Really busy weekend...

...Friday night we went for drinks at Flyingpops' folks, the rest of the weekend was spent largely sorting bits and bobs out from being away (putting things up in the loft, finishing off tidying away all the clothes from their various piles/bags)...played a lot of "Earth 2160" (excellent, atmospheric and really challenging RTS game) on Saturday night (while watching "The Cannonball Run" which had come through the front door with "The Sun" newspaper), however, I won't be playing it tonight thanks largely to what we did on Saturday morning (and the resultant chain)...

We were up fairly early and headed over to "Dorking Windows" (Friday night recommendation from Flyingpops' uncle Alan) to enquire about getting double glazing fitted around the house (this has needed doing for quite some time, us having been in the house for a year now). We had measured up, so we handed over the details, took a look at a few designs and settled on "standard white", the chap in the office seemed like a nice fellow, we shook hands and he promised to put a quote in the post...however, as part of getting this done (and really the main motivation for doing so), was to get the rather sticky back door replaced by a nice set of double glazed double doors.

This led Flyingpops to thinking about the placement of the living room PCs (which would be right in front of one of the new doors), so after some discussion we decided (by this time it was Sunday morning) to go round Homebase in Crawley and a few of the other big furniture stores, and also check out Staples and PC World to see if we could find some more compact means of storing them (saw this car in the car park - looks like someone forgot to lock their alloy wheels, I can just picture someone with their arms full of shopping bags standing open mouthed upon returning to their car, hehe...not funny really... ;) -

Instead of coming away with a minature PC desk (they were all a bit too big, or too flimsy looking), we instead came away with a Belkin Turbo (154hbs) 802.11g wireless networking kit (the router was a snip at £50!)...not *quite* sure how that happened...


Anyway, this meant that my job for Sunday afternoon was to rebuild the main PC (it hasn't managed to get on NTL for absolutely months now, couldn't work out why), so I backed up my saves for Earth 2160, bit the bullet and re-installed XP, it took about an hour I suppose, but unbelievably even after the rebuild exactly the same fault occured! It simply won't refresh the IP address! I've even installed a second network card to no avail...so, tonight I'll be on the phone to NTL to see if their experts can manage to help me get the machine online, but until then the wiresless network will have to wait...nightmare...

The weekend concluded with a meal of lovely roast lamb with red wine jus (think I prefer leg to shoulder though), roast potatoes and steamed veg spent in the company of G/S and Alexander (who is just starting on the long road to solid food, weighs about a stone now and is being much more responsive to stimuli)...