Housing

According to the radio this morning, the average price of a house in this country, last year was £175,000.

Now the way things seem to work, is that you can get a 3.5x mortgage, and in order to get a sane interest rate you need a 10% deposit. OK, maybe only 5%. Oh, and of course there's a big bunch of 'other costs' to moving house, like solicitor fees, stamp duty etc.

Which basically means that in order for a first time buyer to afford an _average_ house, they have to be earning £50,000 a year. And have around £10,000 available for 'deposit and costs'. I don't know about anyone else, but the rate of my savings is about enough that i'll have saved that kinda cash in about 10 years time, if I'm really lucky. And the salary? Well, nice if you can get it...

Sadly, we have no Amber tonight, which means I shall have to spend some time conniving and plotting. Oh, and probably mowing the lawn.
I also really need to start going to the Gym again. It's been over a month now...

ADSL woes

Well, my opinion of DABs is dropping steadily. My order of and ADSL modem router has been in 'can't be arsed' status for a week now.
Well, actually I think it's 'waiting for stock', but that's clearly a lie, because their website says they have 57 of them "hot and wet and waiting for YOU!".

Now I can sort of understand them hiding their phone number to keep costs down, but when I want my toys NOW because my ADSL will be live tomorrow, and I medically need Internet, this is not very satisfying. In fact, I could draw comparisons between that, and a certain company that goes by the name 'Eclipse computing' who are renown far and wide for having the most shitty service ever.

They've until lunchtime to respond to my plea, before I cancel and go order from OcUK instead, because they do next day delivery for basically 25p more than 'special delivery'.

Clarity IT seem to be a little slow on the extension and faceplates. That I'll cope with by going and buying a 'standard' telephone extension, because I've got spare microfilters.

Oh, and then I need to yoink some network cables. Unfortunately it seems our 'make your own' box of cable and connectors is currently in use. (it's at someone's house, who had roughly the same idea, but he's currently doing Gigabit cabling.).

So fear not mortals, home broadband may be delayed but my internet-impaired status is incipiently drawing to an end.

(Quote for the day: "What the majority of the US seems to be missing, is that when it's your country being oppressed, you aren't a terrorist, you're a freedom fighter")

RIGHT THEN

Well, my query to dabs with an emailed 'other query' got an automatic form response.

That copies part of their FAQ on the website.

DUH!

If it was in the FAQ I wouldn't have bothered emailing them.

Wankers.

OK. time to cancel the order, cos OcUK wasn't that much more, and I can have it tomorrow.

(mutter mutter)

Re-pets?

Remember 're-pets' from 6th day?
I'm still trying to decide if this is something other than a horrible piss-take:
http://savingsandclone.com/

Lovely weather

It seems this recent spate of miserable sunshine has broken, and we've now got some lovely weather.

It's moderately warm. Raining steadily.

Used to be a time when I wasn't a big fan of rain, but now, I love it. There's a couple of easy tips for enjoying rain:

Get yourself some decent boots.
Get yourself a Tilley Hat

Top off with coat, and then find out how much fun it is to go stomping around in the rain.

Alternatively, you could just get one of these.