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This weekend was fairly busy! On Saturday morning Philippa’s parents came up to help us out with various things we had to do. We had quite a productive day: we broke up the old radiator cover and took it to the tip, we also got rid of my old computer desk (it’s been replaced by one they brought up, donated by one of Phil’s friends from home). We covered up the hot water tank with new lagging, as the old lagging was insufficient. We painted the radiator in the main bedroom… and I think that’s about it actually!

So it was a fairly productive day. In the evening, we went to my office Christmas party, which was at the Fynn Valley Golf Club. I was impressed with the venue – it was really nice inside! The evening went well, the meal was lovely (I had roast beef and Phil had salmon), the company was good, and the dancing afterwards was much fun! I haven’t had a good dance in ages so I was pleased when the DJ started rolling out some of the cheesy classics… we left at about 12:20AM, so we didn’t get back home until around 1:15AM.

Unfortunately we were doing tea and coffee at church the next day, so we had to be up early to set up! Ah well, c’est la vie. Church was good, and afterwards we had a student lunch. That seemed to go well, everyone was chatting away merrily and there was generally a good atmosphere.

In the evening we went out to a concert at Ipswich Corn Exchange by the City of London Sinfonia – the second concert we’d been to there in just over a week! They played ‘Le Tombeau de Couperin’ by Ravel, Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony, and a new piece by Robin Holloway called ‘Fourth Idyll’. I wasn’t too convinced about the new piece, but the Beethoven and the Ravel were both beautiful. I particularly liked the Ravel, it was very ‘light’ and had a sort of lyrical quality.

Last week, someone from Solar Home rang up and asked if we were interested in Solar Powered heating. Anyway, as we are interested in Solar heating, we had someone come round to visit yesterday. It wasn’t the best of evenings…

He arrived at 7:00PM– early enough to prevent us having dinner, meaning we’d have to wait until later to eat. Wouldn’t really have been an issue, except for the fact that he stayed until 9:00! He also managed to upset one of our next-door neighbours by parking in front of her garage, which really didn’t impress her (murphy’s law: if you choose one garage out of five to park in front of, someone WILL want to use that one and not one of the other four). Still, you just shouldn’t park in front of garages really and gone somewhere else… the guy was fairly nice but to be honest hearing the guy have a bit of an altercation with our neighbour outside (after she’d come round and knocked on our door asking if we had a car parked there) did put a bit of a dampener on the evening.

Aaaaanyway. Like I said, the guy seemed to be nice enough, but he wasn’t a classic salesman: he didn’t exactly do much other than read through the booklet from Solar Home. It’s what my lecturers used to do, and it annoyed me then: I am perfectly capable of reading something myself! Don’t bother reading something out unless you’re going to add to it (in this case, phrasing what the booklet actually said in a slightly different way does not count as ‘adding to it’). Basically it took about an hour and a half to go through this booklet, at an agonizingly slow pace, when we could have gone through it in – probably – around half an hour. This is a tip for anyone doing this kind of work: just give me the information I need to know! Don’t read it out to me, I am perfectly capable of reading myself. Be brief, you don’t have to assume that it takes me five minutes to digest the fact that your workmen are certified (lunatics?) or whatever.

The worst was yet to come, however. I can take being treated a bit like an idiot (to be fair, I probably give that impression by looking gormless most of the time). The problems came when we started talking about pricing. The guy gave us three prices (one for using our existing hot water tank, one including a new hot water tank, and one including a new tank as well as linking it up to the central heating). The prices that he quoted us were more than we were prepared to pay, as of yesterday (the most expensive was around £12,000). We told him this. He then called up his boss, told him, and got us a new price. This actually happened a couple of times…

The thing is, we weren’t actually trying to drive the price down. We weren’t haggling. We were saying no – we just don’t have the money right now to pay for something like that, and I’m not prepared to go with the ‘pay monthly’ option (i.e., basically take a loan out with the British Credit Association or something like that). We managed to get the price down to less than 50% of what we were originally quoted, which is pretty impressive, without actually really trying to!

After his final offer, which we turned down (again), it was about 9:00 and I basically said that we’d reached an impasse, that it was late, and he should probably be going… which he did.

The whole experience has made me realise, though — I never want to have someone come round the house again on a sales-oriented call. It’s a waste of time, and at the end of it you get blackmailed into making a decision you potentially don’t want to make (i.e., “buy the product now or you won’t get this discount”). I understand that a sale is much more valuable to a company than someone saying “we will actually buy it at some point in the future” – but at the same time, we will go to green power in the future (Solar Power does look very good), and probably at full price, just not right now!

By the way, I should probably mention, I don’t want to cast aspersions on Solar Home’s product itself, we were quite impressed with it. This rant was more about the common methods used by sales peoples, as I’m sure it doesn’t just apply in this individual case!

It’s been a busy old couple of days, this weekend! On Saturday we had Sarah and Jon round for lunch, which was nice as we hadn’t seen them in ages!

In the afternoon we went into town to do a bit of shopping, and then in the evening we went to the Ipswich Corn Exchange (which I’ve already mentioned, so I won’t repeat).

On Sunday we went to church in the morning, and afterwards we were invited to lunch with Mike Neville and family, which was rather nice! We had to leave mid-afternoon to go round to our next-door-neighbour’s for a cup of tea, although unfortunately I couldn’t stay long because I had to drop the car off in Wivenhoe to be repaired. (On that note, I’ve heard back about it today – apparently the car had a broken fuel injector, which is why I was having problems with its power).

I got a lift back with Matthew, who came round – along with Alex and Elisa – to watch “Bender’s Big Score”. It’s brilliant, I really enjoyed it! It wasn’t quite your usual Futurama style – I think they are more used to the shorter episode style – but it was packed with laughs and was very well written to boot.

So, I think that just about brings me up to date…

… try saying that three times fast!

We went to a concert this evening at Ipswich Corn Exchange. The Ipswich Orchestral Society were playing: Elgar’s Overture “In the South” (Alassio), Max Bruch’s 1st Violin Concerto, and Anton Bruckner’s 4th Symphony “Romantic”.

We really enjoyed it! The violin concerto was absolutely beautiful. The soloist, Matthew Trusler, played it very passionately… it was electric. It’s difficult to describe, but sometimes you can almost feel the music is alive, and I think that’s what it was like tonight!

The Elgar, too, was very beautiful – I hadn’t heard it before, but I would really like to hear it again. The Bruckner symphony was very long, but also lovely – certainly nothing like what Brahms allegedly called Bruckner’s symphonies (“Giant boa constricters” or something like that!). I don’t think I quite enjoyed it as much as Bruckner’s mass, but good nonetheless.

Yesterday evening was a little strange. I got back home to find Philippa standing outside the house saying “I can’t get in – the door won’t open!” Apparently she couldn’t open the door using her key. I tried with mine, and couldn’t open it either! We tried for about five minutes to get in, but we just couldn’t open the door! The key would not turn all the way in the lock.

Unfortunately neither of us had a back door key – because they look identical, I thought it was probably best to

We called round to our next door neighbours, who let us use their yellow pages and phone, and we called a locksmith. They managed to send one out in 45 minutes (I think they specialise in doing emergencies). Anyway, it took the guy about 30 seconds with a G-clamp style implement to open the door… he managed to push the handle down from the inside, which opened the door.

He then looked at the lock, and told us there was nothing wrong with it… and charged us £80 for the privilege! I guess it was worth it because if not we would still be locked out now, but it still seems a lot of money.

Needless to say, I’ve now got a back door key on my key ring, so at least if it happens again there’s a good chance we’ll be able to get in…

We must do something about global warming.

The consequences are far too dire for us to keep ignoring it!

I’ve been thinking about writing a quick post about internet security recently, and this article by Stephen Fry finally made me write it. We are living in dangerous times, so to speak – keeping your computer free of viruses or any such malware is becoming more difficult. We also have an army of scammers and ‘phishers’ who want to steal our credit card details by sending fraudulent emails (Mac and Linux users — take note: you don’t have to be running Windows to get caught out by phishing!).

So, I thought I would offer up a few tips on staying safe on the internet. Feel free to contribute in the comments to anything I have missed – I might make this into a proper article. Some of these tips are Windows-only — for that I apologise, but the majority of people who need these tips will be Windows users.

• Do not, and by this I mean DO NOT open attachments from anyone you do not know. It’s just not worth the risk.
• If you’re running Windows, disable the option to ‘Hide extensions for known file types’ – you can do this by going to a folder, clicking on ‘Tools’ -> ‘Folder Options’, then clicking on the ‘View’ tab, and in the list of checkboxes unchecking the box next to ‘Hide extensions for known file types’. This will prevent you from accidentally opening up virus.jpg.exe, thinking it’s a photo! (admittedly, it probably wouldn’t have ‘virus’ in the name, but still…)
• If in any doubt, err on the side of caution.
• If you receive an email with an offer that is “too good to be true” — it probably is. DO NOT send your bank details to anyone, even if they promise money.
• Always access your bank’s website by typing it in / using a favourite in your browser. Never click on links in emails, even if they appear to be from your bank. There are many fraudulent websites which look exactly like your bank’s website, don’t be fooled.
• Always run a firewall. Windows XP has a firewall – if you don’t know whether you have turned it on, see this page.

That’s all for now, but I may well update this as time goes on!

On Saturday we went down to a family friend’s 70th birthday party. My parents came round at about 10:30, and shortly afterwards some friends of theirs arrived to drive us the relatively straightforward journey down to (near) Heathrow. Unfortunately, the north circular was rather busy so it took us a bit longer than it should have to get there, but we managed in the end! We got there at about 2:15 or so. So that was quite a good afternoon, it was good to see people who I hadn’t seen in a while and afterwards we went over to see my sister and niece and nephews. So all in all it was rather a good day! I’ve put some photos up on Flickr if you’re interested.

On Sunday we went to church in the morning. We stayed on afterwards to practice a couple of songs we’re going to be singing at Christmas – two Graham Kendrick songs! I really can’t sing from music so I’m going to have to practice at home, fortunately we were given the sheet music so I can play it on the piano and learn it that way.

In the afternoon we didn’t really do much… in the evening we watched “Blazing Saddles” (a Mel Brooks film) and then Top Gear. We watched ‘Blazing Saddles’ because a friend of ours recommended it. He apparently doesn’t like Spaceballs, though. Now I don’t know about that… I actually didn’t like Blazing Saddles that much. It was quite random, had its good moments, and of course was very silly, but in general it just didn’t have such a coherent storyline as Spaceballs, and I don’t think had quite the charm.

So there you go, that was our weekend!

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a routine by Bill Bailey where he looks at the influence of cockney music on the output of classical composers. If not, you can watch it on YouTube — it’s definitely worth seeing, particularly if you like classical music! (Plus, the rest of what I am about to say probably won’t make sense if you don’t watch it).

Anyway, he says that there is only one recorded instance in classical music where the cockney “Have a Banana” is used – in the opening bars of Grieg’s piano concerto. However, I believe I’ve found another: listen to the first few bars of Chopin’s Polonaise No. 3 in A Major (Op 40) — see if you can spot another ‘have a banana’… or several, in fact!

In other random humour, I found a good website today with humorous answers to tests, it had a few there which I hadn’t seen before.

Sorry that I haven’t updated much over the past few days… it’s all been fairly quiet really! Nothing much has happened here…

On Saturday we did a bit of shopping during the day, in the evening we went round to a work colleague of Philippa’s for dinner. On Sunday we went to church in the morning as per usual, came back and did a bit of the Moore Course unit we’re on at the moment, and then in the evening watched Top Gear.

It’s fantastically exciting life!