Busy busy busy.

• The sofa is being delivered tomorrow! This is great news, except that I may be sitting in an empty flat all day as they could only say ’sometime between 0900 and 1800′. I’ll load up the car with as much as I can, make a start on building whatever furniture I can carry and give the place a good clean. I don’t want to start painting without somebody else around, as I haven’t done any before. Must remember to take a radio, kettle, food, £50 in cash for the delivery driver(!)
• I phoned BT at 1800 yesterday, and the phone line was enabled at 0600 this morning. The number showed up in broadband compatability databases at the same time. This is worryingly efficient for BT…I’m waiting for that to fall apart somehow.
• I’ve signed up with Metronet for broadband. Their 1mb service is £19.99 monthly with a 45gb limit, and they have extremely good ratings from the folks at adslguide.org.uk. I was considering Virgin, Newnet and Freedom2Surf, but discovered that podcasts alone have amounted to 5gb over the past couple of weeks, which puts me over their bandwidth limits. I could ditch the podcasts, but when my phone line doesn’t support 2mb¹ there’s little point paying for a 2mb service when 1mb would do fine, and I can get the higher cap. Should I go over 45gb, I’ll be charged per mb up to a maximum of just under £30, although I plan for this never to happen! Metronet are also nicely geeky, and contribute to the forums regularly.
• Just to make things even more complex, I’ve opened a new bank account at Smile. They operate entirely online, and you pay cheques in via mail or at the post office. This should be much easier to manage than my current HSBC account, the online features of which are a little lacklustre. The interest rate is 3.3%, which while not the highest on the market is far more than the 0.000000004% at HSBC². There’s also the added attraction of parent company The Co-op’s ethical policy. For example, they won’t invest in any business or government “which fails to uphold basic human rights within its sphere of influence”, or anything to do with the tobacco industry. I think they’re too paranoid about genetically modified foods, but I find everything else entirely reasonable.

Tomorrow evening is my dance group’s christmas party, then on Friday I need to pack up everything I own. Painting and moving will hopefully take place on Saturday and Sunday. I plan to sleep for all of next week…

Although busy, this isn’t too stressful. I can’t imagine fitting all of this around a full-time job and one day to move completely!

1. too far from the exchange anyway [↩]
2. this may be a slight exaggeration [↩]