Year: 2015

20 week scan

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A 20 week ultrasound image of our baby

Last week, Christine had her 20 week ultrasound scan. Our baby is developing normally, it would seem – everything seems present and correct, and he or she is growing at the correct rate. And the image is much more clear than it was at the first scan at approximately 11 weeks.

We did found out the gender of the baby and have told some people (mainly family), but we’re not making it widely known. This is mainly because the sonographer wasn’t very confident about whether the baby is a boy or a girl, but also because we don’t want to end up with lots of pink or blue clothes in case we have another child later on.

Christine is still due to give birth in early January.

A wee trip to Scotland

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Saltire flag

Last weekend some very dear friends of ours got married in St Andrews in Scotland, and so Christine and I made our way up there.

This was our first time in Scotland since a trip to Edinburgh four years ago, and the first time either of us had been to St Andrews. It’s a small town on the Fife coast, north of Edinburgh and south of Dundee. The town is dominated by its university, which is one of the oldest in Britain and has many famous alumni, including Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge. It’s also rather isolated, with only a couple of roads in and out, and three miles from the nearest railway station at Leuchers.

There’s a small harbour which still receives boats carrying fish and shellfish, although not on the scale of other small port towns like Whitby. The major landmark is its ruined cathedral which sits on the top of the cliffs, overlooking the North Sea.

We had enough time for a stroll around the town, followed by lunch at the St Andrews Brewing Company – a very nice brewpub with an extensive gin and whisky selection. The town is very much geared up for tourists and students in equal measures.

St Andrews is somewhere I’d happily go back to but there isn’t a lot to do there. It really is quite a small town – just one that happens to be very well-known with a lot of history.

Making a house a home (part IV)

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Back in mid-July, we anticipated that we’d be 6 weeks away from moving in to our new house. Well, it’s been more than six weeks and we’re still not in.

We haven’t hit any major snags but August has been a busy month for us (as evidenced by the lack of blogging) and so we haven’t progressed as much as we’d hoped. Here’s an update:

Plastering

The damp-proof plastering dried out mid-August, and so we have the first two coats of paint on the walls in the dining room. I’ve also been able to patch up some bits around plug sockets (for example) that weren’t quite finished to how we’d like.

I also mentioned last time that we needed some extra bits done – we had a builder in last week, who did these for us. So, the plastering is all done now, and we just need to wait for all of the new plaster to dry out. This means that we’ve finally had all of the holes from the old plug sockets filled in.

Bathroom

The bathroom was the one upstairs room that we planned to decorate, and also the one with the least amount of work required. However it ended up as a lower priority when we realised how much work the rooms downstairs would be. Anyway, we’ve got on with the painting in here and it’s basically done, but needs a little touching up to make it tidy with clean lines. The floor also needs a serious clean to get the paint splashes off, but otherwise, the bathroom is pretty much finished now.

Flooring

The living room, dining room and hallway all originally had the same dark blue carpet. We had to take this up as part of the re-plastering work, but we’ve decided to get rid of it. This is mainly because the new plaster is actually thinner than the old, so the dining room floor in particular now has a very slightly larger surface area – and so the carpet no longer fits correctly. We’ve instead decided to get oak laminate floor, with the same pattern across the kitchen, dining room, hallway and living room. The new flooring has been ordered and paid for, but we’re awaiting the last few bits to be delivered before it’s installed. As for the old carpet, a friend of ours took it off us for nothing for use in her house, which is great as it would have probably cost us money to dispose of.

‘The Triangle Room’

Beyond the living room is a room we’ve been calling ‘the triangle room’, as it’s roughly triangle-shaped. I assume it was originally part of what is now the living room as it’s separated by a comparatively modern stud wall. This part of the house used to be a shop, and the window in this room used to be full height. It’s been partly bricked up, but only on the outside, as we found when we took a bit of plasterboard off behind the radiator and opened up a void below the window.

I mentioned that we’ve had a builder in – he’s filled the void with insulation and covered it with some new plasterboard and plaster that is flush with the rest of the wall. We’ve also had an additional stud wall and door fitted in the room, as shown in the work in progress photo at the top, as eventually this will become a cloakroom with a toilet and washbasin. This probably won’t happen until after we’ve moved in as we’ll need to save up some more money first. It’ll also need flooring putting down, but again, after we’ve moved in.

Painting

We’ve started painting the dining room, as mentioned, and once the rest of the plaster is dry (which should be in the next couple of days) we can paint the living room as well. We’ve bought all of the paint already – the dining room is being painted green, and the living room a kind-of chocolate brown.

Exterior building work

We had two gas fires that we didn’t want, which both had external flues. Having removed these, we got the builder to fill in the holes in the external walls. He’s done a great job and it’s actually hard to see where the holes were originally. When the mortar dries, it’ll be almost impossible I reckon.

What’s next

We’ve not got many jobs left now. The flooring needs to go down, and we need to re-hang some skirting boards and lift some gripper rods that were left over from when the carpet was down. After that, it’s basically just painting, and then we can move in. Whilst this won’t be the end of the house renovation project, we’ll have done the most disruptive work before moving in. If all goes to plan, we’ll be living in the house by the end of the month.

Passed

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A photo of part of my driving test report, showing just two minor errors

I passed my driving test today, with just two minor faults (you’re allowed up to 15). As you can probably imagine, I’m delighted, and also very relieved.

Technically this was my third attempt at the test, but it’s been almost 8 years since my last attempt and so I’ve had a fresh set of lessons since. My lessons have been approximately weekly since July last year so it’s taken just over 12 months, although that includes a month-long break in March when I was in the Middle East. I passed my theory test in April.

Now I just need to wait for my full license to arrive, which will take two-to-three weeks, and then I can go and buy a car. Having a car will definitely make things easier, especially with a newborn baby come January.

2015 is certainly turning out to be a big year for me.

A photo of me posing with my Practical Driving Test Pass Certificate

It’s worth buying a new washing machine

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Today, I’m going to talk to you about washing machines. We bought a new one last month, and it is so much better than our old one in several ways.

The new washing machine is this Bosch model, which is normally £399 from John Lewis. We actually paid much less, by combining loads of gift vouches from the wedding and a cashback offer that was on at the time. This is now installed in our new house.

Our old washing machine is the one in our flat. It’s a Hotpoint washer-dryer, so it will wash and tumble-dry our clothes in one process. It’s probably around 10-15 years old as we assume that it was installed when the building was converted from a mill into flats.

For a start, washer-dryers are never as good as stand-alone washing machines and tumble dryers. Indeed, the dryer part of our old Hotpoint machine is pretty rubbish – if you’re lucky, it’ll get a half load mostly dry in around two and a half hours after the wash cycle is completed. Bigger loads will come out wet.

But it’s also not that great at washing either. It’s okay, but takes its time, and the drum can only take 6 kilograms of washing – about 13 pounds in old money.

The new Bosch machine has a much bigger drum that can take 8 kilograms (17.6 lb), so we can wash a third more clothes in each cycle. It’s significantly quieter, and barely makes any noise apart from during the spin cycle, which is still comparatively quiet. This is good for us as the washing machine is in the kitchen, which is directly below the room that will become the baby’s room when it’s born.

As well as being a good price, we also chose the Bosch model because of its energy and water efficiency. It’s rated A+++ for energy usage, which is the highest possible rating, and it required the least amount of water. Indeed, it looks like it uses less water than our current machine despite being able to handle bigger loads.

Despite using less water and electricity, the Bosch machine still manages to be quicker than the old Hotpoint machine – even when you enable its energy efficient mode. So not only does it wash clothes more quickly, it costs less money to do so. And it has a countdown timer telling you how long it has left. Timers these tend to be standard on new machines nowadays but this is the first time I have owned one with a timer, and it’s really useful.

We chose to get a water meter fitted to the house, and so conserving water will save us money in the long term, as will the reduced electricity costs. Furthermore, as we’ve opted not to buy a tumble dryer, this will save us more money on electricity bills in future. The house has a drying rack in the kitchen and space outside for washing lines, which we don’t have in the flat. And with a little one on the way, we’re likely to be using the washing machine far more often than now.

If you have an old washing machine, I would advise you to consider a newer model. The improvements in energy and water efficiency may well save you money in the long term and make up for the cost of buying a new machine. We’re really pleased with ours.

Plus, if you get rid of your old machine, you can create silly YouTube videos like this one.

Knowing how the cookie crumbles

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Screenshot of the privacy policy page

I’ve made two minor changes to the site today:

  1. There is now a privacy policy available to view
  2. The first time you visit this site from today, you will be asked for permission to store cookies on your computer

These come about because of my participation with Google AdSense – all EU sites must obtain user consent for cookies with effect from the end of September. This is the so-called ‘EU Cookie Directive’.

As you may guess from my tone, I’m not particularly happy about this. I accept the need for a privacy policy and I should have probably had one already, but I hate the popup cookie consent messages that sites use. There’s a lack of consistency, they offer a particularly poor user experience to mobile users (obstructing a large part of the page) and I bet almost nobody actually reads the privacy policies anyway.

The privacy policy is adapted from this example, and I’m using the Cookie Law Info WordPress plugin to generate the messages. The plugin is really simple and you can set it up in a few minutes. There’s no need to edit any templates, but you can still customise it.

P3P

I really wish that, following the EU Directive that mandated consent for cookies, that there had been some collaboration between web site owners and web browser vendors to come up with a more graceful solution. Whilst I accept that it’s best if users are able to consent to cookies being stored on individual web sites, this could have been done in a standardised way as a function of the user’s web browser.

Years ago, the W3C proposed P3P, which used HTTP headers and machine-readable privacy policies to allow users to select a level of privacy that they were comfortable with. Anything else, such as third-party cookies, would be blocked if desired. Ironically for a web standard, the only current web browser that supports P3P is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which has done since version 6. It remains an opt-in and rarely-used standard and the W3C paused all work on it ages ago.

I haven’t researched P3P enough to know whether it could be developed further, so that web sites can use it for EU Cookie Directive compliance. If it could, and if Google, Mozilla, Apple, Opera and others all agreed to implement it, then the web could become a less annoying place. Especially if there was an option to implicitly accept all cookies from all first-party web sites, for example.

Finding a Medium

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A screenshot of my first post on Medium, called 'Too Many Inboxes'

I’ve posted my first piece on Medium. Entitled ‘Too many inboxes‘, it was inspired by this Tweet from Buzzfeed’s Chris Applegate:

Trying to remember whether I agreed to drinks with @humour42 over SMS, Twitter DM, Facebook Messenger, email or WhatsApp. The future sucks

— Chris Applegate (@chrisapplegate) July 7, 2015

The separation of messaging into proprietary silos is a problem – and it’s far from being a new problem either. I felt it was something that was interesting enough to write around 1500 words on – which Medium estimates will take you around 6 minutes to read.

I chose to publish the piece on Medium, rather than on here, partly as an experiment. I decided that it would be sufficiently interesting to warrant exposure to a wider audience, but I also wanted to see just how much attention a Medium post from a regular person like me would get. How it performs will dictate whether I post further long-form blog posts there, or whether everything stays on here in future. It follows an experiment with Buzzfeed last year, which ultimately didn’t achieve anything.

Don’t worry – even if it is a success, I’m not going to switch over to Medium for everything. I like being able to manage everything myself, and I doubt that there’s such a wide audience for what we’re doing in our new house, or pregnancy announcements.

I was surprised at how easy it is to write on Medium. Generally, the pieces I have come across have all been high quality and so I assumed there was some kind of vetting procedure. But no – apparently anyone with a Twitter account can write anything. The writing tools are minimalist, but functional.

So far, my post has been up on Medium for about 90 minutes. It’s been viewed 11 times and read 5 times. That’s about how much a typical blog post on here would get – not great, but at least it’s not being totally ignored. And a couple of my Facebook friends liked it and commented on it, which is nice.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, I would appreciate a few minutes of your time reading the post at Medium, and your comments or recommendations. Thanks.

Camkix Selfie Stick Review

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A photo of an iPhone on the end of a Camkix Selfie Stick

Hello. My name is Neil, and I bought a selfie stick.

No, I haven’t lost my mind. I saw genuine instances when I would want to use one – especially when the little one arrives – and so I went onto Amazon to find a reasonably good one. Of those, the Camkix Extendable Selfie Stick (sponsored link) seemed to have the best overall reviews and wasn’t too expensive, so I bought it.

A photo of the Camkix selfie stick and accompanying Bluetooth shutter controller

The term ‘selfie stick’ is a relatively recent invention. Technically, this is a ‘handheld telescopic universal smartphone monopod’. It comes in three parts – the handheld monopod itself, a smartphone grip, and a separate Bluetooth remote. The monopod hand-grip is available in a variety of colours – I went for green, but you can also get pink, black and other colours. On the model I bought, the grip wasn’t very well-glued to the body, but otherwise I’m reasonably happy with the build quality, considering the price.

Retracted, the selfie stick is about 30 centimetres (11 inches) but it can extend to around a metre (40 inches).

The smartphone mount allows you to clip in a smartphone. My iPhone 5 fitted comfortably, and I’m sure the larger iPhone 6 would fit too. I’m not sure about phablet-sized smartphones like the iPhone 6 Plus or Samsung Galaxy Note but theoretically anything that 8 centimetres wide or less should fit. It won’t take a tablet computer like an iPad or iPad Mini, but if you are using a tablet to take photos on a selfie stick, then you are truly a horrible person and should reconsider your life choices.

A Canon EOS 600D mounting on a selfie stick

The smartphone mount is detachable, leaving a standard screw-in tripod mount on the monopod, so you should be able to use it with any regular camera. I was able to mount my Canon EOS 600D onto it, although the extra weight meant that it was hard to control it when fully extended. If you are planning to use a regular camera, remember that you’ll either need to buy a separate remote for it, or use your camera’s timer function. And unless you have a screen that flips around, you won’t be able to see the picture until you’ve taken it (the EOS 600D has a flip-out screen).

Finally, there’s the remote. Some selfie sticks come with a button on the handle, which connects to the smartphone either using an audio cable to plug into the phone’s headphone socket, or wirelessly via Bluetooth. This selfie stick has a separate Bluetooth remote. There are two buttons – the larger one is designed for Apple devices running iOS 6.0 or above, but should work on many Android phones as well. The second button is for some fussy Android phones that need a different command. Whilst iOS users can use the built-in camera app, Android users may or may not need to install a third-party camera app to use the remote.

A photo of me taking using a selfie stick

The remote also has an on/off switch so that you don’t inadvertently take photos of the inside of your pocket. Pairing it with your phone is straightforward.

On the whole I like the selfie stick. It’s small enough to fit in my camera bag, albeit with the smartphone mount folded downwards, and both the monopod and remote have decent wriststraps. And I promise that I won’t be one of those horrible people who ends up taking people’s eyes out in the pursuit of a selfie in a busy place.

Mystery meal

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Homemade burger

Christine and I had our first experience as mystery diners recently.

Ages ago, I signed up for the Mystery Dining Company, an intermediary that arranges mystery shopper visits for various restaurants in the UK. Whilst I got regular emails about available visits, none of the establishments interested me – they were mainly pubs that I wouldn’t consider visiting. Finally, an urgent visit for a restaurant that we actually like came up, and so I booked us in. I can’t tell you which restaurant it was, but it was a large multi-national chain.

As part of the task, we had to book a table online, but also call the restaurant using a call recording service (Record Your Call in this case) and upload the recording. There was a questionnaire to complete which had several questions that related specifically to aspects of the experience that the restaurant aims to offer at its locations, so it wasn’t a case of simply reviewing the food and the service. Fortunately, the restaurant and the staff did well on the whole, although I did have to put a few negative comments in places.

Obviously the major benefit of being a mystery shopper is that you get reimbursed for the meal, so effectively it was free. There are limits as to how much you can claim in total though, and you’re usually restricted to no more than one alcoholic drink each. To be reimbursed, you upload copies of your receipts; I learned that after submitting mine that I should have uploaded both the food and card receipts so that I could claim back the tips.

We’d happily do it again, although sadly visits are a bit few and far between in the Halifax and Bradford areas at the moment.

The Mystery Dining Company is just one such company that arranges visits; another is Market Force Information, and you can find out more about them in this blog post from Money Saving Expert. They offer a small additional fee on top of the reimbursement but it’s only a few pounds.

If you’re literate, enjoy eating out and are flexible enough to go to places at short notice, then I’d recommend signing up as a mystery shopper. You effectively get free meals out of it, and you’re helping the restaurant companies improve their customer experience.

Making a house a home (part III)

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It’s been a couple of weeks since we my last update on the house. We’re now four weeks on from having got the keys, but it’s likely to be around 6 weeks before we move in unfortunately. Here’s where we’re up to.

Plastering

The damp-proof plastering is done. We had to get this done as a condition of the mortgage, but thankfully we’ll get money back from the mortgage lender now that the job has been completed. Considering that the cost of the work was a four figure sum, this is quite welcome.

We have some more plastering to do, however. Last time, I mentioned that the existing plaster was in a poor state; fortunately it’s not universally bad. Once we got more wallpaper off the walls we found some re-plastering work had taken place more recently, and bar a few small holes it’s in good condition. But there are still some larger holes that need re-plastering, and some (presumably original) plaster that needs replacing or skimming over.

Wallpaper

Most of the old wallpaper is now gone. In some areas, it was four layers thick – three layers of backing paper and then a thick outer layer – so it’s been a challenge. Several walls had some hideous woodchip wallpaper, which is also an absolute pain to remove. Others had wallpaper over the top of a thin layer of polystyrene, which, whilst insulative, is also a bit of a fire hazard. Especially behind radiators. Thankfully this was easily removed.

We reckon we’ll have the last of the wallpaper off this week.

Painting

We started painting the bathroom some time ago, but other jobs got in the way. We’ll be picking up on this once the downstairs is further on. The damp-proof plaster can’t be painted at all for at least another four and a half weeks, and the additional plaster that we’ll have done soon will also need time to dry before we can paint it. So we might as well crack on with the bathroom in the meantime.

Cleaning

Obviously all of the work that we’ve been doing has created a lot of mess, so we spent much of Saturday cleaning the kitchen – with friends and parents to help. The kitchen didn’t need any urgent work doing to it, barring the installation of extra plug sockets – those are now in, so the kitchen is basically ‘done’ for now and we can use it. We will need to do some tiling at some point soon but it’s a job that could be done after we’ve moved in if needed.

We’re slowly moving forward with the house. The offers of help that we’ve had from friends and relatives have been most welcome, and it’s stopped the project from getting too overwhelming. Still, I’m very much looking forward to it all being finished, and for us to be able to live there.