Friday, 31st July 2009
Ugh
Back to work for me tonight (yuk). I’m really not looking forwards to it.
I always find it really difficult to get back into the work mentality after annual leave. I think this time round it’s made worse by the fact that I’m starting nights and have to start revising again (I gave myself my annual leave off – in fact, I have done a couple of hours of reading today already).
I had to get up at the crack of dawn today in order to get to the house by 08:00 as a BT engineer was supposed to visit anytime between then and 13:00. Guess what? After waiting for three hours I get a phone call from BT saying that an engineer doesn’t need to visit our property after all. Arseholes! I could have slept in this morning. What was more frustrating was that the line wouldn’t be activated until it detected a phone plugged in. This meant I had to leave the house (no big deal – since there is no boiler at the moment it’s freezing and I didn’t have a jumper, not to mention that I was having to lay on the floor to revise as we have pretty much no furniture) and drive to Argos to buy a cheap phone. I then had to rush back to the flat before noon as I had to wait in for an estate agent who was showing some potential new tenants around and doesn’t have a key to the flat.
After the estate agent had left I drove back up to the house and sorted out the phone – which had been successfully connected. The builders were busy removing the window between the hallway and the garage and the supporting struts were still in place in the lounge. I then nipped to Waitrose to buy a sandwich and get a pizza for this evening.
I’ve been spending the rest of my time trying to figure out the best way to rip the TV shows I have on DVD and how best to manage them. I have toyed with both Plex and the Apple TV in the past. I’m not super-keen on being tied to Apple’s proprietary formats and the Apple TV is not without it’s faults. I was using Plex but moved away from it because of lip-sync issues with video and not being able to use the Genius playlist functionality of iTunes. Given that I’m setting up a home cinema – I’m trying to get everything right this time round. I’m leaning back towards Plex and am currently looking at the best format to store the DVDs in (don’t suppose anyone knows much about the .mkv file format?).
Last night, Fi and I had drinks and dinner at Brown’s with Sophie (Fi’s Reg) and her boyfriend Alexander (who Fi and I hadn’t met before). I like Sophie and I got on pretty well with Alexander. It was a pleasant evening.
To finish up, here’s a few photos of the downstairs of the house I took yesterday afternoon. Note the lack of the supporting wall!
Supporting wall being, erm, supported:
View of the lounge from the kitchen:
