Category: Life: Personal

Drat and double drat: here in the UK we have just had a public holiday (called a “bank holiday” as the banks are closed on what would be a normal trading day) – it’s also called the “May Day Bank Holiday” as it’s on the first Monday after or on May 1st. Anyway, I had the day off work and I planned to get so much done over the extended weekend, but on Saturday I made a mistake.

A big mistake.

I came across a site showing how to get Sim Theme Park World working on Windows XP and 2000 machines. I’ve had Theme Park World for around 2 years now, but never been able to properly play it because of various bugs with Win 2k, but I came across that site: installed the font patch file supplied, set the game to run in Windows 95 compatibility mode and away I went.

I started playing around 4pm on Saturday afternoon: I didn’t leave the computer until 7am on Sunday morning! Yep – practically playing the same game continuously (it did crash a far few times though). I haven’t done that since I got ThemePark for an old Sega Megadrive (in fact, I actually brought the Megadrive from the game as a local store had the game available for £10 and a Megadrive for an extra £20 IIRC).

So, 7.30am on Sunday I went back to sleep, 10am – woke up, played until it crashed again at 11.30am, went back to sleep, 2pm woke up and played it until 8pm…. I didn’t get anything I wanted to do this weekend done in otherwords 🙁 It’s not like I said to my boss I’ll try and get a new site up and running, along with having the GTM site to finish bugtracking and … 🙁

I must delete it from my hard drive or else I’ll never get any work done: but I just love that style of simulation game so much (Lemmings, Theme Hospital, Theme Park – but I’ve never actually got into The Sims though).

Blarg 🙁 Must get next “Guess That Movie” image ready though….

But I’ve just got the “Space Zone” level to complete and and….

Arrghhh! The other day I received my first “Self Assessment Tax Return” which means I’ve got to inform the tax office of all my income last tax year and let them know if I owe them any money or the other way round.

For the last 12months, I’ve either been employed (and paying tax via PAYE – pay as you earn) or unemployed (where the tax is taken off my unemployment benefit at source), and since I’ve been employed from mid-January I’ve been paying “Emergency Tax” (i.e. tax at a higher rate than normal) as for some reason my “proper” tax code still hasn’t reached my work.

However, I’ve also been running a small business which has been generating some income – around £2,500 to £3,500 at a rough estimate. But, alas, most (if not all) of that income disappears into business costs: I’ve got a dedicated web server in London which is a “necessary asset” to run the business: that’s around £3,000 I *should* be able to write off against the income, then I had to buy a new computer to conduct business on (another £880) and then there’s the dedicated work telephone line (only around £120 per year) and then there’s the internet connection – £300 per year. Total income at most: £3,500. Total expenses: £4300. So hopefully I’ll be entitled to a tax rebate or something…

However, I’ve got to double check 3×30 page documents before I’m even mildly sure I can claim some of that back (I may only be able to claim 40% of the cost of the new computer back for instance), but I’m hoping the whole process won’t be as complicated as it appears!

So the forms that are sitting on my desk awaiting completion: New Credit Card application form (4 pages), Mortgage transfer form (8 pages), Tax form (30 pages), 2 letters to return to the bank (to close “dormant” accounts) and I’m sure there’s quite a bit more paper work to do. *sob* I hate doing paper work – don’t these people understand I’ve got a cat that needs fuss? (hey, I wonder if I use Smokey as the “company mascot” whether or not I can get a tax-rebate on her cat food and litter? It might be worth a try 😉 ).

(obligatory disclaimer: nothing in this post should be interpreted as any sort of tax or financial advice yadda yadda yadda. I am not a lawyer [IANAL] and I have never played one of those on TV or on stage…)

On Thursday, I finally plucked up the courage to ask my sweet shy co-worker (MSSC) out on a sort of date… Yep, it’s been hard for me to pluck up the courage to do so (a couple of months at least!) and then once we had talked for a bit via email (I was actually off Thursday afternoon for a surveyor to come round to my house to tell me it has doubled in value in 2 years), I somehow suggested that we go to the movies together. We managed to work something out and come Friday afternoon, at the end of work – off to the cinema we went.

We did originally think of asking my other co-worker “BRCW” if she wanted to come with us (as we were just going as friends), but she’s busy doing other things. So it was just me and MSSC…

I had purchased the tickets in advance (£5.60 each with a 50p per ticket booking fee!) to save a bit of time, and since the movie we were going to see – Johnny English – wasn’t due to start until 7.15pm, we decided to pop to a pub near the cinema for a quick drink.

Blarg and flibblepenguinahoy (hello to all of you who found this blog through those keywords – yep, the email you received is probably from the same person, and talk about cryptic comments 🙂 ). Today’s been “one of those days” where I had a few major projects to work on (2 clients need websites designing, I’m still working on automating the Nominet DNS registrations and I’m just trying a few things with a shopping cart package), but I spent all day (and I wish I was kidding) just responding to emails and sales calls – I’m normally just search engine optimising/tech support, but some of our sales team have been off the past two days so I had to chip in.

I think I’ve managed to get a couple of sales sorted for our lower-end search engine optimisation service, maybe two e-commerce shopping cart customers and maybe even a reseller signed up (we work with a number of web design orientated companies who then outsource/resell their search engine placement and promotion services to us: we get customers without the hassle of having to contact each one and bill them individually – it’s slightly cheaper for us to send one monthly bill to one company that we know is a ‘good payer’ then 100 smaller bills to 100 customers and then having to check they have all paid – and we pass this discount on), and then I had some tech support issues to work out…