I Am Seb

A week ago, in a bout of foolish zeal for getting back into shape, I purchased Wii Fit.

I thought at the time that I had a pretty good idea of what I was letting myself in for. It’s a games console, I told myself. How hard can it be?

As it turns out, the answer is very hard indeed.

Wii Fit features a very wide range of games and exercises, far more so than I exepcted. There are Yoga Exercises for posture, strength and balance, Muscle Exercises for strength, Aerobic Games for burning off the calories and building endurance, and Balance Games for balance and swearing loudly at the TV. With a dozen or more varying activities in each category, and several levels of difficulty for each, there’s an awful lot to keep both mind and body occupied.

I spent the first couple of days gently easing my way into the new regime with an hour or so on the aerobic and balance games, and after a shaky start started racking up decent scores on the easiest levels. The yoga and muscle exercises looked just a little too boring (and frankly, intimidating) for me to get into them until yesterday.

I assumed that the yoga and muscle exercises would not involve the Balance Board (the handy peripheral that makes Wii Fit possible in the first place). Again, I was proven wrong when I loaded up the first Deep Breathing exercise. Asked to stand as still as possible whilst maintaining an even breathing rhythm, I found myself swaying slightly with each breath, a little indicator of my centre of gravity weaving from side to side as I over-compensated trying to keep it within the target area.

I’d write more, but right now a skinny virtual woman is needs to kick my ass with some impossible yoga poses.

About 10 days ago we had our internet connection activated at Awesome Manor. It’s Be Internet’s (up to) 24Mb all-you-can eat buffet package.

Problems, naturally, began immediately. During the normal period of line testing that the ADSL2+ products use to determine the maximum stable rate of the line, we saw massive instability and fluctuating speeds from 12Mb down to 300kb. Not ideal for a house full of internet junkies.

As it turns out, BT has been screwing around with the Barnet exchange for the past week, which has stuffed up our MSR testing well and good. It looks like Be have settled on 12Mb/1.3Mb for our line now, which at under 1km from the exchange is just not good enough.

Rather worse, however, is the quality of wiring in Awesome Manor. Judging from the amount of work I’ve just done to minimise noise on the lines (pulling the bell wire from all extension sockets, and stripping and rewiring the master) I’d guess that most of the wiring is older than I am.

After much work, and much swearing, I’ve managed to reduce line attenuation (signal loss due to the crappy quality of wiring) by more than 50%. This seems to have stabilised the line, and is a good start for improved line speed when the MSR tests finish later this week.

The worst thing is, I’m about as technical as you get. I dread to think what normal people go through in this kind of situation. I can only assume that if they reach breaking point they would fork out a few hundred quid for a BT engineer to come and rewire their house, which seems like a fairly expensive way to solve a problem that can be fixed with a screwdriver and a pair of pliers.