I had come across the title before, while actually searching for material by the Pussycat Dolls. Yet, I decided against downloading the song then. It was strange how the artist did not click with me then, as it does now. When it comes to music, generally speaking it is rare for me to like the debut single by any artist, particularly if their debut is a cover version. (Ne yo and Carmen Reece are exceptions to the rule). I was never a big fan of Don’t Cha, it just was not my cup of tea but nevertheless radio friendly. Plus, being a UK number one, is included in my world famous mp3 collection. Of course, late 2005, they had released their second single, StickWitU which was amazing, so different to their debut release. A soft gentle ballad which does pull at the heart strings. However, let me get back on track, a remix of the single was released featuring the soulful lyrics of Avant. There was just sign of things to come, but there would be a long wait. I was watching music television, as I tend to do on Monday evening and noticed the video playing. Instantly, within a few seconds I knew I would like this song. Call it intuition, if you will. A few hours later I had not only obtained the mp3 but also the album, Director by Avant. There is something about well polished production on a smooth RnB track that really needs to be heard to be fully appreciated. The vocal remains the most important element against a moving and emotive melody. While I like a range of music from different genres and decades, this song perhaps comes closest to being the song that could be described as my perfect companion. Lie About Us could even refer to a difficult period in my life, little over five years ago. USB has become the de facto standard for all computer peripherals and accessories. Consider in more recently times the inventive usb powered air conditioning unit and usb slippers among others over at Me, My Coke & I or Off Beat USB Gadgets. So you can imagine that it was only a matter of time before someone came up with the idea of rechargeable batteries that charge on USB. Quite a simple idea when you think about it, but only recently bought to us by Moixa. The Guardian Technology blog offers a better insight including images of the only size available currently, AA. Although there are plans for all types of standard cell, plus digital camera and mobile phone batteries. Great idea, but how long will they last and will they be any good and how long will the recharge live expectancy be? The UK company behind the batteries are also looking at other ways we should power the 21st century in a sustainable and cost effective fashion. Amazon are efficient, even when it comes to their super saver free delivery service. I placed an order on Wednesday, hoping over optimistically for delivery by the weekend but instead was informed that the item would be dispatched on Saturday for delivery between Tuesday and Thursday of the next week. I knew the item would arrive on Tuesday. Perfectly in time for me to tune over to ITV4 for Champions League football. However, would I get it working?

After ripping opening the stupid plastic packaging they tend to put these devices into, I sacrificed Hollyoaks to take the aerial cable out of my current Hauppauge PCI card and insert the USB extension lead in the back of my unit, push everything back in place, reboot and wonder how long it would take me to get it all sorted? Particularly as kick off was under an hour away. Inserting the CD, I installed the software, plugged in the usb stick and magic. It all worked. Well sort of. First of the the Arc Soft Total Media software, which is basically a poor man’s Microsoft Media Centre clone, detected and attempted to scan using my PCI card. I switched it over to my DVB-T device and sure enough it started scanning and picked up 53 channels in no time. The time was 19:04, as I noted it down on my blog. However of those 53 channels, three were BBC interactive channels and useless (no red button feature I am afraid) another three were locked pay to view channels, courtesy of Top Up Television and the remainder the DAB radio stations. However there was one problem. One major problem that kept me hunting around for an answer all night and as I write this I still have not found an adequate workable solution. You would think that after picking up these channels I would be free to edit and rearrange them as I please. No sir. Instead all I could do was rename the channel which was pointless as most were labeled correctly. So I had ITV1 on channel 1, ITV2 on channel 2 and so on with BBC One on channel 8. So I began my search across the web to download, install and configure an alternative program, or PVR. All hunts begin at the door of Google the mecca of all search engines. It took me in the direction of Digital Spy forums, a fantastic resource but their focus generally has been programming gossip rather than technical knowledge. (As I can recall reading up about The X Factor during the live shows last year going on to create an account in late December. The forum was an 18 page mega piece thread on the trials and tribulations of just installing the device, requesting BDA drivers and problems with alternative PVR software. In the end I had to drop a post on the end. Reading almost every page and taking every word as gospel, I used this as my basis for my extended search. This was not the ideal time to be trying to find and install software while Arsenal were playing FC Porta in the Champions League but I had little option. First stop was Media Portal, an impressive site, good support and constant updates made this a possible contender but it fell down after the installation. It would not detect the device. I knew by now that I had the correct BDA drivers installed, after downloading them from the Freecom web site and discovering that Total Media would not work without them, so I was making some sort of progress. Next came GB-PVR but it was far too difficult to set up, even with my mediocre knowledge. I spent several minutes trying to get it working but once again it would not detect the card, even though it was clearly listed in various INI files. Uninstall. I perhaps was not giving any of these home brew software installations the time and space to actually work but I was eager to get something up and running last night. Next up to try their chances was ProgDVB but once again unable to detect my device. I was at this point giving up home and it was starting to get late. I had already taken the advice in the thread and completely uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers for usb stick but to no avail when it came to other pieces of software. It was at this point I discovered a blog entry from over seven months ago. Reading this post and some of the comments, I regained some enthusiasm to get something done and in a last ditch effort, (for the evening) I tried to find a copy of DVB Viewer. After several minutes of searching, I found a link to download the software but as part of a driver installation CD, so had to wait for the 20mb file to download but as the server was located somewhere on the outer side of Mongolia, it took an age for the file to come down. Frustrating when all I needed was a three megabyte executable. Once again no luck, although it did actually get as far as detecting a single. However to update the program ini files you have to download another piece of software but that would not let me save the updated files in the program directory so I gave up a defeated man. This afternoon in my lunch hour I did some further research and downloaded a few other PVR solutions. There was Yahoo! Go TV (but unfortunately it is US only), K!TV and finally Got All Media. I had the most success with the later. It picked up the USB device and actually scanned channels but the front end is slow, which is a pain even on my rather fast machine. However there are others out there that I have not tried or read much about. ChrisTV, SageTV and SnapStream Beyond TV. Hussein was on MSN last night. I was tempted to ask him for some advice but I knew what he would have said. MythTV. Well he would do wouldn’t he.