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A few weeks ago the number of felines in our house doubled. My father-in-law, downsizing his house, decided to get rid of his 2 cats. He was never the cat lover, and he wasn’t really dedicating the time to them that they needed. So, Jasmine, the friendly on the pair, came to live with us. Unfortunately, she didn’t get on with Molly, our existing house cat.

So, we spent New Year with my sister-in-law’s family, and they agreed to take Jasmine. We bundled her into her cage yesterday and took her along. She’s been acting very timid but will soon come out of her shell. They have a big house and a big garden, no other cats, and 4 children who will all love to stroke her. In time she’ll be in her absolute element.

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.