I’m at home still. In mid December I had a quite serious bout of depression and am still off work. If you have been trying to contact me then I am checking my personal email and hope to be back at work soon.

I would like to thank everyone that has been supportive during the last month.

I had to go to Lakeside today to get a few bits and pieces. The main reason was to get one of the new Nokia X6′s with the new touchscreen. I need a new phone before I go on holiday as my old N96 has started to go wrong after a year. I could try and get it repaired but it would probably take too long.

Instead I ended up returning with everything, and more like you do when everwhere has sales on, but the one thing I wanted.

Looking at google shopping when I got home didn’t show up anything so I reverted back to the normal google searh.

Turns out that was quite lucky as it returned a news item about the launch at Nokia’s flagship store in Regent’s Street in London.

As they are open to 8pm I was able to ring them and ask to reserve one to collect on Monday.

Apparently they have a lot of stock so I can just go and get one in my lunch break on Monday as Oxford circus is only a few stops on the Bakerloo line from where I work.

It’s just a shame that none of the mobile phone shops at Lakeside had them in stock as I could have got it cheaper on an O2 contract.

The ones at the Nokia flagship store are SIM unlocked so at least I can swap in my business SIM card during the week.

If Nokia’s flagship store also had allowed me to take out an O2 contract then I could have avoided having to goto the O2 store up on Oxford street.

They probably have to be operator neutral though which is why they only sell unlocked phones.

I’m going to Cuba over christmas on Monday the 14th and one thing that I’ll be taking with me is a set of three playlists.I’ve always found that particular tracks bring back special memories – especially of particular events which is a great way to remember fonder times (particularly apt given the current cold and rainy weather we have in the UK at the moment)

It was whilst discussing Spotify with a friend at work and how it was the modern equivalent of a mix tape (yes for you youngster’s I’m old enough to remember them at the height of their popularity in the late 80s) that I got the idea. Well that and a discussion on explore.co.uk’s Facebook wall.

At the time I hadn’t purchased an iPod Touch or signed up to use Spotify Mobile so I created them in iTunes.

So I thought I’d do a bit of an experiment and try and recreate them in Spotify. Well it almost worked. Here are the links

• Cuba Pop/Indie
• Cuba Relax
• Cuba Rock/Pop

There are actually more than thirty songs – about three hours worth split pretty evenly between the three that represent some of my favourite songs and artists.

You probably haven’t spotted it, but in Spotify there are two missing tracks – both should be in the Cuba Relax playlist.

These are

• This is London by Don MacGlashan from the album Warm Hand
• The Other Side of the Reservoir by Graham Parker from the album Don’t Tell Columbus

So a pretty good strike rate for Spotify but not perfect yet.

One of my future posts was going to be around how to de-clutter your life, in a both a physical and psychological sense. It seems that David Turnbull who writes a blog called Adventures of a Barefoot Geek has beaten me to it.

His article How To Want Very Little (via zenhabits.net) struck a chord with me because I’ve actually being doing a lot of what he suggests over the last few years ( in fact it was only a combination of actually doing this and realising that other people are writing about exactly the same issues that gave me the confidence to start writing this blog earlier this month).

However I think the title is completely wrong. It should be reversed.

If you do the things that David suggest in his article then you will actually find that you want more out of life and can have it.

You don’t need to take my word for it though – if you need more convincing then you should go and read Martin Seligman’s bestselling book Learned Optimism.

If you’ve  already seen my first mobile blog post then you will already know that I bought an iPod Touch 64gb this week and that one of the first things  I installed on it was the iPhone wordpress app.

It wasn’t the first though – that honor goes to Spotify Mobile.

Of course to use Spotify on a mobile or iPod Touch you need to pay the £9.99 monthly fee to upgrade to the premium service. (but you don’t get anymore annoying adds interrupting your listening!)

A few of my friends remarked that I was a bit crazy spending so much money on a new iPod Touch when I already had a perfectly good 80gb iPod. And if you take it a face value then it looks like it is.

So must first mobile blog entry from my new iPod Touch.

I have to say that the wordpress iPhone app is really easy to use so this is unlikely to be the last

(Ok so the picture was taken on my N96 and then uploaded via my macBook later, but one thing at a time)

If you read my post on How not to do customer service you would have thought that I’d had a really bad day yesterday.

Well it turned out to be frustrating sorting out the issue with Scottish Power but that was the only thing that upset me.

I actually ended up feeling pretty good because I’d taken action about everything else that had happened – which if you read on is not inconsiderable considering that I also did a full days work which  involved four hours of conference calls, 150+ emails, two sets of powerpoint slides to prepare and a document to review (even just that sounds exhausting now looking back on it!).

To put my problems with Scottish Power problems into some perspective my day started with me knowing that my Marks and Spencer order for a sofa and two chairs had been blocked by my credit card company because it would have taken me over my card limit (made slightly worse because M&S had told me they would only charge me two weeks before the estimated delivery which was always going to be at the earliest the 14th of December. It really is amazing how one small thing going wrong can turn into a cascade of problems).

UPDATE: Turns out this was neither my fault of Scottish Power – the previous owners had a new meter installed in May. When they moved they gave the meter reading from the sticker that had the Old Meter readings on it… It was still bad customer service though and I’m still expecting an apology.

A few days ago I got a letter from Scottish Power, the energy suppliers that the previous occupiers of my new home used and I chosen not to.
I’d switched to EDF Energy and was expecting a final invoice from Scottish Power so  I was expected a letter around this time.

So I was a bit surprised to see that they had worked out there was an excessive charge of over £300 pounds on it. So I tried to call them but their customer services line only operates from 9am-4pm – which is decidedly customer friendly if you are out at work and don’t get in till after 6.30pm!

So the very next day I phone them from work  with a new set of meter readings. It turned out that there had been a mistake with the Gas Meter reading and I was promised it had been corrected. (Given that I’ve only just moved in and had a new boiler put in two weeks ago using over £300 of gas in two weeks would have been insane – it’s just not possible to use that much Gas without having gassed the entire street!). It was all very nice and the lady on the phone was very helpful – but it was about to turn very nasty.

About six months ago my organising system was in a bit of a mess and needed refreshing. So I read Getting Things Done by David Allen again.

(I really must get around to buying and reading his later book Making it All Work at some point soon!)

I had a good old sort out which took nearly two weeks – scary how easy it is for bad habits to re-establish themselves!

For example I stopped using email folders in Outlook and instead switched to using tags to organise them. I also had a clear out of the 8000 odd emails that were clogging up my various reference and project folders.

(Doing that made me realise just how much junk or unimportant email I get and can delete, if not immediately then after a week. So that helped dealing with 150+ emails a day and meant I could actually get some real work done!)

For the last month or so I’d wanted to go and buy a new pair of black jeans and look at some new shirts. Primarily because over the last two months I’d dropped from a size 38 waist down to 36 and some of shirts (size L) were looking far too big on me.

 

In particularly I’ve got one really nice Ben Sherman shirt that I like to wear on business trips – only it’s a bit too large now!

I’d also found an online store, MandMDirect.com which had some nice Ben Sherman shirts, end of line stuff so heavily discounted,  but I really needed to know if a Medium size shirt would fit me.

So finally last weekend I forced myself to go to the nearby shopping complex, Lakeside. Now this is one of the largest shopping complexes (malls if your american) in the UK and nearer christmas it gets really busy.

I’m not a shopping complex person (Is any man?). Normally I like to get there when it opens and get out in an hour or so. Only I had a lot to look at and in every major store I ended up queuing to pay for 5-10 minutes.

Sometimes I really wish that the British would learn what really good customer service is about because queuing for 10 minutes to just pay for something really isn’t it!

So I ended up looking in about four of the major stores for jeans and was about to give up when walking along I spotted a shop called Madhouse. These are another re-seller of brand name clothing so I thought – what the hell, I’m here.

Fifteen minutes later I’d bought a new pair of Wrangler Jeans, reduced from £40 to £25. I ended up getting everything else I wanted as well.

Of course I did end up buying the shirt at full price – but there was just something about it that I just had to have. Still I ended up buying 3 more Ben Sherman shirts online the following day, and including P&P it came to the same price as the one I bought in Debenhams so I think it balanced out in the end