In 2007 I bought a second hand laptop from Cash-Converters in Belfast. It served me well over the next two years at Uni. Until it started crashing a week before the end of the second semester this year forcing to have to buy a new laptop to finish the year.
Last week I spent several days trying to fix the laptop hoping perhaps to sell it on. But one blue screen too many and I had had enough and gave it a screen condition worth complaining about.

I removed the hard-drive, RAM and DVD-Writer and was going to keep the rest as a ornament; but something terrible happened…

The laptop was sitting casually on the roof.

Oh no! It seemed to fall off.

And was attacked by a vicious dog!

The laptop jumped through the air trying to escape the deadly teeth of the grinning Collie.

But out of the frying pan and into the fire as the laptop ended up hanging out with a bad crowd.

It started with a misunderstanding about the Hammers mother.

Trying to get away the laptop jostled the irritable Harry Hatchet, who buried it in the laptops face. That’ll hurt in the morning.

The Hatchets mafia connected brother Sledge “The Hammer” Cogniti got a few digs in.

Now clueless and somewhat key-less the poor laptop stumbled straight into the path of “Angry” Axe McSplinter.

In a last attempt to escape the poor laptop hit CTRL ALT DEL. Unfortunately something short-circuited…

At this point I felt obliged to step in and hose down the laptop.

Thankfully the laptop only suffered minor superficial damage.

And should hopefully be covered by the insurance.

So as I write this I am standing in a rather quiet Butchers shop staring out at the sunny outdoors, wondering why the heck I agreed to work here again. Anytime I have had to work here recently my method has always been the same, broaden my accent, slag off the boss, comment on the weather and make sure the customer believes I am dreadfully concerned with the rising price of a Barrs Steak and Gravy pie.

In many ways I can really see the appeal of a job like this. You work 9-5, you know nearly all your customers by name and never have to take your work home. But me being me and getting bored really quickly doing the same thing it wouldn’t be ideal as a career choice. Customers would come in and I’d be staring at that patch of blood on the ceiling away in a world of my own. Or trying to create the worlds first mince-beef headwear with build in sauce pockets ,something like homers nacho hat. Ah, the ‘elf an safetay folk would have me for breakfast.

Anyways Uni for this year is over, has been for some weeks. My days have been filled with; trying to get a placement, stupidly long walks, sending my new laptop off for repair after the blueray drive broke after just one month, trying to fix the old one, ice-cream, job interviews, tennis, salad, flying disks, water fights, sitting in the park with Louise for hours, being watched my squirrels, making friends with a pigeon, ice-cream, losing the friendship of a pigeon, walking home freezing in shorts after forgetting that it’s cold when the sun goes down and sitting on chairs on the roof of our house ankle on knee, wine glass of ribena held aloft and waving like madmen at the unamused southerners giving us the middle finger from the Enterprise as it goes past on the tracks behind our house. Just because they have to work for a living.

Is Jim Allister really that deluded? I mean grow up and move on.

As I’m sure you are aware, the UK had a slight sprinkling of snow over the past weeks and everything ground to a halt. Really everybody just wanted and excuse to skive off work and make snowmen, I know I did.  Alas here in Northern Ireland the snow was not very bad and we only got a couple of days of snow. But I got to run down the street barefoot in the snow so thats me happy for another year.

Anyway here are some photos of the snow we did get.

Some more on my Flickr

With second semester fast approaching and with it a more and more urgent need to find a placement for next year, I needed an online portfolio. Luckily the last assignment for my design module was to create one. So here is my effort: www.stephenreiddesign.com, let me know what you think, any suggestions/crit welcome.

If you can’t be bothered clicking through here is a screenshot.

My main rationale behind the site was, keep it clean, keep it simple, keep it to the point and keep it easy to find information. As well as what is currently on the site I am also hoping to start a design blog where I will post about anything related to design. This blog will be kept for my personal rants and non-design related ramblings.

Placement

As meintioned above I am currently looking for a placement for third year and will hopefully be starting in the summer.  Ideally I would like to get a job with a smallish design company in the Belfast area.  So if you know of anyone or any company looking for design employees for next year, please let me know.

Apologies for the rather short second part but if I don’t post it as it is I never will.

Car

Insurance

Shop around for your car insurance although be wary of very cheap companies as the quoted price could be for a 10 month contract or the company may be hard to get money out of if you do have an accident. Checkinsurance review sites after you get your quotes to find out what the company is really like.  Some companies will offer low insurance but you will be liable to pay more if you do have an accident so make sure you know what you are getting into.

When you get your yearly renewal quote, shop around and then go back to your original insurer with any cheaper quotes. If the terms are the same they will probably beat lower quotes to keep you as a customer, if not go elsewhere.

Fuel

Only drive if you need to, I won’t drive anywhere in Belfast I can walk to in 45mins and in Belfast that’s most places. Drive efficiently and you could gain up to 30% extra millage between refuels.

If you find you are driving friends around a lot, consider charging them for fuel or getting them to pay for some of your groceries. If you are really mean you could charge them according to weight.
Another useful article from HowStuffWorks.

Rent/Accommodation

This is assuming you are not living at home with you parents were no doubt you will be living for free.
Rent is a tough one as it varies a lot from city to city, In Edinburgh you can expect to pay at twice what you would pay in Belfast.
Also location in the city will affect cost as a house close to the city centre will cost a lot more than one in the suburbs.

My advice would be  don’t look for the best you can afford instead look for the worst you will put up with. After all if you go home at weekends and Holidays you could be spending as little as 6 months a year in a house you are paying a years rent for.

On that note, look out for shorter term renting, some landlords will do 8 month contracts for students.

This is part 1 of Beating the Credit Crunch for Students.

With scary SEO keywords such as “Credit Crunch“, “Recession” and “We’re all doomed” being thrown about lately, it probably wasn’t the best time to give up my secure part-time job and strike out on my own freelancing.

Well not totally on my own, I just have to survive until Jan 5th when that great establishment The Student Loans company pours free money upon my skull.

Ok so it’s not free money, I will have to pay it back some day but for now it’s better for my sanity to pretend it’s free.

Anyway I have learnt a fair bit about managing finances over the past few years of living away from home, albeit some of it has taken a long time to sink in and I am still prone to the odd impulse buy. 500 glow-sticks anyone?

So from my own personal experience here are my top money saving tips. (No doubt my more business and financially minded peers will correct me if I’m wrong)

This is mostly aimed at students who are trying to survive on very limited finances i.e just the student loan.
Due to varying living costs in different cities some of this may not be relevant to you personally but hopefully the principles will be the same.

Banking/Student Loan

Student Accounts

I think student bank accounts are of the devil. Perhaps thats being harsh but I really don’t think the banks are doing students favours offering them interest free overdrafts of up to £3000 (Halifax).

Students are not going to view this as “oh good I’m covered if I get into difficulty” instead this is viewed as “wooooooooooo free money”.

The result of this being that the £3000 “free money” is spent the first year of University and the student spends the rest of University hovering just above the banking fees line, which believe me is not pretty. I lost £100 in fees after making a number of small payments totalling around £30 after I went over my overdraft limit. 

I have no doubt there are students who are perfectly sensible with their finances but I suspect they are in the minority.

Look on down the page to see “With our student bank account, you can keep your interest-free overdraft for the length of your course – that’s up to five years – plus an extra year after you graduate.”

Sounds good at first glance, but do you really want to wind up trying to pay back £3000 to a bank the year after you graduate. You may not have a job yet and this time the student loans company isn’t there to fill the void.

My advice on this is, if possible avoid using an overdraft unless you really really need to. In my case I went into my overdraft in first year and have been trying to get out since. Also I’m with Nationwide who don’t do student accounts which means I pay interest on my overdraft. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing as it is quite a low rate and it means I don’t view my overdraft as free money (anymore).

If you have online banking use it regularly to keep a check on how much you are spending and what you have left so over expenditure doesn’t sneak up on you.

Student Loan

As for the student loan, don’t waste it buying stuff you don’t need. If you don’t need it to survive either don’t take one out or consider investing it.

Savings

Savings tends to be one of the last things that most students consider while at University and until very recently I was the same, mainly because I never saved for purchases and simply bought things on impluse.
It’s so much more rewarding to buy something with money you have saved up over time for that purpose than to buy it with money you don’t have. Even if you have very limited finances you should at least save a small amount of money. I am currently saving in a couple of ways.

Using my online banking I set up an online saving account with my building society (most banks/building societies have some form of online savings).  I have set up a standing order from my current account to my savings account for £10 a month, it’s not a lot but it’s £120 a year I would spent on something I dont need otherwise. 

Once my finances improve (when I get a paid placement next year) I will increase this.  The account has a fairly high rate of interest and money has to be transferred to my current account before I can withdraw it. 

My other savings method is a more traditional approach, I have a big glass jar into which I throw any 50p coins and the odd £1 coin that I get in my change. This can build up surprisingly quick and I am using it to save towards upgrading my computer at some later date.  Although Louise would like to debate it’s usage.

Spending

Food

Check your bank statement and you will probably find your largest expense is food, I was spending up to£300 a month on food at one point. That’s nearly twice what I’m currently paying for rent.

That’s about £70 a week and roughly added up as follows:

Weekly Groceries:£25

Take Away/Eating out: £15-£25

Snacks: £7-10

Soft drinks:£10

I’m currently spending £15-£20 a week on food, that’s £80 a month which is £220 less than I was spending.  Just to clarify, like a lot of students I go home at the weekends where I am fed by my mother ( ah bless). While I’m home I raid the cupboards for any “spare” food, although this would rarely total more than about £5 in cost.

Weekly Groceries:

• Never ever shop on an empty stomach, you will buy lots of nice expensive extras that you will regret later.
• WRITE A LIST! And stick to it.
• Only bring enough cash for what you intend to buy at the shop, leave your cards at home. You are most likely to impulse buy while grocery shopping.
• Shop less, if you are well organised only go grocery shopping every couple of weeks. You will save on fuel as well.
• Learn how to cook from first principles i.e buy ingredients and follow recipes don’t buy ready meals.
• Learn to love the spud, potatoes are cheap.
• If you are not squeamish buy a whole chicken at the supermarket and butcher it yourself. You get two fillets, two legs and two wings for about the price of two pre-packed fillets.
• Make friends with the local butcher and bulk buy meat at discounted prices.
• Spread the cost of items such as milk, sugar, coffee etc with the whole house.
• Chopped tomatoes are your friend, you can make pretty much any tomato based sauce using the right spices and herbs.
• Spices and herbs are expensive initially but will last you ages.
• If you go home at the weekends, raid the cupboards (with permission of course) for items much as beans, tuna, sweetcorn, eggs or anything else your parents may stockpile in the wash house (or maybe thats just my parents).

I’ll finish this section with a simple recipe of my own devising, although I’m sure its been done before.

Place a chicken leg in a roasting dish, stab some holes in it,  coat it in honey, throw in some chopped onion and roast at 180oC for about 40mins or until it goes brown and crispy. Serve with boiled baby potatoes and some form of veg. Simple.

Take Away/Eating out

Don’t.

Unless you have lost the power of your hands there is no valid reason not to cook your own meals. It’s cheaper, rewarding and a lot healthier than carryout.  Of course I wouldn’t invite everyone round to mine for spag bol on special occasions but the less you eat out the more you will appreciate it (well that’s what my mum always says).

Snacks and softdrinks

Again don’t.

Fill up on decent meals at mealtimes and you won’t need to snack. I have sensitive teeth so I cant really eat sweets that much anyway (not that im recommending you get sensitive teeth). As for softdrinks, whats wrong with re-filling a bottle with tap water. If you must then bulk buy when they are on offer in supermarkets and DONT DRINK THEM ALL AT ONCE Mr Boyd.

End of part one.

If you agree/disagree or have any other points related to this post please comment.

In the next part I will cover transport, accomodation, mobile phones and whatever else I can think of.

I have just finished a website I was working on for a client, the client in question  being Hillside Community Church in Ballymena. This is my girlfriend Louise’s church and she was the official person I had to deal with to develop the site. Talk about nightmare clients She was a great client, very efficient at pointing out things that needed fixing and emailing me seven pages of changes. Seriously though she was very good at getting me the content for the site in really good time, which helped a lot. (@Louise happy now? I have mentioned you by name in my blog)

As well as the site design I had to go one Sunday during a service to get some generic photographs for the site, people milling around, praise, outside etc.

Anyway the point is go and have a wee look and tell me what you think, I’m hoping to use the experience from this to help with a larger project I have coming up soon.

People with no interest in web design look away now.

I was mostly given free reign with the design of the site and designed the site from a blank page up. I find this allows for more creative designs as you are not limiting yourself by technology.

Developed initial idea

From the drawings, the site was then built up in Adobe Illustrator to create high quality mock-ups to show the client.

High quality mock-up to show the client.

Once the design was finalized it was split into individual images and marked up in Dreamweaver CS3, hand coding XHTML and CSS.

I used Dreamweaver as it has built in FTP and can update links globally if pages are moved around, although I find it doesn’t display CSS layouts properly.
PHP includes were used for the navigation and the site was tested using Wamp server and tested in Firefox 3, Opera 9, Google Chrome, IE7 and IE 6. I didn’t test for Safari as I don’t have a mac (yet) although if it works in Firefox it will work in Safari.

I am aware that some of the pages don’t validate on the W3C validator, I will fix this if I have time. Though as the problems don’t affect the sites performance or appearance I may or may not fix it. The CSS validates though.

So I went along, as usual to the Freshers Fayre at Uni to see what free goodies I could get my hands on.
Heres the spoils of the day.

I managed to get my hands on:

• Academic dairy.
• Scribble pad.
• Two sets of earplugs.
• Microsoft branded mints.
• Microsoft branded highlight.
• Stress ball from MDS Pharma Services.
• Keyring from the students union.
• Tea bag from Christain AID.
• Five headed highlighter.
• Tin of beans from the Church of Ireland chaplaincy.
• Tin of beans from some bank.
• Mini Nutty Crust loaf of bread.
• Packet of Bikers.
• Jelly Beans.
• Energy drink.

Not bad for being free.

In other news the cable for the electric window in my car broke as I was driving home from Uni on Tuesday and the window slid down into the door as I sailed down the motorway at 70MPH.
Had a major headache by the time I got back home with the wind blowing in.
Ripped off the door panel and temporarily fixed the window up with a USB cable until I can get it fixed properly.

Right I am finally bored enough to update this poor neglected blog, guess I better fill you in on my Summer from about July onwards.

To be honest my summer this year was pretty rubbish as far as summers go, I worked every single week and the nearest I got to a Holiday was going to Swansae for two days. I am very much glad to be back at Uni so I can get a break.

We got our house in Belfast sorted on charming Donegal Avenue or as I like to call the neighbourhood “The Murder Zone” oh and Chopper is a Tout as is Jamsie but I digress.

Living with me this year are William Barr who is working as an Animator at a production in Belfast,  Andrew Boyd who is working as a programmer for a software company, Adam Turtle who is going into final year in Interactive Multimedia Design and Lee Kilfedder who studies computer science and works part time for a software company.

So a right house of geeks.

Should be good.

We had a BBQ last night and at the end I poured some out of date milk onto the BBQ to put it out. Gagged on the fumes and fled inside the house to watch the foul steam rise.

Later Lee went into his room to discover the stinky steam had floated in his window.

His room now has the distinctive smell of burnt pungent cheese.

HeHe :p

After getting the house in Belfast I decided to try and get a job in Belfast and live in the house as otherwise it would be a waste of money. Dandered into Jessops in Belfast on the off chance that they had jobs going. I was offered a 30hour contract on the spot as it turned out they were losing nearly half their staff that week. So that worked out alright.
I left Spar and have been in Jessops for the past seven weeks. It took about a week to get re-used to the hecticness (that a word?) of the place.
Now I’m back at Uni and have cut my hours down to six a week on a Wednesday because I want to concentrate on building up a portfolio in my spare time.

I don’t know how much I will enjoy Uni this semester as we have a stupid Visual Basic module again. I really don’t understand why they think it is any use to teach us a ten year old program when they could easily upgrade.

Anyway that’s pretty much my summer, I shall try and keep this blog better updated.

Oh and I’m off coffee, again.

Belfast Colour, originally uploaded by stevieni.

I shall update this soon with a longer post about what I have been up to lately. In the meanwhile I’m testing Flickrs “post to blog” feature, here is the view out the back of my house in Belfast. Its four images stitched together, going to sit out some day and do it again with the train.