StefAshwell.com

I’ve finally got my arse into gear and put my Shermans up on the bay, feel free to head on over there and have a look :)

I’ve just picked up the lovely new Wolf Guard plastic set – very nice indeed! I’m also playing with my new phone so not quite able to get good images up yet, but here’s a couple of them anyway. The Grey Hunters I’ve been painting are coming along nicely too, I’ll have stage by stage pictures up as soon as I download them from my camera!

Wolf Guard Box

Wolf Guard Sprues

How exciting, a week ago I returned home after the regular tuesday night of gaming to find that there was a gas leak in my house. A few days previous we had a new boiler installed, and it turns out the engineer who fit the appliance neglected to weld one of the pipes, and to quote the emergency engineer we had “a significant leak”.

The actions of British Gas over the past few months have lowered my opinion of them again and again. Let’s backtrack even further to why we needed a new boiler in the first place. It was a regular check up being done by a young whipper snapper of an engineer who looked like he was fresh out of boot camp. For around 18 months the boiler had a slight fault, but it was one we could live with. The engineer insisted that he tried to fix the broken part, and suprise suprise whilst trying to do so broken something else which is irreplacable.

Now I’m sure he was only trying to do the right thing, be helpful and give a good service to a customer, an this isn’t a personal attack on him. But his insistence caused us to be without hot water or heating for around 2 months, and in a time where money is tight, a new boiler is one thing you don’t want to have to be spending money on.

Shortly after this a manger visited and offered a measly £200 voucher as compensation for a new boiler. A £200 voucher isn’t going to make much of a dent in a new boiler!

Maybe it’s my view on things, but the suspicion is there that British Gas are not particularly bothered about keeping an existing boiler running, when they can break it and sell us a new one, making a tidy profit.

Fast forward a month or so and we managed to take advantage of a deal on a boiler with British Gas, and this whole new sharade has begun. Right now a letter of complaint is being directed to them, along with Ofgem and anywhere else we can think of. These actions are not acceptable, and could have resulted in disaster.

Over the past month or so I have been working on a new website Gifts for Geeks, an online store selling Games Workshop and other wargames related products. Happily today it’s gone live!

Their new site has moved to use Clear eCommerce rather than their previous solution. This allowed them to have customer accounts and to be able to offer worldwide shipping on all orders.

In the main however it is the back end that’s seen the biggest changes, allowing their staff to manage the site and orders more efficiently.

It’s been a pleasure to work on the project and hopefully it will bring them even more success online!

http://www.giftsforgeeks.org.uk/

Over the last few days I’ve been creating a number of tutorial videos using CamTasia (which I’ve fallen in love with).

Something has to be done with my presentation technique however! Or maybe just getting the words out. I spent an hour earlier today recording audio for a video with no results – must try harder!

My problem was probably not having a proper script, tomorrow I’ll have to have another go, write some scripts and get them done!

The series of videos will be showcasing some of the great things inside the Clear Content system, showing how easy it is to create a website with the software. The intention is for them to give users of the system a better understanding of how things work, while giving new visitors an overview at the same time.