Heart attack

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Eye-Test and Sky Upgrade

Last Friday I had my eyes tested. I haven't had an eye test for quite a while. You're recommended to have this done every two years at the most. It is well over two years. When Carol and I went into the Milton Keynes Central Shopping Centre a few weeks ago we managed to go into the Boot's opticians and booked both of us for eye tests. Carol's is this Friday, after work. I don't mind having my eyes tested, but the only bit I don't like is when they more or less clamp your head into this machine and you have to look at a small green dot of light and then they shoot a jet of air onto your eyeball. It has something to do with detecting pressure of your eyeball which will show up any deficiencies or other. I'm not sure what. But just as the jet of air strikes it's a natural thing to blink and it took several attempts to get the test done. Really don't like it. Probably not as bad as giving blood, but it has to be done. Then, when you go into the main testing room you do a test which shows how good your peripheral  sight is. You have to look directly at a red dot and then they turn on and off white blobs of light and you have to press a button when the lights come on. I passed this with no problems. Anyway, it turns out that my distance vision has improved and officially I shouldn't need to wear glasses to drive. I'm somewhat amazed as I would have expected my sight to have deteriorated as I get older, but apparently not. My left eyes require lenses to adjust my sight for close reading. So, not as bad as expected. I will have to wait until next month to have new glasses made up and I'm having varifocal lenses made so I can see distance and close-up with one pair of glasses. They will cost in the region of £250.

Yesterday we had our Sky television package upgraded to what is called Sky Q. It comes with the latest Sky box, recorder and broadband router, and we also have a television in our bedroom. I bought a small HD television in Sainsbury's the other week and the whole system includes a mini Sky box so you can have all the Sky channels on two sets. A vast improvement on the old Sky+ box and superior picture quality. We had considered putting the set which is in the lounge upstairs and getting a slightly wider screen set to go in the lounge, but on going to look at sets we decided that a bigger set wasn't really required. If it's too big it would just dominate what is a fairly small lounge. Which is why we went for the 20 inch set for the bedroom and left the original 32-inch set where it has always been in the lounge.

A few years ago we decided we wanted to improve our television system. When we moved to this house, which must be around 5-6 years ago, we had Freeview, which comes through a conventional television ariel. We didn't have access to a decent outdoor ariel, so we had to make do with a rather inefficient indoor ariel which sat on top of the television.  The quality of the television picture was not very good as a result.  So, around three years ago, we decided to look at having a new television provider. We imagined we could choose between perhaps two, for example, Virgin and Sky. It turned out that we couldn't have Virgin because that comes through cable and apparently Milton Keynes doesn't have the cable infrastructure. Quite a surprise when you consider that Milton Keynes is such a modern city, no more than 50 years old. I would have imagined that there would have been a cable system in place when the city was built originally, but apparently not. So we had no choice but to get a Sky multichannel package. We also wanted to change our broadband internet  provider, having been TalkTalk customers and not finding them a very good company. Which is why we had Sky providing television, broadband as well as our landline telephone service.

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