James Titcumb

Today Hannah and I went to look at a new house we’ve fallen in love with. Monday, we’ll be going along to drop off the reservation deposit so it’ll be ours! It’s a lovely 2-bedroom coach-house type thing, with garage and parking in Whiteley. It’s only 5 miles from work, and it’s in a lovely area, and Tesco is just around the corner. Should be able to move in from 1st July, so here’s to that!

As Hellfest gets nearer and nearer the wait becomes even more agonising, and the more death and black metal I listen to and tap my feet. I’m starting to get into the festival mood now, summer is nearly here. Just 27 days to go at the time of writing…

Last night I progressed a bit more with my new project, my own webmail client that will be used by myself, Tom and Hannah for our Total Carnage e-mails. It’s progressing quite well, and is very very AJAX orientated. So far, everything except loading the list of folders is done by AJAX (well, technically AJAJ as I prefer JSON to XML). So far, receiving mail works well, and you can now read and delete mails (although I’ve turned off permanent deletion for now). Take a look at the screenshot to the left to see what it currently looks like! I’m developing it with general users in mind, not just us three, so perhaps one day it might become my first publically released open-source project… Hah! Anyway, yes there is still much to do on it:

• Calendar (make compatible with .ics?)
• Contacts (make import from Hotmail/Gmail etc.?)
• Integration with GMail (download e-mails from Gmail)
• “Goal” scheduler
• Task list
• Full folder support
• Full spam&junk filter
• ?? Phishing filter ??
• Whatever takes my fancy really!
• Maybe make it WAP compatible?

So once again it looks like Finland are putting in clearly by far the best entry to the Eurovision Song Contest once more. Someone I’ve not heard of before, but after watching their video, they sort of remind me of Hammerfall, which can never be a bad thing. I very briefly checked out the UK’s entry, nearly vomited, so returned to Finland’s second metal/rock entry Teräsbetoni. After a little more investigation it seems that these guys are a bit tongue-in-cheek (a-la Edguy I guess), which for me is an even better thing. I might have to check out more of them! Good luck Finland, I hope you win this year, I’ll be voting for you!

As one of the many people who are in the stagnant queue for re-claiming bank charges, the BBC’s recent report that the Banks wish to appeal the court’s descision is another knock back in the turbulent world of my finances. HSBC, the bank known to many as the most moneygrabbing bank there is (although this could be debateable) owe me in the region of £1,400 worth of bank charges, and Hannah under £700 worth. That’s a lot of money. And of course, in the past 6 years, the banks have invested my £1,400 and probably made lots of money off that. Of course, it’s not just me – it’s everyone. According to that article, the banks make £3.5 billion a year from bank charges. Thats an insane amount of money.

At the end of the article, where it says “…the banks are likely to face criticism that they are simply stalling, contrary to their publicly stated desire to resolve the legal status of the charges as quickly as possible…” is spot on the mark. I’m getting annoyed with this, even though I’ve only been monitoring the situation for a couple of months.

A message to the banks (not that you’ll listen, you money-grabbing whores):

Give us our money back you bastards. Now.