Sins Against English

For all my sins, I'm a fan of simplifying and optimising life generally. With this in mind, I feel qualified to discuss when new, cute abbreviations and contractions hit the urban colloquialism atmosphere. In some cases this means adopting an initially distasteful word which encapsulates exactly what I'm trying to convey. Perhaps "to Google" someone would represent an item which I would include in this small category of acceptable new terminology.

This does not, and will never include the hate-crime that is "webinar". What a hideous, clumsy and nauseating implementation. You can see where they're trying to do. It's a seminar ... but ... it's on the web! Kudos my friend. Of course this then leads me to ponder how we'd treat the reverse of this. What would a seminar in a conference or meeting room facility be? A confinar!

The noise you just heard was possibly my brain screaming.

Perhaps I'm in a minority, but "web-based seminar" just strikes me as a far more eloquent way of saying what they actually mean. Yes, I realise there are additional letters in there, but don't let them scare you! Embrace these friends, for they add to the descriptive qualities of the phrase and give you all the information you need to completely understand. When a new word is created by tearing a hole in the language universe, this is self-defeating and the grammatical equivalent of setting fire to a kitten's face.

Banking on Entertainment

It would appear my adventures with the Halifax continue. Another point raised during my review is that my Home Insurance payment was coming out with my mortgage payment, and I could probably save myself money by having them as two distinct items instead of one combined item. Keep in mind this is my Halifax advisor telling me to try and save money with another Halifax product ... I'm all ears for things like this.

So off to the Home Insurance phonline I trot. Five minutes of heinous music later, the lovely helpful account manager starts chatting to me. I explain I want the two payments splitting and at this point the assumption is they'll click a button and two direct debits will leave my account instead of one, and somehow money will be saved in this process.

What's this? They'll have to redo my quotation all over again? Oh such a naive fool! Your head's probably hurting now (see delightful amateur model on left for demonstration) and even possibly beginning to regret entering into this whole process. You know what's going to happen ... they policy prices will have gone up, all the bits you had beforehand have changed and everything's going to cost double!

But what was that you say? You have an Ultimate Reward Account with us sir? Well just a moment, we can knock another 15% off your new policy for that. In fact, shit ... lets just have a proper look at this and see if we can't help you out proper. Tell you what ... lets class it as a new policy and if you don't make a claim in the next 11 weeks, we'll give you £50 back just for being so awesome? Yes please.

Meet the new policy. Same as the old policy. And yet different ... as with the discount and simply by being me it seems, it's now £15/month less than beforehand! No loss of cover, no change of circumstance, and yet not only have they been competitive but they're throwing money at me just to use them. Magic. Now, while my original policy probably wasn't the best available and I had been too lazy to shop around ... but the point here isn't to simply highlight my own laziness, but rather to focus on two aspects;

• The bargains and discounts are there when you do pull your finger out and do something about it. Don't leave that renewal letter sitting unattended and let them get away with taking your money for another year without fighting for your business.
  
• If you're willing to place multiple eggs in a single basket by using one finance provider for several services, there are cross-product deals to be had, and in some cases you may not even realise it until you trawl the fine print.
  

Gots Me Some Wheels

I never realised that there's a distinction between prams and buggies. To my rather blokey way of thinking, these are mechanisms designed to allow comfortable perambulation with a child without the unecessary step of carrying them. While providing room for impulse purchases from PC World or Games Workshop.

But no, it's more complex than this and I was chastised for not knowing the difference. Having leapt to the Internet to find out what marks each one aside, my usual scan through Wikipedia told me they're exactly the same thing. This leads me to believe that women have their own wiki somewhere with alternate definitions and aren't sharing this out to anyone equipped with testicles; which would explain why we get it so wrong so often.

We bought this particular pram from Phil & Teds and it appears to do everything needed, and even has a few nifty tricks in the form of multiple positions for varying stages of a small person's development. Five clicks and it's perfect for a newborn, four clicks it's in place for a child under one and so on. Reasonably sure that if I do the catches in the right order it will turn into either a a Chevrolet Camaro or fingers crossed ... Megan Fox. Or perhaps the bitey robot lady from the sequel.

The "Sport" monicker associated to the product is a little cringeworthy however. Short of a Saturday Night Live style spoof Parent Olympics event with an obstacle course, I can't see any real reason this should be considered a sport version. In fact, the gentleman on the product page displaying an abundance of enthusiasm for his pram seems a little too overjoyed for my liking, to the point of suspicion.

Fergal Sharkey

I'm adopting my annual stance of not celebrating Valentines Day, but thought that I'd share my reasoning.

I buy flowers for my wonderful wifethroughout the year for no reason at all, other than she likes flowers. I make regular cups of tea, dinner, and rarely a day passes without me remembering to tell her I love her. We even had an anniversary where we go out to celebrate our first date, not some generic event the world feels required to participate in. Now we celebrate the anniversary of our wedding in a similar fashion.

Why on earth would I buy into a commercial event specifically designed to part an individual from their shiny coins? There's no place in my corner of the world for elevendy six foot high teddy bears that growl "WUFCHOO" when you punch them in the stomach, nor sickly candy that says "I think you're great, but here ... eat this rubbish and put four pounds on to celebrate our love".

A card with a kitten on the front hugging a comedy oversized heart does not make for a wonderful relationship. Don't celebrate some humdrum day with fifty million other people, dreamt up by a pale-skinned lonely souless wizard in the Hallmark ideas department ... gift wrap it, insert it where the light can't reach and wrap a bow around it. Why not save your hard earned coin, wait until your own anniversary (you remember when that is, right?), buy a decent bottle of wine and cook her dinner instead.

A Bank That Doesn't Suck!

This is a rare event ... I'm about to praise my bank. It's not a short tale, but one worth sharing for the potential benefits on offer. This is only really worth following through if you're not carrying an overdraft, and ideally looking to maximise your money.

Regular Reviews
I went in to my local Halifax branch for a regular bank account review. These are worth doing every couple of years (at the least) to ensure I'm on the right accounts and not missing out on any potential extras. In this case I had been remiss with getting married in 2008, and had skipped a year of review so this was overdue. Most banks have reasonably standard terms and conditions now, so you look to see what benefits you most.If you're maximising, it still requires a lot of effort to ensure you're not missing something too - especially when having a review like this. If you're in debt, it requires twice the effort to read the fine print to ensure they're not screwing you over.

We hold three current accounts; mine, good lady wife, aka She Who Must Be Obeyed (SWMBO) and a joint one; this is key to the next stage.

Upgrades
The lady reviewing my details immediately recommended I upgrade my extremely basic current account to their vanilla Reward Account, which magically gives me £5/month just for paying in £1000/month. They've dropped the concept of paying you an interest rate, and indeed the same applies to penalties too (which aren't pretty reading) but it was the reward bit which interested me obviously. At this point I'm now up £5/month on my previous account's interest rate of 0.0000005% so that's quite a profit in comparison.

SWMBO upgrades her own current account to the same package, so now we're up £10/month. This must be how blackjack players in Vegas feel when its going their way! Practically giddy with excitement at making money now. I wonder if Michael Douglas felt like this when he skipped lunch in Wall Street.

Fun Part
Now the fun part ... our advisor then mentioned their Ultimate Reward Account too. By this point you've now clicked the link and glanced through the various benefits and costs yeah? Note, this account costs you. They're taking my money away! £12.50 a month for this racket! Clearly you can imagine my inflated sense of worth and indignation rising at this point. Then I stopped and had another good look over the details again ...

The account's £12.50/month, but they'll also pay me £5 for paying in £1000/month. So now it's down to £7.50/month,. In addition to this, they give the account owner(s) travel insurance, breakdown cover, mobile phone insurance, credit card cover and home emergency cover for good measure. I checked the wording again, and then it clicked ... if we got this account for the joint account, then we're both covered by this policy for the price of just one account! The first two items on their own from that list cost us in the region of £15/month usually, so now we can cancel our other policies.

By this point, we're now receiving £15/month on three accounts simply by virtue of not being overdraft and having regular salaries. We're paying out £12.50/month, which leaves us a net profit of £2.50/month but we've also saved £15/month on travel insurance and breakdown cover so we're back up to £17.50/month profit for approximately twenty minutes work on a Saturday morning. Okay, it doesn't sound like a huge amount but in the coming year that means there's an extra £210 in our budget which we didn't have before that meeting. I don't know anywho who'd refuse that amount of money should they be offered it.

How happy am I? It's fair to say I'm chuffed. Very chuffed. Happier than the gentleman with bendy glowsticks in the picture on the left.* From a simple account review, they've saved me a considerable chunk of money and won my loyalty for a couple of years; not to mention my recommendation of their services.

* Gentleman is actually known to me, but lets be honest ... this could be a very random photo pulled from the Internet of any crazy person with bendy glowsticks at their disposal in a whisky bar in Stockholm.

Wrist And The Art Of Movement

It has now been a few weeks since my last post on the subject of fecked wrists. During this time I'm pleased to report my emo suicide scar (remember kids, down not across) is healing nicely and doesn't look quite as bad as I feared it might. Doctor gave it another x-ray for good measure, and reports the bones are healing well but that getting it wiggling (technical term) is crucial. During the first three months after surgery you regain about 90% of your potential movement before the joints start to stiffen, and getting back extra movement from that point onwards becomes considerably more difficult.

Cue the physio! The actual rotation of the wrist is rather limited at the moment, but a series of stretches to get the hand moving in all directions has definitely improved what I can and can't attempt. Jar opening is heading up the list of manly activities it would be nice to do. Better than it was, but still a way off great.

Childish Jokes

When chatting to friends we haven't seen in a while and SWMBO announces "and we're pregnant!" there's a little period where the excitement of the situation overwhelms people and they appear to hear nothing. I discovered this when I then added "and if we ever find out who the father is, there'll be words!" and watched it just wash over the masses with not even a bat of the eyelids. Clearly baby-related humour is a niche market.

To Broadly Go

Having gone MMO cold turkey since April and being saturated with fantasy multiplayer games, I've been looking forward to the arrival of Star Wars: The Old Republic with baited breath. Good quality sci-fi games online with friends have been in short supply in recent years and it was pre-CU/NGE SWG some six years ago where I last got a satisfactory fix of fricken' pewpew lasers. Star Trek Online caught me on the hop, as all of a sudden here's a game people are wanting to play and apparently isn't half bad.


With reports from closed beta (NDAs be damned) being very promising, I was lured into a trap where Steam offered a version of the game to buy, which gave open beta access, early start complete with a KHAAAAN emote! Come on, how could that not tempt me ...

In My Wallet, Not The Banks'

After years of chipping away at unnecessary and unwanted debt, not including our mortgage I've had the pleasure of being debt free for a couple of years.

With that in mind, I've tried to start optimising our finances a little further and make a profit from the institutions we do business with. A profit? Yes indeed and here's what we currently do to achieve this and have the banks look favourably upon our business.

Me, me, me ...

It's generally held in writing that the more occurrences of "I" in an article the worse it will be. I've been proud to uphold that principle in the writing of this post.
 
Over two weeks into 2010 and what have I achieved? Chuff all! That only leaves me 50 weeks to get on with activities, so it's time to work out what needs doing ... and in particular you get a clarity of purpose when given an immovable deadline such as a little person arriving in your life.

Gretchen Rubin's Happiness Project has been an inspiring read over the last year or so, and while I may not agree with everything that's been written, there's no doubting it has provided considerable food for thought and a way to modify my outlook on life for the better. I'm also quite liking the DayZero plan (link courtesy of Ceri) with the specific goal of marking out 101 things to achieve in the next 1001 days. Generating items and pushing to complete them is a great way to show progress but with hand on heart I couldn't sit here and write that list right now.