Inspired by a few friends doing a roundup of the year and plans for the future, here is mine.

Past

• Got made redundant from Jigsaw
• Got a new job at a spangly design agency
• Came out of a long term relationship
• Saw a life coach
• Went in search of my biological father in Belfast
• Realised I am not cut out to work for other people
• Went to some awesome raves
• Quit the spangly job to develop my own web design business

Present

• Up to my eyes in building websites
• On a mission to lose some weight
• Enjoying spending time with my daughter
• Networking with other web/tech folk in Nottingham

Future

• Spend more time with friends that I have neglected while building my business (Sorry guys!)
• Be more decisive and do the things I want to do
• Care less about what ‘people’ think
• Develop the website business and open an online shop
• Learn to use my dSLR!
• Live on my own again (Not cut out for house-mates…)
• Plan and finance a windmill meditation retreat centre
• Maybe build another custom retro car

When I moved back to Nottingham after doing my degree in Lincoln, I obviously needed somewhere to live. Not being able to afford to buy, or rent a house to myself I started looking at rooms to rent.  I have a major dislike of Property Agents and professional landlords due to the fact they don’t usually give a toss, and charge for things like credit checks, admin fees and loads of other things that make it expensive and stressful.

What I found was that there a number of websites that match up people who have rooms to rent and people looking.  Afters signing up to a few, I found a room in a converted barn through Flatmateclick. Their website allows you to search by postcode – many other sites do not.  The site is easy to use, and has plenty of rooms available.  When the contract ran out on the barn, I found my current place in Radcliffe-on-Trent on Flatmateclick too.  I pay for a room, but because nobody has rented the other room, I get the place to myself

So in short, Flatmateclick was the best room to rent site that I found and has sorted me out twice with lovely places to live.

Sign up FREE at Flatmateclick

Because I am too busy playing and watching the following, this will be quite short.

Fate: Mac RPG. Cute, addictive, easy to pick up for half an hour and you get to have a pet who you can load down with loot then send off to sell it for you.  My pet is currently permanently transformed into a bad ass spider.

Flatout 2: Mac racing game: Ridiculously fast paced, you earn points for breaking shit much like Burnout.  You can go through your windscreen if you hit a wall or something. Has awesome stunts where you launch the driver as far as possible. Lots of fun, and works on LAN

Dexter: TV show about a forensic cop that is also a serial killer. Really harsh and messes with good/evil clichés.  Funny, sick and a little bit too close to the truth for me. I’m really surprised this got on TV at all, but I’m glad it did.

Coda: One window web development tool for Mac. I love this program, and everything else that Panic do (Including Transmit that I bought as well). It makes life so much easier, well worth the £50 or whatever they charge for it. This is what Dreamweaver should be like. I <3 you, Coda.

Quorn mushroom fillets: Food, for putting in your mouth. Absolutely delicious. Eat them.

I have recently installed a set of db Audio 6.2c speakers into my Calibra front doors. The install process itself was a Herculean task, but that’s another story…

Not wanting to randomly buy some speakers online, I visited the Car Audio Centre in Hyson Green, Nottingham. As I have found with this shop before, most of the goods don’t have prices on. They ask you what you have seen it at. You tell them the website price and they go “Yeah, that’s web only prices, it is £more in the shop”. I asked for a set of Infinity components which I had seen on their website. Again, as many people have found with these guys they didn’t have any stock. What they did have however were lots of InPhase and db Audio stock. Hardly surprising, as these are their own brands. The shop used to be called InPhase Audio back in the day. So they tried to switch sell me onto db Audio.
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Work have kindly provided me with a 15″ Macbook Pro. I love it. It has Bootcamp & Parallels with XP Pro just in case I need that (which I haven’t yet… ). The screen quality is fantastic. Leopard kicks ass. I don’t know what else to say. I am hooked

I also have a Wacom Graphire 2 tablet on loan, and I don’t know how I managed to do any kind of artwork without one. I will be buying one of these, even at £200+ it is still good value. Sketching and graphics manipulation is 100 times easier than with a mouse, and it even makes normal windows or Leopard operation faster and more intuitive. Fantastic!