Last Friday, on the 12th of December, I had Sky HD installed in my bedroom. I had actually booked it over a month before - Sky had an offer in October for a £75 Sky HD box with free installation (if you’re doing multiroom, otherwise £30 installation), so I decided to go for it and get it installed. Obviously they’re busy, as they didn’t have a single day available for installation during November.
I previously had ghetto-Sky HD installed in my bedroom using a Firewire based DVB-S2 tuner, however since my MacBook has no Firewire, I sold it, and decided to get the cheap Sky HD box. Anyway, a technician arrived on Friday (and, I will add, he looked suspicously like Hamish Blake, which was weird), and got to work. First of all, he drilled a hole in the wall downsairs, next to the master phone jack, and installed a wire going outside, up the wall, and into my bedroom. For those who don’t know - the phone line is used for ordering pay-per-view programs on Sky, as well as to make sure you’re not giving the box to a friend to use. If you take out a multiroom subscription, you’re essentially getting a second box for only £10 more a month. Presuming you have two HD boxes, Sky don’t want you giving that second box to a friend so you can both have the full Sky package for a total of £77 per month - because if you EACH take out Sky, it’s a total of £114 a month (for two HD boxes with all programming).
Of course, there are a few ways you could get around this. If you’re sharing it with your neighbour, you could simply give them the box, and run the telephone wire from your house into the box. Unless Sky actually came and checked, they wouldn’t know any different, however if they did find out, I can imagine you’d get your service cut off or you’d be fined, so…don’t try it.
Anyway, back to my box. The installer guy then removed the old satellite cable to my bedroom, which I had had installed last year for my ghetto-Sky-HD solution, but it was only a single feed, so he replaced it with a dual-feed cable. He also replaced the LNB (the thing on the end of the stick attatched to the dish), as it was looking a little worse for wear from the sun. I also suspect he did it because when he pulled the cover off to access the jacks on the LNB itself, the cover itself snapped in half because it was so brittle from the sun. Anyway, he came back inside, did a few tricks on the box, and within about half an hour, it was up and running with Sky HD!
It’s pretty much the same thing that we’ve had downstairs for the past year, so I’m not going to go into any detail, but I must say that the box itself is nice and quiet - it’s an “Amstrad” branded box, whereas the one we have downstairs is a Thomson box which I purchased off eBay last year. The one downstairs is okay, but it crashes sometimes (I generally have to do a hard-reset about once a month), and the fan inside it basically never stops, and hasn’t stopped since I upgraded the HDD inside it with a 500GB drive last year. 
It’s also quite a noisy fan, so you notice it when you’re watching TV, even with the volume turned up a bit. I’m tempted to butcher the box a bit to fit my own quieter fan, but I’m not sure if that’s a good idea, because I’m not sure if the box would work with the fans unplugged. If you unplug the CPU fan header on a PC, it complains, and I can imagine the Sky HD box would do the same.
I’m not that fussed overall about it though, as you do get used to it after a while. However, I’m very pleased at how quiet this new box is, as it’s in my bedroom and I like to sleep in a *quiet* place. 
Anyway, that’s all up and running and I’m very happy with it so far, and I’m even happier at the fact that Sky switched MTVN HD on yesterday, so there’s FINALLY some good quality HD music showing. Well, there’s not that much at the moment but I’m sure it will get better after a while. I wish all the channels would go HD, even if they’re just showing SD material - the difference between the SD music channels and SD content shown on MTVN HD is amazing, since they absolutly kill the bitrate on SD channels, sadly. You can especially see it if you switch between Channel 4, and Channel 4 HD, during the 7pm news. The HD channel looks loads better, despite it still being SD.
In other news, I finally upgraded to WordPress 2.7 on here and several other places that I manage (with a little help from kudos, because I always break something). Also, I’m going to London for a couple of days from Saturday, to see the Stereophonics live at The O2. As usual when I go to London, I’ll most likely have both my iPhone and laptop with me, so I’ll still be reachable. Just maybe a bit slower at replying. 
In preperation of the trip I also decided to pick up a cheap laptop slip-case-thing for my MacBook, as I don’t really have anything else that’s good for transporting it in, other then a messenger back which is 1) designed for 15″ laptops, and 2) missing.
Anyway, this post is too long, so that’s it for now.
It's Not About You by Scouting for Girls