Bachelor life

Dancer has been away for the last few days at a 4 day long dance retreat, so I've been home alone and living life as a bachelor. Microwave meals and dvds have been prominent :)

Today though, I slept in late, waking up at 10am, got some shopping done, and thats when a migraine hit. I've not had one in a long, long time, but I was feeling sick, my eyes were watering. So I went back to bed for a few hours which the puggies loved, and woke up nice and refreshed again.

So now I'm working through my season 1 box set of Carnivale, which has been sitting on the shelf for too long, drinking some Amstel light. Much happier.

My shared items

I read a lot of blogs, and like most people, I use a feed aggregator to do it. This used to be Bloglines, but I switched to Google Reader as it has more features.

One of these is the ability to "share" items on my feed list that are interesting or fun. It creates an almost blog like website with them listed, and if you look over on the right, there is a small view into these. Enjoy!

The English invade!

I'm a member of a British expats forum, and while I don't post there a lot, there are sometimes some interesting threads. Recently someone posted looking for people who lived in Western Massachusetts, which happens to be the are I lived in.

So I responded, we exchanged a couple of private messages and set a date.

So last night saw myself, and two other English blokes, they brought their wives (mine was busy), one of whom was American, one German.

We sat down in The Peoples Pint in Greenfield, MA and we had some of their lovely micro brew beers. We chatted, we exchanged immigration stories and situations, we discussed how much we have changed by living here, wether that is our accents, our lifestyles.

We're hoping more people can join us next time, as it was a fun time. I also got to buy a real, honest to god round of drinks for the first time in over 4 years, which was rather amusing.

It's been a long week, we're both looking forward to being in bed before midnight, and not up before 7 for a change! I know I'm starting to run on fumes.

I know I shouldn't be suprised that Fedex actually sucks, but they do.

I placed an order from Woot.com. Actually, two orders within a couple of days. I screwed up and had my old profile in place, so they had my shipped address as my old office building.

My phone rang early one morning, it was the local Fedex depot, they got a package and they couldn't find my company in that building, where would I like it delivered. I gave them the new address, and it was in my grubby little mitts the next day.

At the time, I let them know there was a second package coming to the same invalid address, and she promised a note would be left redirecting it.

It didn't work. Last Tuesday they called to tell me they couldn't deliver, they got the new address again. According to their website they then proceeded to try to deliver it to the same wrong address on Thursday, Friday *and* Saturday. I just tried to call them to chase them up today and spent *30* minutes in their voice activated, voice driven system, that doesn't recognize my English accent.

So infuriating!

Still it should be with me tomorrow. Except I'm out of the office. Grr.

Fedex = muppets

Now thats entertainment

I had a much needed day off work yesterday, so I did a big job that I've been wanting to do for some time.

I re-organized my home theater setup.

Now, I don't have a hugely expensive setup, nor is it professional quality, but each of the components I researched what would be best within my budget at the time, and bought wisely.

I have a 46" Sharp Aquos LCD TV, which sounds big, but it fits the room well. It's got a great picture, with rich colors.

Directly below it I have a Yamaha 5:1 Dolby Digital audio receiver that drives the speakers that came with it. It's subwoofer lives right underneath.

I have now moved all the components into a seperate tower next to it, instead of scattered all over the place.

On the bottom rung, I have a Sony DVD player, which upscales regular DVDs to nearly HD quality, outputting 1080i. It is connected to the TV over HDMI and the receiver over Digital Coaxial.

Above that I now have a series 3 HD Tivo DVR, which I love love love. This outputs to the TV over HDMI, filling up the HDMI inputs, and to the receiver over Digital Optical for full digital sound.

Above that, and raised high and off the ground for best WiFi signal is my xBox 360. It connects to the TV by component HD cables, and uses the last Digital Optical port on the receiver to output it's sound.

Lastly, on the very top, is the Nintendo Wii, it used a regular RCA connection into the TV for both video and audio as it needs neither surround sound, nor high definition.

Primarily I wanted to get the Tivo in, as I was using a digital cable box and a series 2 Tivo before. Comcast are coming out tomorrow to provide me with two cable cards so I will get full digital dual tuner goodness into my Tivo by the weekend.

Secondarily I wanted to get my xBox and Wii off the ground and higher up, due to them living under the TV, they had a lot of inteference between them and my wireless access point, and neither had good network reception. The Wii is fantastic for browsing the internet, especially YouTube on the big screen, but when you have to wait for the video to buffer, it gets old quick.

Thirdly, and analy, I wanted to organize my cables. Having so many video, audio and power cables in one place, it gets very mess very quickly. I had picked up some cable pipes for organization from BJs a while back, and this gave me the chance to sort them out. So now you only see 3 black pipes between the component stack and the TV, which is a dramatic improvement over the mass of wires, cables and connections that were there before!

Sorry for the geek out entry, this is why I'm called "Geek" though ;)

Master class - they weren't kidding!!

Tonight I had a class with the person making my costume. She was offering a Master Udulation class. (think wavy dance moves) Holy crap!! I knew none of what she was showing. I felt very out of my league, but I soldiered on and tried to do the best I could. I also tried to absorb as much as possible. I tried to write down everything I could remember so I can keep trying to learn to do these moves. There were so many people too. At least 30 people, mostly young women, but there were a few people who were my age or a bit older.

It made it worthwhile when someone came up to me after and told me how beautifully I moved. I thought I sucked and everyone else was doing amazing!! :D

The studio was gorgeous. It was HUGE with lots of mirrors on one wall. However, it was HOT. No AC in there. BUT... They had an amazing boutique in there. I had to padlock the credit card, otherwise I would've melted it. They also had some gorgeous line drawings of people dancing. I sort of wish I'd picked up one, but I really want to have photos up in the studio.

I would really like to take some classes from Shadia. I could definitely learn a huge amount from her. Oh, and my costume is almost to the fitting stage. :D I can't wait!

I am so going to feel this in the morning.

Weekend

I've ran the ride on mower over the land, and it's all looking good and short and nice. The smell of cut grass was in the air.

Right now, I have some hand cut yukon gold potatoes in the frier, with some gorgeous burger paties all seasoned up on the grill. Dancer is watching the TV, fresh from her trip to Vancouver.

I have a Sam Light on the go, and the pugs are sleeping.

Life is very very good.