Cheryl got her visa

Posted on February 9, 2011 by Stu

Since December Cheryl and I have been worried about whether she would get her Post-Study work visa or not. Today Cheryl received it in the post. 😀

It means that Cheryl is free to look for jobs here, and we’re free to look for somewhere to move when Rik comes back from Thailand.

I didn’t really realise how much of a burden this thing has been over the last few months until it got lifted a little while ago. Such a huge relief is so nice. It means we can carry on with our lives instead of putting everything on hold while we wait.

One problem is that the Home Office still have her passport. This wouldn’t be too much of an issue if we weren’t booked to go to Prague on the 17th (Cheryl’s birthday). I’m hoping the passport will turn up in the next few days because that’d make things so much easier. If everything’s sorted in time for us to go to Prague it will mean that I didn’t waste lots of money on flights and hotel bookings that they refused to refund just last week.

I get to keep my girlfriend around for at least another 2 years! 😀 No long-distance rubbish to contend with. Love it.

Oh and also, I got my first rent payment from my tenant. Today is a good fricking day! 😀

Becoming a landlord

Posted on January 27, 2011 by Stu

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

Posted on January 6, 2011 by Stu

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

Posted on January 6, 2011 by Stu

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

Posted on January 4, 2011 by Stu

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.

Problems with LOVEFiLM on PS3

Posted on December 10, 2010 by Stu

I recently subscribed to LOVEFiLM again because I saw that I could stream movies to my PS3. I was mostly pleased with how the application worked initially, but now I’ve been using it for a while there are a few things that bother me about it.

A-Z should mean A-Z
When you view a genre of movies you can view the most popular ones, the highest rated ones (usually pretty much the same list), or you can choose to view the entire genre A-Z. I decided I wanted to view all of the comedy movies on there to look for something a bit less popular. I scrolled down until I reached somewhere in the B section of the list and then it stopped scrolling. The problem is that the application only lets you view 100 movies in a list. No more get added to the list when you near the bottom, and there’s no pagination at all. This means you have to search for a film specifically if its title comes after the beginning 2 letters of the alphabet and it’s not in the popular/highest rated lists. That brings me neatly to my next gripe.

Searching is clunky
Rather than use the PS3 system keyboard there is a very limited keyboard in the application. Every time you press any key the list of matching movies is fetched again. When the list of movies is being fetched the keyboard no longer responds properly. If I have filtered the results by clicking on the “Watch Now” tab then it flicks back to all movies before showing me the results. On most sites with an auto-complete field on the web there is a delay of half a second or so before the search begins. This helps to prevent extraneous searches, and improve the experience for the user. A delay of a second or so without the focus moving or a button being pressed on the keyboard before a search is sent would help greatly. I could type in a more specific search and find what I’m looking for much more quickly. If I’ve previously chosen the “Watch Now” tab then this should be the default tab that I’m shown when the results are returned.

I can understand that the keyboard isn’t the default system keyboard for the PS3 because LOVEFiLM’s keyboard allows a narrowing down of results in something like real-time, whereas the PS3 keyboard takes over the whole screen and only fills in the text field after you’ve finished typing. So perhaps there’s some work that could be done by Sony there to have a keyboard as a popup when in a text field or something. Perhaps LOVEFiLM could allow me to use the system keyboard if I want to. It would certainly make the search section easier to use for now.

Default PS3 controls are replaced
I use my Playstation to play a lot of media. Whether I am watching a DVD, Blu Ray, or downloaded video I know I can fast forward by holding down R2, rewind using L2, and pause by pressing Start, which is pretty much universal in the console world. In the LOVEFiLM application fast forward is the right-direction on the d-pad, rewind is left, and pause is the X button. This was quite confusing at first and I always pressed the wrong button the first time. Why is there a disagreement? Don’t Sony have guidelines similar to Apple/Google when it comes to apps for their systems? Things should behave in a similar way across a platform. To do otherwise just adds problems for the user.

No personal recommendations
When it comes to picking movies to watch you’ve either got to know what you want and search for it, or find it in the Most Popular section, the Highest Rated Section, or the collections. LOVEFiLM have a bunch of ratings from films I’ve rented from them. They suggest films that I might like to watch when I visit their website. Why not pass that information over to the PS3 application? In fact, why not just return a section called “Films on your Rental List” that are available to Watch Now? The information is available with a simple call to their API.

I’m sure the whole thing will get better with updated versions of the software, and it is usable for now, but it could be so much better.

How to listen to NME’s top 100 albums of last decade

Posted on December 6, 2010 by Stu

“Enjoyable and worthwhile”

How I did it: I found that most of the albums are on Spotify, and the few that aren’t are available on Grooveshark. Much easier than Rolling Stone’s top 500 of all time to get hold of.

Lessons & tips: Subscribe to Spotify or some other streaming music service. 🙂

Resources: Spotify
Grooveshark

It took me 1 month.

It made me happy

See more progress on: listen to NME’s top 100 albums of last decade

Subscription TV over the Internet

Posted on November 26, 2010 by Stu

I recently signed up for Lovefilm again when I saw that I can stream a bunch of stuff via my PS3. They’ll also send me DVD/Blu-ray/PS3 games in the post and I can send them back when I’m done. I pay £14 a month no matter how much I watch, which seems like a good deal to me.

I pay for an Unlimited card at Cineworld so that I can go and see as many films as I like at the cinema for £13.50 a month. Cheryl and I tend to go to 4 or 5 films a month, which makes it considerably cheaper per film than not having the card and seeing the same number of films. We get to see all of the latest films as they come out in awesome quality complete with surround sound (and idiots with their phones on).

I pay £10 a month to Spotify so that I can stream whatever music I like (with very few limitations) to my work and home computers, and also my mobile phone without any advertising, at a high quality.

When I want to watch a TV show I have to watch it as it plays out on TV with advertising, or record it with a DVR when it’s on so I can watch it later. Other than sometimes on Virgin there seems to be no concept of an on demand catalogue of shows. Why? I would quite happily pay £15 a month or so for an archive of TV shows to be available at the press of a button on a variety of my devices in different locations. If LoveFilm had rights to more shows I would definitely go there for them, but sadly they don’t.

An additional problem is that I am a fan of shows on Facebook, so I get all sorts of updates as the latest episodes of How I Met Your Mother or House get shown over there, and then I get to wait 6 months for the episode to air over here on a channel (as part of a package) I have to pay Sky to watch even though I only want 1 or 2 shows.

Why would I do that? Why should I do that? If I want I can download the entire episode within hours of it airing in the US with ads removed and play it on my PS3, my phone, burn it to DVD and play it basically anywhere, etc..

It is obvious that the subscriber model works, I subscribe to almost all of my media these days. If you guys make it available in a sensible way then I will happily give you my money for it. If you continue doing it this way then people will continue to make it freely available. If you want to succeed you have to make your stuff as available as TeH pIrAtEz do, but legally and for a decent price.

London, staying up late, Assassin’s Creed, the wait for GT5

Posted on November 23, 2010 by Stu

Just over a week ago Cheryl, Hayley, Dave, and I went on a road trip to London to watch the last F1 race of the season with JonP and Alex. We all made mix CDs to play on the journeys, which was cool. We also played the psychic game, where only one of us was allowed to put The Chain by Fleetwood Mac onto their mix CD but we couldn’t discuss it. If more than one of us put it on then we all lost, if none of us put it on then we all lost. somewhat amazingly I was the only one who put it on their CD, although Dave did put it on a secret CD by itself because he doesn’t believe in our psychic powers. 😉

The time in London was fun. We mostly just had some drinks and watched TV and films into the night. Very relaxed (and cheap!) compared to most of my trips to London. We watched the race on the Sunday and we were all pleased that Fernando Alonso did not win the championship, because he’s a wanker.

Cheryl’s friend Holly came to visit over the weekend. We all ended up staying up until about 8:30 in the morning watching random movies and just generally chatting, drinking, and stuff. It was fun even if the movie choices were a bit dubious.

The other day I bought Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. I had no intention of buying it until a little while before I got it from HMV, but oh well. It’s actually a really enjoyable game. I’m just hoping I can finish it tonight because I should finally get Gran Turismo 5 tomorrow! 😀

I’ve been waiting for Gran Turismo 5 since I first got my Playstation 3 a few years ago. It’s been delayed many times, but this time there are no more delays. It is out tomorrow and I should get my copy in the post really soon. 😀 I was kinda hoping it would arrive a day early because it was sent on Saturday, but no such luck. If it doesn’t arrive tomorrow I will probably go on a killing spree… I hope I don’t lose my job and get taken to court for saying that, as it’s obviously a joke.

Stu.ie – A boy named Stu

My name is Stu, how do you do?