Tag: cable

Living in the shed

I’ve not been doing much coding on the Weblogs recently – I’m just too tired. I’ve been on call (3:30am to 9am during the week) alternate weeks for the past year and basically I’ve run out of energy. The alternate weeks was a “short term” requirement after a member of the team at work quit last October, however the management then dithered and the post seemed to vanish so we’ve been a person down on the team for just over a year and there seems to be no real prospect of the person ever being replaced in any meaningful, useful way in the near future, and indeed I found out today that another member of staff has resigned leaving me as the sole UK DBA for the company… Oh Joy and Happiness (NOT!)

I’m hoping that a long break over in Maine will give me chance to recharge my batteries : apart from Thanksgiving we’ve not really got anything planned so hopefully its going to be a relaxing time … well apart from getting involved in planning my step-daughter’s wedding.

As we’ve got cat/house sitters for the duration we are away we tidying up the house a bit – I’ve finally tidied up the book case in the living room by throwing away what looks like a small skip full of old Yellow Pages and Argos catalogues etc. and shuffling a few things around. The computer cupboard sitting in the corner is over powering and we keep having great plans about moving it up stairs… well moving the contents upstairs and into one of the two bedroom cupboards – the one in our bedroom has a power line in it (I know it has because the plumbers cut throught it when they were installing the central heating) and we can easily run a network cable up through where the pipes come down to the radiator (I might even move the coax cable for the TV in our bedroom and use the same route).

Whilst all of this has been going on I’ve noticed that our neighbour seems to go out to his shed late at night and again in the morning. The other day he was in the back garden in his dressing gown… so all I can guess is that he is sleeping in the shed… seems a bit odd but if it cuts down his foul language as he shouts abuse at his kids it can only be a good thing.

Cable

When we first moved into the house back in 2002 there was a Telewest cable installation. We had it re-activated and used it for a bit. When we came to re-arrange the living room we asked Telewest how much it would cost to move the isolator box. They told us it would cost approx £100.

So we told them where to go and moved to Sky.

Sky installed the dish and everything was OK. Then over time the picture deteriorated. Sky came out and looked at the install – their response was basically “which idiot installed this – the dish is in the wrong place and the cable run is all wrong”. It was all ripped out and re-installed with the dish wedged right under the eaves and the picture got better.

That was a couple of years ago and the picture slowly deteriorated – blacks got very pixellated, signal went whenever it rained heavily, box kept crashing and rebooting.

So we ‘ve moved back to cable ((and having been told that I was “cutting off my nose to spite my face” by Sky I’ve no intention of ever using their services again)) … picture quality is spot on – no pixellation of blacks, no visible artifacts…. bliss.

We’ll probably take the dish and the box and see how well it works on the boat… will give better reception than the aerial! 😉