Phew, the sweat on my forehead is starting to subside as I am, at last, online good and proper. Well, sort of. I had an email from Tiscali earlier to say that the line has been activated and I should be getting my router in the post any day now. Fortunatly I have an old USB ADSL modem in the garage and have bodged it to work on my Vista laptop. The initial speed test says I have 3Mbps downstream which isn’t too shabby. I think I can improve that as I’m running off an extension which could be a little ropey. So… expect more inane ramblings from me in the coming days.
So far we’ve decorated two rooms in the house. The study, which I think I’ve mentioned before, is still waiting for furniture – hopefully any day now. I’ve also decorated the master bedroom… in a <lie mode> lovely shade </lie mode> of pink. I will counter balance that with a 32″ LCD TV within the next few weeks. I managed to get Sky to run a cable up to that room and I’ve put my old Sky box in there too as there were a number of ‘incidents’ involving a clash of viewing preferences with there being only one telly up and running. The guest room is also up and running.. we have our old double bed in there with some new curtains and bed linen – incidentally… our new king size bed with memory-foam layered mattress is going to take a bit of getting used to. It doesn’t cave in when you lie on it like a normal mattress would and when I lie on my side, my arms get squished in to me more than I’m used to, but still it’s much comfier than any other bed I’ve had. Jobs remaining to do are rebox some stuff in to smaller boxes to go in the loft which should hopefully leave the other spare room with only stuff for the study in, then it’ll be empty and ready to decorate as Poppy’s proper bedroom. We’ve also got to get some more storage to go in our wardrobe…. especially for shoes, Vicky has a whole large box of shoes yet to be unpacked. I think the next room she wants decorating though is the lounge, which is understandable really as the carpet does look a bit rusty (where the old occupants sofas were)… however I’ll need to put a new telly up on the wall first and feed cables through the walls before I decorate as the cable runs and mounting brackets will definitly damage the wall. In anticipation of the decorating I had to go purchase a new AV receiver quickly so as I’d only have to run minimal cables up to the telly. The new amp is an Onkyo TXSR606 and so far it’s pretty nice. You bung any input source you like in to it (S-video, component, composite, HDMI, optical/coax audio, analog etc…) and it’ll up-convert it and send it out the HDMI cable to the telly… pretty sweet so far. It even comes with a microphone which allows it to optimally configure it’s settings based on listening to the sound output from the speakers.
Right… quiz night tonight. Time to go get that chocolate.
