Dave's Free Press

Saving throw against salesmen: success!

Over the last few days my TV has been getting temperamental and sometimes needing a reboot before it would listen to the remote control. Yesterday, it stopped responding altogether. This is Not Good, because without the remote I couldn't tell it to switch to the particular input that my shiny Mac Mini was plugged into, and so I couldn't watch DVDs.

So today I went out to buy the nice big monitor that I've been procrastinating about for over a year. At PC World, home of the High Pressure Salesworm and the Bait-and-Switch Monster. But I successfully made my saving throw against salesmen, and came away with a tolerable 24" monitor (they were out of stock on 26" screens) and saving those 2 inches also saved me 120 quid.

It's all plugged in and it Just Works, the Mac automagically detected it and chose a sensible resolution (which I then turned down a bit because I want to be able to read text from the other side of the room). The only teensy problem is that it really shows up the compression artifacts in stuff I've downloaded form the intertubes. So overal - I win!

Anyone want a humungous 28" CRT? With a broken remote? For free? No? Damn.

One less mouse

Hurrah! One of my glue traps finally caught a mouse. It is now quite certainly an Ex Mouse. How much is it worth for me to not post dissection photographs?

GRUNT!

Me man! Me move heavy things! Me then have a sit-down and a nice cup of tea, write in journal!

During the week, the nice carpenter chappy (who is without interweb - maybe I should offer him one as payment next time he makes Stuff for me) came round and built yet more shelves for me, into which I have moved my DVDs, most of my CDs, the hifi, and TV. This has saved a lot of space, and I only dropped the TV once while on its epic journey four feet sideways.

I now have some surplus furniture to get rid of - one set of crappy particle-board bookshelves (which are already sitting outside in the hope that someone will just steal the bloody things), a crappy particle-board corner Thingy what used to have the TV and playstation and stuff on it, and a rather nice steel and wood rack what used to have the hifi in.