Category: Life

Happy New Year to you all!

I’d apologise for my quietness over the Christmas period, but I’ve spent the time with the family, computer barely on and that’s not something I’ll apologise for 😉

One thing I did get a chance to do is to start the swap over of my broadband service. For a couple of years I’ve been with Zen Internet and they’ve provided an excellent service. However, at £24.99, sorry, £24.46 (must remember those important VAT changes!) it’s a little expensive. After some research I’ve settled on O2 Broadband. As a phone customer they can provide me with a 6 meg product (it’s around 2-3 meg at Zen) for £7.34 a month. No, that’s not a misprint.

Time will tell how fast and reliable the service is. However, I received a wireless router the very next day and I should be connected sometime next week. Getting connected with my existing Netgear modem, however, may be a little more tricky – they pre-set the modem they send to automatically retrieve settings, etc, to make the set-up as painless as possible. But that means a little more work for me. I could, of course, use their modem and, indeed, I may do (I feel some wireless signal strength testing coming on!).

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Last week I had a cold – much better than last year when I had the cold during Christmas itself. Unfortunately, last weekend I was away with friends and it rather ruined the time. And to top it off, the cold has been gone but has been left with a raging cough that particularly gets me overnight.

So this is third night on the trot when I’m up – friends have been over so I didn’t get to bed until midnight. Tomorrow (or rather today) I visit my mums so have to be up at about 8am. But here it is, sometime after 2am, and I’m wide awake, but hacking away (in the coughing sense, rather than the code “cracking” way).

What normally happens is that it settles down after about an hour and I’m back off to bed.

Anyone know anything that helps with this kind of thing? From Simple Linctus to Buttercup Syrup has been tried. And have failed.

I’ve recently been reviewing some of my expenditure and this includes my home phone company. BT, strangely enough, was pretty competitive so I didn’t see the need to change. However, I could see a benefit in changing my current calling plan. Right now I’m on their free evenings and weekends package. This is a free option but you have to sign up on contract to get it – basically tying you to BT for a year to be able to get it.

What I’d like to do is change to their Unlimited package – I have to pay more but get free calls during the day too.

On their website I appeared unable to do this and it didn’t tell me anywhere why. So I emailed them. And they were pretty swift with their reply – same day. However, the reply did surprise me – I can’t change until my contract time is up. That’s right, they don’t want me to pay them more money until my year contract has expired.

Now, I can understand this when reducing your package, but when increasing it? Paying BT more money? Weird. I guess I’ll just have to stick it out.

I slept badly last night… my cold has virtually completely gone, but has left a nasty hacking cough which is what kept me awake. In fact at one point (about 2:45am) I got up for an hour.

A full day at work for me and there’s  a ridiculously long queue for the bacon cobs, which I’m desperate to partake in.

Unlike past Christmas I’ve managed to get my organising all on it’s head – where I normally fall down (cards, getting and wrapping presents, etc) were all sorted early but where I don’t normally have a problem (getting the house ready, presents under the tree, generally making everything feel Christmassy) I’ve cocked up.

I don’t even have a Christmas CD to play 🙁

And I’m out tonight.

Christmas may be a little more rushed than usual!

Went to Hull at the weekend to have a Christmas meal with some friends. However, I’ve had a cold since Thursday night and, for whatever reason, really decided to hit me hard Saturday night. So I was dazed and confused and therefore not as much company as usual. I also slept really badly on the Saturday night (stayed at a friends house).

This cold has been really weird – things haven’t gone in the right order (you know how it usually is… sore throat to begin, etc, etc) and have hit me quite hard each time.

Anyway, weisited my father-in-laws new house on Sunday and then headed back home for a rest. What could go wrong?

The M1 was shut. Except for those poor suckers already on it, stuck in 7 miles of standing traffic. Yes, that included me. Instead of getting home at some reasonable later afternoon time, we got home about 8pm. My temperature had been erratic and, probably due to sitting in the cramped car, I wondered whether my cold was actually flu. Thankfully a good nights sleep has confirmed it to be simply a cold. I’m now dosed up on Cold & Flu relief and feeling a lot, lot better than I was yesterday.

Meantime… this site has been down since Friday. Apologies. My host neither has a helpdesk not, it seems, any kind of technical support over the weekend so even though I reported it to them within business hours on Friday they didn’t get around to looking at the problem until this morning. And they haven’t stated what the problem was (although I’m going to try and find out).