Grey and miserable

Unfortunately, every time I've been somewhere special in the last month the sky has clouded over. First the Lake District, then Loch Lomond, then Edinburgh, and now Holland...and the tulips had all gone too. So what do you do when the weather is shocking, watch the traffic!


Cars on a bend in the road on a wet day with spray, showing headlights

I stumbled across a good blog whilst thinking about shooting stock in overcast conditions, here, some excellent photography, especially in gloomy conditions. Here's one of mine...


A rainy park with a large tree, with a bench beneath 1/2

I think that is probably beyond dull, but you never know it might be useful, whereas my Edinburgh shots were just limited by conditions...


A courtyard behind Lawnmarket on the Royal Mile, Edinburgh 2/2

Stock photography again

Well, look at how time flies. One minute I'm sat in M&S thinking about corporate social responsibility, the next I am two contracts later back in mortgages and sat in sunny Watford.

In the meantime, I have finally found an outlet for my photography, and this blog will be tracking my progress. After years of hobby photography, the odd wedding and lots of kit buying, I am now submitting to Alamy and trying to sell my wares. It's been tough to step up to the kind of quality they want but very good for my photography and very motivating...cue one or two images taken in the last busy three weeks, from old stock...


La Defense, Paris, France

to new stock...

Cottages in Caldbeck, Northern Fells, Lake District

and Amsterdam last weekend to come...

Don't use Hammonds Direct

The buyers of our house have instructed Hammonds Direct to act on their behalf. Hammonds Direct are a volume conveyancing firm and it is now clear three months into the sale that they are overworked and/or incompetant.

As I write we are waiting to exchange contracts but our solicitors cannot get through to Hammonds as their lines are busy because it is the last day of the month.

This is the latest in a catalogue of errors, in reverse order:

• We are now on our fourth and final completion date and are waiting to exchange contracts a full three months after accepting the offer. The chain is very simple, our buyers are first time buyers who are renting, the vendors of the house we are buying are moving out with no onward chain. That's it, three solicitors involved. Two of them competant, Hammonds Direct are not.
• Yesterday was our third completion date to fall through. On Monday all parties were ready to exchange until Hammonds realised that their clients (the buyers of our property) had not signed the contract they returned - not their fault, they're first time buyers - Hammonds should have instructed them clearly. So on Monday they sent them a new contract from Bradford to Reading. Our solicitor is in Reading and had volunteered to drop a contract round to them to sign to save time, but Hammonds being a team solicitor cannot work with such innovative methods. Two days later we expect the signed contract to have arrived in Bradford but as yet we cannot get through to them and they have not acted on the contract if it has arrived.
• Last Friday Hammonds were unavailable again, so our solicitor, our estate agent and the buyers left messages. Hammonds declined to call our solicitor and instead faxed a demand for a maisonette indemnity insurance payment. Our solicitor re-sent them a copy of the letter from three weeks before agreeing to pay the charge - they had clearly lost it or overlooked it in the file.
• Last Thursday we were given our first definite completion date by Hammonds - however, this was actually our third completion date in all. It had taken them three months, tens of calls by our solicitor, estate agent and calls to the Law Society, the Halifax (the buyers lender) and direct to Hammonds to get any movement on the case. Unfortunately, the vendors of our new property couldn't move on the date we picked so it fell through.
• The three months up to last Thursday we had had various demands from Hammonds but they were nigh on impossible to contact. Our solicitor had left numerous messages and rarely got a call back in good time. The conveyancing process has been slow, ill informed and non-communicative. All from a company who state on their website

"We are recognised for our partnership approach, tailoring our technology and processes to match our clients’ needs. In this way, we help them to improve the service they offer to their customers, making the process of buying and selling a house, and obtaining a remortgage as fast and efficient as possible." http://www.hammondsdirect.co.uk/

This was a simple sale and Hammonds Direct were totally obstructive. Our opinion is that they are not set-up to process the volume of purchases that they have agreed to act on. In this regard they are grossly negligent.

We intend to take the matter up with the Law Society and Office of Fair Trading. We have incurred costs in moving the removal firm dates and extended storage not counting the stress we have physically endured. This reflects badly on the Halifax who have partnered with this firm for volume conveyancing.

If you are involved in a sale or purchase where a party is using Hammonds Direct I recommend you look for an offer or property elsewhere.

EDIT: http://www.mortgageintroducer.com/story.asp?storycode=11193&sectioncode=12

B&Q Stupidity

B&Q have put up a billboard near where I work at Jct 4 of the M4 (the Heathrow junction) with a domestic wind turbine on top. The tag line goes something like "the world's first energy efficient billboard".

Then they added a 300W halogen lamp to illuminate the wind turbine at night

Reduce margins and save paper

In my quest for new ideas I've stumbled across one that's been thought of before.

Reduce the margins in Word documents and save money (and the planet) http://www.bio.psu.edu/greendestiny/publications/1.pdf
I tested this on a 36 page document where I am working at a leading high street retailer. By reducing the left and right margins by 1cm each it saved one page (2.8%)

Reduce the font size by one point (in Word use the shortcut CTRL + A, CTRL + [ ). This saved another three pages (a further 8.3%)

Luckily the high street retailer in this example already enforces duplex printing (that's a 50% saving that is already there). Challenge any company not using duplex! The cost of a duplex printer over a simplex (!) printer is far less than half their paper bill each year - non-duplex printers should be banned from the workplace.

Played around with trimming down the header and footer so that they take no more than a horizontal rule and a single line of text. Also reduced the top and bottom margin. That didn't effect my 36 page document

..OMG...replacing all the manual page breaks (you can search and replace them in Word click on Edit > Replace... > More > Special or search for ^m) and removing the automatic page breaks on the Heading 1 style saved another 9 pages (a further 25%)

Then removing all spare lines (repeatedly search for ^p^p^p and replace with ^p^p) shed another couple of pages (a further 5.5%)

What about title pages? Most of the document I produce are less than 30 pages (or should be with the tricks above). Why waste an entire page on the title. I don't know how many documents we produce here but saving half to one page on every one must be worth something. In the case of the test above it's another 1% or so.

The verdict, these tricks saved nearly 40% on the number of pages. With duplex printing here that is 20% of the paper on every copy printed. Given that this document will go through several versions and there are three or four people who will review it this could amount to...5 versions x 4 reviewers x 4 pages = 80 sheets of paper. 1 ream of paper is 500 sheets at ~£3 a ream = saved 48p

Perhaps this leading retailer might consider paying me half the profit for telling them about it.

http://www.bio.psu.edu/greendestiny/publications/gdc-mueller_report.pdf