Category Archives: Uncategorized

Cheryl – MASTER of science!

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I got a call at work yesterday from Cheryl. I missed it, so I called her right back. Straight away I could tell she was excited about something.

She excitedly explained that she’d checked her results on the university website and found that she has got her masters degree! 😀 It’s excellent news because it means that she can now apply for her post-study work visa. Assuming she gets that she’ll be able to stay in the UK and get a job, etc..

To celebrate we went for sushi at Yo! Sushi where I collected food from a conveyor belt for the first time. It was actually pretty nice food, and I didn’t make too much of a fool of myself with the chopsticks. I’d definitely go back there again, so that made Cheryl happy too. 🙂

Cheryl Chan, MSc. I am impressed.

Natwest Support

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This is not really a major rant about Natwest’s support, but rather just a little bit of something that frustrated me.

I was placing an order on Play.com earlier and when it came to the point where I normally enter my Natwest banking password in a little iframe to verify the payment it gave me an error instead. It said to contact customer services and quote error code 6001. I called them on their really handy regional phone number and a lady called Sarah answered. She got confused by what I was trying to explain and hearing the word “website” in my description she told me that I should speak to the online banking team.

A lady in the online banking team answered and I explained that I was pretty sure I was in the wrong place, then explained my problem. She confirmed I was in the wrong place and then offered to transfer me through to the SecureCode place instead. I said yes please and went back on hold for a minute.

A Scottish guy answered the phone to me, so I explained the problem again and gave him the error code. He asked if I had my card, so I had to come back into the office to get it to pass security. He told me that he couldn’t see any order on the account and assured me that the problem I was having was because my workplace is blocking popups…

I was actually speechless. Since I’d got the information I needed from him (no order had gone through) I just said “ok” and finished the conversation without letting him know how wrong he is. First of all, an iframe is not a popup, and secondly my workplace doesn’t control what software I have on my PC. I knew it was pointless to disagree with the guy so I just agreed with him and went my own way.

Back at my desk I went through the order process again and got no errors whatsoever. So yeah… Thanks Natwest. 😉

How to listen to all Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums

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“An extremely lengthy goal requiring a lot of patience”

How I did it: Holy crap, I can’t believe it’s over!

I started out with this goal around about 4 years ago. I mostly listened to albums that I’d got from various sources because I’d only heard something like 13 of them when I began.

Earlier this year I realised that a program called Spotify gave me access to a huge number of the albums. When I’d exhausted the ones on Spotify I moved on to a site called Grooveshark to get the last ones.

I got stuck on one final album but a friend managed to help me find a copy pretty quickly.

Lessons & tips: Use Spotify and Grooveshark to get through the vast majority and then go though the remaining ones as you can.

If you want to do them in some order then work from the bottom up so the albums theoretically get better and better, rather than worse and worse.

Resources: Spotify
Gooveshark
Friends

It took me 4 years.

It made me Happy and unhappy

See more progress on: listen to all Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums

Sorting my loan

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About a year ago I had to get a loan for about £8000 to sort out buying my house and things like that. I got the loan for 5 years and the monthly repayments came to £187 per month. Around £87 of that is interest, which is insane.

The other week I got an Egg credit card with a £6000 credit limit, so I decided that I should transfer as much of my loan as possible onto the credit card with 0% interest on balance transfers. Egg told me that I could transfer £5700, with the balance transfer fee taking the balance a bit higher. I was a bit worried about how much my repayments would come to, but I read on the Egg website that credit card repayments are only 2% of the balance per month, which would be £120 with a £6000 balance. I spoke to a man at Natwest to see how much the repayments would be on my loan if I transferred £5700 out and he said it would be adjusted to about £35 if I kept the term of the loan the same. My total repayments for the loan and the credit card would be £155 and would decrease as I paid off more of the credit card, which is good.

I got most of the way through the balance transfer process when I considered that Natwest might charge me for paying off so much so early. I called them again and a lady there told me that I wouldn’t be charged anything, and there were no fees. So I went ahead and did it. 🙂

Now I’m looking forward to being able to pay less money each month, and still pay off my loan quicker than before. If something goes wrong and I end up getting charged a shitload of money then I will not be very impressed. Stupidly I didn’t note down the names of the people I spoke to at Natwest, but oh well. I’m sure they’ll have a log of the calls somewhere. I will probably increase my payment on the credit card so that I’m paying the current amount each month because it’ll mean I pay the card off sooner, which can only be a good thing.

Your Dumb

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I made some changes to my website YourDumb.net recently and decided i’d see if I could get the word out today. Luckily I have good friends online who helped me post about it on Twitter and Facebook, and word seems to be spreading now.

So yeah, check out the site, unless you found this site from there, in which case feel free to take a look around at my emo blog posts from the last 7 years. 🙂

How I Met your Mother

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A few of my friends have been telling me to watch How I Met your Mother for months and months. Well, the other week I decided to get started on it with Cheryl, and it’s completely hilarious and brilliant.

Over the weekend we went through somewhere in the region of 27(!) episodes (s01e11 to s02e16 I think). I’m so glad there are so many episodes to watch, but at this rate I’ll catch up before the end of the year and then I’ll be stuck waiting like everyone else. 🙁

If you haven’t seen this show then give it a chance!

Life is good

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Life is good and things are going well at the moment.

Cheryl’s finished her dissertation, and has settled into the new flat really well. I have actually stayed there every night since the move, so I guess I’m settling in well too. 😉

At the weekend we went to see Les Miserables at the local cinema. The performance was taking place at the O2 Arena in London, but it was broadcast to the cinema. It was really good, apart from the slight delay between the video and audio. They were sending the video as it was recorded and the audio as it is delayed. It was quite annoying. I understand that in the arena most people would have to watch on the screen, and because the video takes a short amount of time to be processed there is a delay added to the audio to sync them up, so why wasn’t this done with the cinema broadcast? Oh well.

Last night we went to meet Dave and Hayley for some pizza and to discuss going away to Prague in February next year. It sounds pretty straightforward, and pretty much only relies on Cheryl having her new visa by then. It shouldn’t be a problem, so we’re going to go ahead and book it at the end of the month. Should be awesome!

Old web techniques

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I often go around looking at the source for the websites I frequent. It’s not very interesting to most people, but I am not most people.

Something I’ve noticed a few times in the last couple of weeks is that sites are suddenly using an evolved form of a script I was very familiar with many years ago:

if(top.location != self) {
  top.location.replace(document.location.href);
}

That’s how it appears on Last.fm. Essentially the script checks to see if the page is contained within another page, and then takes the user to the page by itself if it is. This gets rid of page headings you sometimes see from sites like Digg and Facebook when you follow a link from there.

The script used to be used to make your own site break out of frames put there by sites like Geocities (R.I.P.) before domains and hosting were quite so affordable. Obviously now there are basically no sites on the Internet that use frames in the traditional sense (that’s a good thing), but the modern equivalent (iframes) are pretty much all over the place. They tend to be used for displaying external content rather than the layout of internal content, but the idea is mostly the same: multiple documents on one page.

I just find it somewhat interesting that “web 2.0” seems to be encountering the exact same things I really hated about web 1.0 all those years ago.

Patched Simple Facebook Like for WordPress

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I am adding a Facebook Like button to the blog posts at work and so I looked for a WordPress plugin. The highest rated one I found is called Simple Facebook Like by a guy named Huseyin Berberoglu.

I had a bit of a problem getting the button to go where I wanted because the iframe that gets added to the page doesn’t have an ID or a class for me to address it by. I modified the source to stick in a class quickly and easily and dropped a comment on the guy’s blog to see if he would add it as an option for the plugin so future versions wouldn’t overwrite my change, and then I decided that I would just do it myself.

So I created a patch that can be applied to version 1.0.1 to let you specify a class for the iframe so you can use CSS to move it around more easily.