Renton – definitely go and find your mortgage paperwork.

I came out of a fixed rate in December. I didn’t bother doing anything and just assumed I would revert to the standard variable rate. However I received a letter in the middle of December informing me my new rate would be 3.75% which was less than my fixed rate. Thinking the bank had made a mistake and would end up chasing me for money when the error was noticed, I phoned up and discovered my new rate was base rate plus 0.75%, and since the base rate at that point had dropped to 2% my new rate would be 2.75%. There is no lower limit on the rate and I am now at 1.75%. :D

So definitely check your motgage paperwork you MIGHT get a nice surprise and not need to change anything.

Download OpenOffice from here[/url] install and load the spreadsheet – this has allowed me to edit a password protected spreadsheet in the past.

REM only fit in this category if your knowledge of their releases starts at Automatic for the People. Prior to this there were 6 fantastic albums, and I don’t include Out of Time as this was where the downhill slide started. They managed to pull it back with Automatic but it’s been an inexorable slide album wise ever since.

Stereophonics – there’s a band who have never even come close to matching the songwriting on their first album. Word Gets Around is one of the few albums I still listen from start to finish, anything after that is utter carp.

The person with only 1 arm? Defo.

Really???? :?

I recently moved from Plusnet to Sky.

I changed as I got tired of Plusnet’s traffic shaping which slowed the speed to a crawl in the evenings and getting grief when the usage occasionally got to 12gigs in a month despite having a supposed 20gig limit.

The change to Sky was completely painless – I was given about 3 weeks notice after I gave them the migration number. The changeover occurred on the day they stated and I was without broadband for effectively no time at all as I was at work when it happened.

With Sky I have had no slowing of the service in the evening at all and I am very happy so far.

Be aware that all of Sky’s broadband packages are going to increase by £5 in the next year or so according to a letter I received in December.

MediaMonkey[/url] works well with Ipods and is great for organizing MP3 collections.

I’ve never managed to find a decent hotel in the vicinity of St George’s when I’ve been working there.

Best I’ve managed is the Holiday Inn Express opposite Collier’s Wood tube station. It’s within walking distance and the walk takes you past Moose Cycles (nearly bought a Commencal last time I was working there but managed to resist).

Only caught the last episode as my daughter wanted to watch it having seen the rest with her mother.

I already knew the story but it was, as others have said, still very sad at the end.

For those that missed it (eg me), at the end of the last episode it said it was to be repeated on BBC2 starting (I think) on the 22nd January.

Mi New yaers rosolution iz too lurn two spill butter.

iTunes may do on the fly conversion, I don’t use it myself as I find it slow and irritating. If it does format conversions at the same speed it does everything else then it could take an awful long time to fill a 60/120gb Ipod classic.

As for bitrate, I’m no technophile but I can definitely tell the difference between 128kbps and say 192kbps. 128kbps really does seem to lose an awful lot of quality and introduce artefact to an unacceptable level resulting in music only suitable for listening to through earphones from Poundland. And when converting between lossy formats you should not try and increase the bit rate as this really does make for a whole world of pain for your ears.

MediaMonkey is probably what you need. This will convert audio formats and keep tags and artwork correct. It can also be used to synchronise your wma files to your ipod and convert them on the fly – so you won’t have to convert them all manually and then add them to itunes. This would mean that you won’t be able/have to use itunes – to me this is an advantage.

The quality issue of converting from one lossy format to a different lossy format is another question entirely, and as househusband says, ideally you would rerip them.