reflections

My good friend got married for the second time a few weeks ago. His first marriage, which was to a bizarre and slightly psychopathic young lady, ended in disaster when she walked out on him and their son.

I was Best Man at his first wedding, so when I discovered that he was planning on doing it again (admittedly with a much nicer young lady) I thought I should volunteer to do something more constructive, and ended up with the job of official photographer.

On my way to the ceremony (with Best Man v2’s Mother as a passenger) I managed to reverse into another car while bay parking. I won’t go into the great depth about how it happened, but let me just say that there was very minimal damage to the other car, and none to mine.

It occured to me later that day, as I told the story to others, that she could have orchestrated the whole incident - in order to get her already bashed-to-bits car replaced perhaps? Her reluctance to give me her insurance details at the time also bugged me that day.

A week later the other driver calls me, and tells me that she’s had the damaged assessed by a mechanic. She asks me if I’d like to pay the 500 pounds (!) for the work, to avoid going through my insurance. Well, I tell her politely that I think she should proceed with a proper claim, and let our insurance companies handle it.

For the last two weeks I’ve been wondering why she hadn’t made a claim immediately. I ended up concluding that perhaps she was driving without insurance?

Then today I get a call from my insurance company. The lady has (finally) made a claim, and has elected to deal directly with my insurers. So (out of curiosity) I ask the man on the phone whether her choice to do it that way could be an indicator that she was driving without insurance - and what does he reply?

“That’s irrelevant sir. It doesn’t matter to us if she’s driving without insurance, or without a tax, or without ever having passed her test. As you’ve damaged her car she is entitled to make a claim against you.”

Um… Excuse me? So let me get this straight… She could be breaking the law on three counts, and driving totally illegally - but she can still claim off my insurance?

“Yes,” says the insurance man, “that’s a matter for the Police - not us.”

So her claim is going through. It’s quite possible (although totally unproved) that she was driving with no insurance at the very least when I had the accident… And yet it’s still going to cost me a 150 pound excess charge. Sucky, huh?

However, the happy couple had a fantastic day - and they’re currently sunning it up somewhere in Cyprus - so I’m going to let the wedding be the memory from that day that I remember..!

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http://mashable.com/2007/04/21/web-startups-and-the-lying-liars-that-lie-about-them

Not literally, obviously! But it would appear that they do stretch their words when it comes to attention-grabbing headlines! There’s definitely some terminology in this post that will be recycled to several of my current clients…

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… go out to anyone who has lost a loved one in the recent shootings. I don’t think I’ll be joining much of the blogosphere with the one day silence, but only because I’m not sure that it’s the most appropriate way to honour those who died. As bloggers, surely our time would be better spent writing about ways that events like this could be avoided completely? http://www.onedayblogsilence.com

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Well, I finally turned thirty today. It seems an awfully long time since I celebrated my twentieth birthday, and so much has happened to me since then. So I thought to myself, what better way to commemorate such a great milestone than with the launch of a new blog?

Firstly, I’d like to thank Dean J Robinson for his Redoable Wordpress theme - which will no doubt be tweaked and hacked to within an inch of it’s life by the time I’ve finished with it!

So who am I then? My name (somewhat obviously) is Paul Enderson, and I live in a town called Harlow, which is in Essex in England. There I enjoy time with my wife Abi and my three daughters, and I love all four of them dearly. I have a supportive family on my wife’s side, and a largely mentally unstable one on mine.

I’m currently a freelance web and graphic designer, and have been since I gave up my last full-time job in September of 2006. My specialist areas are those of usability, standards-compliant coding, and stylish design.

I actively run another blog, dedicated to Windows Vista Sidebar Gadgets and their development. I also have a few other projects that are currently bubbling away on the back-burner, or still waiting to see the light of day.

Like pretty much everyone else on the planet, I have shit going on in my life that I’d rather wasn’t happening. For example, I’m currently in the middle of a very long testing process for Huntington’s Disease. Now, I only found out about a year ago that I might be at risk of this, thanks to my aforementioned lunatic relations. It sucks basically.

So, what’s going to be included in this blog? Well, I’d like to think that this will be a place where I can log what’s going on in my life, along with the things that interest and excite me. It should end up being a place for personal reflection, be interesting enough for a complete stranger to read, and offer me a way of recording memories and events that would otherwise be forgotten.

If all that sounds like it might be interesting to you, and you think you can ignore my occasional rants, then by all means stick around and I look forward to your company.

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