I have an urge to buy a large hard drive (that's the first time I've ever called it a hard drive -- up 'til now it's always been a hard disk) and rip all my CDs onto it. Why? What good would that do me? None. I have no computer where I want to listen to music, and I probably won't. Mightn't. May. I don't know.

We have three main rooms in this house. One has a decent amp/CD/speakers set up that plays music just fine. One houses the TV and there's a DVD player that can play CDs but the lack of a decent set of speakers makes it intolerable. The third room isn't ready yet, but when it is, it will probably house this PC and could therefore conceivably use it to provide music (and DVD viewing too -- but we'll get to the telly in a minute).

The high tech solution would be to have a central server containing ~6000 songs with an amp/speaker/mp3 player combo wherever music was required. The old communist style solution would be to have a central stereo system and remote speakers, but that means that 1. everyone listens to the same thing and 2. the speaker wiring becomes a problem (because they'd end up in parallel or series and isolation becomes an issue and so on).

Then there's telly. We have an aerial on the roof and we get nine terrestrial channels in varying degrees of watchability (and languages - English, Irish and Welsh). Access to this is available in one end of the house and the two remaining rooms are at the other end of the house with two or three two foot walls between them. Then there's the bedrooms. Anna's is near the existing access point and could probably be accommodated easily enough, but ours is (again) at the other end of the building. Add to this Sally's mum who is in another building, but who could probably tap in to the existing system easier than we could.

I hate coaxial cable. I can never get it to work right, despite years of trying. I have on numerous occasions tried to improve our reception by fiddling with the cables but I have always considered myself lucky if I've ended up back where I started. When one sees the degradation in picture quality caused just by introducing the video recorder, one is wary of introducing splitters and extra lengths of cable and so on. Leaving aside the issue of cabling to the other end of the house. The children still use VHS (which I approve of as it's cheaper and more robust) so we need a VCR, but they also use DVD, so we have to choose the location of the DVD player carefully.

And lastly there's the phone line which provides internet access too. Currently this is in the guest room (which doubles as my work area as it allows a certain amount of isolation from daily life) but ultimately I want it to follow the PC into the as-yet-unfinished room. Wireless is the obvious answer for the computer and to some extent the phone too. But that feels wrong somehow. We currently use ISDN for a few reasons. It was cheaper than getting a second phone line. Using single channel gives me a fast connecting, guaranteed 64k line as opposed to the one-minute-to connect might get 43k on a good day that I was getting. Oh, and we can't get any band that is broader.

Anyway. I foresee lots of heartache and expense in the future (leaving aside all other areas of my existence that might contribute to heartache and a shrinking bank balance, like say, a new baby). I will however attempt to be organised and rational about all this.

T'was all simpler when you could just twiddle the rabbit ears and sit in the hall on the Bakelite rotary phone. Rotary phone! We have one, and before I disconnected it, I wondered how anyone got anything done in those days. It took ages just to dial the bloody number. Mind you, you couldn't beat the old Bakelite rotary phone as a blunt instrument. Try bludgeoning anyone to death with a Nokia 6610 and see where that gets you.