Unified, finally!

It was sometime last month that my wife and I noticed a bunch of boys hanging out at a road junction in my neighbourhood. Saw that they were hawking Telekom Malaysia's Unifi service and so, we went over to talk with them. Had always been interested in Unifi ever since it was launched some three years ago. Couldn't believe that it took so long before it finally reached me!

Anyway, effective today, my house can be considered as officially Unified. The TM independent contractors came over in the morning to carry out the installation.

The Unifi service also carried a subscription to TM's HyppTV: television channels served through optical cables.

Initially, I was considering installing the Unifi equipment downstairs beside the television set but yesterday, I decided that I really didn't need HyppTV to clash with my Astro channels. Therefore, the installation went ahead upstairs in my present work area where I have my desktop computer. Perhaps I shouldn't term it as my work area because here's where my desktop's hooked up to my hifi system. This area upstairs has become a complete entertainment centre.

The contractors insisted that they had to instal HyppTV anyway, before I could sign off their work chit. But I don't have a TV set upstairs, I protested. No problem, they said. They'd just carry the TV set from downstairs temporarily. So I allowed them to carry up the old and humongously heavy television set from the living room downstairs just to test the signals before they carted the set down again. Well, even if I don't watch television much, at least I know that HyppTV works.

After they left, it was time for experimentation. First, I hooked up the HyppTV set box top to my little 19-inch computer monitor. I've heard that it could work, that it was possible to channel the video feed to a computer monitor, but a television doofus like me was totally in the dark. How to get it to work? Sweated buckets but eventually got it right - with the right cable. Next, I connected the audio cables to the hifi system. Wanted to "get the perfect sound" but later decided that it was a bit of a bother listening to audio that wasn't hitting me face on. So the next best alternative - which worked, luckily, because it was audio and not video - was to connect the audio cable to my desktop speakers which allowed for this sort of secondary input. So everything's all right now in the house...