new procedure

So when it was snowing I had a lot of difficulty with doing my laundry.

I use the local laundrette, which is just up the road, but they don't tend to clear the roads and pavements around here very much, so it's difficult to get too.  If I have multiple bags (generally I produce two bin bags of washing every week during the winter) then I have to drive.  So if I have to walk like I did during the snow, then I can only do a bit (a three-quarter full bin bag is about all that's practical to carry, so I just do the essential stuff).

Now because the worst of the snow as over the weekend I decided to try doing my laundry in the evening during the week after work.  Previously I have gotten up super early and done it Saturday morning and it normally works.

The real problem is people who clearly have washing machines but not driers.  There are only a handful of driers in the laundrette and usually at least one is out of action.  That unfortunately sometimes means I will have my washing in the machine and people turn up and fill the driers with clothes.

This is actually a bit of a bugbear with me as they tend to use the driers like they would a smaller home drier, spreading what are large home loads (or perhaps 2 loads) across multiple driers.  The whole point of the big industrial driers they have in the laundrette is you can get a big load in them.

Also, the best way to use them is to load them up with a few pounds and let them run for a good while.  If you spread the laundry out across multiple machines it is less efficient (obviously there's a tipping point, but these people are way below it) and then feed in small change, checking it all the time and therefore letting all the hot air out, it will take longer and therefore cost you more.

Anyway, point is that I discovered that generally the laundrette is not particularly busy in the evenings.  Certainly not as busy as at the weekends.

Now obviously part of the reason I have not previously tried the weekend is time - I get up early and therefore tend to go to bed early so spending 1.5-2hours in the laundrette after work is basically my entire evening.  But there are also some other issues - obviously it's more efficient for me to drive straight there after work, so that means loading the bags into the car in the morning.

Now that's fine, but what if I need to wash my work trousers or similar?  Also I only have a small number of vests, so it can get complicated if I'm not doing the washing at the weekend when I'm wearing casual clothes.  So yeah, there are some kinks, but I think I prefer it.  It's quieter, quicker and it frees up my early Saturday mornings.

the end cometh

Apparently it's going to warm up a bit this weekend.

I've also seen forecasts for rain.  The double combo of warmer weather and rain should be the death knell for all the snow.

This particular bout of snow has been particularly frustrating.  It arrived during the day, which gave me that horrible journey back and also meant I didn't really get a proper "snow day".  It was also a Friday and it then didn't snow very much across the weekend, so by the Monday it was drivable and I had to go to work.

Then, this last Tuesday we had a bit of a mini blizzard towards the end of the day.  The snow didn't really settle as such (about 2cm maybe) but it made driving conditions horrendous.  The problem was that there was just enough snow settled on the ground so that I couldn't see the markings.  It was also dark, so I couldn't go on general vision, but instead what I could see with my lights.

All that meant I was staring quite intently down at the road in front (usually you look into the distance to see where you're going and looking for any hazards, etc).  However, because the snow was really coming down it seemed like it was all blasting straight towards me.  I'm pretty sure it wasn't very windy, so it was just the effect of me driving towards it and the lights illuminating it that gave that effect.

The combination of staring down and stuff rushing onwards me was actually very disorientating and made me feel a bit sick.  Not to the extent of throwing up or anything, but I felt a bit dizzy and really tired at the end of the journey.

I've also been getting up a bit earlier (which translates to "stupidly early" for normal people) because I didn't want to travel in traffic and obviously knew I had to scrape the car, etc.  Now if it had properly snowed here at the right time I'd actually have been having some nice lie ins.  Tbh, what it's actually done has mainly disrupted the normal stuff, rather than work.

So I've a huge pile of washing to do because I've only been to the laundrette on foot and could only carry one bag.  I've also not been shopping in a while so have run out of stuff.  And I'm almost out of petrol because I haven't wanted to do too many journeys and also have had to have the engine on at lunch to keep warm.

It's also played havoc with my walking - I've only done a handful of walks early in the morning and have been woefully short of my step targets since last Thursday.  Add in that, as I say, I've not really been shopping so have been relying more heavily on tins and things like that and I'm fully expecting to have gained weight when I weigh in this weekend.  Which is particularly annoying as I should be shedding my Christmas pounds.

So, long story short, I'm very much hoping they're right that the weather is on the turn and I can get back to a bit or normalcy!

re-arrangement

So I thought I'd blog today about the sort out of my telly corner I did while I was setting up the BT vision box.

Basically the BT vision box represented something of a crunch point for the TV stack, particularly in terms of plugs.  I have a long-lead gang plug that has six sockets and surge protection and in days gone past this was plenty for the TV corner.  However, just recently I've added a few things to it that meant I've actually changed another ganger off it too.

But even with this extra capacity I didn't have a slot for the BT vision box.  Part of the problem has become redundancy versus convenience.

A while back I decided to get Blu-Ray, but I was not keen on the players and proper multi-region machines cost an absolute fortune.  There are machines where, like with some DVD players, you could essentially 'crack' them to be multi-region, but this generally involves farting about with firm-ware that you constantly have to update.

My solution then was to get a PC I could use as a media centre.  I blogged at the time how this turned out to be a huge faff as well, but I've come to a point of it working okay.

Now being what it is this PC can obviously play multi-region DVDs, but because of the faff involved I ended up keeping my multi-region DVD player.  I'm not really explaining this very well. Basically when trying to add the BT vision box I already had these electrical devices to account for:

A 6-point surge protected ganger with the following plugged in:

• TV
• PVR
• DVD player
• Dolby digital Amp
• Sub-Woofer
• four point ganger

The four plug ganger had the PC plugged in but meant I could also plug in the following as needed:

• 2 * lamps on timers (my landlord is paranoid about security and likes me to have these on during winter)
• Bass guitar amp
• VCR (yes, kicking it old school)

So as you can see at worst case that adds up to more sockets that I had available.  In practice I never needed all things on at all times, but faffing about around the back of stuff to unplug things (and making sure you got the right plug!) was a pain.

There were also a couple of other issues.  Firstly my picture through my PVR (via the aerial input) has been quite poor lately.  It has a lot of interference and no amount of switching plugs and cables seemed to fix it.  The solution was simple - use the SCART, but they were in an unknown box in the shed.

Secondly I don't use my VCR at all - now that we've switched over to digital I don't need to keep it as a back-up.

Thirdly there was the redundancy of having the DVD player and the PC.

And lastly my Amp has only 2 optical digital inputs.  As such a bit of rationalisation was in order and I decided to have a bit of a clean-up too.

I've taken the VCR out of the loop, but in the end I decided not to get rid of the DVD player.  Instead I've switched the optical cable it had to the box.  My theory now is that if I want to just quickly watch a DVD the player is there, but if I want to watch it properly with the full sound thing I will have to use the PC.

Hopefully as I get used to it I will find the DVD becomes properly redundant like the VCR.  However, part of the issue there is I've been using a wireless mouse and keyboard and while the keyboard works well, the mouse is a pain as I like to take the batteries out and that means re-synching it every time I use it.

I also found my other SCART cables and plugged the PVR in via SCART.  The noise is all gone and the picture is a little better, though as I was afraid it has a few issues with up-scaling, but then that's a pretty standard issue many people have.

So there you have it - my only plugging in I need to do is for the base amp / lamps and I'm fine with those.  Although as mentioned yesterday the BT box's LEDs are incredibly bright and it's weirdly fronted so I can't easily block the light.  I may try and stick some tape over it (I'm unsure if this is where the receiver is for the remote signal) or simply plug it in when needed.

burn, burn, burn

So this last weekend I had a few things on my to do list, one of which was burning and ripping some audio books.

I listen to audio books when I'm walking.  I find music difficult to walk to as you naturally want to fall in to step with it and of course each song has its own tempo.  Well, unless you listen to dance music I guess, as loads of songs are at exactly the same tempo.

I use audible, which is owned by amazon.  It's all done digitally - you download the audio books and they have their own player thing.  Their player is actually terrible, but I don't generally use it.

What I generally do is burn them to CD (I've discussed this before - you're only allowed to burn them once) and then rip the CD and stick those on a tiny MP3 player I have (a Sanso clip).  Ripping the CD means I have to deal with iplayer, since audible uses its own proprietary format.  It's a necessary evil and generally seems to work okay.

Anyway, the to do list only featured ripping and burning as one of the things I had planned.  It was a grand prix weekend, and one of the ones the beeb was showing in full, so that would obviously take up a big chunk of time, but I hadn't expected that doing the audio books would take quite as long as it did.

The problem was I'd stacked up more audio books that usual and also the books I'd purchased were mostly quite long.  So while burning each Cd only takes about 5-10 minutes, when you're doing 30 of the things you're talking 2.5 hours at the minimum.

Ripping the things is quicker, but it comes with a kind of admin burden.  The reason for this is I just use windows media player to do it and it doesn't really recognise the tracks.  That means you have to go through and re-name everything.

I don't do this to the extent I could - I just rename the files and folders, rather than editing the Meta data, but still, it's horribly tedious.  And it's horribly tedious on top of the whole ripping process, which is tedious too.

There are associated tasks too, like downloading the audio books, backing the files up, putting them on the MP3 player, etc, so all told I'd say I spent a total of around 7 hours doing all the stuff that I needed to just to rip the audio books.

When you consider that the total time for the Grand Prix adds up to 6 hours (1.5 + 1.5 + 1 + 2) it's not really surprising I didn't get much else done at the weekend!

yet more boxes

Well I acquired more boxes, which pretty much sets what I'm going to be doing this weekend. I'm kinda just hoping that I've finally got enough now - it'll be tedious if I get half way through and realise I need yet more!

Apart from that I've got a weird list of stuff I need to do. My Dad gets back from Canada this weekend and he's buying my old monitor off me. That means that at some point I'll have to drop what I'm doing and take the monitor to him. Because he's flying from Heathrow, it means he won't be that far away, so he's decided to go the long way round and we can meet up and I can give him the monitor.

I've given him some basic instructions and they should put him on roads he knows from when we used to go to Devon on holiday, but I wouldn't be surprised if he gets lost. My basic idea was to take him slightly off route and meet up with him at the large Sainsbury's that's down the road from me. Trouble is Dad's never the best with directions and it can be a bit confusing round there with all the roundabouts.

But adding on to that is the fact that he's not computer literate, so I'll need to sit down and write him some instructions as to how to connect up the monitor and, more importantly, set up his desktop so it does the new resolution. That should be interesting.

Most of the rest of the weekend will be spent being domestic, I think. With all this time spent sorting out I've not done any cleaning or ironing in ages. Well, I'm assuming there that I get the sorting down fairly quickly - if it drags I won't have any room to set the iron up, which means I could be wearing a lot of scruffy shirts at work next week!

Hopefully I'll be able to do the ironing while the MotoGP is on this Sunday. It's the British MotoGP, I think, which means it'll be my first proper look at the new Silverstone circuit.