Just a quick update. Her Majesty’s Court Service rejected my request to be exempted from the jury duty so I have to do it early in January.
However having emailed our chairman, he informed me that the Art Loss Register pays employees there full salary while they are doing jury service. So all of my financial concerns are resolved on that note.
As that expensive time of year is fast approaching, I decided to try and better manage my finances. In the past I used to do it with my own designed databases or spreadsheets but it was always time consuming to maintain. This time I got hold of a application called Moneydance that was recommended on the Which? website.
Its probably overkill for the use I need, but it does do a very good job of both visualising my expenses so I can see where I can cut down as well as allow me to quickly review and check the years transactions for anomalies or “expensive things” I should not have paid for.
Another potential issue for most people will be the complexity of actually managing your personal finances in such a detailed way. Using online banking it was easy enough to download a years worth of transactions in .ofx format and import it. Unfortunately, you do have to define what category each transaction is one at a time. Thankfully, Moneydance learns and starts suggesting categories so it only took me 2 hours to check a years worth of transactions.
I also had to provide opening balances to get things to balance. I have an accounting background so expected as much, but I can imagine it would cause confusion for some people when you see your current balances not matching live balances.
Results:
To the right, you will see a comparison of my income and expenses for the entire year to date. Giving me an overall picture of how well I am doing in terms of controlling my spending and not living beyond my means.
Its interesting to see the spikes visually like this. A is when I deposited cash I got as gifts from Christmas. B is my expenditure from attending the Denmark meet up. C is from selling various assets. Ignoring those, my expenditure remains consistent, slowly increasing due to inflation I would guess? But as my income is not increasing it does highlight the need to address my expenditure and cut back more.
In the left image, you can see how easy it is to browse transactions by category. Unfortunately I could only download the last five months credit card transactions online. Income and Expenditure graphs still look correct because payments to the credit card are on the current account so I had accurate total values. I just lacked the option to view the details for the start of the years credit card transactions.
Finally, on the right is one of the graphs that show the top ten expenses.
This is perhaps one of the most useful reports though, as once I get it working it shows the highest expenditure. There is no point me worrying about how to lower a £15 monthly bill when I have £200 going to Sainsbury’s that I could try and cut down on for example.
Anyway, that’s all I have been up too… Now that I have set this up, its easy to maintain on a monthly basis and I do love playing with new applications and playing with figures. XD
So this morning I received a letter from Her Majesty’s Courts Service because my name is on the electorial register. Apparently I have been selected for jury service in January 2011 in Bristol Crown Court which by itself is quite a pain to travel to for someone who dos not drive. However as I read the paperwork, I came to the following conclusion.
Presuming a court case lasts two weeks, my employer is legally required to give me that time off work unpaid, so I would lose about £850 (gross) income in that month. Plus £68 for train travel to Bristol gets the total to £918… Continue Reading
Over the past few weeks I have been pretty distracted by a new game called Minecraft. Still in development so it has its bugs, but for 10 euros its good value for money considering how much time I have enjoyed it.
Within the game you basically have this massive randomly generated world that has no boundary’s and allows you to mine resources and build whatever you can imagine. Sounds good, but you also have some great “redstone” mechanics to makes things complicated too. Continue Reading
Since getting back from the Denmark meet up to celebrate The Volition Cult alliances four year anniversary, my new computer ordered from Scan was delivered. Those guys are busy as there was a 45 day wait. Worth it though, as the new 3XS machine is very nice. The old 3XS machine has been sold, the spare computer is also gone, as is my old mobile so I have deleted the “For Sale” section of the website.
Using this new computer, I have started working on creating a digital version of the Volition Cult Academy, which focuses on training or supporting new players to Eve Online, helping people better understand the theory and mechanics of the game in relation to player vs player game play. Example below.
I am actually really enjoying creating these videos and its quite rewarding seeing the feedback and comments of people actually finding this sort of thing useful. I have done quite a few so far…
101 – Introduction to the Volition Cult Academy
102 – User Interface including Overview Settings Part 1
102 – User Interface including Overview Settings Part 2
103 – Attributes, Skills and Clones – Part 1
103 – Attributes, Skills and Clones – Part 2
104 – Introduction to Ship Classes - Part 1
104 – Introduction to Ship Classes – Part 2
104 – Introduction to Ship Classes - Part 3
105 – Basic Ship Fittings – Part 1
105 – Basic Ship Fittings – Part 2
106 – Tanking
Currently to cover everything I would like to cover, I would estimate that in the end that you can expect to see around 60 videos, around 14 hours of content as I have plans to continue onto more advanced topics in the future. So if you want to be notified of when I add new videos, the easiest way is to probably subscribe to the YouTube channel.
Members of Volition Cult can also take a number of exams I have created that if passed, get you rewarded with in game medals. Its all very geeky! You require 100% to pass, and most of the questions are free text so its tough. To date, I have marked around 50 submissions, with a 94% pass rate so the academy is doing well. Its worth mentioning that Eve Online is a complicated game.
One unrelated final thing I wanted to mention briefly was that I will start using Picasa Web Albums as a online backup tool. So photos of the Denmark meet up will eventually be posted up there with everything else. Some will be public, some will be private, but for $5 a year for 20 GB of storage, its not a bad place to store a backup really.
As I am leaving for Denmark in under a week I have been working on getting decent camera software on my mobile.
First job was getting a decent video recorder, and it seems because I installed CyanogenMod 6 on my phone, my Nexus One is now capible of recording video at 720p which was a nice side effect so that should be fine for the Volition Cult meet in Denmark next weekend. Continue Reading
Having got back to the office after a two week holiday, I am pleased to report that no one decided to break anything and all of my (technically my employers) lovely configured servers are still functioning as intended.
Just spent the time relaxing, sleeping and not doing much of anything. Although I did see my first few 3D films though at the cinema, which was an interesting but I was not overly impressed by it all. The 3D effect is nice, but as the flat screen is large and far away I suspect the effect is lost a little. Get the feeling it might look better on a PC, but needing to use special glasses is a pain in the rear. Continue Reading
For those of you that have visited and taken note of the local wildlife that lives in the roof of the building next to my kitchen window. Those birds are still present and I finally managed to get a photo of a couple of them without them disappearing when I wonder off to fetch a camera…
At the time I was actually moving furniture, taking a couple of desks apart and doing a general spring clean so left my phone on the window seal. The idea was to make my living room more efficient you see, fixing the problem of where to leave drinks and snacks when I am watching films and also the height of my computer monitors. Continue Reading
I have just created a few new sections to the website to try and make myself some money so I can afford to replace the ageing Anubis (shown in the two images). They are in the menu above called “IT Services” and “For Sale” of which both are pretty self explanatory.
The issue I am finding is that some of the new games I wish to enjoy I always have to run on moderate graphics settings because of the bottlenecks present in the system. Not unexpected as my computer is now five years old, although it is annoying how a machine I spent nearly £2000 on is now worth just a few hundred… Damn computer industry, moving so fast! Continue Reading
Guessing many people have been keeping up with Sherlock over the past few weeks on BBC as the series of 90 minute programmes have been quite entertaining. Hopefully they do more in the future.
I wanted to share the following websites the BBC crafted to help with immersion which I thought was pretty cool to be honest. They could have just made the series and be done with it, but they went the extra mile and made these mock sites that relate directly to the series progression giving you extra insight to the story. Continue Reading