No, no, don't all rush to argue with me on this point: my resolve is steadfast. No longer am I prepared to stand idly by while the world fails to notice my greatness (in being stupid, that is).

Y'see, I've just worked out why my Media Center (made from old PC parts, empty toilet rolls and requiring occasional servicing with a large hammer...) was saying there's no TV guide information available after I rebuilt it last night following the power supply blowing up - quite spectacularly - almost two months ago to the day.

Of course, four hours of Googling took place between my noticing the problem and my having fixed it, just a few minutes ago (and if you spot the posting time, Steve, this will be why I'm not going to be in work this morning... ;o). I even went for a drive to try and clear my head because this problem was bugging me so much that I couldn't sleep.

Normally, Windows Media Center is pretty much trouble-free. It's kinda like Sky+ or TiVo in that you can record TV shows, a whole series of shows, etc,with just a couple of clicks on the funky back-lit Microsoft remote.

In fact, it was such an integral part of my life (such was my incurable need to catch up on re-runs of The Bill on UKTV Gold... Why are you staring at me??) that my sleep patterns were - possible irreparably - damaged when it blew up last October, forcing me to crawl out of bed at 9am regardless of how much - or (more commonly) - how little sleep I'd enjoyed.

So, having finally got round to picking up a Shiny New Case™ for it from Novatech yesterday (I love those guys... Sometimes...), I rushed home full of joyous abandon... Ok, I wandered home via. Pizza Hut - and revived my televisual crutch back into life.

I hope this explanation means you can understand my absolute frustration when I realised it wasn't showing any TV listings at all - channel after channel said "No program guide available" and, although I could watch and record TV fine, I couldn't schedule anything because I didn't know what was on.

Anyhoo, as I mentioned, 4 hours of Googling followed by a sprint up the motorway (which, err, might also have been to test out my new TomTom... No wonder I'm always broke and surrounded by electricity bills which would make Blackpool's Illuminations department envious) didn't provide any answers, so I decided to take a look in the error logs.

"That's odd" quoth I, munching a pink & sprinkled doughnut and slurping on a cup of unhealthily sweet tea. "That date's in the wrong format - it should be 01/09/2007 and it says 09/01/2007." To cut this increasingly long-winded, but painfully boring, story short, it turned out I'd mistaken Americanese date formats for English and set the date on the Media Center to September 1st 2007 (01/09/07) instead of today's date (09/01/07). Result? Media Center was trying to download TV listings for 9 months' time. Since they haven't even been written yet, guess what? No listings found... Duh...

Common sense: 0, Idiocy: 1. So I guess that means that I win then! 

(Geeky moment) Comms manager Mike Cooter's shiny new 19" widescreen monitor arrived yesterday. On enquiring whether it was any better than his old 17", he darkly muttered something about "fuzzy pixels" and poor picture quality.

... Turns out he'd spent several hours thinking his new screen was fit only for the bin because he'd been running it at the wrong resolution.

(PEBKAC: "Problem exists between keyboard and chair" - Wikipedia)