The Blog of G

I’m off on holiday, well more a weekend away in that it’s only four days. I’m really looking forward to getting away for a few days though, some relaxing, a change of scenery, some sight seeing and the first music festival that I’ve been interested in going to, in more than a decade.

“So where are myself and Elly off to?” I hear you ask. The city of Amsterdam, one of our favourite cities in the world and the place that we got engaged. We’ve been there a good few times over the years and we’ve seen a lot of the museums before. Thankfully there is a (kind of) new one for us to see this time, Hermitage Amsterdam.

I say kind of because The original Hermitage museum is in St. Petersburg. I have always thought that it was in the Kremlin as that’s what our tour guide told us when I was in Moscow in 1990, but maybe the 20 years have taken there toll on my memory more than I thought.

Either way that Museum tour was one of the most amazing of my life, our guide barely stopped the whole tour and I know there was a lot more to see. I could have stared at the Imperial Faberge eggs all day, such amazing pieces of craftsmanship and pure beauty, I cannot describe and no photo I have ever seen can do them justice. But I’m waffling now. In short, I’m giddy with anticipation

I mentioned we’re going to a music festival, Jam in the Dam to be precise. Two concert halls under one roof and a full set from all the bands each night, which is great because if you miss a band one night, you get to see them the next. I’d love to be able to go to all 3 nights but these days I’m grateful to even get 1 night.

There is only one act on the lineup that I’ve heard of before (I will be getting myself upto speed on the rest of the lineup before we head off so expect some post about them as well) but I’ve been a fan of Les Claypool since I first heard Primus play at the battle of the bands in San Dimas, California… oh wait a minute, that was in a movie… Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.

Primus were barely even on screen but the music grabbed me and it’s never let go since, they still sound as fresh as the first time I heard them. Bands come and go and over the years Les has moved on to other projects and I have purchased almost all of his albums since.

If ever there was a band that I would travel through time to hear it would be Primus, even over the chance to be at Woodstock, so there was no way I was going to miss the chance to see Les play, especially since it’s his first European gig since I discovered you could use the internet to keep tabs on your favourite bands.

Unfortunately, I’m going to have to wait until March but in the meantime hears the track that grabbed my attention so fiercely 19 years ago…

On Friday afternoon last, myself and Elly finally got inside what will be our new home. No we haven’t moved in yet, but we’re a lot closer. We got access to ’snag’ all be it without power or plumbing. Still, that’ll be another day out.

Essentially, we studied our new home from top to bottom looking for thing’s that aren’t up to scratch and with only a few minor issues to report, were very happy with our afternoons work. Well apart from the fact that we’d spent hours standing on hard concrete floors and were exceptionally tired as a result.

We also took the opportunity to measure some of the rooms so we could start thinking about where things would go and planning what we needed to buy to fit the spaces we wanted.  We nearly didn’t, we were so tired.

Once we got home (the rented home that is) I logged onto IKEA’s web site to download their room planner tool and plastered across the screen was the news that they were having a 21% off sale in all UK stores to celebrate 21 years trading in the UK, starting at 6am the next morning, running till midnight that evening. We did some calculations and worked out that if we went (what with the current exchange rate and the sale) items priced at £100 sterling would end up costing us about €100. You can’t argue with that value! A call was made to my youngest sister (long time IKEA fan) to see if she wanted to come, Alas too short notice for her.

We decided to get up early, Saturday morning and hit the road. Planning to use IKEA’s delivery service to ship what we bought to Grannymar and we’d get it from there once we had the keys to the new house.

Literally 3 minutes before we were going to leave my sister texted me, to let me know she was on her way, complete with people carrier. After a bit of a wait for her, off we set. The sister had removed all but 3 seats from the people carrier as well so we had almost as much space as a ‘Hiace’ in the back.

After trekking round IKEA for most of the day and meeting up with Grannymar in the process we finally headed to the tills, paid and left, heading for the cars. Packing commenced and for a while it was looking like not even the world Tetris Champion could move these ‘bricks’ around to get them to fit. In reality we couldn’t get everything to fit in the people carrier. Thankfully, Grannymar was on hand to take the excess items that wouldn’t fit, otherwise it would have been the returns desk.

So we got most of our purchases back to Dublin with us, Grannymar is storing the sofa-bed for what we plan to use as a spare room/home office. Thankfully it will fit in either my own or Elly’s car so it shouldn’t be to difficult to get it back to Dublin. Which is probably just as well because as I type it’s the only bed we own.

For the amount that we spent, we got an awful lot, enough bookcases to cover a wall, Dining table and chairs, a sofa bed, an armchair & footstool, Light fittings for almost every room in the house, a dressing table, a crockery set, a very cool magnetic spice rack thingy and a load of other little bits and pieces. Jaysus that sounds like I’m on the Generation game

As for the shopping experience, I’ll be generous and say that shopping in IKEA is unpleasant (if it wasn’t for the price I would never shop there again) I may post again about that, I think this one is long enough for now.

Wow! what a couple of days it’s been. Since last Friday morning, we (Elly and myself) have…

1. Snagged our future home
2. Discovered an amazing sale in IKEA Belfast
3. Been to IKEA Belfast
4. Bought 2 loads of furniture
5. And last, but by no means least, possibly even most importantly, been to my nephew/godson’s confirmation.

All in all it could be described as a busy, expensive and exceptionally tiring  weekend.

It’s a question people ask, often with an air of disbelief, like why would you want to have a pc in your living room?

There are a lot of plus sides to it, not least of which is a 32″ widescreen monitor to surf the web with. But that’s only a small plus, first off what does a HTPC do for you?

Well a home theatre personal computer is exactly that it’s a computer for your home theatre, or in my case, living room. How does this add to your home theatre? for a start it’s 1 box for your DVD player, all your music, digital photo’s, TV recording’s and Home Movies. That’s what Windows Media Centre 2005 will do out of the box. Is it difficult to setup? not really, you can do it all from the remote once the operating system is installed.

For me there are 3 killer features…

1. My Photos – allows basic photo editing and slideshowing your photo albums
2. My Music – The Music collection
3. My TV – schedule and watch TV recording’s

The last of these gets the most use in our house, although having a photo slide show as wallpaper means both myself and Elly get to see those precious moments plenty.

I love the Music portion of Media centre, it was a bit time consuming to get all the info and album art sorted out but once thats done, it makes it so easy to find your favourite artists’ or albums. I’ll post another time about my personal experiences tagging over 20 Gb or about 10,000 individual audio files, it’s actually not as time consuming as you might think.

Where Media centre comes into it’s own is working hand in hand with our set top box for TV. it means outside of Grand Prix, neither myself or Ellybabes watch TV “live” anymore. Instead we record all our favourite TV shows and we can watch whatever takes our fancy at that particular time. So much better than spending 20 minutes flicking through channels till you find something worth watching.

This is really easy to do, just search by keyword till you find the program you like and select “record series” you can even tell it to record all showings on all channels or just new episodes, but once you take those 2 minutes to decide that, media centre just does it. The NTL set top box is far less reliable, needing to be rebooted at least once a week.

What if 2 shows are on at the same time? first media centre tries to find an alternative showing of either show, if it can’t then, it decides what to record based on the recording priorities the user sets. So for instance, we’re huge “Bones” and “Boston legal” fans, to make sure we don’t miss an episode these are top of our priority list.

Whereas “The Simpsons” which is on so many channels and almost daily, it’s near the bottom of the priority list as there always being re-shown.

What all this means is that when we sit down to relax and watch some telly what we want to watch is always on.

So is that it? well not entirely, there is a lot more to it than that and in a future post, I’ll touch on the why I chose Microsoft Media Centre and the benefits that it will bring when we move into our new home.

It’s true, just ask Elly. So when I realised that I needed to update my wardrobe a bit for the impending honeymoon, I got into my usual sulk at the thoughts of what was in store.

Still at least this time I don’t have to go looking for T-shirts as well, thanks to T-Shirt Hell. I have ordered off them before to check the size and quality etc. so I just logged in and bought a load of great T’s in no time. Job done. Well, except for the trousers, shoes, Shirts and Jackets that I apparently “need” :p

There are some designs on there site that I would never wear for obvious taste reasons, (in fact some would say they are not suitable for public consumption) but they are all funny and they’re great quality T’s as well.

Still it got me to thinking about which of T-shirt hell’s shirts would most suit my favourite ‘local’ blogger.

Ellybabes

or how about

and finally, the one that I think is probably gonna get me in trouble

So have I got it right or have I just seriously insulted my new wife? time and the comments will tell