Meanwhile the buggers insist on phoning me! What is this, the 80s?
Anyway, enough ranting. My SEO work continues, and after finally getting my employer's site Moneysupermarket into DMOZ, it's fun to see that it's finally propagating around the web as people download the DMOZ database. They don't do this very often though a new version is available each week, mind you it's a humungous size. I downloaded it once, and because it's not actually a database, but a weird type of XML, you have to have specialist programs to parse it into something useful, so I'm not surprised.
Today there were 54 sites who were using the copy of the db that we're in, I'm intrigued to see how this will grow.
Find the cheapest credit cards, loans and mortgages
Monday, December 22, 2003
Well, back to Holland over the festive period once more. This time it's the last time, hopefully. We have to go and collect the rest of our worldly belongings from our old house, which will be sold from mid January. While we're there we'll get the last load of Dutch goods from the shops that our family have ordered.
One of my 1000s of money making schemes is a moving what's in demand in one country from another. In the case of Holland, as far as ourselves and my family go, that would seem to be Dutch pea soup, with big chunks of smoked sausage, a type of biscuit called stroopwafels (which are big round biscuits with toffee in the middle). Possibly the nicest sugar free chocolate milk in the word - Chocomel, another type of biscuit called Jewish biscuits, and if we have room, a Dutch Apple Cake or 2.
Everyone takes home different things from different countries. It's always a good idea to buy saffron when you're in Spain, as it's so cheap, likewise Wine in France, although it's getting cheaper here now. It's intriguing what foreigners buy in bulk, like the English people buying 10 x 5kg boxes of French washing powder, or the chinese women in Amsterdam buying up the entire, well, stock of chicken Knorr cubes. I had this picture of them back home saying 'Look, this is fantastic, you don't have to boil up a whole chicken each time'.
When we lived in Holland, and would visit the UK in our car, we always stocked up with English cereals, the Dutch are very severe in their culinary habits, there idea of breakfast is a piece of bread, with some cheese or ham, and a boiled egg perhaps. Cereals were available, but very few of the frivolous child-enticing kind, although in the last year or so CocoPops has made its way onto supermarket shelves.
We would come home with around 20 boxes of Cranberry shredded wheat, Golden Nuggets, Golden Grahams etc, and eke them out until our next visit, or trip to France, where we would tour the Hypermarche with a bulging trolley, loading it with french versions of our favourites, including the sadly no longer available 'Crispy Sea'.
We're still trying to get out of this obsession with cereals and hard to find English foods, so we, well, at least I, still tend to feel slightly desperate if we get below 10 boxes of cereals, or 200 teabags (obviously you can get tea in Holland, but it's completely shite).
So if anyone needs anything just let me know.
Find the cheapest credit cards, loans and mortgages
One of my 1000s of money making schemes is a moving what's in demand in one country from another. In the case of Holland, as far as ourselves and my family go, that would seem to be Dutch pea soup, with big chunks of smoked sausage, a type of biscuit called stroopwafels (which are big round biscuits with toffee in the middle). Possibly the nicest sugar free chocolate milk in the word - Chocomel, another type of biscuit called Jewish biscuits, and if we have room, a Dutch Apple Cake or 2.
Everyone takes home different things from different countries. It's always a good idea to buy saffron when you're in Spain, as it's so cheap, likewise Wine in France, although it's getting cheaper here now. It's intriguing what foreigners buy in bulk, like the English people buying 10 x 5kg boxes of French washing powder, or the chinese women in Amsterdam buying up the entire, well, stock of chicken Knorr cubes. I had this picture of them back home saying 'Look, this is fantastic, you don't have to boil up a whole chicken each time'.
When we lived in Holland, and would visit the UK in our car, we always stocked up with English cereals, the Dutch are very severe in their culinary habits, there idea of breakfast is a piece of bread, with some cheese or ham, and a boiled egg perhaps. Cereals were available, but very few of the frivolous child-enticing kind, although in the last year or so CocoPops has made its way onto supermarket shelves.
We would come home with around 20 boxes of Cranberry shredded wheat, Golden Nuggets, Golden Grahams etc, and eke them out until our next visit, or trip to France, where we would tour the Hypermarche with a bulging trolley, loading it with french versions of our favourites, including the sadly no longer available 'Crispy Sea'.
We're still trying to get out of this obsession with cereals and hard to find English foods, so we, well, at least I, still tend to feel slightly desperate if we get below 10 boxes of cereals, or 200 teabags (obviously you can get tea in Holland, but it's completely shite).
So if anyone needs anything just let me know.
Find the cheapest credit cards, loans and mortgages
Friday, December 19, 2003
Work goes on here at Moneysupermarket. We're all in the Christmas mood at the moment, and despite a scrooge-like decision to ban christmas lights for 'health and safety' reasons, people and their workplaces are looking very festive. There's a competition for the best decorated desk today, but we in the framework team are too cynical and cool for all that nonsense. Anyway we're peeved that our lights had to come down, so we're boycotting it.
We did consider making a statement by doing it in the style of the Grinch or Scrooge or the nightmare before Christmas, but as I say we're far too cool.
Here in software development, we don't get the perks of those responsible for making big orders. Bottles of champagne and hampers are arriving continuously for those select individuals who sign the invoices. In my previous job when I was in this position, I always made a point of giving them on to my employees. It always felt too much like bribery.
I'm kind of running out of things to complain about, which maybe means that I'm getting in the Christmas mood, but I'm sure I'll be back with a vengeance when it comes to buying our new house next year.
I'm going back to the Halle this weekend, to a Christmas Carol concert, with our Sam who's 4, my mother, and grandmother. I would recommend the Halle concerts to everyone, it's a whole different experience watching an orchestra, rather than listening to classical music alone.
This promises to be even more accessible, with audience participation. I'll just mime though, as, blessed as I am with a multitude of talents, singing in tune is not one of them. Apparently though I'm in good company. Stephen Fry lists being able to sing as one of his missing talents too.
Find the cheapest credit cards, loans and mortgages
We did consider making a statement by doing it in the style of the Grinch or Scrooge or the nightmare before Christmas, but as I say we're far too cool.
Here in software development, we don't get the perks of those responsible for making big orders. Bottles of champagne and hampers are arriving continuously for those select individuals who sign the invoices. In my previous job when I was in this position, I always made a point of giving them on to my employees. It always felt too much like bribery.
I'm kind of running out of things to complain about, which maybe means that I'm getting in the Christmas mood, but I'm sure I'll be back with a vengeance when it comes to buying our new house next year.
I'm going back to the Halle this weekend, to a Christmas Carol concert, with our Sam who's 4, my mother, and grandmother. I would recommend the Halle concerts to everyone, it's a whole different experience watching an orchestra, rather than listening to classical music alone.
This promises to be even more accessible, with audience participation. I'll just mime though, as, blessed as I am with a multitude of talents, singing in tune is not one of them. Apparently though I'm in good company. Stephen Fry lists being able to sing as one of his missing talents too.
Find the cheapest credit cards, loans and mortgages
Sunday, December 14, 2003
I went to a pantomine last night (Oh No You Didn't!! - Oh Yes I did!) for the first time in about 30 years I think. I actually quite enjoyed it. I took my son of 4 years old of course, I wouldn't have gone on my own (though quite a few adults seemed to be there without children - I can't understand why personally). Though it was quite amusing, the best part was my son's reaction.
The jokes were appalling, but that's what you expect, it's not high art after all. I can definitely recommend this panto "Cinderella" at the Opera House, in Manchester. Someone called "Brian Connelly" is the star apparently, I've never heard of him, but he's a bit like Bruce Forsythe, but funnier.
More art today, although a bit more refined, we went to see the Halle Youth Orchestra at Bridgewater Hall, they were doing one of my favourites - Dvorak - Symphony No 9 from the New World. It's better known (at to people of my age and older) as the theme from 'the Hovis advert', and it's possibly because of that association that it always make me feel homesick and nostalgic, wherever I am. I don't know why, I did grow up in a street very like the one featured in the Hovis advert, though I never wore a flat cap. It's a strange thing, the power of music, I was sat there with tears streaming down my face just because of that one refrain on the cor anglaise. Choirs and orchestras both make me really proud of the human race, they put so much effort into something as fleeting as a piece of music, and each person contributes such a very small part (except the guy playing the kettle drums of course).
God I wish I could play. Sam and Morgan are definitely going to learn instruments, in fact, I think at 4, Sam's ready now. I'm not sure which is most likely to get them into an orchestra though. Definitely not piano, you have to be really good, and then it's not a permanent member of the orchestra. Violin should be good, they always have loads of violinists, and the same with chellists. Perhaps though there's too much competition, as everyone has violin lessons. Maybe they should learn more obscure things like the bassoon or perhaps even the cor anglaise, then they could reduce me to tears whenever they wanted something and I'd give in.
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The jokes were appalling, but that's what you expect, it's not high art after all. I can definitely recommend this panto "Cinderella" at the Opera House, in Manchester. Someone called "Brian Connelly" is the star apparently, I've never heard of him, but he's a bit like Bruce Forsythe, but funnier.
More art today, although a bit more refined, we went to see the Halle Youth Orchestra at Bridgewater Hall, they were doing one of my favourites - Dvorak - Symphony No 9 from the New World. It's better known (at to people of my age and older) as the theme from 'the Hovis advert', and it's possibly because of that association that it always make me feel homesick and nostalgic, wherever I am. I don't know why, I did grow up in a street very like the one featured in the Hovis advert, though I never wore a flat cap. It's a strange thing, the power of music, I was sat there with tears streaming down my face just because of that one refrain on the cor anglaise. Choirs and orchestras both make me really proud of the human race, they put so much effort into something as fleeting as a piece of music, and each person contributes such a very small part (except the guy playing the kettle drums of course).
God I wish I could play. Sam and Morgan are definitely going to learn instruments, in fact, I think at 4, Sam's ready now. I'm not sure which is most likely to get them into an orchestra though. Definitely not piano, you have to be really good, and then it's not a permanent member of the orchestra. Violin should be good, they always have loads of violinists, and the same with chellists. Perhaps though there's too much competition, as everyone has violin lessons. Maybe they should learn more obscure things like the bassoon or perhaps even the cor anglaise, then they could reduce me to tears whenever they wanted something and I'd give in.
Find the cheapest credit cards, loans and mortgages
