This week has been particularly hectic at work. It's a damned inconvenience when work intrudes on personal life and, more importantly, my ability to blog.
The major event this week was that we both passed our driving tests. If we were to keep score of the number of errors (where a low score is better and 16 is a fail) then Sam beat me 7-15.
Most of my errors were related to speed and how often I checked my mirrors. My piece-de-resistance was to make the examiner cry out “Oh my gosh!” as we pulled out of a T-junction to narrowly miss an oncoming truck. It appears that America has some rule about giving way to through traffic at T-junctions. My defence is that this country insists on having crosswalks at every intersection and the T-junction looked more like a 3-way stop to me so I was expecting the truck to stop.
Sam's errors were too minor to even note here so she's now going around the house with a big smile on her face.
This weekend saw me finally bite the bullet and buy a Cingular phone. I paid the $500 deposit on the grounds that I need to get a credit presence and we can see this as sort of a savings account because Cingular pay back the deposit after a year with 2% monthly interest. So, I'm now the proud owner of a Motorola Razr V3. I'm getting appreciative noises from m'colleagues when I show it off.
The only other gadget of note this week was a TiVo box. They were giving them away for the cost of a year's service so I took them up on their kind offer. I had to wait a couple of days before I got to download the latest firmware update which allowed me to connect it to my wireless network but I can now stream TiVo content to my PCs around the house. How cool is that ? 🙂 Next step is to hack the box to get a bigger disk.
I managed to achieve the technological equivalent of recording static with it though. For the uninitiated, a TiVo box is basically a hard disk with a video input that allows you to schedule recordings by using a TV guide that TiVo provides. It's like Sky+. The box has a couple of IR transmitters which are used to control your cable or satellite box and the cable or satellite box is connected to the TiVo box. So, this week, I scheduled recordings for Tripping the Rift. The major requirement for TiVo to work is that the cable or satellite box is turned on.
This week, I have been mostly recording a cable box that is turned off.