2008 flying mileage

Following on from my post in July, I've now totalled up my flying stats for 2008.

Total miles flown: 45515

Total number of flights: 45

Cost per mile flown: £0.18

Destinations:

Great Circle Map

Quidco, or getting paid to shop: 1 year on

If you haven't come across Quidco, you'll thank me for this post.

Quidco is a website that pays you to go shopping. The idea is that Quidco get paid by retailers to send them traffic, and as a Quidco member for being part of the traffic they share their revenue with you. Sometimes this is as a percentage of your spend, or perhaps as a lump sum. For example, if you take out a car insurance policy with NatWest via the Quidco website, you recieve £75 cashback. The best bit is that you don't have to shop with particular retailers to benefit from Quidco, in the example above you'd already have used Confused.com to find that Natwest was the cheapest policy, and then rather than going to the Natwest website you'd go to the Quidco website first, and then bingo, £75 cash!

For the privelege of using the service, Quidco keep the first £5 of any earnings you make in a given year, so continuing the example you'd be up £70. Amazing eh?

I just passed my 1 year anniversary of signing up for Quidco, so the whole point of this post is to review my earnings.

The headline is that in 2008, I earned £379.62 from Quidco after the £5 fee. Or, to look at it another way on average I earned 18.24% on purchases through Quidco.  Some of this was on joint stuff like home insurance, energy suppliers etc so I probably should share some of my swilla with May...

If you'd like to see the breakdown of what I earned and where, for what spend, check out my spreadsheet.

If you haven't been using Quidco and are now intrigued, I suggest you start here. 

How much will you save in 2009?

I has turquoise star, and certificate!

(amusingly, eBay emailed me to tell me about my new status, and offered my the certificate above for download as PDF for posterity!)

iPod Nano vs washing machine - update

You may have seen my previous post about my iPod going through the washing machine. Well the other night I tried a repair job. In my previous post, I was escstatic as the iPod still powered up and contained all my music despite taking a trip through the full 2h03m, 40 degree washing machine cycle. Unfortunately, as soon as I unplugged it from the USB cable, it just switched straight off. Duff battery, thought I and off to eBay I went for a replacement battery for the princely sum of £3.49.

I dismantled my Nano with the help of an instructive (if monotonic) YouTube video and the case tools that came with my replacement battery (shown below in green). Disassembly requires the removal of 6 tiny philips screws and some fairly terrifying wiggling. Once you're in, you can really appreciate that there really isn't much spare room inside; quite a marvel of design really.

Once disassembled, after taking a look at the soldering precision required, and bearing in mind that I don't own a soldering iron, I decided it was time to get some help.

Enter Dean, friend, confidant, man with tools and general internet legend. After braving the frost down his road, the Nano was ushered through to his 'workshop' (dining room table) where surgery began. Job one was removing the sticky gunk covering the solder keeping the current battery in place on the PCB. This was achieved through a combination of soldering iron, stanley knife and screwdriver until we could clearly see where to solder the new battery on to.

At about this point, Dean told me about the properties of Lithium Polymer batteries, and in particular how you shouldn't ever touch the contacts of one together. If you do, you can start an hard to stop chemical reaction that ends in both fire, and explosion. It was one of those occasions where you've read the safety instructions on the battery ("Do not place in water or fire, do not pierce, do not touch contacts") and thought "yeah, whatever" but then get a bit scared of the task you're undertaking. Who knew iPod repair was this potentially dangerous?

With Dean's steady hand and nerves, surgery resumed with a renewed focus on how to keep the contacts from touching while we soldered and frequent checking of the temperature of the battery. Our final solution was a glue gun, and lots of toothpicks. After checking the current was crossing the PCB, I returned home for operation reassembly. You may have remembered that I said 6 tiny screws came out of the iPod, well I can now reveal that only 4 went back in, whooops!

On connection to the PC, the iPod powered up and everything was looking great until I discovered that 1) the click wheel wasn't working and 2) when I unplugged the USB, it turned straight off again. Boo hiss.

It was quite late by this point and I'd become so freaked out by the prospects of a lithium polymer explosion that I decided to fashion an air-tight box to leave the Nano in overnight. With this achieved, the next question was where to position it for maximum safety. My initial thought was in the car (NO) before I settled on in the porch between the 2 doors. Only once I'd climbed into bed did I think this through and realise that if there was some kind of incident, I'd just neatly blocked the exit from my 2nd floor flat. After getting up to rectify this, I finally settled on leaving it in the bath!

Any intrepid readers who want to give this a try might find this guide useful.

Ant, but not Ant

I remember back when I first got into Facebook, I tried to find my friend Ant, and with only one hit for my search added him to my friends list.

Here's what's just happened:

Cookalong-a-curry

Last night May and I did week 6 of Gordon Ramsay's Cookalong. We skipped the first course (lamb kebabs), but cooked the chicken tikka masala and bombay oranges. Overall it was very enjoyable, but I don't think we'd have managed it without Tivo and the ability to pause the show. Gordon goes very quickly and doesn't give the best of instructions. I also didn't rate his "roll the chilli between your fingers, chop the top off and shake out the seeds" technique, as lots of seeds got left behind resulting in a rather hot curry!

Status: November

02 November
03:03 Tim is back from Madrid! Woo!

03 November
22:53 Tim is going to see the Killers tonight at the Royal Albert Hall. Brill!
01:25 Tim is on the train to London, dinner at Leon followed by Killers and Zane Lowe.
03:58 Tim is at the Royal Albert Hall, 20 mins till Zane.

04 November
09:06 Tim just ordered an Ixus 960IS, bargainous £149.99 on Amazon.
19:31 Tim has been stitched up by the AA's savings account.
07:12 Tim 's new Ixus has shipped already, woo Amazon!

05 November
08:25 Tim is watching the election.
15:00 Tim is pleased. You go to bed, wake up and the world has changed for the better. History will remember today.
02:12 Tim is in the FlyBe lounge at Manchester airport watching Neighbours.

06 November
22:27 Tim is in London today. Poland tomorrow.
02:06 Tim is contemplating getting personalised whiteboard markers. I love whiteboards.
03:34 Tim is packing for Poland.
07:26 Tim has made it to Leam for last orders.

07 November
21:28 Tim is at LTN. Think I lost a bit of tooth over lunch, good job we have a dentist with us.
01:41 Tim is in Krakow, watching the Simpsons in Polish.
06:04 Tim is listening to the bugle player atop the tower, it's a warning the tartars are coming.
07:04 Tim is in a shisha bar.

08 November
20:21 Tim is fragile, but up and about.
00:30 Tim is feeling much better now.
04:34 Tim is in the Jewish quarter having frozen cocktails.

09 November
10:43 Tim is playing Blackjack, amazing triple split win ftw.
12:12 Tim is still awake.
18:43 Tim is light on sleep, heavy on headache.
07:32 Tim is in Leamington, one more sleep and then back to May (yay!) tomorrow.

10 November
18:21 Tim is trying to get home, but the traffic and rain are hampering things.

11 November
18:25 Tim is requesting a refund from Amazon, Ixus 960IS now at £129.99!
21:46 Tim is buying the full version of Fantastic Contraption.
07:40 Tim saw the QE2 leaving Southampton for the last time, it's going to become a floating hotel in Dubai.

12 November
20:43 Tim has the Benq working on DVI again, and recalibrated with the Spyder. Big difference over VGA.
01:47 Tim is getting shocking realisations about DJing on Saturday.

13 November
19:48 Tim is not at the office. The office is closed.
02:08 Tim is scared of the new printer/scanner/copier.

14 November
02:29 Tim is sending stuff to Clara.

15 November
23:43 Tim is packed up for not Foxy Beats.
00:30 Tim has departed for Leam.
04:31 Tim has arrived at the venue, smelling slightly of Paco Rabane.
07:20 Tim is wondering what sort of crowd doesn't dance to Groove is in the Heart but gets up for Salt n Pepa?

16 November
08:40 Tim is having a lol at J mixing with both decks on enforced 0%.
21:08 Tim in traffic to Bicester, iPod shuffle making great selections for once.
22:29 Tim just bought a Paul Smith suit.
04:05 Tim is back in Winch. Have moved the wireless dongle to improve reception.
07:56 Tim is not particularly impressed with FB's Blogger import. (Status now grammatically correct).

17 November
08:09 Tim is glad that May has discovered lolcats.
22:13 Tim hopes Animal Crossing arrives today.

18 November
20:01 Tim is ordering a new toothbrush.
07:34 Tim has succeeded. Made Fin's day AND Clara's day.

19 November
14:09 Tim just switched to O2 sim only 500 mins, 600 txts + data for £20/month until the E71 becomes available.
17:23 Tim doesn't have Animal Crossing.

20 November
11:21 Tim has applied a Gmail theme!
22:57 Tim is gently falling in love with Lightroom.

21 November
10:42 Tim has paid off his mortgage with proceeds of selling fish (in Animal Crossing).

22 November
00:56 Tim very much enjoyed the maiden voyage in Joe and Clare's hot tub.
13:04 Tim has realised that he left his boots on the boot of a car back in Winchester. Hope someone finds them.
15:38 Tim is at May's Dad's housewarming. Archers crew, chess crew, work crew and Rosie's family. Amazing scenes.

23 November
20:25 Tim has put 31k in the stalk market.

24 November
13:28 Tim is more than a little bit pwned.
15:58 Tim is calculating VAT savings.

25 November
03:30 Tim is wishing he had some proper toilet cleaner, eco stuff doesn't seem tough enough.
12:01 Tim is poorly sick.
21:16 Tim is getting cheered up by Screen Wipe.

26 November
09:11 Tim is feeling much better today.
13:32 Tim bought a replacement iPod Nano battery.
23:16 Tim is considering importing a Lincoln Mayne tee.

27 November
12:13 Tim is getting his massive hair cut.

28 November
12:45 Tim is at the Fosse retail park, en route for Sherwood Center Parcs.

29 November
19:26 Tim has been in the mud suite, now on to Rajinder Pradesh.

30 November
16:55 Tim has dropped May at the station and fought back through the tards in the Centre Parcs car park.

Reducing my carbon footprint

I was at Center Parcs this weekend with my family for the final part of my Mum's year long 60th birthday celebrations (her actual birthday was on July 19). Whilst there, I took part in National Tree Week and planted an Oak tree. Technology equipped visitors to the Sherwood Forest holiday village can find my tree here.

I asked my brother how many of my airmiles I'll have negated with my kind ecological act and he said "3". Quite a few to go then...