Another weekend over, and most of those things I hoped to get done over the weekend still need doing. Where does all that time go to?

OK. Saturday was mostly taken up with the dentist, and then feeling sorry for myself afterwards, with Sky Sports in between (good results for West Ham and Crawley Town). Also, we were expecting guests in the evening so didn’t want to start anything – but they called in the afternoon cancelling.

Today was one of those days where the more you get done, the more seems to need doing. I finally mowed the lawn (it has been too wet since we moved back and finished the bulk of the decorating.) which took a while. Then I tidied up the patio – mostly filling black sacks with rubbish to go down to the tip, and tidied up the shed – more tip-fodder. Then I dried my tools… I had left the toolbox outside earlier in the week, and it let water in through the hinges for the handle. Just about the only jobs I got finished in the house were to stain the last bookshelf to match all the rest, and fit a conduit for all my TV cables. So I still need to finish my desk off and lay the laminate flooring in the hall, and replace the telephone cables which I accidentally cut through the other day.

That last job (the conduit) might sound trivial, but there are a dozen cables running along the wall in the space between the hi-fi and the TV! (speaker cables for the centre and front left speakers, power cable for the 4-way adaptor in the TV cabinet, satellite cable from the dish to the decoder, digital cable from the DVD to the amp, left & right audio from the TV to the amp, and now 6 audio cables from the DVD to the amp – for surround sound using the DVD player’s decoder. Necessary for playing DVD-Audio and SACD). That is one untidy mass of wires, but now all hidden inside a bloody great bit of trunking.

I tried out the 6 new surround cables on my only audio DVD and I have to say I was not very happy with the results. Even to my cloth ears it was badly distorted, but I don’t yet know what the problem is. It could be that the cables are a bit shoddy, or the decoder in the DVD player is faulty, or the disc is faulty. The cables seem OK as I played a normal DVD using the external decoder option on the amp and it sounded fine, so the best guess at the moment is that its either the disc itself or that the player has trouble decoding high bitrate stuff. I need to get another disc to try and diagnose it further I think.

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