Quick update

Ok so I know I'm not posting regularly enough to keep you following however I do get the odd new person coming along to check out whether I lost the plot with champix or actually manged to kick the cigs.  The good news is that I didn't get all suicidal, have a heart attack or attack any loved ones and I did kick a 40+ habbit.  The bad news is that I do still treat myself to an occasional cigar and when on holiday that 'occasionaly' translates to five or six a day.  My recomendation is to not do the cigar thing.  Because I gave up more than a year before I tried a cigar I can sort of switch it on and off but it's a bit like old Alan Carr says:  people who switch on and off are just good at abstaining and torturing themselves for weeks between caving to the addiction.  I wouldn't even begin to compare my struggles with actually giving up but I struggle for about three days to actually quit each time I give in.  On the plus side not smoking at work ever is the one rule I stick by and it makes life a lot easier.

If I can be a phone bore for a moment I'd also like to say that I have got rid of the evil iPhone and am now about one month in to loving an HTC.  I don't have to follow the internet or spend hours jailbreaking and all my apps work without the phone crashing.  It's fantastic to be back to using a phone that both promises and delivers.  Incredibly the iPhone 4s still advertises its SIRI voice function in the UK even though it's been proved on several occasions to be useless.  I'll never convert the iPhone faithful but if your on the fence then trust me, iPhone is all mouth and no trousers as we say here.   It's incredible to me that people put up with apps crashing or just not delivering and a signal that is so poor that the mobile internet is almost unusebale but still stick with their phone because they think they would lose something by changing.

On the subject of things that should be brilliant but aren't:

I gave up the jeep last year in favour of a Mitsubishi Lancer.  Now I really have gone for something that is all mouth and no trousers.  The lancer looks like an evo sports racer but is actually just a reliable family car.  Is it reliable?  Yes.  Can it go fast on demand?  Yes.  Is it a sports car?  Probaly not.  You can get a fair kick out of it though.

So why get rid of the jeep?

The Jeep in question was a patriot.  Look for a forum on wranglers and you'll find a million satisfied customers telling what new and unusual thing they've done or what customisation they are saving for.  Look at the grand cherokee and you'll see stories of how they can move mountains.  Look at the patriot and you'll see complaints about water penetration from about six points, ball joints failing almost annualy and a variety of electrical faults (probably partly due to the water penetration).  Add that to oxidising alloys and poor break/tyre longevity and it's a pretty sorry story.  Jeep have decided to discontinue the range but still deny all the above faults and are selling off their reserve stock.

I wanted to love that car.  I did love that car.  When working it was faster than expected, more comfortable than expected and you could just about move a house with it.  It had great road presence, fantastic creature comforts and no little amount of power.  Strange then that I would actually consider it my duty as a friend to prevent anyone buying one.

The mistubishi is slightly less luxurious but just as fast and twenty to thiry times more reliable.  I just don't love it as much.  In fairness though I leave the house each morning expecting that it will work and have yet to be let down.

Saving money is still happening big time.  The biggest change has been that I'm getting clever at the home brewing and that that now accounts for about 95% of my alcohol consumption.  On the downside I'm now having to cut back a bit because I'm never short of drink and I don't need much excuse to drink it.

Sorry it's a short update after such a long time but I promise I'll be back with avengance soon.  I'm just waiting till the end of August and the the darker nights.  In the meantime, if you're wondering about phones cars or fages (that's cigarettes to our american friends) post a question or stay tuned.

T

Ginger is the new beer

Actually Ginger is a very old beer.  In fact according to some research it was the most popular drink in British Inns and taverns up until the first world war.  I presume that those brave young men discovered the joys of Stella Artois and maybe even Budvar whilst being massacred in foreign fields and thought, "why don't they do stuff like this at home?".  It's like anything else the beer you can't get is the one you want and our returning heroes shunned Mead, Cider and Ginger beer in favour of more complex stuff and rightly so.

In fact some will tell you that we have actually lost the art of ginger beer making all but completely now and point to the fact that the sweet sugary, fizzy drink that you get at the supermarket is actually pretty far removed from what ginger beer tastes like.  I actually quite like the sweet, sugary fizzy drink but I'd still agree with the purists that it bears no resemblance to real ginger beer.  It also lacks the 4.5% alcohol of the stuff that I'm going to recommend you make (unless you don't do alcohol).  Unfortunately however the purists aren't going to love my version either.

Let's get some history first.  I was watching a program called River Cottage on channel four in the UK.  It's a great show where this accomplished cook makes you wonder why you ever settled for a hot dog or a burger, why your garden isn't bursting with herbs and spices and why you ever need to purchase vegetables.  It kind of washes over me to be honest and I love nothing more than to settle down with a hot dog and cheese toastie in front of the TV and watch this guy tell me what life could be like.  Anyway one day he really grabbed my attention.  As part of a seasonal summer menu he declared that he was going to make an alcoholic ginger beer in just two days.  Two days....  I practically hid behind the sofa to watch excitedly.  Why had no-one told me that ginger beer could be alcoholic?  Two days....  Why the hell had I ever paid for beer?   Two bloody days...Alcohol....good stuff and in just two days.  My world collapsed around me.  This guy had truly discovered the true meaning of life and it didn't involve preaching or fighting Romans.  Nobody was beheaded and nobody even needed to feel guilty.  Screw making bread and fish for the masses or turning water into wine (actually keep the water into wine bit) we are talking two days for 4% ginger beer.  I watched in quaking awe.....

The recipe involved ginger and lemons and lime and sugar (a lot of sugar) and yeast in an empty two litre bottle that you left to ferment for...you guessed it....two days (maybe I made that up maybe it was four but whatever).  I followed the recipe.  Something definitely happened in the bottle.  I tried it.  A bit powdery but gingery.  Problem.... no alcohol.   Less than 1%.  Since there had been a reaction in the bottle I decided to try again but leave it for two weeks.  Not bad tasting but still I'm afraid untroubled by alcohol.

I had the bug now however and had started searching the web for recipes.  I came across the recipe that the purists probably long for me to print here (although there are some purer than pure purists who still say even that isn't right).  I made what is called a ginger beer plant.  Search ginger beer plant on wikipedia and then follow the link to the H2G2 site and you'll get instructions on how to create and share a ginger beer plant.  Apparently according to the purer than purist ginger beer experts it isn't possible to make this at home but the recipe I tried made an effort to work.  The plant involved all the ingredients of the two day recipe but, made in a jar, fed daily with sugar and ginger and then diluted after seven or eight days.  I followed the recipe.  Whilst brewing the 'plant' is interesting to watch as things float to the surface and back down again.  I felt a bit at one with nature as I created this natural gem of a recipe.  I diluted it.  I released the pressure in the 2l bottles every couple of days and tasted every so often (let's be honest I tasted daily).  I learnt to use something called a hydrometer (more on that in a future post) to test the alcohol.  It took six weeks to reach 2.7% proof.  Properly chilled it actually tasted fantastic.  Like nothing I've tried before.  Cool, crisp and fresh with a bit of a bite that caught your breath with every gulp.  If I could just get this to be a bit stronger and a bit quicker we would be in business.  It tasted so damn good that my resolve became stronger than ever.  I wanted ginger beer that tasted this good but was properly (4% or above) alcoholic.

More research and my success with wine mentioned below spurred me on.  This time I upped the ingredients, put them in a five gallon bucket and added a sachet of brewers yeast from a local home brew shop.  Bugger me but ten days later it was 2.7% proof and it had been that way since about day six.  What was going wrong?  It wasn't helpful to read forums where people claimed this worked because it didn't.  In desperation to see if the experiment could be saved I added a couple of t-spoons of wine yeast to the 2.7% brew.  It started brewing again.  4 days later and we had a four percent brew.

Problem....  The above brew didn't taste great.  Not bad but, you have to be honest with yourself about these things, not great, be even more honest, below average.  Now I was getting beat. 

Because it didn't taste great I didn't drink much of it after the first week but, once the wine stock started getting low, I chilled another bottle about two weeks later.  No way!!!!!  It tasted great and had achieved the glory of 4% proof.  Now all that had to be done was to refine the recipe.  I'm not going to go through all the successes and failures but below is the key to making a superb 4-5% ginger beer that tastes truly great.

You need for 5 gallons/ 22 UK litres:

4-5 lemons

4-5 limes

About ten knuckles of ginger or two 200ish gram jars of 'easy ginger' (ready chopped ginger in oil).

2 kg sugar (normal shop bought sugar is fine and no, 2kg is not a mistype)

2 t-spoons of cream of tartar (apparently this might be optional but I've never tried it without)

2 t-spoons of wine yeast

Equipment you need:

A five gallon, food safe bucket (they call this a fermentor).  Food safe is important buy one from a brew shop or maybe ask your local bakery to give you one of the ones they get supplies in.  Don't use the bucket you use to wash the car.

A lid for the bucket with a hole pierced in the middle

A bubbler that goes in to the hole (brew shops sell these for pennies)

A length of tube to syphon off the beer (future post for syphoning or google it now)

11 empty and clean 2l fizzy drink bottles.  (They must be fizzy drink bottles not still drink bottles as they need to be able to handle pressure)

Method:

Zest the lemons and limes (the peel has a strong flavour, get a zester or use a grater on the skin)

Half the lemons and limes and stick in the microwave for a minute (this makes them easier to squeeze

Grate your ginger finely or...open the jars of grated ginger

Boil a kettle (approx 2litres) of boiling water.

Pour the boiling water in to the bucket (avoid inhaling the vapour it's apparently bad for you)

Add the 2kg of sugar and stir till dissolved

Squeeze the lemons and limes into the water

Add the other ingredients and stir

Add two T-spoons of cream of tartar

Top you're bucket up with 20 litres of tap water (the guide on the bucket I bought from the brew shop was wrong.  The only way to know you're topping up exactly 20 litres is to top up using ten two litre bottles.

Stir

If you have a hydrometer it's time to take a sample and record the opening reading.  If not go to the next step.

Add two t-spoons of wine yeast.

Put the lid on, put the bubbler in and leave in a place that's as close to room temperature as you can get.

7-10 days later  (If using a hydrometer you want a read below 1006, if not wait 10 days):

Clean and if possible sterilise the 2l bottles (google it if unsure or ask a parent with a small child, they are forever sterilising things)

Add a tablespoon of sugar to each empty bottle (that's four t-spoons or 2 desert spoons)

Syphon the liquid into the bottles leaving about 2.5cm gap at the top

(Don't worry if it tastes slightly flat and odd at this stage.  There's still magic happening)

Cap the bottles tightly and store somewhere where it wouldn't matter if they exploded (hasn't happened to me yet but apparently it probably will)

Leave for ten days. (Patience, patience, patience)

Refrigerate a bottle for at least one hour

Pour out a pint glass and marvel at you 4-5% stroke of pure home brewing genius.

By all means you should now pat yourself on the back.  You are a true brewer and, let's face it, apart from the bucket this stuff was way cheap.  You now have 10-11 2l bottles of heaven.  It tastes much nicer and fresher than shop bought ginger beer but beware...It's 4-5% proof.  It gives you a headache and shaky hands if you over indulge.  It would be illegal to drive in the UK after just one pint. 

Drink sensibly, improve the recipe and then let me know how you got on.

There is no better way of saving money and making yourself happy than to create your own alcoholic home made fizzy drink.

Go for it

TQ

Rose tinted recepticles

Ok so wine will be my first brewers blog.

It may help to know my wine credentials however before we start.  I have liked red wine for about twenty years now.  So your maybe thinking that in that time I've become a bit of a connoisseur.  Well not really although I have tried some truly gorgeous wines.  Like most people my wine shopping habits started out based on price rather than any real taste or quality.  I liked a good £3.99 vintage whilst anything above £5.99 seemed to be strictly the reserve of gifts for people who knew their wines.  The problem is that I've never really changed.

I don't know about the the rest of the world but wine is something that has effectively got cheaper as I have aged rather than dearer.  When I was trying to impress a girl in my teens and early twenties it seemed to cost about £4 or £5 pound for the cheap stuff where now it can be as little as £3.  What's more when I was a lad the cheap stuff was truly cheap and a bit nasty.  Now supermarkets here promote some pretty strong brands with a price point under £5.  When I was young Paul Massons Californian was a wine from a far fetched region and le Piat Dor was for those who couldn't stretch to french wine.  Nowadays there's wines that I can't afford coming from south America and Australia.  At one time a screw top wine bottle was just beyond the pale where now it's the norm. 

The upshot of all this is that I've actually managed to develop a taste for wine and different grape varieties without ever having had to stretch the budget.  The problem is, as readers of this blog will know, that the budget as far as wine is concerned disappeared about two years ago.

Imagine just how thrilling it would be then to make wine at about 75pence per bottle.  How rough must that taste?  Well surprisingly I've discovered at least one wine kit (maybe beginners luck) that produces a wine that I would seek out in the shops that costs precisely that.

After a show about cooking that involved an alcoholic version of ginger beer (I tried it, it tasted great and contained almost no alcohol) I told my wife that I would like to try home brewing.  Try as I might and work hard as I do we just can't seem to afford the luxury of beer or wine with any regularity and it annoys me.  I don't want lots (well actually I do) but I used to have a couple of beers in the pub on the way home of a night and then maybe two or three cans.  By the end of 2007 I was celebrating if I could have two or three cans a weekend.  I miss beer and wine.

My wife obviously also misses beer and wine as she come home one night from the supermarket quite excited to tell me about a kit she'd seen that promised 30 bottles of wine for about £70.  £70 would buy a kit with everything needed including the ingredients and, even more exciting, once you bought the kit you could make wine even cheaper in future by just buying the ingredients.  The idea seemed good.  I liked it but I had reservations.  £70 was a damn good amount of both wine and lager made by experts and drinkable today at supermarket prices.  Also I reasoned that, easy or difficult, the wine would have to sit for months before we could drink it or we'd end up ill.  Well actually this stuff claimed to be ready in seven days.  I looked at reviews and they seemed average.  Believe it or not I saw this as a plus because I would have thought that the reviews would have said it was appalling.  There's a home brew shop close to us so I suggested we look and see what they had.  I expected again to be told to avoid the seven day stuff and go for something decent that would take months to brew but no!  Apparently there's even five day stuff that tastes quite good.  Still £70 is a lot of money.

I started to research this and couldn't find much bad about it.  People kept saying it was simple but used terms like gravity, mash, krausen and fermentors.  Well maybe it is easy but I wasn't a million percent convinced.  Thirty bottles though....That's a lot of wine and, from what I read, beer wasn't that much more difficult.  Could it be true?  Could you actually make palatable stuff at home?  I had doubts but decided to give it a try.

I think the money came more out of desperation rather than us being able to afford it but I researched the kit I needed and bought it from Tesco's (a major supermarket chain in the UK) for about £30 rather than just buying a ready made kit.  I bought a Young's, seven day, thirty bottle kit of Cabernet sauvignon.  I followed the instructions to the letter and......

A passable wine.  Thirty bottles of a slightly Rose looking red from a kit that cost about £22.  What's more it wasn't evil.  It wasn't a wine I'd rush to buy again but it was actually quite tasty.  Also now that we had the kit it would be criminal not to use it.  I was off to the brew shop for some Shiraz.  With my £30 I couldn't afford the £35 Shiraz they had so I took a gamble on Solomon Grundy Medium Dry Red.  I knew the wife would be unhappy even as I handed the £22 over.  This wine kit didn't even claim to be a specific wine.  It must be awful.  But I didn't want to come home empty handed.  I boiled my water, put 4kg of sugar in the tub along with the mix and enough water to make to 22l.  Having learnt how to use I hydrometer I tested it the added yeast.  It brewed for seven days and I tested again.  To my surprise it had reached exactly the gravity that it said on the can.  I began to bottle.  I got the surprise of my life.

Lt's deal with the downside first.  I'd say that this Medium Dry Red was actually quite a sweet jammy, plummy red.  Given my £3.99 expertise I would compare it with a ruby Cabernet.  Thing is I really love ruby Cabernet and....this was a good one.  Good enough that, were it a shop bought example, I would seek it out.  What's more at 10.5% proof it was none to shabby at getting you drunk.  Even better I had thirty bottles.  I had no kit to buy for this one and that means that it cost me less than a pound per bottle.  This could represent extreme savings and extreme quantities of alcohol.  Better still I hadn't had to do anything clever.  I needed the kit: a barrel, a bubbler and stopper, a bucket, a syphon and  a hydrometer but, once bought they pretty much last forever.  For all future wine kits I just needed £22 and I could have thirty bottles.

Of course now your thinking that, like all alternative types, I was giddy at making something that anyone else would have said was rubbish.  Not so.  I've had no bad feedback and even get requests for bottles. (Of course free booze is always popular).  So go on, give it a try.  Risk a few pounds on the equipment and try Solomon Grundy Medium Dry Red.  What's more, let me know how you get on.  I've got lots more to try but, as a starter, it's turned my head.

Now of course the wine story won't finish there, there's beer and ginger beer still to discuss but, that should do you for now.  Follow this and you may not feel as poor as you used to....You'll be too drunk to care.

Hope the new years resolutions are still going well

T

Jesus! I can turn water in to wine

It's true you can actually turn water in to wine if you buy the right kit.  I'm not just talking about a bottle either, no, we're talking 22 litres, 5 UK gallons here.  That must be good.

First let me say hello, I'm back and especially thank you to the loads of people who have viewed this blog for one reason or another since I last updated nearly a year ago.  I haven't been away anywhere or anything like that I just haven't been blogging.  Sorry.

The blog has also seen a recent upsurge but I assume that that's probably got more to do with people making their new years resolutions to stop smoking and finding me through some sort of Champix search.  If that's the case welcome, stick with it and good luck.

Anyhow, related to all the saving money stuff in my 2011 blogs I decided to have a go at home brew.  Remember homebrew?  If you were around in the seventies or the early eighties then you would probably have come accross homebrew.  If you were around at that time and did come accross homebrew you've also probably resolved to never look at the stuff again.  Watered down dubious looking lager that presented a valid excuse for a week off work with food poisoning and/or a brain disorder and flashbacks for years to come.  Either that or some new age hippy that could make quite a pallatable wine out of hedge clippings but it took eight years to mature that one special bottle.  Homebrew it seemed was not a viable alternative to the pub.  Well the homebrew I'm going to talk about isn't like that at all.

My dad did a home brew in the late seventies or early eighties and, even though he died an alcoholic, vowed never to touch the stuff again.  He suceeded in making several litres of  foul tasting vomit inducing brew and invited all his mates around to try it.  None came back for a second helping.  Most of them, even the hardened drinkers, weren't capable for at least a week.

In spite of all this I have always had the feeling that brewing could be done at home.  What put me off was patience.  Had my dad left that brew in the bottle for about eight weeks or longer it probably would have been a good brew.  The whole process is just chemistry afetr all.  The reason I've never tried it up until now is that, like my dad, I lack patience and I know that I would be trying to drink the stuff long before it was ready.  I had mentioned to my wife however (as we cut back on the amount of beer and wine that we could buy for monetary reasons) that I might look in to home brewing.  This must have planted a seed because a few weeks later she came back from the supermarket to tell me about some homebrew kits she had seen.  On a seperate trip I had seen them too, noted the details and done a quick google search on what was available.   It seems that home brew has moved along in the past few years and, whilst it is still a bit like keeping pigs or growing your own vegetables, it can produce a decent alcohol and, more importantly, in a short period of time.

Almost completely seperately I was watching one of those lifestyle chef type programs that you can't avoid these days and one of them claimed to brew a 4% proof ginger beer in just two weeks.  Who knew ginger beer could actually be potent?  Well probably everyone did but I didn't.  4% is practically the same as the lager I buy in the shops.  Also although I'm not famous for soft drinks one of my favorites is ginger beer.  Even better if it could be alcoholic.  So I'm going to return to blogging for a while and let you know about my beer projects.  I'm not going to tie myself down to a blog a week or a blog a month, but I'll update on the various things I try.

Who knows you could save money and get drunk in to the bargain.

Keep watching

T

Nice Days, White Weddings

Spring somehow manages to pull that trick of being somehow both gradual and sudden. One minute I'm celebrating the fact that a couple of daffodils have survived the morning frost and the snow has stopped, next thing it's everywhere, trees are blooming, grass is growing and there's been more than two dry days together. No wonder religions and spring got so intertwined. It's as if winter devastates everything in it's path and disappears leaving a Barron landscape and then spring just comes along behind it and starts colouring everything in again and makes it all look like it should. Yep Spring has definitely sprung. Here in Scotland it's been particularly nice for the last two weeks. (Spring can be a pretty wet affair in Scotland but not this year so far)

The downside to all this lovely springy stuff (you must have known there was a catch) is that things start to need looking after again. Grass and weeds spring up and hedges bush out where they shouldn't. Paths need that winter filth sprayed off them and it's then that you notice where repairs are needed. All those little outside jobs that you've avoided thus far due to the ridiculously cold weather can't be avoided any longer (Lucky I didn't put Christmas lights outside this year because, if I had listened to the wife and done it, it would have been about two weeks ago before I got them down).

Proof, if proof were required, that god exists comes at this time of year. Not from the beautiful rebirth of the world but more from the fact that, thanks to his rising again, we get a public holiday with which to catch up on all of these tasks. Ask any DIY retailer and they'll tell you that the big event in their calendar is Easter. Even your local supermarket will have cashed in with a selection of sun loungers, barbecues, hoses and lawn mowers.

Here in the UK this Easter has been a wee bit bigger than most. Why? Well because in the UK we have both God and a Queen which means that, when the queens grandchildren decide to get married, we get more holidays. Yep Prince William and Kate Middleton (commoner and daughter of multi millionaires as the press keep telling us) tied the knot yesterday and the whole of the UK workforce gained an extra public holiday to organise street parties, wave union jacks and basically celebrate along with our young royals. Cynics will point out that if you want us Brits to forget the recession, stop moaning about politics and generate a whole feel good factor then all you need is usually a royal wedding or a good war. The problem with the 'good war' plan is that it needs to be something properly nationalistic like the Falklands. I'm afraid that, whilst we have immense respect for our troops serving all over the world, the whole Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya type stuff just isn't nationalistic enough to create that uniquely British feel good factor that's required just now. Our sportsmen and Women aren't active enough just now either because they can sometimes create a mini feelgood factor. Nope the only way to get us to kick back and forget our woes this year was going to be a royal wedding and boy did we get one.

Now to be honest (Don't tell everyone) the United Kingdom over which our monarch presides isn't maybe as united as you might have been led to believe (unless of course you're battling the Falkland aisles). In fact there have been points in history where it's been downright un-United. Even now politically there are parties dedicated to nationalistic splits and every part of the country actually has it's own parliament as well as central government. It should come as no surprise then that some of it's royal subjects might have taken the day off, may even have raised a glass, but actually chose to use this free day for something other than a wedding street party. I have nothing against our young royals however I was asleep when they said 'I do' and when the crowds gathered at the railings of Buckingham palace I gathered at my own railings with a ladder and a paint pot ready to get one of those exterior jobs out of the way. Religion, Royalty and Politics are three things garanteed to cause controversy in any conversation however thanks to all three we had Easter Monday, The royal wedding on the Friday, and then International Workers day (May Day) the following Monday.

As the English and some of the Northern Irish sweep away the bunting, the Union Jack paper plates and napkins and reopen their town centres the gardens of Wales and Scotland will never have looked so well kept. Here's to William and Kate may their marriage be fantastic and long and may the press and tourism focus on bringing the benefits of this across the whole UK. Across all of the UK I think I can speak for everyone in saying thanks for the holiday.

So last weekend (Easter) we got a nice long weekend down at the caravan and this weekend (both the wedding and May day) we've had the chance to start the never ending task of making the outside of the house look beautiful. Caravans and gardens!! God I sound old. But it's all good really. Few things make a cold tin of beer more enjoyable than a weekend at the sea side or the end of a hard day grafting in the garden in the sun. If that makes me old then bring it on.

Access all areas

Yep the database that I was cursing last month is now a reality in my workplace. God was it a bad idea to start that project. From the minute I realised that it wouldn't work properly across a network I should have abandoned it but, did I? Did I hell. I now have a database with four full months worth of info based on a platform that is almost guaranteed to collapse. The thing is, people are loving it and even asking that I develop more. No-one seems to want to listen when I point out that it's hurtling towards an inevitable crash landing. I think the problem is that I've come up with a solution that seems to work. It's quick, functional and seems to have very few glitches that couldn't be worked around within the first week of use. Even I forget how precarious it all is. To be fair I've got it backed up all over the place so, when it comes crashing down, we shouldn't actually lose anything but the information that was being keyed at the time of the crash. Or maybe my band aid type fix of having users in the North work with a front end whilst users in the south access the back end directly isn't as precarious as it seems. If you google this method of a semi split database you'll find nothing comes up. No one either recommends or condemns it. Is that because it's such a stupid idea or is it because no-one has ever thought about it? Not so sure myself.

Anyhow if it continues to work as it does at the moment and I can tweak a few things it might just be the appraisal winner that I need for this year. I've been all but obsessed by it for over a month and now that I've finished delivering the course that I was delivering I should be able to get another month devoted to it before I move on. It's not every job that affords you two months to work on a geeky project that you actually enjoy doing. For all the frustration it still beats going to the shops and buying a brain training game. Trust me, with access, every small triumph brings with it many many pitfalls that need fixing. Every simple suggestion that anyone makes to improve it results in endless hours puzzling over why even the most straightforward of ideas can't be accomplished in the way that you thought. If I were my employer I wouldn't have let me near this project as, if I ever left the job, there's almost no-one about that would have any idea how to develop the damn thing. That said a lot of the reason it's taken so long to design is that I've avoided taking any shortcuts. Every report and form has been designed in such a way that, whilst it's taken a while to create, it should not need any maintenance to continue to work. Maybe future proof is too strong an expression but definitely future resistant. Well at least provided it doesn't corrupt. Fingers crossed.

In learning and designing the database I've also relied heavily on the Internet and a few of the forums that are out there devoted to Access. The problem with the forums, and databases in general, is that there is a sort of science behind databases that needs to be adhered to. That's probably why they are so much less popular than huge excel spreadsheets. Databases need thought about in advance. You almost need to know everything you will ever want out of it in advance or you'll pay dearly further down the line. If your design didn't anticipate that you would want that 'percentage' report or 'comparison' report then you may have to do a lot of back peddling and redesigning to get your tables into a state that will allow it. In doing so you'll also probably break all the other reports that you were successful in creating first time round. Users on the forums seem to almost take pride in how un-user friendly it actually is. They love to talk about data redundancy and the 'normalization' of data. Yep they'll devote days, even weeks to getting a table structure that avoids any duplicate references yet they think nothing of having to create three or four queries just to end up with a calculation that could have been written into a cell in excel in about a minute by a complete novice. The difference I suppose is that the access database will take up a tiny bit of the disc space taken by it's excel counterpart. The database will also be easier to use and more robust for the end user. If I'm honest I'm delighted with myself for getting this one moving but, had I known at the start what I know now I would probably have spent the time designing a huge excel spreadsheet. At least then, had it all gone wrong, I would have had plenty of people willing to help.

So there you have it, the clocks have changed, the weather has changed and now we're heading toward my favorite part of the year, Summer. Don't think I've forgotten about the money saving stuff. We're still car sharing, the electricity and gas are with cheaper supplier's and the next focus will probably involve seeing how much I can save on this years car insurance. Previous blogs will also point those who need it in the direction of cheaper tyres and a fantastically priced vehicle recovery service. Yep money saving will continue to be a big part of life so keep watching this space.

Till next time

T

Access all areas

First things first. Congratulations to Jo on getting to 40 days stopped. That's about when you begin to start thinking that, much as you might miss the cigs, it's a bit of a waste to blow it. Let's face it there was a point where 40 minutes without would have been good for me. Giving up smoking is a truly strange pursuit and one that I think only a smoker can understand. Very well done.

Well folks the clocks have changed and I can now see the potholes in the road on my drive to work because it's daylight. It seems quite sudden too. Around valentines it was beginning to look like our poor wee dog might at least glimpse the twilight on her walk if we rushed home. Now it's broad daylight for a couple of hours after. Daffodils and everything. After the winter we had it's really good to see. For me it's over a year since I smoked and, despite the odd cigar when the wife was away, I'm now more of a non smoker than a smoker. I still don't do the non-smoker thing though. Quite the opposite. If you want to smoke smoke. The smell has absolutely no impact on me, strangely neither bad or good. For a long time after I stopped I seemed acutely tuned to the scent of smoke but now I can take it or leave it.

As to saving money: well quidco and EDF energy both made good on their promises in the last month. £80 cash back for signing up through quidco and £100 of the first bill with EDF. Nearly £200 earned for doing essentially nothing. That can't be bad. We continue to car share to and from work which is saving us a good bit per month as well. I haven't however got any new fantastic savings to pass on. The good news is that that means the car has behaved and not cost anything for a few months.

I haven't had much chance to blog because I've been driving myself nuts creating a database for my work. We have been recording our time on a spreadsheet for about three years and now it's decided to kick the bucket. As a true geek I've often wished I understood how to use MS Access so I decided that I finally had to try and up skill myself. Back in 1998-99 I fell in love with a software called Lotus Approach. At a time when people could still be shocked out of their minds by the fact that Word had more than one Font or that PowerPoint might actually replace acetates and the overhead projector I eagerly worked away on a stock and order system for the shop I managed. It was actually pretty effective and lasted for about three or four years before that particular company got swallowed up by another.

So if I was making software around the millennium how come I'm not a dot com millionaire? I'm all about creating it and figuring it out and knowing why something works and even what it could be capable of. Once it's working and everybody is happy with it I lose interest. It's also unusual for me to even care about perfection. Does it work? Does it do what you needed? Is it better than what you had? Yes, well that's good, get on with it. But what about... Get on with it. So it has glitches that shouldn't happen and you're learning workarounds before you've even learnt the correct way. Get over it. Basically when I create something it's usually very good but it really needs someone else to make it saleable. This time however I'm trying to push myself a bit further. After Lotus I didn't like the look of Access. I preferred every other Microsoft product but not Access. Now that I've properly applied myself to it I have to say... I was right to not like the look of it. What happened Bill? With everything else it seemed to about helping imbeciles like me to get good with the computer but with this? The truth is that if you don't write code your off to a very bad start. Everything can be done using wizards etc but really it only pulls together with code. Why? With Lotus approach you basically designed some pretty forms and it did the techy stuff in the background. With access it's the other way around. If you want a pretty form you'll have to work pretty hard and jump through lots of hoops to get there. It's the first software I've ever encountered where you can do the same thing twice and get a different result both times.

However after three weeks of almost literally banging my head against the wall I seem to have something that is actually pretty good. I have worries though. The whole reason that I got allowed the time to do this is because our spreadsheet is effectively crashing every users PC. I'm trying to put it to the back of my mind but the database isn't exactly nippy. It doesn't crash the PC and we're talking about seconds rather than minutes but it's brand new at the moment with just one quarters data in it. Is it going to slow to crawl in it's first year? Hope not. Also it has a small issue that if two of us are working on separate records and then one hits save...the other finds that their record jumps to the saved one. For a variety of reasons that won't be a big issue with this particular database but it's driving me nuts that I don't know why it happens. In true me fashion though I'm presenting it to my bosses tomorrow and expect to subject the masses to it within the next week. It's not quite saleable yet but it's something that any training department would benefit from even in it's present state. That makes me want to learn more about Access because, even if it was never saleable, when you go for an interview and you can describe how you created something like that it always sounds good.

Sorry to land you with such a geeky post when I haven't posted for a while but, as those who remember me getting the iPhone will know, I can get a bit obsessed with this sort of thing for a while. It's my addictive personality.

Wish me luck with the database and good luck with whatever you're up to. If you find a way to save or make lots of money please let me know.

Till next month

T

More or Less the same

Well as the mornings brighten up almost enough to drive to work without headlights what's been happening?

Since we last spoke I took my last trip of the season down to my caravan just to make sure it was all OK. The site is only closed in February so we like to get down around the end of January to check that it's survived the worst ravages of winter and will be ready when the site opens again in March. Why do they shut at all? Well it's to do with tax. Basically it proves that it is a leisure home and not a main residence.

Car

Anyway I was beginning to wonder if there was some sort of mysterious fate trying to keep us away from the van. As you read in January's blog we had a mystery breakdown half way down when we went to go at New Year. This time I wasn't even at the end of my street when I drove over a nail and lost the back tyre. I put on the spare however and continued with the rest of the journey. Of course this meant no spare at a time when the roads have so many pot holes that they look like they've been bombed after Decembers heavy snow. In the last blog on tyres I used C Tyres at 73.50per tyre saving me about £40 per tyre on the next cheapest quote. This time I used Camskill. The tyre cost £60 and there was a £10 charge for fitting so just a further three pound saving. In order to keep track overall of savings since I started this quest though I've got to count it.

Saving on one new Tyre against the next cheapest at £113 is £43.00

Whilst we're on that as well I got the tyre fitter to take the one remaining rear tyre that hadn't been replaced so far and fit it to the spare using the spare on the rear wheel. That's another saving of at least £113.

Using spare tyre on rear wheel and old tyre on spare. Saving at least £113.00

I also discovered at the end of that weekend (when my car wouldn't start) that I had a dry cell in my battery. I love my car. It has so many ways to cost me I lose track. Now surprisingly here I'm not going to list a saving. I found plenty of decently priced batteries on the Internet but all had high delivery costs. It ended up that a shop just across the road had a battery around £10 dearer than the Internet price but it worked out the same without the delivery. In fact it worked out a lot better because the first battery was millimeters to big for the tray, although by measurement it shouldn't have been. so we went back and got it changed for another type. I also now know how to change a car battery. So I can change a wheel, a battery and a headlight. Mummy I'm a mechanic now don't you know.

Computer

OK so regular readers probably haven't been by as much as they used to be. Why? Well because I haven't been updating with any regularity so it gets a bit dull reading the old blog pages all the time.

Part of the reason for not updating has been that I'm lazy and living the quiet life hasn't given me a whole load of stuff to write about. Partly it's been because, much as I love my little net book and have had it hooked up to my 32 inch screen, I hate the blurry poor quality display I've been getting from my net book since the computer died. Now a few times I've looked online at bargain basement PC options and it has to be said that you could do reasonably OK for as little as £100 (although you're getting a low spec old system with no guarantees that it will survive any upgrades you do to it). The problem has been that I don't have £100. Also the reason that the net books graphics transfer so poorly to my flat screen is that I bought one that doesn't have a socket for the PC. You can only transfer your display via HD or via the old analogue video cable. HD is great but cheap PCs and laptops haven't got that far yet. Almost half the price of my dead PC went on a graphics card with it's own memory and an HD output and it was this that I hoped I could save and use in a newer cheap model.

Completely unconnected to my computer woes my brother came round to ask me if I could help him figure out how to use his new HTC phone (I'm so jealous, on first impressions it seemed so much better than the dreadful iPhone). Anyway I think he was just showing off because it seemed that he had the damned thing working perfectly. It's not called the desire for nothing. Thing is when he came round (my wife was away for a few days, more on that in a mo) and I was surfing amazon looking at cheap shit PCs and wondering whether they would handle my graphics card. Turns out that my brother has a broken PC of his own that he's consigned to a cupboard. I asked if I could have a go at creating a hybrid between mine and his.

First thing is that I took his, connected it to a projector as I don't have a standard monitor and... It worked straight away. I found myself staring at wallpaper of an F15 fighter launching from an aircraft carrier. After a few minutes wrestling with my conscience I texted him to say his PC worked and that he could have it back if he wanted. I seriously considered claiming dishonestly that it was some magic that I had performed and that he hadn't just given me a working PC. I'm glad I was honest though because he told me to do what I could with it and, if it worked it was mine.

So, I took a working PC and set about breaking it in the pursuit of better graphics, memory etc. I opened the box intent on installing my hard drive only to discover that it was a SATA model and all of my peripherals were ATA. Boo. I installed my graphics card and sound card. I hooked it up to the 32" TV and... It still worked. I spent most of that night and the following night installing and uninstalling programmes in order to truly make it my own. After several hours it looked and behaved not unlike my beloved dead PC. The wallpaper was mine, my photos, my music and a host of software that I like. Unfortunately it started to behave a bit too much like the old PC. After two days it crashed completely. Because the first thing to go was the sound I removed my sound card and reverted to the motherboards inbuilt sound. This seemed to work. The free virus checker that I've been using for nearly ten years, AVG, was using masses of system resource so I uninstalled it and tried another Avira. This made a big difference and the thing seemed to start to act like a stable PC. My old PC also turned out to have a card in it that seemed to extend the motherboards capacity for hard drives, DVDs etc. I reasoned that, although this was ATA technology, it was attached to a PCI slot so might work in a SATA PC. I now have a second drive in the PC and an external drive attached to a USB. It seems good. A little further research has shown that I can buy a SATA/ATA converter that may allow me to use my old DVD drive and even my old floppy drive. Yep I seem to have a working desktop PC again. This is great has almost certainly saved me about £100.

Building a PC out of two broken models. Total saving approx £100

Smoking

I mentioned that my wife was away for a week didn't I? Well I'm ashamed to admit that whilst she was gone I bought a packet of Cafe Creme cigars (small ten pack cigars) and smoked the lot. I thoroughly enjoyed them too. I'm ashamed to admit this when I'm also at a point where I've completed one full year as a non-smoker. It's even more shameful when I know that at least one follower of this blog has recently been re-reading the story of my triumph against smoking using Champix. In fairness though it was only for a week, it was only ten cigars and I haven't slipped any since or, surprisingly enough, even wanted to.

Finally can I also say a big hello to Jo.Kennedy who has joined the merry band of supporters on the site. I know a Jo Kennedy although that's actual Joe Kennedy so probably unconnected but a big welcome anyway.

So I think that brings you about up to date.

Hopefully more savings to come next month.

Till next time

T