The Artesea

It’s now possible to donate towards the cost of LibDemBlogs.
I’ve also added my search engine (well a Google API script) to the site, so you can try and find those old posts or just search for random words. A small bug is that searching for LibDem Bloggers doesn’t really work as their names appear on almost every page.

After two hard days of getting it to work, the new style for LibDem Blogs is live.
Hopefully the layout is easier to read, and with the discrete advertising that has slipped in, some of my bandwidth costs can be covered.
Please leave feedback in the comments, as the site is there for you the readers and not me.

Today I received a Final Annual Statement from the Student Loans Company. Unlike any other bank that I’ve dealt with this statement seems to be a bit out of date.
The statement is dated June 2006 (seems OK at this point), but when I looked at the statement something seemed wrong. I had paid £442.00 this year. Now this couldn’t be correct, since moving to Lincoln in Jan 2005 I took a pay cut which resulted in my annual salary being less than the £15,000 threshold. Only since this tax year through overtime have I started to begin to repay this loan (also now I have my annual pay rise plus my Council allowance, which clearly takes me above the threshold).
It was only then when looking closer did I realise that this statement refers to the period 06/04/2004 – 05/04/2005. That’s a period that ended some 14 months ago!
With the statement you get a lovely leaflet telling me what to do if I think that within the next 52 weeks my loan will have been paid off. This is to ensure that my employees and HM Revenue & Customs don’t take more than necessary. I can only contact the Student Loans Company if my repayments will be completed within the year, but if they don’t tell me how much I owe them for over 14 months there’s a possibility that I’ve already paid everything off (although very unlikely at the moment).
Finally the other issue I have is with the Government and not the Student Loans Company themselves. The amount of money I paid in during the last period was near enough equal to the amount of interest on the loan, and with the 2005 period of zero repayments my total loan will be higher on the next statement than the one I got last year.

I’ve just been to Sainsbury’s to buy some wine. I’ve been saving up my Nectar points for some years now, and after cashing some in at Warwick Castle, I decided to spend some on wine. I’ve selected 12 random bottles, varying in cost from £3.99 to £7.49 (reduced from £10.99) coming to a total of £61.15.
I plan to drink them with Heather over the coming months (we’re not real big drinkers) and hopeful they will all be nice.

This meme is going around the blogs at the moment.

My earliest political memory is at the age of 9 being informed that Margaret Thatcher had thrown in the towel and resigned as Prime Minister.

I then proceeded to run around the school field in celebration.

According to the main BBC Sport website Dietmar Hamann wants to leave Bolton to join Bolton!

I’ve tweaked the background and style sheet to make the left column slightly wider, whilst taking the pixels from the right hand side.
By doing this, it allows me to whore my blog to the advertising world with 468×60 pixel ads. I’ve made a script which rotates the order and changes the ads for each company on each reload. It also places an add at the bottom of the item page, and I’ll work on getting the archive pages pimped.
I also played about with the flickr badge, so I now show all my pictures instead of my Cullen photoset, and they also have a “shake it like a Polaroid” background.
You may need to do a Ctrl+F5 to load the modified style sheet.

Some Tories are suggesting that we should allow left turns on red lights.
I can see advantages and disadvantages of this, however it is reported as some new idea from a Tory policy group, yet I’m pretty sure that this was included or being spoke about during the 2001 general election.

I was going to write a long review, but can’t be bothered.
The film is great, the girls look good and stay until the end of the credits.