Ian

I escaped from a death camp, from the Guardian four years ago. Somewhere between 780,000 and a million people were sent there: virtually all were murdered within hours. Less than fifty survived the war.

Presumably some returns from various shops arrived in the central warehouse, because there are currently rather more games there than there had been.

Stocks are not huge (one I got yesterday is not there this morning), so treat this as your last chance...

Am I the only one who thinks the reason that everyone in the much-shown Kindle ad is on the first page of the first chapter (of the same book, too) is that in a few annoying black flashing 'page turns', they will chuck the things in a drawer?

It turns out that it was in the Guardian's Let's move to.. series last month.

Alas comments on that page are closed, otherwise I would be saying, yes, it was a surprise how good it is. We did get somewhere just off London Road (the old A1 - fortunately, the bypass dates back to the 1960s). It would be interesting to know why the schools were listed in the order they chose..

More coverage in Scrapheap Orchestra on BBC (on iPlayer until at least Sunday) with the violin-making school featured. The charity shop someone else got the cutlery from is here too.

Lunchtime, actually, but today one of the lights in the cooker hood died. In the process of doing so, it clearly blew a fuse somewhere.

Ah, the extractor fan isn't working now, so it must be something out of just the lighting circuit.

Is it the switch on the side nearby? Hmm, let's swap the fuse. Nope, it doesn't work with a known good fuse. (It turns out that that switch does the fridge some distance away on the other side of the hob. Yeah, that makes sense...)

Is it something on the main fuse box under the stairs? Nope, they're all good.

Some time later, I look up and go ah ha! There's one up by the hood.

It probably is it, and it's the one which the person who built the hood half covered with one of the sides of the hood... including covering the fuse bit to an extent that you can't open it.

Longer comments about both 'soon', but I recommend both Castor and Pollux and Eugene Onegin at ENO.

You can now do the former for a tenner: £10 upper or dress circle tickets and £20 stalls tickets for performances on Sat 19 Nov, Thur 24 Nov and Thur 1 Dec 2011. Pick the seats you want on eno.org, and enter the code CASTOROFFER at the checkout. There's a £1.55 booking fee per transaction, but you can book multiple seats in one go. An optional donation of £3.50 will be automatically added - untick the box to opt out.

It's in English, modern dress, simple set, beautifully sung. It includes naked people :) but is not necessarily the best intro to opera if you've never seen one / only seen say Gilbert and Sullivan.

The latter may be available at the tkts booth in Leicester Square on the day: typically £25 for dress circle or stalls. If not, you can do day seats for £19. If you like musicals with plots, you'll like this one: Tchaikovsky can do great themes and there is some wonderful singing. About my only complaint is that they could hold off dropping the curtain at the end of each scene.

My Dear friend,

This is confidential and I must not in any way go into full details about what brought us together in the past, but I want to use this opportunity to thank you for your Kind assistance when you participated and assisted me to move and claim funds through a business proposal I sent to you some time ago. I contacted you via the internet about some certain money which I wanted you to assist me claim.

I am so sorry also that after you have endured with me and spent a lot of money to make this deal successful, I misled you in the last minute and then I used someone else to divert the funds..

I am also sorry because I decided to change the account details and I used another account to claim this money without your knowledge. I am also sorry for the difficulties and frustrations you have been facing sending money to different people to assist you get your claims without success. I am sorry I did not give to you your 30% share as agreed even when I concluded the business successfully without your knowledge.

I am now based somewhere in the Pacific’s (sic) enjoying my new found status as a wealthy millionaire and then suddenly I remembered that I may have wrecked your life financially when I fell sick.

Recently I started having spiritual troubles and I wake up at night screaming after some people in my dream attempted to kill me, this has happened many times and now a Psychic told me that someone I cheated some time ago is facing financial difficulties as a result of what I did to him financial and until I compensate you, the end will be near for me.

I FEAR this bad faith befalling me for the miseries I have caused to your life. I have decided to compensate you with the sum of $500,000.00 so that I may have my peace. I have issued a bank draft of $500,000.00 and I have instructed my lawyer in Malaysia wait for your response and then he must pay you this money immediately and PLEASE FORGIVE ME.

Please contact my lawyer based in Malaysia because I have given him instructions to deliver this money to you as soon as possible. I thank you so much for all your help in the past.You can contact [..] on his email [..] and just tell him that you are contacting him under instruction from Code: RCPFCW Please send to him your (1) photo I.D (2) your full address and (2) phone number at once, so that he will arrange to remit the money to you by wire transfer to your account or by personal delivery to your address as quickly as possible.

On behalf of myself and my family I thank you so much for your great help in the past and I visualize a happy life for you too as soon as this compensation is released to you and then you forgive me all my mistakes towards you. I will be eternally grateful!
Regards
RCPFCW
Cayman Island (sic)

I'm also slightly surprised they commit to a percentage share I have been conned out of, or is 30% the going rate these days? (Or are repeat victims of these too innumerate to remember what it was last time?)

Nice to be reminded that the original is still the best, even if it would be so much better if they'd not added the top and tail to make a flashback structure and kept the original ending. It's not easy to guess what the BBFC censored: the morals of the main couple (just divorced but sleeping with each other?) or a mother wanting to body snatch her child? Oh, apparently it's references to Burke and Hare!?!

I was going to follow it with the first .. Body Snatchers remake, but it doesn't look like I have it. (It must have been borrowed from a library at some point, because I know I've seen one of the extras.)

I do have a few (cough) others to watch though. A third visit to the Nottingham IKEA solved the problem of what to put behind the TV etc in the slightly annoyingly sized alcove as storage: three Billy 40cm bookcases and one Benno 20cm CD/DVD tower. It turns out that you can fit eleven DVDs on each shelf of the latter and there are eight shelves when using it for DVDs.

If we assume that each title has one ordinary sized DVD case (right for the vast majority, although up to 21 times wrong for a few) then if I hadn't disposed of most of the cases, it'd take about 14 towers to fit the collection - twice the space that's there. (And some of the space is relatively had to access, being directly behind the TV.) Umm, yeah I know, but DVDs are very cheap second-hand.

Still, I don't buy everything - I found a copy of the wonderful conspiracy thriller Capricorn One on Thursday and declined it on the basis that it was 4:3 format. It turns out that the imdb mobile site does not consider things like original aspect ratio - or indeed awards - something you might want to know, but it was originally widescreen and if there isn't a widescreen DVD out - the Amazon mobile site does not etc etc - there will be.

I was in London mostly to see The Passenger at ENO, although there turned out to be a side order of unblocking the sink and dishwasher at Buckthorne Road (repeat after me, L18 and two otherwise lovely tenants: neither the sink nor the dishwasher is a waste disposal unit - you have to clean stuff into the bin...)

Now, if you read my opera posts at all, you will know that I am not a fan of most modern opera and the Holocaust subject matter didn't point to a fun evening either. (Why see it then? Well, I like to see all ENO productions and there was also a very good offer on tickets.)

So I am delighted to report that it's stunning. Not necessarily great, but stunning. Interestingly, the Observer reviewer thinks the same way about it that I do and deliberately calls it a master work rather than a masterpiece. Unlike her, I quite liked the ambiguity of the story telling: are the camp scenes her whitewashing her past or what really happened?

It was written in Soviet Russia so even though the composer lost his family in the Holocaust, the plot is an international socialists together one rather than acknowledging the majority of people in Auschwitz were Jewish. Similarly, the husband who discovers that his wife has a Nazi past is pointedly a West German diplomat. It was still banned and its 1968 Bolshoi première cancelled. Amazingly this is the first proper production it's had, first seen at a festival last year. American readers get their chance to see it in 2014.

If I were still in London, I'd be very tempted to see it again. While there are not a lot of tunes, it's much easier on the ear than the wonderful A Dog's Heart production that was also fabulous theatre a couple of years ago. Four performances left, and I'd be amazed if you couldn't get excellent seats cheaply at the official Society of West End Theatre half-price booth at the bottom of Leicester Square.

While the new house is very lovely in many ways, there is one thing that is driving me to distraction.

We're getting internet from Virgin Media cable service. Coo, even the 30Mbs 'medium' speed service is fast, about 10x the speed we were getting in London. (Oh, the joys of being at the very edge of our exchange's area - at least one other telephone exchange was closer, grr...)

The router is located in the living room at the back of the house, because that's where the TV is and we're also getting TV via cable. The PC is in the dining room at the front. In between the two rooms, thanks to the joys of having a 1930s house, is a 6" / 15cm thick wall.

And this, I suspect, is the problem. While the wireless network dongle on the PC will talk to the router, it is not reliable, falling over several times a day. Unplugging and replugging it works, but I am not always there to do that. Alas, even if I were allowed to get the drill out for some Cat5e cabling between the two rooms, that's a rather long hole to have to make.

I have tried setting the VM router to be just a modem and using the Linksys WRT54GS that did sterling work as the router in London - it's been upgraded to third-party firmware that allows all sorts of nice things, including playing with the wireless power. Alas2, while the wireless network became much more reliable, it appears that the router couldn't quite cope with the new internet speed - they'd be ten seconds of nothing happening every thirty to forty seconds.

So, mains networking. Does it actually work well? I expect very high network reliability - if it falls over more than once a quarter, that's not acceptable. Cat5 cabling easily delivers that - does this?

Presumably there is no standard, so once you have bought company A's kit, you're tied to them?