Forgive me if this site seems neglected for a few days. It feels like I'm juggling a lot of balls at the moment and I need some time to get things in order. Dad's downstairs beavering away on the shelves and I'm having a break from being his gopher to get some "work" done.

The girls break up today for two weeks of school holidays. Tomorrow I've got a wedding in Kent of all places! Tuesday is my deadline for having the room with the shelves in it finished, ready for Karen having work-mates round. While all this is going on I need to earn a living as well and have a few deadlines to reach next week. Next weekend is a four-dayer where tradition has it we need to go away somewhere. I must remember to start appreciating those rare times when I having nothing pressing to do.

What I really don't need in the middle of all this is a soundcard that is not quite as plug-n-play as they'd have you believe.

There's only so many times you can turn down a Skype conversation with a potential client because you don't have sound on your PC. How professional does that look?! So, this week I downloaded Skype and ordered one of these and some of these. Not only that, but my ISP are doubling my connection speed to 1GB (for free!), so I can hopefully expect decent results from VoIP to customers with equally large connections.

I chose Creative's SoundBlaster as I expected their stuff to work without too much hassle. It doesn't work at all. Their diagnostics software says it does though. I've done all the usual uninstalling/rebooting, there's no IRQ conflicts and nothing is obviously wrong. My only option now is to call their Support line. Problem - the whole of Europe is expected to call Ireland (which, by the way, is an international call from the UK). Now, calling any support line is a pain and takes forever, but when it's international rates! I don't think I'll be calling them in a rush. Unless I had Skype of course. Which I don't, for the obvious reasons. Anyway, what would I do if they ask me to reboot?

I used to enjoy frigging about with hardware and BIOS settings to get things working. That's when I've got the time and patience though. Right now I don't and so it looks like it's going to have to go back.