a new vision

I think I forgot yesterday to explain why a shaving brush may help with my shaving.

Basically, the idea of shaving foam is that it does two things - it lubricates the blade as it passes across the skin, but the second is more relevant in that it essentially holds the hairs up off the skin surface.

Beard hair has a tendency to lay flat to the surface of the skin and this is one of the things that makes it difficult to shave.  For me this seems particularly acute - my beard hair lies very flat and I also have some weird changes in direction of hair, particularly on my neck where the bottom part grows up and the rest grows down (well, sideways, actually).

This is also particularly ironic for me as my head hair tends to stick straight up for a good half an inch before the weight eventually pulls it down, and even then it's super fluffy.  This was okay when I was younger, but recently I've started to thin and it looks odd because you can see my scalp, even though the hair is long.  This actually prompted me to trim it off.

Anyway, the idea is that by using a brush you really get in and around the hairs, helping to hold them up.  When applying the foam with your fingers, the big flat surface of your fingers has a tendency to flatten the hairs.

That's the theory, anyway - we shall see if it helps.

I recently got myself BT Vision.

They've had a special offer on where it's only £4 a month and the box is free.  Now obviously I already have Freeview - and, indeed, the PVR I've got is a Humax one, which is generally regarded to be the best make.  My dad has BT vision and a Humax digibox and says the Humax is way better and he's obviously been able to compare things long-term.

However, my PVR is not High definition and this Freeview is (well, I think it is - I haven't actually plugged it in yet, but more on that in a mo).  It's also got this new on-demand service.  This is the one that was announced a little while ago - I can't for the life of me remember the name they gave it, but it involves several of the big players.

As I mentioned I've not actually started the box up yet.  My first problem is that I obviously need a clear period where I'm not watching or recording stuff and so that's put out most of the evening.  But also I have a box of AV cables which I will need to play with various configurations and that's in the garage so I'll need to get it out.  I'll also need to find my longer network cable as the one they supplied is about 20cm too short.

I'm therefore going to play with it this weekend.  The thing I'm not sure about is to do with pass-through of signal.  A while back I was having real problems with my PVR in that the signal was breaking up.  However, by chance I discovered that by switching it around with my VCR (so it really was a while ago!) the signal improved massively.

So I'm not sure if I should split the signal and send it through both boxes independently (the BT vision has a HDMI connector - hence my assumption it's HD) or if it'll be okay passing the signal through.

I'll also probably take the opportunity to have a bit of clean around - a lot of dust tends to accumulate around the TV area.