Just Me

On Friday afternoon last, myself and Elly finally got inside what will be our new home. No we haven’t moved in yet, but we’re a lot closer. We got access to ’snag’ all be it without power or plumbing. Still, that’ll be another day out.

Essentially, we studied our new home from top to bottom looking for thing’s that aren’t up to scratch and with only a few minor issues to report, were very happy with our afternoons work. Well apart from the fact that we’d spent hours standing on hard concrete floors and were exceptionally tired as a result.

We also took the opportunity to measure some of the rooms so we could start thinking about where things would go and planning what we needed to buy to fit the spaces we wanted.  We nearly didn’t, we were so tired.

Once we got home (the rented home that is) I logged onto IKEA’s web site to download their room planner tool and plastered across the screen was the news that they were having a 21% off sale in all UK stores to celebrate 21 years trading in the UK, starting at 6am the next morning, running till midnight that evening. We did some calculations and worked out that if we went (what with the current exchange rate and the sale) items priced at £100 sterling would end up costing us about €100. You can’t argue with that value! A call was made to my youngest sister (long time IKEA fan) to see if she wanted to come, Alas too short notice for her.

We decided to get up early, Saturday morning and hit the road. Planning to use IKEA’s delivery service to ship what we bought to Grannymar and we’d get it from there once we had the keys to the new house.

Literally 3 minutes before we were going to leave my sister texted me, to let me know she was on her way, complete with people carrier. After a bit of a wait for her, off we set. The sister had removed all but 3 seats from the people carrier as well so we had almost as much space as a ‘Hiace’ in the back.

After trekking round IKEA for most of the day and meeting up with Grannymar in the process we finally headed to the tills, paid and left, heading for the cars. Packing commenced and for a while it was looking like not even the world Tetris Champion could move these ‘bricks’ around to get them to fit. In reality we couldn’t get everything to fit in the people carrier. Thankfully, Grannymar was on hand to take the excess items that wouldn’t fit, otherwise it would have been the returns desk.

So we got most of our purchases back to Dublin with us, Grannymar is storing the sofa-bed for what we plan to use as a spare room/home office. Thankfully it will fit in either my own or Elly’s car so it shouldn’t be to difficult to get it back to Dublin. Which is probably just as well because as I type it’s the only bed we own.

For the amount that we spent, we got an awful lot, enough bookcases to cover a wall, Dining table and chairs, a sofa bed, an armchair & footstool, Light fittings for almost every room in the house, a dressing table, a crockery set, a very cool magnetic spice rack thingy and a load of other little bits and pieces. Jaysus that sounds like I’m on the Generation game

As for the shopping experience, I’ll be generous and say that shopping in IKEA is unpleasant (if it wasn’t for the price I would never shop there again) I may post again about that, I think this one is long enough for now.

Wow! what a couple of days it’s been. Since last Friday morning, we (Elly and myself) have…

1. Snagged our future home
2. Discovered an amazing sale in IKEA Belfast
3. Been to IKEA Belfast
4. Bought 2 loads of furniture
5. And last, but by no means least, possibly even most importantly, been to my nephew/godson’s confirmation.

All in all it could be described as a busy, expensive and exceptionally tiring  weekend.

It’s a question people ask, often with an air of disbelief, like why would you want to have a pc in your living room?

There are a lot of plus sides to it, not least of which is a 32″ widescreen monitor to surf the web with. But that’s only a small plus, first off what does a HTPC do for you?

Well a home theatre personal computer is exactly that it’s a computer for your home theatre, or in my case, living room. How does this add to your home theatre? for a start it’s 1 box for your DVD player, all your music, digital photo’s, TV recording’s and Home Movies. That’s what Windows Media Centre 2005 will do out of the box. Is it difficult to setup? not really, you can do it all from the remote once the operating system is installed.

For me there are 3 killer features…

1. My Photos - allows basic photo editing and slideshowing your photo albums
2. My Music - The Music collection
3. My TV - schedule and watch TV recording’s

The last of these gets the most use in our house, although having a photo slide show as wallpaper means both myself and Elly get to see those precious moments plenty.

I love the Music portion of Media centre, it was a bit time consuming to get all the info and album art sorted out but once thats done, it makes it so easy to find your favourite artists’ or albums. I’ll post another time about my personal experiences tagging over 20 Gb or about 10,000 individual audio files, it’s actually not as time consuming as you might think.

Where Media centre comes into it’s own is working hand in hand with our set top box for TV. it means outside of Grand Prix, neither myself or Ellybabes watch TV “live” anymore. Instead we record all our favourite TV shows and we can watch whatever takes our fancy at that particular time. So much better than spending 20 minutes flicking through channels till you find something worth watching.

This is really easy to do, just search by keyword till you find the program you like and select “record series” you can even tell it to record all showings on all channels or just new episodes, but once you take those 2 minutes to decide that, media centre just does it. The NTL set top box is far less reliable, needing to be rebooted at least once a week.

What if 2 shows are on at the same time? first media centre tries to find an alternative showing of either show, if it can’t then, it decides what to record based on the recording priorities the user sets. So for instance, we’re huge “Bones” and “Boston legal” fans, to make sure we don’t miss an episode these are top of our priority list.

Whereas “The Simpsons” which is on so many channels and almost daily, it’s near the bottom of the priority list as there always being re-shown.

What all this means is that when we sit down to relax and watch some telly what we want to watch is always on.

So is that it? well not entirely, there is a lot more to it than that and in a future post, I’ll touch on the why I chose Microsoft Media Centre and the benefits that it will bring when we move into our new home.

So seeing as how this blog hasn’t been updated in a while, I decided it was probably time to give it a wee bit of an overhaul.

So, I’ve upgraded WordPress and some of the plugins, I’ve even installed Donncha’s Wp Super Cache Plugin. but there’s more to come. so long as what I’ve done doesn’t explode first, Fingers crossed then.

Wow, is it really August since I posted last? Well, seeing as how I know the answer is ‘yes’ that’s a bit of a dumb question really.

Anyhow, how to start back? There is the old reliable ‘what have I been doing?’ format or the ‘ignore it and pretend it never happened?’ format (Well it’s too late for that one now) or how about the ‘come clean with the reason you haven’t been blogging’ format.

Well the last one’s easy, I didn’t feel like it. :p and that’s because a lot has happened in my life since last August. I guess that brings me into the ‘what have I been doing’ format but not for long.

So what have I been doing?

August was spent working, September was spent travelling all over Europe, October was spent visiting mum, November didn’t see an improvement for mum and she passed away peacefully at home on the 11th, December saw a Christmas of adjustment, January until now was in general a bit quiet and mostly about connecting with some old friends online, getting ready for the move into our new home, oh and I went to Creative Camp.

So am I likely to change my posting schedule? Well, let’s just wait and see

Obligatory Paddy’s day post

Continuing the whole Hungarogate ™/McLaren implosion saga, I’ve lost a lot of respect for both drivers over the last few days but with the coverage of Lewis’s ‘clarification’ today, I’ve lost even more respect for him. Don’t get me wrong, He’s a rookie and it was inevitable he would make a rookie mistake at some point. Whether or not he swore at the boss or not is now irrelevant, the fact that he felt the need to go to the press to ‘clarify’ doesn’t seem like the behaviour of someone that wants to ‘rise above it’ to me. That’s the rookie mistake, that’s disappointed me so much.

I’m tired of all this McLaren mess, maybe some classic McLaren action will help me forget…

Nope that didn’t work!

I’ve decided this season needs a theme tune so here we go…

Thanks for this Gizmodo.

Seems I may have been premature laying all the blame on Fernando for Hungarogate ™ with the news that Lewis wasn’t following team orders at the start of the session.

As a result Fernando was a bit peeved. So he decides he can’t see whether there are white lines on his tyres or not and spends 9 or 10 seconds on the radio checking that the team put the right set on. As a result Lewis misses his opportunity to do a flying lap by 4 seconds.

Now all hell has broken loose, McLaren are once again in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons, let’s not forget Lewis’s accusations of team orders in Monaco, Fernando’s accusations of favouritism, The whole spy mess and now Hungarogate ™. It seems to me what should have been a dream season for McLaren has turned into a nightmare.

Is it just me or are both drivers acting like a spoilt brats?

Eddie Irvine seems to think so and he makes some interesting points. I have to say, I agree with him when he says…

To block Lewis like that in qualifying was one of the most stupid things I’ve ever seen and it reminded me of Michael Schumacher’s move on Jacques Villeneuve at Jerez in 1997

I think Eddie managed to sum up what I found so offensive about this whole thing…

“I can’t condone cheating, but if you must do it, there’s got to be a subtler way!”

At least when Michael and Ayrton were caught they were trying to make it look like an ‘accident’

I can see where he’s coming from, I am starting to think that Lewis has been manipulating things when speaking to the press, but then what driver hasn’t at some point in his career. Still that bit of arrogance that’s starting to show is a sign of what’s happening at the moment and I’m surprised we haven’t seen more of it. He’s the most successful rookie of all time by a long long way and it must be so hard to resist being arrogant when you are in a class of your own.

Last Saturday, when this all went off, I thought that maybe there was a culture of cheating starting to build in McLaren, I now think it’s more to do with 2 giant egos battling to be number 1 in a team that will not publicly condone such a thing and despite the success they have had in the past they have mostly come when there has been a ‘natural’ number 1 in the team (sorry DC I love your attitude these days but you were never a match for Hakkinen, except maybe the day Ron ordered you to let him pass). Remember Senna and Prost? That ended well for McLaren didn’t it

I feel myself, it’s only a matter of time before one of the brats throws the toys out of the pram and does something even more stoopid (and probably dangerous) than what we saw this weekend. I really hope it doesn’t come to that but barring Ron actually names a number 1 driver I can’t see this ending any other way. The question is which one will it be, the young gifted rookie or the 2 time world champ?

Now just how am I supposed to go to a dentist ever again after this!