I just want to wish everyone a happy new year for 2008! My new year’s resolution is to find that great job I want and make loads of quid so that I can travel around Europe properly!
By the time most of you in Australia read this little note it will already be New Years Day so I hope you enjoyed yourselves 
For those friends back here in London, have a great night tonight!!
Oh, how annoying!
There is a bug with OS/X’s Spaces in which windows will disappear. They don’t close, they just can’t be accessed any more. I have experienced this bug only a couple of times but according to my friend Justin this is just a temporary problem.
It seems the easiest way to get your windows back is to bring up the Spaces preference pane and restart Spaces. Your windows will all recombine onto Space 1 and you’ll have your access back!
Thanks, Justin!
Ever done an ego search? That is, searching for your own name in Google or some other search engine to see what comes up about yourself. I was doing this tonight. I googled ‘bugmancx‘ which is a username that only ever applies to me. It’s great, though. It shows up my YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, etc all in the top results. But if you continue down those results you start seeing some really weird stuff.
It all revolves around the concept of tags. To sum it up basically a ‘tag’ means the keywords you apply to any video you upload to YouTube or image that you upload to flickr so that people typing in something like ‘eiffel tower’ can find your image of the eiffel tower. It seems that in order to draw people in, websites are making use of this tagging technology by using the tags of successful websites like Flickr and YouTube. Before I even reached the end of page one of ‘bugmancx’ I’d come across websites like www.adelaideindex.com and www.gnosh.org which all trawl the web looking for content to re-display.
Re-display? Well these websites are using the tags to re-display content from the internet that already exists elsewhere. For instance, the gnosh.org site basically picks up on Flickr tags as well as many other image sites and shows you the results in one page. While this might be handy it means that every time I upload new photos to my Flickr profile they’re appearing in Google results on varying sites all over the web.
I suppose this is a smart way to re-engineer and make money from things that already exist on the Internet without breaching any terms and conditions and without having to do any actual work. I did feel quite some annoyance when I started seeing my YouTube videos being displayed on websites using the YouTube HTML include functions and being surrounded by Ads. A few of my videos are even featured on ‘AOL Videos.’ I put those videos up on YouTube for my own entertainment and enjoyment, and not so they could be plastered all over the web for other people’s financial gratification!
Look out people! It’s true when they say that once you upload something to the Internet it’s up there forever
Not too much has been going on lately thanks to the cold and Lindsay being at work during the week. Without work I’ve been going out of my mind at home a bit without much to do on my own. It’s taking some time to find work even though I’m looking constantly. Right now the job market isn’t changing much probably due to the time of the year. I think it will pick up in January again but right now thanks to our change in finances it’s a little more annoying not actually having work. Never mind, I’ll keep looking. There are a few jobs I’ve applied for which I’m pretty confident I’ll get called about but I have a feeling it won’t be until well into January thanks to the holiday season!
Lindsay and I didn’t get up to much on Saturday but went out and did a little more exploring today. We wanted to go up on the London Eye but the fog was so thick it wouldn’t have been worth it! People went up anyway. Here’s a shot of the London Eye and Big Ben during the fog:
While most of our friends here have gone elsewhere for Christmas, Lindsay and I will have a quiet one in this year.
Now I don’t promise this to be the most indepth of reviews because that’s not really what I’m here for, but I thought I would go through some of my views having used the 3 Skypephone for a couple of weeks.
Firstly it should be known that because I have no broadband at home yet I am submitting this review using the phone’s own 3G connection, shared over Bluetooth to my Mac. There’s one thing I’m happy about! Well, on to the review.
First of all the actual physical phone itself is quite light and compact. This is good. The phone weighs 87g and each row of number keys are shaped at a nice enough angle to make it easy to find and press the keys. Beneath the screen in the centre of the keypad is a large Skype button surrounded by a silvery directional keypad. To either side are a couple of function keys, the menu and clear keys and the pick up/hang up buttons.
Three Skypephone
On the right side of the phone is an application switching button, and beneath that a camera button. On the opposite side is a volume up/down button. At the base of the phone is a USB connection port covered by a rubber clip. This USB port can be used for both USB connectivity to your computer and doubles as the charging port. Having the phone use the port for two functions simultaneously is a step toward the future as it reduces clutter and also means that the phone is more worldly compatible.
For a small phone the screen is quite large, bright and clear. The top of the screen houses your standard icons such as battery, bluetooth etc and down the bottom are two other buttons, ‘Launcher’ and ‘Planet3′. I’ll get onto that later.
The Skype features of the phone are built right in so there is no need for additional software or launching a separate application for making Skype calls. If you scroll down your list of contacts you have Skype contacts mixed in with your regular telephone contacts (up to 500) or if you prefer, you can combine contacts into one so that you can choose either to call them or Skype them.
As you scroll through the contact list you can use the left/right buttons to scroll across to different information within that contact such as phone numbers, Skype, and Email. You can’t click on anything to send an email if you have an email address showing but you can still send an email to that contact if you go through the menus.
Issue #1
When you edit a contact’s details and enter in a Skype contact name, the phone will no longer give you an option to call that person over the regular mobile network! Talk about crazy. This is one bug which seriously gave me the willies. There are times when you don’t wish to Skype a contact, for instance if they are at work they may not have the ability to have a two-way conversation. Even when selecting their mobile number in their contact details there is no way to call it. The only option presented is ‘Skype’ and it always makes a Skype call. This option is presented even if the Skype user is not signed in and it will attempt to make the call over Skype informing you that the user is not logged in. The only way around this problem is to remove any Skype details from each contact and allow them to appear in your list twice; once as a Skype contact and the other as a normal ordinary mobile contact.
Well at least that one isn’t a complete show-stopper but it’s a pretty big bug.
Issue #2
The phone does not support receiving of vCard messages. In other phones also incapable of reading these you are often able to extract the number from the message and use it manually. Not so with the Skypephone. The functionality to extract numbers from the message is there but it will not work with a vCard message because of the format of the number. It will save or send vCards but I did not test this.
The SMS capabilities of the phone are fairly normal and work quite well. Background message sending means sending is quick and easy. Skype chat is right there mixed in with SMS and Email, so all your messaging is in one place.
Skype chat is a fantastic feature of the phone. If another Skype user is online it makes it very easy to have a free conversation with them without having to rely on costly SMSs. Simply select the contact, start a chat and you’re typing back and forth as easy as using MSN or Jabber.
Issue #3
The Skype chat uses the built-in T9 dictionary but can’t read words from your custom dictionary! Talk about annoying.
If you receive a new Skype message from an online user your phone will beep at you and indicate ‘New Skype chat received.’ Simply click OK and you are taken into, or back into, Skype chat. Mind you, even though it has already received notification of the message, Skype chat won’t actually download the whole message until you’ve enter the Skype chat screen. This can add a couple of seconds of annoyance on to the whole experience each time you come back to Skype chat. For example if I have a couple of chats in that section and I’m notified of a Skype message, I go back in to the Skype chat screen and I have to wait for the message to download and the chat icon to change before I know which chat and who from.
The handset also supports multi-user chat but can only participate in those chats, not start them.
Apparently the handset is capable of receiving video calls. It’s not capable of initiating them even though there is an option in the contact list. This option is only available on non-Skype contacts and when you select it, it proceeds to call them. Talk about dumb.
Email features
Composing an email is relatively simple and shows how intuitive this phone is in certain areas — if you type an email address in the To field and press the character button, it will automatically give you an @ symbol. This will happen in certain fields by default. When web browsing for instance, the default symbol is a period.
I’ve sent a couple of emails to myself on this phone using the default email account however, have not received anything to date. I even got a “Message not sent to…” message which didn’t tell me very much. I’ll stick with http://m.gmail.com/, thanks.
Media Player
The phone includes a media player which will sort by Artist, Album and Track. It will also allow you to create Playlists. I didn’t go into these features much. The phone also lets you connect to the 3MusicStore. Another relatively useless feature.
Camera
The camera is a 2 Megapixel camera with no flash. It’s quite easy to use in a point and click fasion and is also capable of recording movies. The camera button at the top of the phone allows you to snap your picture with ease with a maximum resolution of 1600×1200 or record a movie by pressing the Skype button. The camera has a Night Mode which helps you in the dark, a timer and several effects such as sepia and black and white. It’s relatively good and easy to use. You can activate the camera at any time by just holding down the camera button on the side.
Some of the tools the phone comes with are a calculator, calendar, notepad, stopwatch and world clock. The calculator is really easy to use. The calendar is a little colourful for my liking and I have not yet really had a good play around with it considering I use iCal. The alarm allows you to set three alarms and when it goes off it will not let you turn the alarm off unless you go through the menu into the alarm settings and turn it off from there. Annoying but useful for actually waking you up and making you think without turning it off and accidentally going back to sleep!
Web Browser
The phone’s web browser is fairly good and renders web pages right to the edge pixel of the screen giving you maximum viewing. It will do some clever things like resize large images so that you can see them more easily and if you use the Google search on the front page like I do, Google will re-render pages in a mobile-friendly format which is extremely useful when you’re on a small screen as it cuts out all the junk. You still have the option of viewing the original page. There have been occasions where I have visited a web page and run out of memory (“Insufficient memory”) but I suppose you can’t win ‘em all
The browser come with several default bookmarks and annoyingly, you can’t delete them. You can store up to 50 bookmarks and these 9 default bookmarks make up part of that 50.
The Three network will annoy you daily reminding you that you have to pay for Internet access if you haven’t done so already. This is just a daily message with a 24 hour timeout stored in the browser’s cookie so once it’s been read you can move on with your life.
Launcher
The launcher button brings up a few applications and web sites that you can visit. The first two are Planet3 and My3, followed by Yahoo! Search, Music, Google Search, Games, TV, Messenger, Facebook, YouTube, Mobilcast and eBay. There are quite a few. Ignoring Planet3/My3 and the search engines, let’s take a quick look at the rest:
Music – The 3MusicStore. Does everyone have one of these now??
Games – The Three Games store. Nothing free here. Why don’t they ever give you SOMETHING for free? The two default games installed on the phone are simply 45 second demos and they want £4.99 for the full versions. No thanks! Each game on the Games site is about £5 which is huge. How about 50p?
TV – I’ll spend a bit of time here. This one’s pretty cool!
I said earlier that they don’t give you much for free. Not so, but perhaps this is just because Three want to promote this product. You can log on to the TV site and download a heap of TV content or stream it live. Most of it is paid for, so you just ignore all that stuff, but they do give you access to things like episodes of the X-Factor (meh), BBC1, BBC3 and BBC News 24 for free. The other channels are all paid for but at least this time it’s kinda reasonable — 49p for 24 hours access to all channels or I think £5 for the month or something like that. I don’t think this is a feature I’d readily use but it must appeal to some people out there and it certainly is a future avenue of online digital content. I think it’s pretty cool.
The pre-paid users are more restricted. Only 8 channels for £2 per month and only in 20 or 30 minute sessions depending on the channel chosen.
The quality of the picture and sound are quite good for such a small screen. You can also choose full screen or not. Interestingly the phone will display the media player controls but you can’t do anything with it like pause or skip backwards.
When you go to each channel page you are also presented with a TV guide telling you exactly what’s on now and what’s coming so that you can easily choose what you want to watch.
Messenger – A java based MSN messenger client. It’s clunky and slow, just as you’d expect. It works, so it’s useful, and it will run in the background. Annoyingly if you get a message the application will just re-focus and interrupt whatever it is you were doing before. The chat interface is incredibly clunky. You need to press edit to go into edit mode in a conversation and the default is not predictive text. Once you’ve finished typing you need to select exit, then press send for your message to go through. It’s not as nice as the Skype chat mode.
Facebook – A very simple version of the facebook website letting you keep up to date.
YouTube – Again, a very simple interface to YouTube which allows you to watch YouTube videos. Interestingly it will use the phone’s inbuilt media player to play the movies.
Mobilcast – Mobilcast is a podcasting application. You need to download it separately and when you actually go to click download you are presented with the error “Sorry, but Mobilcast is not available on your handset yet.” One wonders why they would include it as an option unless they knew there would be a compatible release for it very soon.
eBay – You guessed it, a quick and simple interface to eBay.
Internet Sharing
Sharing your Internet connection via Bluetooth is relatively painless between the phone and the Mac. Simply pair the two devices and go into Network Preferences and create a new Bluetooth connection. Select the advanced options and enter ‘three.co.uk’ into the APN field and save. Click connect and you should be away!
One drawback to this mode is that once you have connected to the phone to use the Internet, the phone itself loses all Internet capabilities. You will drop out of Skype and you will not be able to browse the web on the handset. A minor bug in the web browser crops up under these circumstances where it will launch and quit immediately, not actually telling you why it has done so.
For the £5/month Internet Add-on pack you get ‘Unlimited’ broadband but watch out — this falls under a ‘fair use’ policy and the fair use policy states that you should use up to 1Gb a month. Once you get your computer online through your mobile it can be very easy to tally up those Megabytes and the My3 website won’t tell you how much you’ve used, either.
Bluetooth Sync
Issue #4
Big, big issue for me. This phone is not compatible with my Apple Mac, so I can’t use Bluetooth to sync my contacts and calendars. This is such a disappointment. I’ve asked Three when they are going to release a conduit for the phone but they never replied to my email.
Such a pity.
If anyone finds any hand-made tools please feel free to comment!
Battery Life
Excellent! With Skype being constantly logged in there is a lot of battery drain but the battery life tends to last quite a long time without an issue. I get into the habit of charging nightly anyway so I’m not too bothered if a phone uses a fair bit of power, just as long as there’s enough for it to do what I need it to do every day!
The phone’s battery/SIM casing is interesting. It’s held on by a magnet and this keeps it quite snugly attached. It’s also very easy to open even with the magnet.
So all-in-all I’m quite happy with this little phone! There are of course a few things that could improve it but the same could be said of any phone. Hopefully the next version of firmware irons out some of these bugs and the more we talk about it as a community the better off we are at being heard. So I’d recommend getting one of these phones and getting all of your friends onto Skype to use it. You can call them on Skype regardless of whether or not they’re on a PC or other compatible device, so it doesn’t matter where they are. And because it’s free you can call your friends via Skype all around the world.
That’s it from me!
UPDATE: 8/1/2008
After a couple of month’s normal usage I have noticed a major issue with the Skype features that have really bugged me. Lindsay and I both have Skype phones which give us the ability to text and call each other for free, using the Skype Chat and Skype features of the phone. Unfortunately for some reason, when both of us are logged in, we consistently can not see each other. This means we have to rely on the existing voice/SMS network to contact each other for which we are charged. The same issue happens for other users logged in via Skype so I believe it to be a problem more with the Skype network than the Three network however, since the phone is provided by Three my issue is with them.
It is extremely annoying. I’m going to log a case with Three and see what’s up.
I’m surfing the web from a WiFi hotspot in my local stomping ground of Chiswick. A fair bit has happened and a lack of broadband access has made it difficult to keep the blog up to date. As you know Lindsay and I fell quite sick with a horrible cold! Thankfully we are both over the worst of it.
Lindsay and I finally started making progress with our house after the nightmare that it was trying to organise it. To briefly re-cap, we were required to pay 6 months + 6 weeks damage deposit up-front in order to take the property without requiring a guarantor. Now that hurt the bank balances! In addition to that we had to give a character reference, a previous landlord reference and a reference from one of our banks! BankSA weren’t too cooperative with that so it took 48 hours of chasing to get the reference through, but in the end I gave up and the landlord settled for a reference from my previous employer. It took a further few days for them to organise the contract etc and we eventually went in to their offices on Wednesday last week and finally signed off everything — we were ready to go. Almost. They couldn’t move us in until either Saturday or Monday morning because they had to get the contract signed finally by the Landlord. Sigh!
Our presence at Justin’s house was taking it’s toll as we had been there for over two weeks now and spent the last week of it sick. It was rather uncomfortable so Lindsay and I decided to get a hotel room for Thursday and Friday night, taking a gamble that the landlord would be ready to move us in on Saturday. We spent most of that time getting over the last of our illness! Even though the hotel room for two nights cost us almost a couple of hundred quid, it was worth it if not for the fact that we actually had a proper bed to sleep in and could sleep whenever we wanted to. Thankfully though the gamble paid off and the agent rang to say we could move in on Saturday. I didn’t want to have to pay two more days worth of hotel bills.
We met the agent on Saturday at the house and moved in! It’s a nice place and has all floating floors and was mostly furnished. The sofa is a sofa-bed so that is useful if anyone stays over. We spent most of Saturday buying the things we needed for the house, particularly bed linen and a mattress topper. It smelled of heavy foam for the first few days but it’s getting better. So several hundred pounds later we had most of what we needed for a home!
The heating systems in London are quite different to home and fairly energy efficient one should think — they have metal grills in each room connected to a series of pipes which carry heated water around the house. The grills heat up and warm the rooms. It means you can heat the whole house on the same water. Ingenious. I don’t think our programming timer works properly as it doesn’t seem to turn on when it’s supposed to! Either I’ll work it out or smash it to pieces
Broadband! Well we have cable running down the street so we decided to get broadband via cable. Virgin told us that someone had already had cable in our house at some time in the past so there should be a socket in the house already. This would have been awesome as we would have been online within a few days but alas, there was no socket. We had to arrange for a tech to come out and hook up the cable and the first available appointment was JANUARY 4TH… This means I have to continue my search for a job at a local wifi hotspot… oh well.
Lindsay has started his job this week which means we’ll be bringing in some income now. I haven’t been as successful yet. I put some applications through a couple of weeks ago but haven’t had a chance to really get back on the ball due to being sick and then moving house. Once I finish updating this I’ll get stuck back into it !
So with everything going on we haven’t really done very much ‘holiday’ stuff! Hopefully now that we’re settled into our house we’ll get our chance to do and see some more.
Until next time!
Lindsay and I are staying at Justin’s house and have been struck by a virus which is running rampant through the house!
Justin’s been sick for nearly two weeks but luckily Lindsay and I are not that bad. I made sure I had plenty of lemon and ginger tea to try and build up my antioxidants. After a terrible night’s sleep I feel better today after a couple of Neurofen and so I am hoping that I’ll be back to normal by tonight.
Finally, the severe reference checking we had to undergo is finally over. The estate agent wanted a reference from my bank however, my bank took three days to get themselves into gear and email off a reference even after several attempts to get it done! In the end I managed to convince the estate agent to accept a reference from my boss at Internode and luckily it was still evening back in Adelaide so I was able to get hold of her and get her to email off a reference. Thanks Liz!!!
This should now mean that all of the loose ends are tied up for our home and Lindsay and I should *FINALLY* be able to move in!
It’s about time.
It’s been so long since I have been able to write an update given that my server has been more unreliable than ever. I’m sorry about that. I should have written more offline but kept on kidding myself that the server would return to normal more quickly!
I’ll have to do a real quick re-cap of the last few few days, but as yet there isn’t too much to tell. The reason for this is that Lindsay and I have been working towards getting our new home. We will be living in the suburb of Chiswick:
This is right around the corner from Michelle and only a bus ride away from Justin. And it’s a really nice area! The problems in getting the place have been irritating. Firstly there were two bids in at the same offer so we had to bid higher (an extra £10 per week) in order to actually get the place — but I believe that the price we’re paying is still very worth it, otherwise I wouldn’t have bid the extra! Secondly, being Australian citizens with no jobs on a working holiday visa, we really don’t have much in the way of a credible background in this country. Nor do we have jobs (except for Lindsay’s which he starts shortly.) This means that in order to be able to lease the property, we had to go with one of two options.
A) Get a guarantor for our rent payments.
B) Pay 6 months rent up-front.
Neither of these options are extremely desirable. We considered the guarantor path and talked it over with Justin who agreed, but the more we got into the paperwork the more we realised we can’t put a friend of ours through this — essentially it would mean that he would be leasing the place and be responsible for it and we would have to pay the rent. He would have to hand them over all of his details and they would have to do a credit and background check on him. And we would have to do nothing. It all seemed a little unbalanced. We decided to go with option B. Youch.
6 months rent plus a 6 week damage deposit plus the agent administration fee of £100 comes to £7540. That’s a lot of cash. It’s not all that we came with but it certainly is a large chunk of it. It will give us enough leftover to live on. At least on the flipside it’s not like we’re losing that money entirely; we we were going to spend it anyway. At least this way we won’t have to think about rent for the next 6 months and we’ll be able to save that money back again for traveling around. Luckily I suppose we’re not in a bad position. Many people I’ve spoken to have said they came over with far less money than we did.
But the saga doesn’t end there! In addition to paying the rent for 6 months the agent still wants to do a bank reference on each of us. Lindsay seems to have had reasonable cooperation out of Westpac but I can’t say the same of BankSA, who said at first they wouldn’t do it until I convinced them. They then said last night that they had never received the fax, which I’ll confirm that it was sent today with the agent. Frustratingly because of the completely flipped timezones I have to call the bank at about 11PM local time, when they’re just starting work, and I can’t contact our agent until daytime here, which is night time at home… so for any minor delays like this it can take up to 24 hours to resolve 
On a lighter note we went out to Leicester Square on Saturday night which was extremely busy. We were also down there earlier in the day and they had a UK premiere for the Bee movie with Jerry Seinfeld. Guard rails were going up, a giant inflatable bee was being inflated, and people were camping out so they could catch a glimpse of celebrities. This was at least 5 hours before the premiere would have even started!
So later that night we went back to the square and decided to see the movie Sleuth. It was about 3-stars I think. I wasn’t that impressed with it but it was a movie that was a little different than normal. Much like Hitchcock’s ‘Dial M for Murder’ this film was set in only one location and had only two characters. The younger boyfriend was played by Jude Law and his girlfriends older rich husband was played by Michael Caine, who actually played the younger boyfriend in the 1972 version of the film. All in all I rate it OK. I’ll make a point to watch the 1972 version as it is a remake after all.
Last point of note! Lindsay has come down with a chest infection which seems to be going around here at the moment! Luckily I have not come down with the ailment and although Lindsay has been pretty out of it in the last 36 hours I hope that he’s going to be much better today.
Thanks for being patient with my server. I’ll write again soon!
I’m definitely getting my exercise walking around London’s streets! I think I’ve lost track of some time somehow, somewhere! Lindsay and I took the tube in to central London and explored the main shopping district, you know, areas like Leicester Square, Oxford Street, Piccadilly Circus, Soho, etc! There sure are a lot of stores and people clambering all over the city. Shoes were definitely one thing we needed in London because we spent so much time on foot and the pairs we brought along weren’t really up to the task any more. The pair I wanted was down to the display pair so I managed to haggle and knock off 10% of the price. I suppose that is something!
We also went around looking at some properties. One we looked at was fairly shoddy, another was good and in Fulham, and this one was upstairs on the third floor of a building. It was a strange layout; in order to get to the bedroom you needed to go through the kitchen. We were interested in this property but didn’t end up going for it. Later that evening we caught a lead on another property in Chiswick which we visited. We’re not used to all the geography around here so when we were trying to find the estate agent they ended up finding us and picked us up from a street corner. The property we looked at was great! It’s a furnished 1 bedroom garden flat for £230/wk. It’s roomy and fairly modern and in a good area. It’s 5 minutes walk to the Tube and a few minutes walk to Michelle’s house. It’s available now, too! The best part is Lindsay and I can actually live in our own place without having to house-share which is so extremely common in London. I wouldn’t mind so much but I’ve always preferred having my own space.
The next day we decided to put in an offer but someone else had beaten us to it apparently, so we upped the offer to £240/wk which is still a very reasonable rate for this place.
So we have a house! We can’t move in until all the credit checks are complete and I had to ask Justin to go guarantor for us considering we’re both unemployed. Well technically, as Lindsay has been offered a position working for a domain name registration company! They want him to start ASAP but we’re trying to work around that so that Lindsay and I can have some time together first.
I haven’t had too much excitement on the job front yet although I did get some interest from Microsoft for a role which by description is quite well suited to me. I asked the woman who approached me how much the job was going for but she wouldn’t tell me up front, instead asking me how much I would put forward. I named my rate but she didn’t get back to me. I also named a high rate because I figured that even if my offer was way more than expected at least I wouldn’t have under-offered. I will reply to her as I still am curious.
The job is, in their words: “The position is a Support Specialist position within our Response Management Program team. The Response Management Program is in place to allow Microsoft to proactively listen and respond to employee, customer and partner issues. The purpose of this position is to monitor the vendors who provide Microsoft’s internal IT support, so the duties include ensuring that Service Level Agreements are met, being a point of escalation for any issues, providing training to vendors, and some reporting. So it’s not a hands-on helpdesk position, but more of a supervisory-type role.
Please note that the position is based in Reading and is a contract position (exact terms TBC, but it is likely that it would be a rolling contract from month to month). Travel could be up to 10% of the time and would be mainly within Europe (Paris, Munich, Amsterdam).”
The pros and cons are equal. Although I don’t like the sound of that whole Reading thing :/ Its 35 miles away. I’ll think about it.
Well I must say I am quite exhausted after being on my feet for so many days in a row. I think I’ll go to bed now
We’re back to a normal sleeping pattern! Almost! Hooray!
Lindsay had his job interview today, which he says went well. I’m still unemployed. I’ve applied at a few places on jobserve but no real bites yet. I’m trying! Michelle says I should come and work for Rackspace and although that is a possibility I would also like to see what else is out there!
I’m having some difficulty accessing my money in Australia at the moment. I can pay for plenty of things via Mastercard but it is not easy to access cash at the moment. I should have been a bit more thorough about that when I was back in Australia. Lindsay and I only set up a bank account at the last minute thanks to a bit of thoughtlessness on my part, and that will take a few more weeks before it becomes set up. At least we did it in Australia. The second problem was that I had not set up any international bank transfers on my BankSA account. I now have to get Justin to fax them a form for me that will allow that to happen, which will take a few days to go through. The other option is to Bpay money onto my credit card and withdraw it as cash. I can over-pay them bucketloads of money and withdraw it with a 3.5% cut being taken by the bank, and at pretty much market wholesale exchange rates, too. So that’s not too bad. The only problem is I don’t know what the PIN is on this Mastercard, so I either have to withdraw over the counter using photo ID if Barclay’s Bank will let me, OR get a new card issued. A new card being issued wouldn’t be a problem in Australia — I would just wait for it to arrive, but over here I have to get it sent to my Mum’s house, then get her to send it on to me! Gah.
I spent some time around Putney and got some lunch. I took it over Putney Bridge and walked around the gardens for a while before beginning to wander around the area looking at homes.
Gardens by Putney Bridge
I wandered into the grounds of a church and cemetary. The cemetary was beautiful, in that it was so dated and wintery. It looked like it had been untouched for hundreds of years in some ways. The grounds were littered with wintery leaves and squirrels ran rampant, as usual!
Putney Church Cemetary
I meandered past the church and decided to go in. It’s not something I would normally do as I am not religious at all however, this was London, the church was old and I had enjoyed the grounds. I respectfully went inside and the Pastor (I think) greeted me, asked me if I was visiting and said I was welcome to stay. Well I can tell you it certainly didn’t convert me to religion any time soon nor did I gain any spiritual experience from my visit but it was interesting and definitely something different.
Putney Church
The rest of the afternoon was spent walking around looking at houses while I wandered the streets of the Hammersmith and Fulham areas. I wanted to see what was out there and what the various areas were like. Much of London this way is very similar. The housing style is all the same although you can tell the better areas even in a small pocket of housing. I can understand how there can be millions of people living here.
There is also an amazing amount of renovations going on. In almost every street there is at least one house being renovated and upgraded. Justin says this is because if you buy a house here it instantly turns a profit, unlike back home. I suppose this is somewhat of a good thing as it will ensure that the housing standard is better than crap, but I’m going to find out on Day 5 (today from my point of view) exactly what these places are like, because Lindsay and I are going to go house hunting.
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