6 February 2025 (Thursday) - Full Fibre

Despite a rather vivid dream in which Bailey announced that she was no longer a dog and from now on was identifying as an arctic fox I slept rather well. “er indoors ^TM” ‘s alarm woke me immediately following a dream in which I had been told that the answer to today’s wordle was “smear”. What was that all about?

 

I made my toast and had my usual look at the Internet. It was still there. There was a surprising amount of grief being expressed about Brian Murphy who died yesterday. He was famous for being George Roper in “Man About the House”; a rather lame comedy from fifty years ago. He was in his nineties. This morning I read poems written about him and lamentations about his passing. The chap was ninety-two. That’s not bad, is it?

I Munzed, I found that not only was “smear” not the answer to today’s wordle but not a single one of its letters were in the word, which was actually “pupil”.

 

I took the dogs up to the woods. We set off driving through a glorious morning, but the woods are on much higher ground and as we got closer so the fog got thicker. I often wonder if it is fog or low cloud, but when we arrived visibility was less than fifty yards.

We met quite a few people in the woods today. Dogs on twenty-metre leads seemed to be popular today. I can understand having a dog on an epically long lead might be needed if there are recall issues, but an epically long lead is an ideal thing to get tangled round the trees. And we met one very nervous dog… or (to be precise) a dog whose owner told us he was nervous. The dog seemed fine. I suggested they came to Dog Club to socialize; she seemed quite keen on the idea.

As we walked so the fog/cloud lifted. We did one of our usual circuits which my watch told me was a shade over three and a half miles. It was just under four miles when we walked the same route earlier in the week.

It was only a shame that Bailey tried to eat a dead bird.

 

We came home and for once didn’t need baths. I made a cuppa, wrote up some CPD, and offered to help tidy up. The nice man from Openreach was coming to upgrade the broadband and needed to get to the front wall to drill a hole. “er indoors ^TM” said I wasn’t to help tidy up; it was a job she could do better on her own. She probably had a point.

It has to be said that upgrading the broadband wasn’t my idea. The nice man at Sky suggested it when the broadband went down just after Christmas. I got the impression that it was some sort of a bung to keep me sweet because the internet had been down for three days. But he also gave me two months’ supposedly free Sky Sports and I’ve just been told that from next month I’ll be charged for Sky Sports. Not that I ever wanted the sport channels. I’ve now cancelled them.

 

The nice man from Openreach arrived, fiddled about and after an hour and a half he went leaving us a nice new white router box thingy. He left the old one as well and said it would probably work for another hour or so. I plumbed my lap-top and mobile into the new network thingy.

I cracked on writing cache pages for my new load of geocaches in Kings Wood. After three hours I had a first draft for about a quarter of them. And then the Alexa stopped playing music. The old broadband had been turned off and we had to plumb it into the new. There was a minor issue in that Alexa wouldn’t accept the new network without “er indoors ^TM” telling it that all was fine. How many other devices want your password when connecting to a new network?

Connecting the telly was simple enough, but connecting the SkyQ box was hard work. We’re now running everything on Full Fibre. Go us!!

I’ve done a before and after speed check. The upload isn’t much faster, but the download is thirty per cent quicker. I suppose that must be a good thing, but I never had an issue with the old broadband.

I wonder how long it will be before Full Fibre is old hat and the next new thing is being foisted on us?