Congratulations go out to Brian and Jayne on the birth of Oliver Brian Lees - Born at 9.53am on Tuesday 20th Feb 2007 and weighing in at 5lbs 10oz.

Hopefully having Jayne as his mum will offset some of the madness that awaits Oliver with Brian as his dad...

Just kidding. I'm sure he'll do just fine and Brian and Jayne will be more than up to the job. I personally look forward to seeing him grow up (Oliver that is, although I guess it applies equally well to Brian).

This has proved one thing though: Justin's wife management is far superior to Brian's... he only managed to secure Brian as a middle name unlike, Justin with little Justin Junior. It's a shame really as we were all looking forward to Brian Lees III.

Hopefully Bri will cut down on the coffin nails now and carry plums in his pockets instead.

A while ago a visit to the Windows Update site revealed an update to my installed Windows Media Player. I like to keep my machine fully patched so I downloaded the update and thought nothing more of it. A while later I tried watching TV through the MCE interface and found the TV functionality was no longer working. I tried to re-scan for the channels but I was prompted with a "Tuner Not Found" message.

Try as I might new drivers didn't help my problem and I just couldn't find a solution. Fortunately Windows has a system restore function so I was able to roll back the machine and apply the other updates without the Media player update, and my machine has stayed in a similar state for the last few months.

Without warning the latest batch of auto updates must have been rolled out to me during the last week as when I tried to watch Top Gear on the PC last night I was met with a blank screen.

Once again going into the TV settings reveals that the tuner cannot be found by MCE. I've had enough of postponing updates so once again I went over to the Twinhan site to try and find some updated drivers for my TV tuner card (A 3020C since you ask). I found one updated file (lord knows what it does but I've updated it anyway) and tried re-installing the BDA driver (this is supposed to connect MCE and the tuner card) and drivers, but to no avail.

I don't know what to do now. I could re-install the machine, but this would once again involve re-applying all my software and the various configurations, or I can just ride it out until I either stumble upon a solution of give up and re-install. Either way I'm not too happy.

Last time this happened the card did appear to still function with the Twinhan software, it just seems to be the MCE part of Windows that's got its knickers in a twist. It's quite annoying - it's nice to be able to have the news minimised as I'm winding down for lunch or reading my email, or watch a program in a little window while working beneath it.

MCE is a nicely implemented piece of software, but as I've said before it is still a bit buggy. I really hope Vista has sorted some of these problems out.

[I suppose I could have posted this to my technical web site at http://imorital.net, but I thought it's more of a leisure issue, everything else works just fine.]

Well, It must be that time of year again as I find myself spending ridiculous announts of cash on plants and pots. Yes, The great planting of 2007 has already started.

This year in an attempt to save a bit of money I'm going to try and grow as much as I can from seeds rather than buying plants in pots, which largely explains why I've started already.

Thus far the only flaw in ny plan is the amount of cash I've spent on pots (and for that matter seeds too). The way I look at it though, a lot of the stuff I'm getting should last for several seasons, so it should save money in the long run even if the initial outlay is a little higher than I'd like. All I need to do now is hope some of the seeds actually germinate.

Talking of saving money I've been investigating getting some LED light bulbs to replace some of the ones I currently use around the house. Once again the initial outlay is very high but the savings over the bulbs lifetime are significant. Currently I can only really find GU10 bulbs in the LED variety, not any G4 or G9 as I also want (bear in mind I've not been looking for "normal" bulbs in LED)

An LED bulb should last for about 50,000 hours while a standard GU10 will last 1,000 to 2,500 hours.

An LED bulb will also output the equivalent of a 30 watt bulb on about 2.7 watts of power. My light in the kitchen uses 5 of them so that's a saving of 136.5 watts!!! (against 30 watt originals)

That's the problem though, I can't find any that are brighter than this. Currently I use 50 watt bulbs and find these can sometimes be a little dim.

My conclusion fom all this? I think I'll rip out the current light fitting and put in a standard strip light.

Sunday 28th Jan was spent driving from sunny Colchester to a very mild Duddon Estuary near Millom in The Lake District to help Emma's mum relocate to their new... youth hostel.

I've not been to the lakes for about three and a half years and last time the journey was punctuated by a series of stops overnight in other destinations, so this was the first time I'd done the journey in one day (although I have to point out that I didn't do any of the driving up). Having said that the journey itself was relatively good and fortunately the traffic was quite quiet.

The youth hostel itself was actually quite nice and had been kept clean by the previous owners. Unfortunately the guy who ran the place had DIY skills that are even worse than mine so a few things had an 'incomplete' air about them.

The site also featured a boat that was added to the hostel during an episode of Challenge Anneka as a sensory room for handicapped children many years ago. Unfortunately the ravages of time (ten years?) had not been kind and the boat is certainly not going to be making any more sailings. It's a shame, but then again I don't know what state of repair it was in when it arrived.

We only stayed the one night in the hostel, just long enough to unload the various vehicles and help David make some inital repairs to the boat (oh, and get a couple of pints at the local) before setting off, but I'm sure we'll be up there again before too long.

Being up north we thought we'd take the opportunity to visit Brian and Jayne in York on our way back. It's not only a good excuse for a visit, but doubly necessary as I wanted to see the currently larger style Jayne before she has the baby in a couple of months. She wasn't a big as I expected, so I'm sure that's good news for her (or at least proves she can hide it well, which possibly isn't so great)

While we were in town we decided to take a trip on the York eye (which for reference is located inside the National Railway Museum). It's smaller than the London Eye, and unlike its bigger brother you sit in the capsules (which I guess are about large enough for six) and the wheel actually turns relatively quickly (much slower than a fairground ferris wheel, but like a rocket compared to the London Eye). As a result it gives a different experience to that in London. It was still good though, albeit a little pricey for £6. Having said that it is free to get in the museum itself, so overall it works out very reasonable.