Back in January 2024 I’d identified some things which we thought were going to change in 2024, and most have come to pass.
- Bedroom redecorated (which a bonus of fixing squeaky floorboards)
- Jafar the snake is doing nicely (his “birthday” is the 5th Jan)
- My car is now fully electric
- We’ve switched to Zen Internet (referral link) fibre-to-the-home broadband, which has been a fab experience
- Related to this, we’ve gone fully digital VOIP with our landline
- I got my Tattoo
- And I’ve started playing bass guitar (somewhat set back by putting a screwdriver through my finger the day after I bought it)
The real biggy for me was moving away from Virgin Media (they’ve been our Internet, phone, and TV provider since 2000, when it was NTL). I don’t buy into the fibre hype (coax cable, which is what Virgin ran from the cabinet to the router/modem, has plenty enough bandwidth) – but I’d got increasingly dissatisfied with the cost and the internet connectivity issues. Our monthly bill has gone from £59 for 125 MBps (asymmetric) broadband to £38 for 300 MBps symmetric (£32 for Zen, about £6 for VOIP). Not quite like for like, as Virgin included a set-top box, but not with any channels we watched. But in nearly a year we’ve had one short outage I think, but otherwise no degradation of service.
Didn’t manage to knock down our garage or build an extension. I also didn’t digitise any old negatives.
But did tick another thing off my bucket list, which was that we went on a Canal holiday which was also great.
This year? To be honest no big changes planned. We might sort out the garage, and we might start to think a bit more seriously about an extension.