Archive: 2024-04
Week 173: Floored
You wouldn’t believe how much of a palaver it is to buy flooring. After several cycles of order samples – choose one we liked – find it’s been discontinued – repeat, I was finally able to order something. That flooring had also been discontinued, but there was just enough remaining in stock.
Week 172: Tear down this wall
My train back from Weymouth was also delayed but as I was already entitled to a complete refund of my return journey, I couldn’t get refunded any more. They won’t pay you to take the train. However, my Delay Repay refund, applied for on Friday, is already in my account. That was surprisingly efficient.
Week 171: Intense burst of activity
The builders turned up on Monday, and told us that, contrary to previous plans, we really needed to have everything out of the house for them to be able to work effectively.
Week 170: Serving the song
Very late, very minimal weeknotes this week, for reasons that will become apparent in next week’s edition.
Using the brown M&M’s trick on Freecycle
As we’re having a new kitchen installed shortly, the old freestanding dishwasher that came with the house is surplus to requirements, and its most likely fate would be a skip and thence landfill. I don’t like that, and I’d rather see it live out the rest of its life in a loving home.
Week 169: The calm before
A crow on the Thames, with the Supersewer construction site in the background
It was the last week of anything approaching normality for a while. I booked a storage locker nearby in Deptford, and booked a van and driver to help move things there. We aren’t emptying our house completely, but they’re going to start with the upstairs, and there isn’t room downstairs for everything that’s currently upstairs.
A bookmarklet to download Aldermore statements for FreeAgent
I have a business savings account with Aldermore. A few months ago, they changed their online banking interface. The new one is an improvement in some ways. It looks better. Instead of the typical old-school financial weirdness of several pages of login, “memorable” words, and picking letters out of a password, they’ve caught up with practice elsewhere and use a full password plus a second factor.
On the other hand, the second factor is only available via SMS, something both inconvenient when travelling or out of mobile signal range and notoriously vulnerable to exploits. But what’s really annoying is that the new interface offers no way to get a statement in a machine-readable form.