Hallo Every bod peeps

iss your uncle steve innit!

I've been keeping track honest.. so what's new at this end, well I've done most of my shopping and got my cards and I've organised a trip up to the new Bull Ring for the 14th with Gemma (&Clive) seeing as the retail therapy at Camberley worked so well for the Manoir. Well you see how it happened was when Fay stayed over the other evening after visiting Stan(fatherinlaw) in Thame, she got an emergency call from Jonathan up in Birmingham that his (Fay's) Polo had been smashed into at the Uni and seeing as she's going into hospital and the car's supposed to be parked up in the drive at home on the insurance we thought we better go and see (putting it mildly) and if necessary bring it back as J'd said it was drivable... well you see if J's doing his final year dissertation over Christmas and she's going to be operated on next week end and husband Pete's working up in Edinburgh and the car's in Brum you see, it was all getting out of hand.. anyway not to worry as the passenger's door was only a bit dented and the paint was intact so rather than bother with it and deprive J of his ride home for Christmas, we took the opportunity to go into town for a bite to eat instead. Well, it was like being on another planet. First the car park was well lit like Gunwharf Dad and had big spaces and all the lifts were fab and in the middle of it all is this fabulous Selfridges which is more like Tate Modern in a Bilbao Guggenheim skin. Such a pleasure to walk round it was I got hold of Gem to say we've got to go!
Still waiting for Mandy to produce.. no news yet, house move on hold until March due to awkward vendor not being able to find anywhere.
So there's that.. umm and I've turned into a wi fi bore I'm afraid. I ordered the Apple Airport Express which is a little white box you connect to your modem and printer and plug in the wall which does away with wires, using a radio connection so you can email and surf on the lap top in bed without any wires attached. Not only that but you plug in the printer to the little white box and print wirelessly from your bed like....this! ahahh!! brilliant he say's (only taken him all day to get it working). Well you see I'd also bought a wireless modem/router/firewall thing and you need to get them to talk to each other. I've tested it in the loft so I can be up there on line too and as a bonus I can get on next door's network while on the sofa and surf for free! So I'm looking at the issue of security and having a fiddle with 802.1X if that means anything a sort of encryption thing ahrekken. The next job is to connect a 250 gb hard drive to the back of the router and then load up all our video onto it so we can all access it online. First we need to get the VHS stuff into a digital format so there's plenty to occupy the old bugr!