Deleted Facebook

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I have deleted my Facebook account.

I spent far too much time viewing material on Facebook. Most of it pointless, meaningless and a lot of it outright annoying, including:

  • Pictures of people’s dinner,
  • Political pictures of tortured animals and humans designed to illicit charitable donations or petition signatures,
  • Invitations to games,
  • Pictures of witches and other creatures, usually captioned with advice that should I not share the image I will encounter some misfortune or other,
  • Arguments between married couples in comment threads,
  • Woeful spelling and grammar,
  • Posts by people I only ever had a passing acquaintance with and now seem to know more about their lives than I probably should,
  • Increasingly intrusive advertising,
  • Increasingly intrusive ‘engagement’ by brands,

I’m sure there’s more. Why stick with something that provides so much intrusion and annoyance for such little reward.

Initial Consultation

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I visited the offices of yet another LighterLife consultant last night. I say it like that because this is my fourth consultant, so I’m an old hand at this. However, this time I am going back to a fully-committed model – the first time I’ve done that since my original journey with LighterLife between April and October 2010. In the period since then I have tried (with differing levels of effort) to keep the weight off, but am now in a position where I am a whopping five stone heavier than I was when I left the programme in 2010.

The visit went well and I was surprised to learn about some changes:

  • You can now self-certify to join the 600 calorie VLCD programme;
  • You don’t need to get your blood pressure certified every 4 weeks, but you will need to renew your self-certification every four weeks;
  • You now pay £60 every four weeks to cover your groups;
  • Your Food Packs now have variable prices with the chocolate-style bars being more expensive than the soups;

These changes I think are very good. No more awkward moments at the pharmacy and no more £60 sign-off payments to the GP. It feels a little cashflow-awkward to pay over £100 on week 1 of every 4 week cycle, but I can see how it would benefit me to stay on the programme having paid for 4 weeks and not wanting to lose that money by no-showing.

When I first did LighterLife back in 2010 I was a single man and money was less of an issue. Now as a family man with a partner and young dependent child I need to think more carefully and really would not want to effectively waste the money I am going to spend on this programme by putting the weight back on. It’s great to have the support of my family and others in this second journey, but I can’t help feel it’s one that should not need to take place. I need to reconcile that and move forward.

I start on Sunday 2 June 2013 and aim to complete my initial weight loss by some time in October 2013.

LighterLife Take 4

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I’ve decided to go back on LighterLife.  I originally did it back in 2010 and lost 9 stone.  Since then I have put 5 back on.  I did go back to LighterLife twice before now but never on their Total programme. I’ve decided to commit fully and totally for as long as it takes to drop this 5 stone.

Bring on the food packs!

Renewal Failure at GoDaddy Causes Lost Domain Name

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All of a sudden one day I received an email telling me a domain name had been deleted from my account.

I was very surprised – especially as it was about a domain name that should have auto-renewed. I received several emails in the run-up to the renewal date telling me so.

Turns out the following timeline kicked in:

  • Renewal date: Attempt to take payment from the original payment method. As this was registered into GoDaddy a long time ago it’s no suprise the method had expired.
  • Send customer an email to say auto-renew failed. This never happened and GoDaddy have been unwilling or unable to provide evidence these emails were sent. They claim to have sent 3 emails, but none were received despite having two different email accounts listed with them. Funnily enough I got all their other emails around that time and when I asked them to look in the SMTP logs for proof of sending they shut the conversation down and referred me to take up legal counsel.
  • After a grace period release the domain name to the market where it can be re-registered by a new party.

Note: I do have alternative methods in my account – another credit card and a PayPal account. No attempt was made to charge these. I log in to my account regularly for DNS stuff. No warnings. No indication of a problem.

Sim City (2013) vs. Cities In Motion 2

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As a new father to a beautiful daughter I have a different life now compared to many years ago when I could spend hours crafting cities and economies in various games. My favourites franchises were Sim City, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Railroad Tycoon, and then more recently Cities in Motion. You get the picture.

Fatherhood brings with it opportunities to rediscover gaming, however. When my daughter is asleep for example. I can’t go outside and I dislike what’s on TV at the moment, so I am delighted to be able to spend a brief moment in-game. 

However, fatherhood also brings challenges. I don’t want a game that I can’t put down in an instant so I can soothe the baby. I also need a game that I can play whilst bouncing the baby on my knee and trying to stop her from getting her sticky fingers all over the keyboard. Gaming has become a much more casual affair – I want escapism, fun, quick results and nothing too mentally draining.

Sim City (2013)

Big fan of the franchise and waited a couple of weeks after release to finally give in to my urge to buy it. Refused to pay for the top package – I have a family to think about now! Despite the high price I think it’s worth it. Maxis/EA have done a sterling job. However, what niggles me is:

  • I don’t like how it seems to make cities rely on other cities in the region. Sim City 4 didn’t make enough of regions, but I worry that they’ve over-compensated in this edition. I don’t have time to nurture regions, I just want to pick up and play a city.
  • Online is a massive element of the game. Yet I have no friends – that play Sim City anyway. I don’t want to play with a stranger who is probably a kid with hours to kill and capable of handing my ass to me on a platter – not that Sim City is competitive of course, but I don’t want to have my pride hurt.
  • Loading time (probably due to online requirement) can be hit and miss. My gaming time is valuable and short.
  • Transport is weak. Street cars and buses seem to be the limit at the moment. I liked how Sim City 4 handled traffic with it’s Rush Hour expansion. I also miss the on-road arrows from Rush Hour that showed me where everyone was coming from and going to – I don’t see an option for that in the new edition.

The list of things I like about Sim City is far longer. Awesome game, but ultimately more for the player with hours to burn and able to really get stuck in. When you’ve got a wife/partner asking you to help with something every ten minutes you don’t want to be in the middle of something in-game and have to pull yourself away. Even as I write this I have been summoned a couple of times to do my domestic duties. Duty first.

Cities in Motion 2

it’s cheaper for a start.

You don’t build your city – you focus on getting people around it. I like that because it’s instantly more casual, though never easy to pull away from a half-built metro system.

Compared to Sim City the transportation ‘system’ is much better – as you would expect. But it’s not just ‘as expected because it’s a transport game’, it’s so much better I have found myself enjoying it more than I do the entire Sim City game. Some claim.

There are downsides, however:

  • When you’ve got a baby on your knee the last thing you want is the need to press W, A, S and D to move your camera around. There’s no auto-panning at the edge of the screen and no way that I have found to click, hold and drag the camera around (Black & White was good for this… damn I miss that game!)
  • The method of connecting tram lines and metro sections is annoying. I think I finally got the hang of it, but my god what a fiddly bit of interaction.
  • Adding stops to a line can sometimes go wrong – I don’t know what happens, but I have to wipe the whole lot of stops and start again.
  • I don’t really get timetables and it looks like too much hard work.
  • The interface buttons and controls are great, but need some work in some areas. I still find myself hovering over things, but that can be a sign of age!

Despite the niggles I have with CiM2, I much prefer it to Sim City. I can put it down and pick it up more easily.

Summary

Depends on what you’re looking for. Long-form game with full control? Sim City. Something you can drop in to for a bit of fun without needing to be online and cheaper to justify to your wife? Cities in Motion 2. It’s just got a better and more simple fun to it.

Thoughts? Comments?

Cashd launches in very early alpha mode – testers needed

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I am new to this app development malarky, so I’ve been experimenting with an idea I had some time ago.

How cool would it be to have a site/app where you could see everything that is coming and going every month on all of your accounts across all of your providers?

For example, I have an account with NatWest, a credit card with Barclaycard and a PayPal account. It’s a nightmare at times because some payments go out of Barclaycard (Netflix for example), some out of NatWest (rent, etc) and some out of PayPal.

I’d love to know what’s coming and going and when. Even better if I can get it in a timeline look and feel.

Announcing “Cashd”…

“Cashd” means ‘cash scheduler’ and aims to show you what scheduled transactions you’ve got for all types of account, even your piggy bank.

I’ve started it out very basic and flexible. For example, you can use Cashd if you have a simple set of accounts like me or you can use it for rental accounts if you rent out properties. You can even use it for your business accounts. 

You just set up an account and call it whatever you like. You then set up your transactions and then just check in whenever you want to know what’s happening.

Because Cashd knows very little about you there’s no need for PINSentry devices and two-factor logins. We don’t know your bank account numbers, we don’t even know who you are or ask you for your email address. There is no way for the accounts and transactions you record in Cashd to be traced back to you in real life. Cool huh? By being anonymous to us your data is almost automatically protected. 

It’s very basic for now but will be developed over time and following feedback from you, my brilliant alpha-mode testers.  Some features I have thought about include:

  • Showing you the total expected outgoings in a month compared to the total incomings to give you a net profit/loss figure
  • Support for weekly payments

What else can we do with Cashd? What would you like to see?

You can give it a try here: http://www.cashd.co.uk/

Just sign up using your Facebook Account, Google account, or use an anonymous username and password to get a Cashd account.

Then just set up some accounts and transactions.

I hope you like it and look forward to hearing your feedback.