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Snow everywhere
March 21st, 2008Freezing sculptures
March 20th, 2008Moving the family
March 19th, 2008We were up early (if not bright) on Monday morning with Eastleigh Area Cars arriving at seven to take us to the airport. (They would take our child seat back to their Chandler’s Ford office from where a friend would then pick it up.) They hadn’t taken the hint about the amount of luggage we would have and it took fifteen minutes to shoe-horn it in to the taxi. The M3 was pretty busy around Winchester as it always is at this time of day. The taxi driver, however, seemingly hadn’t noticed the warning sign for an accident at junction 3 and was surprised when we joined a slow moving queue around 4a. He then told us he didn’t really know the back roads and his road atlas was buried in the boot. Fortunately Christine managed to extract my sat-nav (review still to come) and that took us across to the M4 and in to Heathrow.
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Just a half
March 17th, 2008In order to complicate our departure from the UK as much as possible we headed over to the Forest of Dean this weekend to meet up with my mother-in-law’s family for their (almost) annual assault on the trails half marathon. Pre-race preparation wasn’t ideal with Emma screaming her head off for 90 minutes or so in the middle of the Saturday night (perhaps something to do with not getting fed in the night as of the last few days). This wasn’t conducive to getting up early for that vital pre-race breakfast. The conditions weren’t all that great either. It seemed not to have stopped raining for the proceeding 24 hours although it did finally let up about half way round the course.
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Shutting up shop
March 13th, 2008I’m back in the UK this week catching up with the family before we all head out to Oslo on Monday. I’m glad to say Emma still remembers me! I spent a merry couple of hours this afternoon trying to tie up some loose ends with the house which will remain empty whilst we are away:
- Our current house insurance won’t cover us for this long an absence (30 days is pretty much the standard maximum). I’ve only had one quote back so far and that’s £200 over our current policy.
- Apparently it’s fine for us to leave the car on the driveway of our unoccupied house whereas we would not be covered if we left it at one or other of our parents’ places where there would be someone to keep an eye on it.
- We won’t be getting anything off our council tax (they just consider we’re on a long holiday).
- We can, however, put our water, gas, and electric on hold.
- BT were their usual unhelpful selves. After 15 minutes in the queue (entirely unrelated to the fact that I’d selected the disconnection option I’m sure), I was told that the only way not to pay the minimum line charge of £10.50/month whilst we’re away would be to disconnected and they’d then charge us £120 to be reconnected! If there was an alternative to BT I’d happily ditch them like a shot.
- This has finally given me the excuse to say goodbye to PlusNet as our broadband provider. Yeah! Needless to say I didn’t take them up on the offer of having the account put on hold whilst I”m away. I have to say they were actually remarkably efficient in closing the account. I’m currently thinking I’ll go with either Be or UK Online when we get back.
I think that just leaves the council garden waste recycling scheme (although if we renew early it will cost us just the same as if we don’t renew until we get back), the TV licence (which I’m not paying if they won’t let me watch iPlayer abroad), oh, and finding a taxi to the airport which will somehow transport Emma but without us taking her car seat away with us!!
I’ve got the power
March 10th, 2008I picked up two new batteries for my Thinkpad this morning. The originals now barely last for an hour so it’s great to have over six hour’s battery life once again. If nothing else it means I won’t have to spend ages wandering around airports trying to find a seat somewhere in the vicinity of a power socket!
Renting and banking Norwegian style
March 6th, 2008On Monday I was taken to view a few properties around Oslo. Christine and I then spent hours trying to decide whether we should go for the seventh floor apartment in the city centre with views over the fjord or the low-rise apartment in the suburbs within walking distance of the woods. We knew that the latter was more “our cup of tea” but the question was whether we should be taking the opportunity to experience something difference whilst we had the chance. In the end we decided to go with the great outdoors and this morning I signed a contract on a two-bedroomed apartment overlooking the T-bane station at Slemdal (so we can still be in the city centre in under 15 minutes).
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UK international keyboard layout
March 5th, 2008The Norwegian alphabet has 29 characters and for the past couple of weeks I’ve been struggling to find a good way to type Æ, Ø and Ã… on my UK keyboard (particularly as my manager’s name is Jørgen and I think it only polite to spell it correctly!). It’s a laptop keyboard so no numeric keypad making character codes difficult to use and after a while you tire of using Character Map or cutting and pasting the whole time. Windows’ UK Extended keyboard layout unfortunately doesn’t stretch to these characters (apparently it was added in SP2 mainly to support Welsh). For a while I tried using the US International keyboard layout which gave me shortcuts for these characters but messed up other important characters like ” and @ so I had to keep swapping layout. John Sullivan’s UK International Keyboard Layout finally came to the rescue – a standard UK keyboard layout with sensible shortcuts for these characters and lots more besides.
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