Jonathon Wardman

Sunday Bike Ride to Fleet

It’s rained a lot this year so far. While I often ride for work on my bike in the rain, it doesn’t make me very keen on going out at the weekend just for fun. This weekend was a little different,so I took the chance on Sunday afternoon to go out on my first ride of the season. It wasn’t the most challenging ride I have ever done, but it was nice to ease myself back into the habit.

I set off and headed over the MoD land to the Basingstoke canal and along to Fleet. [read more]

Finance: April 2012

With April now done and dusted it’s time to see if I managed to keep to my plan to reduce my monthly spending and increase how much I save. I have turned April’s spending into the same pie chart as February and March’s spending with the same groups of outgoings. If you compare this chart to the previous months you can see that it’s quite different — housekeeping is (slightly unexpectedly) noticeably larger, as it travel. Purchases around half that of the previous two months, while food is higher than either of the previous months. Overall spending was roughly the same as the previous months so it makes a good comparison. [read more]

St Patrick’s Day 2012

Every year London celebrates St Patrick’s day with a big outdoor festival. I’ve been to see the event before, back in 2009, but I didn’t have anything else to do for the weekend this year, so on the 18th March I made my way to Trafalgar Square with my camera. These photos are the result of my afternoon out. There are more in the gallery. [read more]

Finances: February / March 2012

My housemate made a comment with regard to finances the other day and it made me think. She commented on how I should be able to put a certain amount of money into saving each month. While I do save money, and I have a salary-sacrifice pension too, I don’t think I am saving as much as possibly I could. I was also thinking recently about a possible future change to my outgoings and wondering what I could afford. So I decided to do some analysis on my spending over a few months in early 2012. The following is a break down of February and March, and I will take a look at April once the month is complete.

I have broken my spending down into 10 broad categories: housekeeping, basic outgoings for rent, electricity, home insurance, TV license, etc. (I think it’s worth noting that I don’t pay 100% of these expenses, they are generally split 50/50 with my housemate, but as they go through my account they are all included in this analysis); entertainment, including going out, books, DVDs, music, games, etc.; cash, as I have taken this information from bank statements I can’t define what cash is spent on, it is most likely a mix of the other categories; purchases, general material purchases such as clothes and camera equipment; [read more]

The Possible Prizes

With the excitement building to find out what prizes I have won on the Purely Creative “Win A Million” scratch cards, I thought I’d do some research into what the prizes actually are.

I have two winning scratch cards; one with two matching symbols, and one with three. The scratch cards list all the possible prizes, so I should be guaranteed to win one prize from both of the following lists.

Two matching symbols:

• £8,000 – cash prizes are pretty straight forward. The T&Cs on the back of the cards say cash prizes are awarded as a cheques. 1 of these available.
• £5,000 – again a cheque, would cover the Canon 5D MkIII I want nicely. 2 available.
• Family break in Orlando – the back of the card says this prize “includes return flights from UK mainland + 14 nights hotel accomm. for 2 adults and 2 childen.” There is no information about what hotel it would be. [read more]

Million Pound Claim Number

If you read my post back in the middle of February about my attempt to win with one of the free scratch cards you get in magazines and newspapers, you might be interested to know that I received my claim number(s) today. I didn’t get them through the post but had to contact the company to ask about it, however.

The information on the cards said that I should allow 28 days to “receive claim number & info.” So I waited. Day 28 was the 16th March (allowing for delays in the post), and not having received a reply from Purely Creative’s Twitter account when I asked them if the 28 days was full days or working days I decided today to contact them via the form on the website. I was pleasantly surprised when I received a reply from Rubina at Purely Creative with a claim number. [read more]

Trying to “Win A Million”

I was on a train the other day on my way back from picking some things up in Guildford when I spotted on of those scratchcard you get in magazines and newspapers on the seat just opposite me. I’m aware of how these things work, what with their premium rate numbers and suchlike, but I also know they all have to offer a non-purchase route to winning. I’ve often wondered what would happen if someone actually tried the claim by post route, so I decided to give it a go.

The competition is run by Purely Create, a company with a registered address just down the road from where I went to University in Lancaster, and the company behind most of these scratchcard competitions. A brief search also turns up some quite negative reports in the papers, especially the Mirror. Despite that I figured, as long as I was careful, there was nothing to worry about. Their website, incidentally, is run on WordPress. [read more]

Text Obfuscator Version 1.3.1

I’ve just published a minor update to the Text Obfuscator WordPress plugin to the plugin directory. This is an update I have sat on for a while but have decided to push in its current form.

There are only minor changes in this version:

• Modified the behavior surrounding preceding and trailing white space in tokens and values.
• Modified behavior so leaving the replace box blank now assumes a match removal rule even if ‘remove matched’ is not checked.
• Added an uninstall function to tidy up settings when uninstalling.

I hope the white space handling will help out a few people who wish to match strings which include white space before and after their match string. Please leave a comment if you run into any problems with this release!

Those new toothpaste tubes

I’ve just started on a new tube of toothpaste. It’s the same kind of toothpaste as my old tube — Colgate Total Advanced Whitening — but they have changed the tube design in the most annoying way.

We are short of space on our sink, and Dana and I share a little plastic cup to keep our toothbrushes and toothpaste in. This used to work fine as there was plenty of space for two brushes and two tubes of toothpaste. Sometimes there was a problem with balance, especially when one of the tubes was nearing the end, but generally it was a perfectly satisfactory setup. But then, for some reason, Colgate came along and made the caps on their toothpaste tubes huge…

It seems they think that people want their toothpaste tubes to be self-supporting — that by giving the tubes a big cap they can stand on their own single big foot — but I really don’t see it as an improvement. [read more]

Wedding

Now I know I haven’t finished with the second half of the stag weekend posts so forgive me, but I wanted to write this now before I go away.

I’m heading back from Scott and Jess’ wedding this weekend. They had a handfasting ceremony and asked me to do their photos for them. While I was, of course, honoured that they would ask me and trust me to shoot such an important event, I was more than a little nervous. While I’m comfortable shooting live events and theatre, I had actually never previously shot a wedding. Wedding photography is not something that I have ever really wanted to get into, but I have known Scott since we were very young and Jess a few years now, so I agreed on the understanding that they know my style and they knew what they were getting.

I travelled up on Friday morning and stayed with my dad for the weekend. (I’m not sure how long I will have that luxuary now my mum has started her new job. Their house is up for sale and I guess it all depends on how long that takes to sell.) [read more]