Saturday, December 27, 2008

Brr - must leave heating on next time I go away !

I've been back for an hour or so now, so my fingers have warmed up enough for me to be able to type.

Been at my mum's, dad's and sister's places for a few days over Xmas. Tuesday was getting to mum's & dad's place, just in time for dinner too. Convenient :-) Wednesday saw us battling the Lincoln traffic, which typically for this time of year was pretty savage. Lincoln's roads aren't too well laid out, so getting anyway in Lincoln can be a nightmare. Thursday and Friday had us at my sister's place. She keeps a horse, so needs to be able to get to the field it's at to make sure its comfortable (stable, bringing in from field).

I think my sister liked what she got - a Satnav widget plus her internet has been upgraded to Wireless now. That was Thursday evening's job and was scarily smooth too ... I did the typical techy macho-geek thing of taking one look at the instruction book and going "humph" before chucking instructions over my shoulder and setting the thing up on my own. Kinda sounds like being a "know-it-all" there but it was part of a careful plan :-) There's lots of wifi-widgets out there and I've got experience of two ... One is my Philips thing and I wouldn't recommend that to anyone. Sister has a Linksys (aka Cisco) router now, the newer version of my dad's. The first one we got has been almost faultless for over a year. It just sits there behind a chair and works. Which is all you can ask of electronics. So my sister got the newer version of the same device.

Bit different for my electronics - I've picked up an Apple Airport Express which should let me send the iTunes music to my decent speakers without having tripwires. Just one problem ... my laptop took a tumble on Thursday evening and one thing that broke was the hole that the wifi card goes in. So I'm now tapping this out on a laptop that's hooked up by a wire going over the back of the sofa and listening to iTunes with the rubbish lappy speakers because that Airport thing needs wireless. Sometime next week I'll be hunting a new laptop from the PCWorld places, which will get me doing the wireless thing again.

I've got me another graphics card too now :-) So I'll be crossing my fingers that my main PC can supply it with enough juice to work. Checking that out will be tomorrow's job after wrapping a few things up and I'll be hoping for prettier pictures from World of Warcraft, Mass Effect and Fallout 3.

Oh ! I also have a couple more dwagons for the clan :-) Here they are :


Time to sign off now. I had a couple of bright ideas before I disappeared up norf ... One was to turn the heating off to appease the Green Lobby. The fridge magnet temperature currently has it as 15 degrees C, so a little more to go before things get cosy here. I have my main PC turning and burning on medical research, a bit of Seti, some Large Hadron Collider number crunching and climate research, so that's helping things warm up too. (The other bright idea was to leave my Laptop->TV lead here, so Wallace & Gromit couldn't get watched via iPlayer)

PS This may be my last blog entry. One of the presents that my Secret Santa victim is getting may get me killed. I'm sure the other people at the party will arrange something as a posthumous posting, although I think I'll get protection from CQ and CK cos I'm giving them a lift home tomorrow.
PS2 (addon) Still here ! Not been strangled with a cardigan.

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