Sunday 23 August 2009

evil outlook

Since James has been temping he has needed to complete timesheets showing his hours worked. I have been doing him reminder e-mails to complete them. I did six (one, two, three, four, five, six) of them before getting fed up. The sixth and last one was Thursday.

I then had a tiffany moment (a bit like an epiphany but with bling), that I invite James to a weekly meeting, meaning that he will get weekly reminders and I dont have to keep e-mailing him! The idea then hit me that as long as I can get him to "accept" my invites, I can then manipulate his calender - such as 11am Friday (half an hour before he goes to lunch) "buy Amber a huge bar of nice chocolate" ;o) I wonder if Bill knows of my evil intentions ;o).

Back in January our Sky+ Box had a hissy fit and was saying that there were no programmes in the programme planner. We rebuilt the planner and all was fixed. Last night we were watching something we recorded, and the skybox kept on freezing and would then reboot itself. After several goes of this we then decided to rebuild the planner. The skybox wouldnt let us record anything either, and still wouldnt after rebuilding (this course of action had worked back in January). We then decided that it may work out cheaper to upgrade to Sky+HD as we didnt take out the extended warranty.

So after coming back from town I call Sky to upgrade to HD to be told that there is a six week waiting list (one, two three, four five, six), I was dumbfounded! Six weeks (one, two, three, four, five, six) of not being able to record stuff! We then hit upon the idea of calling an engineer out to get a replacement box, that will cost us £65.00 (around $100.00) and the guy is due Tuesday afternoon between 12 and 5pm! And what would you know, after booking the engineer the skybox is working ok! Aaaargggghhhh If its still ok tomorrow morning I will probably cancel!

So this morning while doing the exercise bike (with the absence of being able to watch something I have recorded) I put on a Sesame Street DVD it really made the 35 minutes whizz by ;o) What surprised me was at the beginning of the DVD they said that this show was for adults only and shouldnt be shown to pre-schoolers! Surely learning is learning. In the episode I saw it didnt show anything that I would call questionable. Did you know that Oscar was originally orange? I was quite shocked! In all honesty I dont think I will ever get over this, and may have psychological repercussions ;o)

The sausage lady came up trumps again yesterday, by having my chili chocolate sausages ;o) How many other people have sausages made especially for them? The Queen may give Royal Warrants to companies but I bet she doesnt have many things made especially for her!

Its been the V festival this weekend, I havent seen too many of the festival goers myself as I guess we have been in Chelmsford before many of them have been bothered to get out of their tents. And thanks to NXEA not allowing off peak tickets to be used between 4.29 pm and 6.34 pm this means all but the more affluent festival goers arent going to be travelling on my train ;o). Typically I was sitting next to one of them!

I weighed myself this morning and was well chuffed that I have lost the two pounds (one, two) that I put on last week ;o)

This post has been bought to you by the numbers two and six and the letters l b and s ;o)

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I wouldn't bother with Sky HD myself at the moment. My neighbour has it and says it not worth the extra money. If you can get your box repaired cheaply enough then I would do that. Or, unless you really, really want HD just get a new Sky + box.

I may be missing something but I was always under the impression that Sesame Street was primarily for kids, so why state it's for adults only?

Anonymous said...

Love the ending, there, Amber :)

It seems that maybe the learning and teaching techniques have changed in the past few decades and maybe that is why they have the disclaimer? I would be tempted to email/write someone and find out why, exactly, they label it that way.

I am sure your Sky Box is like TiVo, but not as great. I loved my TiVo, but now I don't have satellite. Of course, I still have hours of movies downloaded to the thing, and I can watch them at will :) When I am rich, I will get a TiVo for my TV (with service, of course), so I can do with it what I please.

chocolat lover said...

It seems to be working ok now, so Ive cancelled the engineer! We'll see how the box goes before thinking about HD again!

One of the many bugs with Sky is that you have to carry on subscribing to the channels to be able to view what you have recorded :o(

There was a guy a few years ago now who upgraded to Sky+ recorded a whole load of films, then cancelled his films subscription, and wasnt able to watch the movies hed recorded.

Im not too sure what the outcome was in the end, but Id bet that Sky got theyre way!

James (UK) said...

Sick to death of timesheets!

Alan, I asked Amber the same thing about "SS"...

And what really hacked me off about the Sky+ box was I'd already tried what the engineer on the 'phone suggested, like 6 times before that!

Anonymous said...

I know what you mean James, the first thing they normally say is to to turn it off completely then turn it on again. Well, duh!

I didn't know that you had to have an active subscription in order to view programs recorded though. I wouldn't call it a bug so much as a design feature! I suppose one way round it would be to get hold of a DVD recorder and re-record movies etc. that you wanted to keep. But then, if you had a DVD recorder and that was your plan why not just record to DVD in the first place?

Kelly, I think it is more or less the same. They did try marketing TiVo over here several years ago now but it never really took off. Now that the predominant paid TV provider in Sky have their own system in Sky+ it's not likely to either.