Snow heating until next week?!

It's not been the best of weeks. Admittedly, last Monday was quite fun with the snow madness though with today's technology I worked at home without any excuse and had my boss keeping me busy. Lunchtime was a strong dose of making snowmen and playing snowballs. We even tried towing each other with our tin drinks tray as a sledge but failed.

Brighton had been well and truly caught out with buses and trains canceled and the university campus completely shut. By Tuesday, most main route buses were working. This didn't stop some of my work colleagues having more excuses on not coming in - 'it's too icy' doesn't cut it for me. I was rewarded with a very quiet office.

Although the snow had gone, the icy winds and cold rain made the week without heating a living hell. It started with an electrical burning smell then a loud pop from the boiler on Tuesday night. Wednesday, the boiler repairman came but left saying three parts were needed. By the weekend they reported that parts wouldn't be available until next Tuesday (tomorrow). Without the electric fan heaters given we're dealing with temperatures down to 10 degrees C in the house.

My Stanton Da Scratch finally arrived and was promptly set up. It wasn't the simple plug 'n' play experience I was expecting after downloading the midi driver and Virtual DJ driver as I was still unable to use it. A search through Stanton's tech help web pages and I came across a similar scenario mentioning a usb web cam problem. It meant deleted part of a reg code but I went and deleting a couple of wrong files and codes resulting in the screen not working when Windows kicks in. Thanks to Paul I was able to reset back to the last settings and delete the right codes. The only problem now is that the sound card I have doesn't want to work properly which ruined the whole experience. I was hoping to use it on Saturday at Paul's impromptu party with Ibiza mate, Nick. But the Virtual Vinyl didn't even work so couldn't make any DJ contribution. Until I buy another sound card I can't really review it.

To escape the cold house we treated ourselves to a couple of decent Japanese meals out. Wagamama does the best chicken katsu curry and, with the rescheduled Norfolk trip, we brought forward our Valentine's meal to Saturday with a visit to Oki-nami, paid for by Kerry's work!