I’ve just wasted something like 3 hours playing Halo on the Xbox! I went over to see Mum earlier today and fixed her washing line for her and we watched a video. Dad had gone to Chateauroux with my uncle to get fencing to stop Barney getting out and flirting with the filthy bitches who live next door. At this point I feel I must point out that Barney and the bitches are canines!

We finised hanging/painting the gates today, and did some cleaning and rearranging. The pink bedroom looks much better now – not so bare (with the single bed gone, it looked empty!) Dad finished the coving in my bedroom and I got some more stuff up in the loft and fixed the light downstairs. We didn’t manage to get hold of any wood to make the doorframe. Kev’s kacking himself a bit about the terror alerts at the UK airports this morning, I’m going to phone him tomorrow night.

I ran a huge bit of CAT5 from the upstairs window through the backdoor downstairs to the Xbox so I could back it up. I also installed my modified dvd2xbox 0.7.6 and removed some crud. I tried out XBMC, it’s quite good as a music/video/picture player, although not as pluggable as MythTV, but much easier to get setup of course. I’ve got quite into Halo and gone off Burnout3 a bit.

Got up early this morning to go to Argenton to get my replacement router. It is now working, including the wireless. The configuration is a bit oldschool – you have to go to the Free website to configure NAT/WiFi on the router as the router doesn’t have it’s own web interface, or DNS server for that matter. The portable phones that Pip gave me are plugged in and working, as is the blue phone that M&D gave me on the France Telecom line downstairs.

I’ve installed dvd2xbox v0.76 after compiling it and using the ACL etc. files from v0.74, just using it to copy Ice Age 2 from DVD+R to the hard disk. When the other 80Gb drive arrives I might try my hand at using the installer disc v3 to install a new dashboard, emulators etc. on it. I got XBMC installed already.