Morning Geekfest

Settling in, working from home today. But first I needed to get the home office more acceptable. This is partially done. We're getting close to being down to the last 2-3 boxes to unpack. Which is good, but then I'll have to go to the Self Store and get the remaining boxes. Lots of shelves are left in the office, which is a relief.

Anyway, managed a couple of ultra-geeky jobs this morning, in readiness for the TV aerial man, and for M getting upset with me. I've finally got the dual tuner working in the Media Centre, which is pretty cool. So now we can reocrd two things at once or watch something and record something else. Now all we need is a TV aerial which recieves more than half the channels.

Also fixed M's user ID on the PC. For some reason she had a proxy installed on her version of IE from the Blueyonder days. The weird thing is; this should simply not have worked on the network configuration we used to have. I'm going to chalk that down to Great Mysteries of XP.

I've also got Skype up and running at home, which is rapidly becomming the standard intra-company comms tool. Of course, this would make sense, as I understand Skype is now on it's last legs ;)

Trades

I need to have a TV aerial fitted. I called around for quotes, well, I called the only company in Ealing which seemed to accept calls and be prepared to send somebody. Over the phone they said it was £25 call out which comes off the costs if we agree to go ahead. Then they expect it to be £80 - £200 depending on the aerial needed.

Well, the guy came, he looked, and he's quoted £150+VAT for a bog standard aerial fittted on the roof - ouch. He is expecting it to take 2 hours, he's got to fit stuff to the chimney to carry the new aerial, blah blah blah... Ouch, again.

It's not that I mind the cost. I don't particularly. I'm not getting up on the roof, I could jury rig a loft aerial but that would be a waste of time given the loft is going to be fairly dramatically reconfigured in the next 6 months - so having a proper roof aerial is the way to go. Unless we give up and go for Sky, not something I wish to do.

What I mind is people not being upfront about the costs.

I'm having the same problem, interestingly enough, at work with our Swedish cousins. They tend to try and hide the true cost of projects by moving people along on ever increasing hourly charged projects until you reach a point of no return. Getting an actual project cost out of them is practically impossible.