Monthly Archives: January 2011

Becoming a landlord

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Recently I’ve emptied the remainder of my things from my house in Mansfield so that I can rent the place out and hopefully save some money. My mum and auntie found a tenant for me straight away, which was handy, but she isn’t working at the moment so things are a bit more complicated.

My main reason for doing all of this was so that I wouldn’t have to pay the bills for the place, and to offset some more of the cost of the mortgage. I’m still losing money when I’m renting it out, but it’s a smaller amount.

So far it’s actually ended up costing me quite a bit, and I haven’t seen a penny back from it. I had to pay Natwest £100 so that I could rent the place out, I’ve had to get insurance, pay for inspections, send letters, make phone calls, and do a whole bunch of waiting around. Because the lady renting my house doesn’t have a job she hasn’t yet paid the deposit or the first month of rent. The deposit might be sorted out next week, but I don’t actually get a penny of that because I have to deposit it in a government scheme to protect it. The first month of rent very much depends on Mansfield District Council at the moment, and I have no idea how long to expect to wait.

It’s kind of a weird situation that I hope will be over very soon.

Cheryl, Nicole, Rik, and I are looking at places to rent in about April or May at the moment. It will be difficult to pay the bills for the places we’re looking at without any income from my house. Surely it can’t take another 3 months… [Commence horror stories in comments]

Hey Motorola, I won’t be buying a Xoom

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I was just reading about the Motorola Xoom tablet. It runs a new version of Android intended specifically for larger screen devices rather than mobile phones and it looks pretty cool in the bits I’ve seen.

As much as I want to buy one of these things I’m afraid that I’m not going to. Why? I own a Motorola Milestone.

My Milestone was advertised as Flash Ready™ when I bought it many months ago. Sadly Motorola still haven’t managed to get Android 2.2 on it, so I can’t actually view any Flash content at all. It’s not that I really care about Flash, but more the fact that Motorola lied to me. They lied to owners of some of their other Android phones too. Some people are stuck on Android 1.6 forever even though their phone is only a year old. It’s just not in the spirit of Android, as far as I’m concerned.

I will be patiently waiting for HTC or Google to release a tablet before I consider buying one.

I bet I’m not the only Motorola customer who won’t be buying anything else from them ever again.

Gmail strips HTML emails

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At work we have a section where people can set up emails that go out to their own customers (we have a reseller scheme). There are placeholders like [NAME] and [BASKET] that the customers can put in their email templates which we then replace with the actual information when we send the emails out.

Recently I’ve been asked to add some IDs and classes to the HTML elements we generate for the placeholders so that the whole section can be styled by our resellers.

I quickly added a bunch of classes and then began testing with a <style> tag in in my email. I spent quite a while wondering why it wasn’t working correctly before the DOM Inspector showed me that Google strips the IDs of elements. I then went on to read that they also remove all <style> content. You also can’t use a <link> tag to include a stylesheet (which is a good thing).

The only way to style email for Gmail is apparently to use the style attribute for each element. This is fine if you are fully writing the emails yourself, but our resellers never even see the actual tags, they just put in a placeholder. That leaves them no way of adding a style attribute to a section, which means we can’t let our resellers fully style their emails. Ridiculous.

Thanks Google.

Renting out my house

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On Christmas Day Chloe informed me that she’d be moving out of my house shortly into the new year. She has now officially moved out, and so I’ve begun trying to get rid of all of the bills and my belongings so that I can rent it out.

I spent 75 minutes on hold with Sky when I called them 4 or 5 days ago. I sent them an email while I was on hold, but I haven’t received a reply to that. I spent another 50 minutes on hold when I called today. After the fiasco of getting the phone line sorted when I moved in I was not looking forward to calling BT, however, they completely surprised me by performing the entire procedure in 4 minutes and 47 seconds! Impressive.

Today I contacted Mansfield District Council to see about stopping paying council tax while I don’t live there. I received an email from a lady a couple of minutes ago that surprised me in a completely different way to BT.

Dear Mr Gilbert

Further to your recent enquiry regarding council tax. Whilst the property is still furnished you will be able to claim a 50% discount. If you remove the furniture you will be able to claim full exemption for a period of 6 months. Please supply the date you vacated the property and your current home address in Nottingham and we will amend your liability accordingly. If you decide to remove the furniture please inform us and we will then be able to awarded the exemption.

Yours sincerely
Ms. Council Employee

This seemed a little strange, and quite annoying, so I wrote this email that I am probably not going to send to them:

Hi Council Employee,

I’m just double-checking, if I leave the furniture there because I’ll be renting out the house furnished I still have to pay 50% council tax?

If this is so can I have a break-down of the services my furniture will be receiving from the council for my money?

I have spoken to my sofa and it has agreed not to put any of the rubbish it generates into the bins, and my wardrobes have kindly agreed not to use the roads any more.

If this is still not acceptable then please let me know which items of furniture will be using the services I’ll be paying for and I’ll see if I can get them to agree not to.

Regards,
Stuart Gilbert.

Dickheads.