Ben Shephard

Once again it’s been ages since I’ve written anything. It’s not that there hasn’t been anything happening worth writing about because there has but I’ve been spending lots of time doing other things. I’ve spent most of my spare time with Janine over the last few months but we’ve not been getting on so well recently and I’m a bit worried about all that but I don’t want to go into detail about it here. I’ve also been getting pretty worried about my finances. I had a pretty bad Christmas and had lots of time off work ill which is rare for me but that resulted in a very low January pay slip since I don’t get sick pay. Also my fridge broke down and I needed four new tyres on on the car and also had to pay for my car insurance which was extra this year since I added Janine as a named driver. All of this plus a pretty expensive Christmas has left my bank account a little worse for wear. It’s not been as empty as it is now for over ten years which is worrying because I’m barely earning more than I’m spending.

All of this had lead me to try to rethink some of my purchasing decisions.

I’m still paying for my car which is something I can’t do a great deal about. I could empty my savings and pay it off but then I’ve got nothing to fall back on should things suddenly get any harder. I don’t think I’ll ever want to borrow money again. It’s like having a ball and chain attached to my leg but once it’s all paid off I’ll be able to chill out a bit more.

One thing I’m constantly looking at is my energy spending. My gas and electricity bills are pretty high so I decided to get my bill recalculated. I’m in credit with my supplier but they won’t return the balance because aparantly with Direct Debit the deal is your supposed to pay up front before you use the energy. Thats a new one on me and I felt like they were just making excuses. They lied to me to get my custom and told me they would be cheaper. I’d worked out my electricity consumption and that worked out right. My gas consumption was a little harder to work out and I just couldn’t quiet get my head around the math. I don’t understand why my gas would have a different calorific value than anyone elses and the imperial to metric conversions don’t seem to tally to me. My meter measures in cubic feet yet I’m charged in Kilowatts. I decided to have a look at Uswitch and compare the offerings from elsewhere. Top of the list as cheapest came a company I’d not heard much about before but they were about two thirds the price I’m currently paying. They were First Utility and their offering looks pretty good. Not only are they cheap but they are the only UK supplier currently rolling out free smart meters which constantly update your account with correct readings by GPRS so no more estimated bills. Also this can tie in with Google Energy Meter which is an I-Google app that graphs your energy usage so that you can tell exactly what you use and when. I like that kind of thing and I think it will come in very handy to help me cut down on wastage. Also I’d like to be able to control certain aspects of my house by remote control such as the heating. Sometimes I’m late leaving work so the heating being on at home then is all wasted energy. If i had a control unit that either had it’s own web interface or could hack something together with something like an Arduino I could get greater control over my energy usage and I think with something like that I could cut my gas usage by a third or more. If I could control my lights in a similar way I could improve my security by controlling lights on the fly when I’m away from the house from my G1 but that would require quiet a bit of wiring and could get pricey and I don’t have a great deal of budget right now.

One of my other areas for improvement is my communications bills. I pay quiet a bit for my mobile phone but that said I do use it a great deal and I’m tied into a contract for most of this year now. My broadband is an area I want to look at. I’m currently with Pipex business / Opal and for what you get it’s very pricey. It’s an ADSL line so a maximum speed of 8Mb which is slow by today’s standards. Also I have to have a phone line which I neither want or need and that costs me £132 a year. I do get a static IP address which I find very handy what with running all the websites I host. I did look at other ways to do what I do now with a dynamic domestic broadband account but I can’t really find a suitable solution that does everything I want it to. Business broadband is way over priced for what is is and so far I’ve found the performance to be pretty poor in comparison to previous domestic suppliers. I currently get about 4-5 Mb out of my line and for the same price with a domestic virgin media line I could get 50Mb but that said I’ve been with Virgin before and their customer service sucks. It’s hard to find a good compromise but I think I’ll be shopping around again for the next few months to see what I can get.

On another Internet related matter my site has been down quiet a bit recently and I think this may be down to a faulty router. I swapped out my ADSL router for one I borrowed from work. An old DrayTek Vigor 2600i I’ve not had any outages since but I’m going to give it a few days and swap them back and see if the problem comes back. If so it looks like I’ll have to invest in a new modem / router at some point this year. I’ve also got  a secondary router in my bedroom acting as an extra wireless AP since the signal is pretty weak at the far end of my house but that seems to be on it’s way out too as the wireless keeps dying on me. The DrayTek isn’t wireless so without that I’m tied to the wall all the time now. I may well invest in a decent wireless router and separate network modem if I have to replace them. I’ve wanted a Linksys WRT54GL for a long time as that model can run third party firmwares quiet nicely which come with lots of added features. Also rather than having the extra AP in my bedroom I think I’d go for some meaty high gain antennae and stick with just the one box.

I need to get my spending sorted out and apart from that I’m doing all the other obvious things like cutting back my food budget. I need to lose some weight anyway. I’m also going to try and stop using the car quiet so much because the price of petrol is on the rise again so as the weather improves I’ll try and get out on my feet a bit more and walk places. The best way I find to do this is to walk to the pub because then I don’t waste money on over priced soft drinks and I get some exorcise plus I can spend the petrol money on more beer.

The other factor I’m looking at is my income. I’ve started STS and I’m trying to get my name out there as much as I can but so far I’ve not had any paying customers but there is time yet. I’m also looking around for alternative employment but the economy being the way it is things are pretty limited. I think it will be the same for STS as well because if people in general don’t have much money then they might not see getting the computer fixed as priority right now. But on the flip side of the coin it may be that people are trying to prolong the life of their machines and would like help with upgrades. I’m hoping things take off eventually because I really admire my friends who work for themselves. I  still think it takes a lot of guts to give up your day job but time will tell.

I’m hoping I can sort a lot of this stuff out by the end of the year and become a bit better off but as for the other things in my life right now everything feels a bit uncertain. I’m trying to put things to the back of my mind a bit and concentrate on the stuff I can work on easily as once I’m financially secure I’ll be able to breathe a bit more and hopefully be a bit more relaxed. Relationships can be a roller-coaster ride at the best of times but when the rest of my life feels like it’s falling apart around me it’s difficult to just chill out and get on with life.

Hopefully I’ll be back again soon with something more exciting to write about. The release of Ubuntu 10.04 is just around the corner now so hopefully I’ll have some nice things to say about that. I’ve tried the alpha so far and when running from a live USB stick I didn’t notice any power problems which really killed 9.10 for me on both my laptop and netbook. but I’ve still got some work to do on that. I just don’t want to wipe out my perfectly usable 9.04 install to do it and then have to go back and re install again. I’ve been without my netbook for long enough this winter and it felt like I was missing a limb or something but my G1 running CyanogenMod helped ease the pain somewhat.

Later

Ben

= 4.5