Barbican, Rollins and Mileage
Posted: Sun 17 January, 2016 Filed under: Day Trips, Domestic, Driving, Food, Getting Organised, Gigs, London, M1, M25, Travel Leave a comment »Yesterday was another Rollins gig, this time at the Barbican in London.
It was a bit more complicated than last week’s gig in Bristol, as it involved collecting another friend of mine from over by Oxford, then getting a train to London, across to Barbican, getting food, going to the gig, and then a similar journey for the return.
All told though, it went really smoothly. I’d booked pretty much everything in advance, including the train tickets and reserving a table at the restaurant of choice, so it was as organised as humanly possible.
The restaurant in particular was a real success – the Jugged Hare, just round the corner from the Barbican itself. I’d seen it before, but never eaten there, so went for it when the chance came up, and booked for their pre-theatre menu. I am truly glad I did. They specialise in game of all sorts – it’s definitely not a great place for vegetarians! – but there’s enough variety in the menu, if game isn’t your thing.
To be fair, there is a vegetarian option on the menu – well, it says “Vegetarian – £14”, so it could be a fillet of vegetarian, for all I know.
The three-course meal was great – particularly the venison haunch, and their sticky toffee pudding was amazing. (as was the accompanying mince-pie ice cream, which has to be tasted to be believed) Knowing how easy it is for me to drive to Barbican in general, I will be returning. Several times.
The gig itself was great – Rollins spoke for three full hours, with no breaks. The show was about 50% the same as the one I saw last week in Bath, but I can live with that – it’s better than being entirely the same!
The journey home was OK – getting the trains back went smoothly, and then a drive through snow to drop off friend, and then another hour and a bit on motorways in heavy snow (though thankfully not settling) to get home, which happened just after 2am.
So a long day, but an entirely worthwhile one…
Booking Breaks
Posted: Wed 13 January, 2016 Filed under: Domestic, Getting Organised, Travel Leave a comment »Having realised that I managed (yet again) to work all of last year without a proper break, I’m working on booking some time out this year. Taking a lesson from Herself’s methods from years back, if I book them now (or at least soon) then they’re a fait accompli, so I can present them to any new contract as “already booked”.
The first one is booked now. It’s ‘just’ a long weekend away at the end of February, sharing a holiday cottage with another friend and her dog, but at least it’s a break.
From there I’ll see how we go, but right now I’m definitely planning on a couple more breaks during 2016 as well – including, potentially, an Arvon break if I can find the right one. It all depends on what’s available, and what I fancy doing, really. But breaks are definitely on the agenda.
That’s got to be progress, I’m sure.
D4D Performance
Posted: Fri 25 December, 2015 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky, Getting Organised, Technology 1 Comment »This year, D4D’s performance as a site hasn’t been that great. I’d noticed a lot of times when pages timed out, or seemed to get lost along the way, but couldn’t find what was causing it, despite looking hard on several occasions.
Last week, I finally found what the problem was – and it wasn’t in something I’d done, which was nice. More importantly, it also wasn’t something that was showing up in code or settings – because it was a plugin that wasn’t doing what it had been told to, for whatever reason.
I’ve got a security plugin on D4D that’s supposed to take automatic backups, to add some safety and recovery to the site. That was set to take a backup every week, and to only store three backups, then overwriting the oldest.
Except that wasn’t what was happening. Somewhere along the line, something had gone wrong, and it turned out that it was taking a full database backup (with a different filename each time, so no over-writing etc.) every fifteen minutes. Then storing them in a folder that was hidden away in a non-obvious location, with a non-helpful filename.
Even on a server that says it’s got unlimited space, that was taking the piss. It was making the server work extra-hard for no good reason, and causing a whole load of problems.
I finally found it all, and ended up both deleting the old files, as well as killing off the backup task completely. (I’ve written my own automated job now which is working fine, and not causing any problems. The moral of the story? Don’t trust other people’s code.)
Since doing that, I haven’t seen the site crash. I’m hoping that the problems are now fixed, the stability will improve, and that 2016 will be a much better year for D4D™
Fingers crossed.
An Organised Christmas
Posted: Thu 24 December, 2015 Filed under: Domestic, Festering Season, Getting Organised, People, Shopping, Shopping Leave a comment »
It’s well-known that I’m not the greatest fan of the Festering Season. I do observe it and sort things out for family and closest friends, but still tend to avoid the overboard hysteria of the entire season. There’s a whole number of reasons for being this way, and I can’t be arsed with going into them on this. It’s a subject that’s been pretty much done to death anyway.
This year,the run-up to the Festering Season has all been remarkably organised and gone very smoothly, which is a thing of joy.
Everything possible was done, bought, organised, and (where necessary) posted or delivered a couple of weeks ago. The only thing that remained – albeit in two stages – was food-based, getting the week’s food order in, and then today collecting the final pre-ordered bits, which was all done at Antisocial O’clock this morning, when the roads and shops were still blissfully empty.
I hate food shopping in the week before Christmas – the shops are just full of tosspots going mad because the shops are going to be closed for a whole 30 hours. I never understood why there always seem to be more people at Christmas, all of whom are buying more. Surely if it’s all about entertaining and having guests, there’d be half the number of people but buying twice as much? Only it doesn’t work out that way.
Internet-based shopping (and delivery thereof) has made this whole process as painless as possible. So long as you’re organised, you can book a slot in the week up to Christmas, order everything you know you want, and that’s it. Yes, there’s the slight roulette of out-of-stock items and so on, but that’s more about luck and timing than anything else. In my case, I got the delivery on Monday and everything I’d ordered was in stock and all was easy and fine. Indeed, the worst thing about it was that I had to lock the cats out of the living room while everything was delivered, which disturbed them quite a lot – I don’t think they’d actually realised the door could be closed, let alone be closed with them on The Other Side.
Collecting the final pre-ordered bits today was also painless – in and out, no hassles.
It really is a most civilised way to do things.
Lists
Posted: Mon 21 December, 2015 Filed under: 2015/16, D4D™, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Getting Organised, Introspective Leave a comment »As we come to the end of 2015, I’m spending some time making notes, lists, and plans for what I want to get done in 2016. It’s not resolutions or anything similar, but I’ve found over the last couple of years that having lists for things helps me to keep it all straight in my head over the year.
The lists aren’t hard-and-fast structures, more like reminders and ‘this is the stuff you wanted to do’ – but it’s a method that I’ve found to be working pretty well for me. I never used to think it would, that I’m not that organised and so on, but it’s been a surprise.
I don’t know if it’s usual, but I have two formats for the lists – my day-to-day ones sit on the mobile, but the bigger plans for the year tend to sit in my Notebook Of Doom.
A lot of the difference is in how things get crossed off, if I’m honest. Day-to-day “what I’m doing this week” works with just a tick gesture on the phone list, and that’s fine. But there’s more of an emotional and mental ‘achievement’ when it comes to physically crossing things off on a piece of paper, in a notebook, it’s a gesture of finality, of “done that”, which I really like.
Even though I don’t necessarily write about everything on here any more (and there’s some thoughts about that, which I’ll probably write and update over the Festering Season) and I certainly won’t list everything here, there’s a lot of stuff on the lists for 2016, which needs some thought and prioritising a bit.
I tend to over-load the lists too, give myself more on the plans than I’m likely to actually manage. But I’d rather have items as a backup for if I get everything done, or when a planned thing turns out to be unattainable and it’s time for Plan B/C/D.
Regardless, I’m looking forward to crossing off a lot of those items.
Rebuilding and Correcting
Posted: Sat 19 December, 2015 Filed under: Bankruptcy, Customer Services, Domestic, Finances, Getting Organised, Rebuilding, Thoughts Leave a comment »As part of the whole finances-rebuilding process, I’ve recently been paying more attention to my credit score and so on, including getting reports on it via Noddle , Equifax, and Experian. (It’s worth doing all three when you’re checking these things, as some companies report to one or two of the credit scoring agencies, but not necessarily all three – which is insanely frustrating, and most people don’t know it)
Within those reports, I found that three companies were mis-reporting things – primarily that debts that had been included in the bankruptcy were still being reported every month as “Default” (i.e. late) payments, rather than acknowledging that they’d been dealt with by the bankruptcy. I have no way of knowing (although I have some suspicions) if this is ‘just’ a mistake, standard incompetence, or a tactic to keep credit-scores low for people who’ve been through bankruptcy.
We’ll find out soon enough, though. I’ve written to all three companies, giving them the necessary information and copies of certification, and requesting that they update their records. In all three cases, I’ve given them three options for declaring the debt ‘satisfied’ (which is a different status to ‘paid’, but still closes the account) :
- Update it as of this month
- Update it for this year’s records
- Update it, backdating to when the bankruptcy was discharged.
Obviously the final option is the best one – and the one generally recommended by the FCA and Insolvency Service – because once the bankruptcy is declared, all debts are nullified, and all the credit recording should reflect that with immediate effect. So I’m still trying to be reasonable and find a middle-ground by letting it be marked as ‘default’ for a further twelve months.
One company has already come back to me, taking that third option. The other two, well, they’re more ‘traditional’, so letters have had to be posted (recorded delivery, naturally) and will take time to process. In both cases, the recorded delivery gives them a finite timescale to work with – if nothing has been done in eight weeks from proven delivery, I can start to involve the Financial Ombudsman and FCA. That’s a while off yet though (obviously) and I hope things will be sorted well before then.
The thing is, none of this is essential to the rebuilding of my finances and credit-score – although it will definitely help to have these three records sorted. But the rebuilding will continue to happen, with other positive credit-score reports and transaction reports helping over time.
There’s no valid reason for the various companies to not make the changes, though. It’s a matter of correcting the information, of setting the record straight. That shouldn’t cause anyone any problems.
But I bet it does.