Drove home via (or more accurately through) what looked like a really nasty accident tonight. It must have only just happened as the road was blocked and no Gardi were there yet. One car front was completely mangled. Looked like it had hit something head on. There was another car on the other side of the road further up and a mangled bike missing a wheel. Oddly the guy with a cycle helmet on was the only one who seemed with it enough to try and keep some traffic moving. So I've probably driven over all sorts of shrapnel. It's a bendy back road (often quicker than the dual carriageway home) between Stepaside and Enisskerry. What I think probably happened is that one of the cars was trying to overtake the bike on a dodgy corner and hit the other car head on and the bike got taken out in the fallout. No one seemed hurt though which was remarkable. I guess driving round those back roads, you can be as confident as you like on them but it only takes one idiot on the wrong side on a blind corner and you're in real trouble.

Had a slightly odd evening. The Bray band had been asked to play about 40mins at the Bray European Evening, which is an event out in the court yard in front of the theater and the council buildings, with stalls/stands from most European countries. It was being hosted by Bray Town Council and one of the local TDs (MPs for you non-Irish educated!). It was a fairly last minute booking for the band but the money was good so they agreed to do it. I already have too many other commitments but since it should have been over before SOS I said Id do it on the condition I had to leave at 7:30 regardless. So I get there at 6:30pm, when we've been shouted at to be there by, but feck all others turn up. At 6:45 when we were meant to start there was about 6 of us. But the event was running late, so no worries there. The previous act (a choir) finished at 7 so we started putting our stands on the stage but were told to get off as there were speaches. The Bray Town Council (I assume leader, something in Irish anyway) spoke for ages and wasn't a riviting public speaker. She shut up around 7:15 and then the TD stood up. At that point I gave up and left! I ended up going down to the car park to change as the Mermaid seemed quite full, so I'm hoping there isn't CCTV down there as I had to change t-shirt and trousers before quazar, hoping while doing so that loads of people didn't come into the carpark. They didn't but if there's a camera and my arse appears in the Bray People then oops! So all that for nothing! I assume the rest of them played at some point. At least enough of the band had turned up by then. It doesn't seem to matter how stroppy the commitee get, people still dont do what they're told!
So on to Quazar, both youth groups together. Turns out Bray Wonderers were at home so traffic was crap with all 5 of their fans queuing to park near the bowling alley. Anyway the older group (one I help with) played Quazar v the younger. Despite there being more of the younger, we completely inhialated them! Swapped a few about for the 2nd go but the score was as emphatic!

My PVR-heaven lasted all of a week or 2 and now the fecking HD has got corrupt. No idea how. So I'm going to sod that vista64 install on that disk and take it out. Less noise/heat (for all I'll notice) and just use the vista32 that's on the other disk. Might eventually stick 64 on it but cant be arsed at the mo. I'm very annoyed with it! Guess I could try and recover the nackered install, but also, cant be arsed. May as well just take that disk out.

I need to to buy a new car and Ford are being crap. The Irish government are going to reduce the vehicle registration tax on desiels in July and most manufacturers have lunched their new prices already but not a peep out of Ford. They assured me that the prices would be out by the end of the last month, well it's already the 7th and I've heard sod all. So do I buy one at todays prices or buy something else? I really dont want to waste any more money on the current car so I need to get on with it so I hope Ford get their act together!

I've been really bad at posting again... Since I last did post, I've managed to hit near PVR-utopia! I've managed to get it working pretty perfectly under Vista64, with the sat card picking up all the UK FTA channels and have also managed to work out how to pick up the Irish DTT signals for the 4 national channels. It's working almost perfectly at 720p50 including DVD playback with menu highlighting. I had to download a DVBscanner to get the Irish channels as it didn't pick them up on a normal scan. The telly found them so I knew it wasn't a signal issue. Turns out that the 3 rock transmitter is +166Khz out on channel 54. Must be a known thing as the DVBscanner included an option for scanning all channels +/- 166Khz. I then took the results, manually added the settings to GBVPR and bingo. So I have a dual Sat/DTT, 750GB web programable PVR with in theory 14 days EPG. I need to get Blu-ray playback working with the remote from within GBPVR and also 1080p50 sorted, but generally I am very pleased with how it's working now. Worth the upgrade!