19:44, 19 March 2007, Feeling irate

I have just turned the volume of my Denon receiver up to try and drown out the awful noise of a burglar alarm coming from outside. It's driving me absolutely nuts, it must have been going for at least 10 minutes now. Maybe I can throw something at it, ARGH! Headache is developing...

12:09, 12 March 2007, Feeling amazed

I picked up a REL Quake subwoofer on Saturday, to go with my NAD C 320BEE amp and B&W DM601S3 speakers in my office. Have been looking at ways of warming up the sound in this harsh room for quite a while, and finally settled on the idea of a decent small sub. Oh my god at the difference the sub makes. It is simply incredible how it pads out the sound and provides bass that you can feel but not hear. It's transparent in that I can't tell where the sound is coming from, but I'd soon notice it if I turned it off. Now re-discovering my music collection

21:55, 2 March 2007, Feeling impatient

First thing's first, I only chose 'impatient' because I couldn't find 'impressed' on my mood list. So actually I'm impressed, not impatient!

I've just wasted a whole hour on teaching Vista on my laptop how to understand me. I had totally forgotten that Vista has speech recognition, and exactly how good it is. Once set up, it's incredibly flexible and comprehensive. I could browse websites, start applications and dictate, change applications and move the mouse around at will, and without even putting too much effort into speaking clearly. However, I could not dictate into MSN chat windows, which is a major annoyance. But, when on earth am I likely to actually use speech control anyway...

On the other hand, I've just finished re-installing Vista on my main machine because of broken video codecs in the old installation. AVI files would stop playing after a second or two, and WMP in general was very sluggish to use. I suspect a dodgy installation of DivX was the cause, as even after I uninstalled it I could still play DivX files! Anyway, everything's nice and snappy again now and hopefully the last thing that I have to install (Nero) won't mess it all up. Otherwise I've got a very boring weekend ahead of me...