Almost in... Year two approacheth

So, it's getting to the point where I'm about ready to move into my house. I've been moving stuff up in stages, but this is going to be somewhat complicated by the fact that I'm currently without a car - a woman drove into me whilst I was driving home from work two weeks ago (and I was, literally, 30 yards from my house, too!... bummer), so whilst I have a hire car (Nissan Micra) until the end of next week, after that I'll have to rely on Dad to help me bring stuff up / take stuff back.

Enrolment week begins on the 18th, and I have to be in Uni to enrol for my second year on the Wednesday (20th). I'm almost fully-installed in my house now, with only things like clothes, my PC, and my other collected detritus to move up in the coming days. However, the past week or so hasn't been without incident - I received a barrage of what can only be described as thoughtless, jumping-the-gun abuse via text message from one of my housemates who mistakenly thought that I'd stolen her room from her (her room was the room on the floor above mine, oops)... So I wasn't too pleased about that, and I'm a little disturbed that as to her immediate flying-off-the-hook reaction, because if that's how she is normally, she'll be one to treat with kid gloves.

Oh well, too late to back out now, I have (at least) a year living with her, amongst others... We all have our problems. I'm sure it'll be alright in the end, she still has problems with her room but that's none of my doing (someone else jumped in and took her room, so I'm just standing well back and watching the fireworks).

Also, one of my housemates who comes from America returned to the UK recently to start living in the house. Obviously, if you're from New York, it's not as easy as just popping down the M40 to get to Brum ;) so she's been there for a few days. She had a friend round a little while before I showed up on Friday afternoon (a day trip, taking more stuff up), and unfortunately her friend managed to put her hand through the top-right pane of glass on the front room's very leftmost bay window. Urk. They can be tough to open sometimes though, but I suspect that an amount of alcohol may have been consumed prior to this opening attempt, because when I tried to open the windows (when I was first in the house) they all opened fine. Never mind, say nothing, keep schtum, nod and agree. Hopefully it's all fixed by now, Campbell Properties was notified and they marked the job as 'urgent' so it should've been fixed.

In the meantime, I've been doing the legwork setting up a bank account for Internet access and phone line. For those who don't realise, unless you go with a very select few broadband providers, who also run telecoms setups and are phoneline providers, ADSL unfortunately necessitates a phone line rented via BT, even if no voice calls are ever made on it... Just like this one. At the end of the day, it's still worth it, because Be Broadband is available in our area - 24mbps download, 1.3mbps upload (maximum, dependant on your distance from the exchange you're connected to) - but for just £24 a month, with a free wireless router, and no usage limits (unlike the VAST majority of other providers, bar one or two very expensive ones) Be was still the best option, even with the £30-odd quarterly charge of the otherwise-idle BT line. Bulldog (who will give you a Bulldog phone line if you go with their broadband package) only offer a maximum of 8mbps download, as do most other providers (Sky Broadband is ridiculously cheap, the top package coming in at just £10/month, and it's run over the Easynet network, whom Sky purchased a little while ago. They'll give you up to I think 12 or 16mbps download, but you need to be a Sky subscriber... Yet more extra cost... And you still need a BT line, so it'd only work out if we coughed up more cash for Sky - and they have usage limits).

So yeah, from all that, basically, Be was the best choice. If you can get Be in your area, I'd SERIOUSLY recommend you check it out. Check your availability on the Sam Knows broadband information site, samknows.com, or go straight to the Be site (bethere.co.uk) and type your phone number or postcode in on there. I'd try Sam Knows first though, I highly rate that site.


So as you can see, things are warming up nicely in prep for my return to Uni. I suppose I am looking forward to it, though I'm a bit apprehensive (the real work starts here now, it's not just a matter of scraping past the 40% pass mark to pass the modules and in turn reach the next year, my effort really counts for marks now and it'll make a big difference between a 2-2 or a 2-1 honours degree.) I'll be 21 a month after I go back, and I'm not really looking forward to that so much (old crusty!) but I can't stop it, so I might as well just sit there and wait for it to roll past. I might get some money towards the Sennheiser HD650 headphones, ideal for my course (BSc. Music Technology, and the headphones are studio-quality professional reference monitoring headphones, which is why they cost almost £200).

More coming soon - I'm off to PLASA2006 (run by the Professional Lighting And Sound Association) trade show at Earl's Court on Wednesday the 13th, so I'm sure I'll take my camera and get loads of lovely shots of new pro audio kit (and hopefully get to play with some of it, too!), so if anything of incident occurs as a result of that, I'll definitely post some shots up on here.

Until next time...

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