General: Goodbye Tonbridge, Belvedere I Come...

Anyone who keeps an eye on my domain name WHOIS might have noticed a new registered address pop up. I'd be a little alarmed if any of you answered yes to this, but hey, it's a flimsy pretext to me saying... I've moved house!

I did love living in Tonbridge, and specifically, the house I was in was perfect – only a few minutes walk from the station, huge rooms, garage and garden and at a price I could easily afford. Living up to it was going to be tricky!

The main reason for leaving was so that my girlfriend of 16 months, Hannah, could commute to London at considerably lesser cost. Plus, with Dave leaving Think Bikes to me, I was no longer so tied to Kent.

Our original plan was Orpington, but after months of hunting, nothing came up that was close enough and cheap enough. Finally, we came across a property in Belvedere. Never heard of it? Me neither. It's in Zone 5, in the London Borough of Bexley. Technically, it falls under the category of Kent still – but a much different side to Kent than I'm used to. Rent is good and more importantly, train tickets are 2/3rds cheaper than Tonbridge. We're 5 minutes walk from the station, a 5-10 minute drive to the M25 and only 15 minutes to visit my brother (who gets married next month!).

The property we found used to be a pub – the Prince Alfred. In 2006, somebody bought it and converted it into three terraced houses. From the outside, it's very obviously a pub, sitting on the corner of the road. Inside, they have done an amazing job of renovating it, whilst maintaining the character.

9ft high ceilings make it really spacious and the warped floor boards give it character. Being in the middle of the three properties, we also have a large cellar where the beer barrels used to be kept. In fact, there are a few mementos left behind - you can see where some of the beer lines used to be plumbed in and were simply cut off, and there is a plaque describing details of the Guiness tap.

For the first time in my life I now have an office that is separate from my bedroom and I'm taking full advantage of this. Both rooms have a view straight out on to the Thames too. Not quite the water – but the industrial areas that you'd expect in what is essentially East London. Still, it's nice to have something to look at and it's doing my eye strain the world of good having some variable focal points.

There's no Freeview in the area, and the same can pretty much be said of mobile phone reception. So annoyingly, my MythTV setup is temporarily useless. I've just ordered a DVB-S card and I intend on taking advantage of the pre-installed satellite dish for FreeSat.

I'm also in a pretty poor area for ADSL, so I said goodbye to my free BT Broadband and went down the Virgin Broadband route. £20 per month with no line rental for a 10Mbit connection. They waivered the setup fee, dropped £5pcm for the first 3 months and I got £30 for giving the details of my sister who also uses Virgin. Bargain!

It also lives well up to it's name – I'm getting 1.2MB/s downloading an Ubuntu ISO. Happy Days! I can always upgrade all the way up to 50Mbit if I should need it, but more importantly, it's much more stable than BT was – especially on upload.

I won't bore you with too many more details (like the Renault Laguna I purchased just before the house move) – and I really do hope I can find the time to keep this blog slightly more up to date! If you fancy doing a street view on our new place – I'm sure you can find it

Coyote, you don't mean a Squaerial? (Remember those?)

I've been really impressed with DVB-S - I do have a couple of HD channels. But more importantly, it feels like the quality of even SD channels is greater. I wonder if they have more bandwidth available for higher bitrates than they do with Freeview?