Still here

Just not had much time to get a post actually finished! I have started a couple. One still to come, and another that has just been deleted. I was on far too much of a downer when writing it and it was too much.

The downer is caused by issues in the office at the moment. I have just started emergency coaching as when in the office I feel about 2 seconds away from a complete breakdown (and have been on the edge of tears too often in the last few weeks). The coaching is going well, but there is a long way to go or recovery.

The good side is that except for the complete and total lack of energy (and falling asleep on the sofa too much) it is limited to just the office, it is not something I am bringing home with me!

This week has been really tiring though. The little guy, after trying it out when he was two months old, decided that he wanted anothe taste of 5th disease this week. On Monday he had high temperatue and was taken to the doctors (btw 240bhp and hearing that are not a good combination! Waiting to see if any tickets come in). The doctor originally thought it was a bad cold as he had a running nose, was coughing and wheezing a little.

The temperature dropped over the following day, but then the spots arrived...  I called the doctors again and they said 5th disease, normally he would have had immunity seeing as he had it in the past but apparently that immunity only comes after a certain age. At 2 months he didn't get it. Hopefully he will at 8!

When he started to recover though we had something that we have never had before (except the first few days). He just would not go to bed one night. He moaned when in our arms and screamed when in his bed. After spending 4 hours trying to get him to sleep we decided to give him a bottle (something he has never needed). Before it was finished he was asleep. We guess that he was starting to recover and got his appitite back. I now have even more sympathy for anyone who has a child that won't sleep at night. One night was enough to completely wipe us out!

He is doing fine now BTW. The spots have gone (expect for the ones that went hard - they are going to take some time to dissapear), he is eating, and playing on his own again. Though when he gets tired he hangs on to our ankles until we pick him up :)

So what else???  Well, a month ago I treated myself to a Sonos Connect to listen to streaming music in the living room. We've tried a few options in the past, but there was nothing that really worked well. I must admit I wasn't overly hopefull about this either (I only bought it after making sure I could return it even after unpacking if it wasn't any good).

Well, I was quite wrong! 5 minutes after unpacking it I had streaming FLACs coming from the server upstairs and it sounded so good that we moved the CDs out of the room that weekend (MP3s are fine for background music, but awful for when you actually want to listen to something).

With that and very good Spotify support connected to the amplifier via a digital link so that the DAC used to make the audio signal is the best it can be I am very, very impressed!

Of course it meant even more cables in the living room and eith that and making it as safe as possible for the little guy (we have not baby proofed the room, he just needs to learn what he can and cannot play with - but the dangerous things to him have been hidden) meant that I had to re-organise all of the equipment. That was a lotmore work than I was expecting, There were cables all over the living room and 7 years of dust bunnys from underneath the furniture that needed moving!

I worked it out that there must be about 200m (about 220yrds) of cable underneath the cabinet! 24m of just power cables! Then there are the network cables. We bought an unmanaged switch a year or so ago. I wanted a 5 port but the 8 port was only a few euros more. Good job that I did! We now have only one of the 8 ports free (if a connection can be wired then I use it wired - better signal and less traffic over the wireless link). And that is used for when we need to transfer huge volumes of data from the laptop to the server (even with a 200Mbps wireless connection a 1Gbps connection is much, much faster!).

All in all taking everything apart, cleaning everything that has been hidden, laying the cables for each bit of kit and then putting the kit back together cost me about 4 or 5 hours. Far longer than I had hoped for!

Worth it though!

Right, looking at the time I should get the little guy up and organise some breakfast for him!