philmophlegm | Bleurghhh and adventures in home cinema

I've been ill (and off work) since Monday night. (Please, no hugs.) As Tuesday should have been my first day back at JOLF after a two week break (which itself was only two days after a week and a half holiday), I am expecting to fend off the odd semi-snide remark when I finally do return to work hopefully sometime next week.

I blame Denon's technical writers for my illness.

I'd been fine all day Monday and the previous fortnight of holiday. Did some Clare Associates work Monday morning and then went into Plymouth in the afternoon to buy a new 'A/V receiver' (or 'amp' to you and me). A Denon AVR-1910 to be precise, with lots of HDMI-in sockets so that we can plug all our video and audio sources into the amp and it will then upscale to glorious 1080p to match the new telly (a Pioneer Kuro 5090 plasma).

An 'A/V receiver' is a complicated piece of kit and a good manual is vital. Denon has something of a reputation for not writing coherent, intelligible manuals. The AVR-1910 is no exception. Adding to the pain is an onscreen display that eschews the comfortable and colourful GUI-ness of most modern high-end A/V products in favour of one that wouldn't have looked high-tech on a ZX-81. Seriously. The experience apparently made me so ill that I couldn't get out of bed (except when I had to which was rather more often than I would have wanted to have to) for two whole days.

I gave it another go yesterday, still feeling rather less than, well, 50% actually. Got some things going and had everything physically wired up correctly but wasn't in the right frame of minds to approach things methodically when it came to 'assigning inputs' and the like. So I persuaded Bunn to come at it from a fresh perspective, and although seemingly doing exactly what I had been doing, she slowly and methodically got both video and audio from each of our four sources (Sky, XBox360, Wii, DVD player). Hooray.

Today someone from a local aerial company is coming over to quote us for a new roof aerial etc so that we can take advantage of the built-in freeview tuner and to upgrade us to Sky HD.