Ideal Home Show

Today I had a day off from work and Nicky and I went to the Ideal Home Show at Earls Court. We bought a few things, including:

• a peeler and a julienne cutter (free garlic peeler) - £15
• three curry sauces from The Curry Sauce Company - £10
• a Pureaire revitaliser (air purifier) with extra scent - £42
• some Method cleaning products (buy three get a free bag) - £10.

Oh yes, and one other thing, we finally succumbed and have ordered a massage chair, having tried out quite a few during the day! It is going to be delivered in 7-10 days, and we are going to have to reorganise the conservatory!

We also had lots of fun looking round and contemplating spending even more money on various pieces of furniture and gadgets. My particular favourite was the Games Room Company - put me down for a pool table, a hover hockey table, a pinball machine, a jukebox and a Coke vending machine (and a bigger house!).

Curry for tea tomorrow!

Sky Broadband

The good news is that Sky Broadband is now up and running, having installed the new router yesterday. As always I'm nervous about setting routers and wireless networks, because frankly I don't really understand them! However, there were only a few glitches along the way this time.
It seemed to take a while for the router to show a constant green light, meaning that it was connected properly to the broadband line, but got there in the end. I can't claim any meaningful input on that, other than turning the box off and on a few times.
Having got that far I had some trouble with getting the laptop to connect wirelessly, and got to the point of calling the support number. Whilst on hold I was looking at the access code, and thought "I wonder if that's an O rather than a 0, and sure enough connected up no problems with the change. I then had to explain to the person who'd come on the line whilst I was doing this that I'd solved my own problem!
The final challenge came with the desktop, as it transpires that my Vaio desktop, being 5 years old now, can't cope with the latest encryption methods which the router had as their default setting, so I had to lower the network security, reconnect the laptop, and then I could get the desktop to connect as well.
Still, all done now!
(Seems faster downloading, but per the status screen, the uploading speed looks slower than the one I previously had with Orange - will have to see how I get one next time I'm uploading photos.)

Rose Garden

Rose Garden
Originally uploaded by Miff73

Well I've been playing a bit more with the wonders of Blogger and Flickr and I seem to have successfully linked the two together!.
This means that I can choose a photo from within Flickr, click on the "blog this" button, and I can create a post for my website within Flickr and send the photo to my site all at the same time. Now that's clever!
The only slight drawback is that when I've been uploading photos to Flickr (over 4,800 at the latest count!) I've always selected the option to make the photos private, so that only friends and family can view them. But, if I want to blog directly from Flickr I have to make the photo public. Still, given that it wil effectively become public once it appears on the blog, this isn't really a problem.
By the way, the test photo chosen here is a picture of the Rose Garden at Castle Howard, taken on holiday last summer.

My first post

Well this is my very first post with blogger, and so I have no idea what it will turn out like when I hit the "publish" button! We've finally taken the plunge and set the ball rolling to change ISP from Orange to Sky. We get 8MB connection speed (rather than the current 1MB), a new wireless router, which is good news as the current on seems rather tempramental, and we save £13 per month. Seems like a good deal.
The only drawback is that Orange had some free tools with it that enabled me to publish my own website for free, and I don't think that Sky do the same thing. However, I have found Blogger, and it seems to be free, and it seems to be reputable (owned by Google) so let's give it a go.
As you can see, all I've worked out how to do is type so far, but no doubt there are lots of other possibilities. Hopefully I'll be able to link to my Flickr photos, add in the occasional bit of HTML and so on.
By the way, it's just started to snow!