Wow – what a finish! I am seriously in awe of Russell T Davies and the writers of Dr Who. To have planted so much so early on (like at the start of the new Series 1). Makes me wonder what other unresolved bits and pieces are waiting to pounce on us.
And The Face of Bo. What can I say? I defy anyone to have seen that coming (although, in retrospect, I kinda think I could have). In that way, it’s a bit like Harry Potter. All the clues are there, and it’s kinda obvious after the event… but before hand, even though you know it’s coming, you still can’t spot it.
Was it planned from the start? It feels like it. But to put all that planning in without being certain anything more than series 1 would be filmed. Wow. It was clear (to me) that the You are not alone thing was about The Master – just had to be.
They still manage to catch me off guard too – who’d have thought Martha Jones would be (partly) bowing out and we’d get someone new? I knew she would be in the next series, so I didn’t pay it another thought, but now she’s off to Torchwood. Crazy (to quote King Louie).
The only downer is that my next fix isn’t until the Christmas special. That and the fact I only managed to watch up to episode 9 or so of Torchwood before it disappeared off the “TV on demand” thing. BBC iPlayer, don’t let us down!!!
Friends on Facebook will already know my broadband suffered an outage on Saturday. Well, actually it’s still out. The set-top box stopped responding at 06.50 on Saturday morning, and the usual prodding didn’t bring it back to life, so I did what any computing professional would do in this scenario – unplugged it from the mains, and plugged it back in.
Unfortunately, it didn’t actually work – instead of springing back into life, it sat there looking at me with all it’s LEDs and bar segments on. 88:88 is not what you really want to be seeing on your STB.
At that point I had a nasty feeling that it might have been in the middle of flashing it’s firmware or something (I didn’t actually bother to turn on the TV to see if there were any messages to this effect.. rebooting the STB is a fairly regular occurrence), but it was well and truly door-stopped.
Nice man from Virgin media is coming tomorrow to give us a new one (hooray), but in the meantime I’m rediscovering the ‘joys’ of dial-up Internet. I’d forgotten how painful and frustrating it is to have stuff trickling down at 56k. I’d never really minded about the spam coming in (my spam filter eats it before I see it), but when you see 60 messages coming down … oh…. so …. slowly … and none of them are for real. Arrggg.
Then there’s trying to just pop onto Google maps while you’re on the phone to someone – but no, doesn’t work. Grrrr.
I did manage to get a whole bluetooth GPRS thing going with my Samsung on Orange (a whole 115 Kbps too), but my contract doesn’t include any data, so that would work out even more expensive then the dial-up.
For what it’s worth, the magic was actually straightforward:
Pair phone with XP
Set the initialisation on the bluetooth modem that appears to
at+cgdcont=1,"IP","orangeinternet"
Set the number to dial to *99#
I found this info on various sites, such as this one.
Still, a useful reminded of the importance of anti-bloat on websites. MySpace is a particularly bad offender over dial-up, incidentally. It’s slow over broadband, let alone over a piece of wet string.
I never used to be able to see a guitar anywhere without starting to get itchy fingers – wanna play it, wanna play it!! I don’t know at what point it went away, but some point over the last 5 years my desire to play the guitar has waned.
To be sure when someone like KT Tunstall came along I had a minor relapse, but not the same craving I used to have. I think it was probably to do with having a baby, because (a) that left me too tired to do anything sensible, and (b) playing it would only wake him up, and the absolute cardinal number one rule of parenthood (early parenthood at least) is
DON’T WAKE THE BABY
One of the few times a blink is justified, I think. Actually maybe not, but I’ll leave it in for now*.
Anyway, we were away with out church last weekend, at Sneaton Castle, and the guy playing in our sessions had a gorgeous Taylor… and my fingers started itching!
He let me play it, so I had a luscious half an hour session of pure indulgence, just me and the Taylor. It was fab. And just this evening, it’s been another half an hour – maybe more – of hammering out power chords and worship songs and some of my own songs (had to blow the dust off those, must were written last millennium). Really really enjoyed.
Guitar playing James just might be back. 🙂
*Turns out <blink> isn’t standards compliant, so it’s come out. Probably for the best.
I’ve just discovered Facebook. I’d heard about it quite a lot – conversations on the train, articles in the press, stuff on various websites – but couldn’t really be bothered with Yet Another Social Network Website. I’d given MySpace a good stab, but after 6 months or so I still only had one friend, and that was only because I organised the friend invite thing via e-mail. I also don’t really like the feel of MySpace – probably a sign of my age, but I find it really hard to (a) find anyone, and (b) read anything about anyone once I’d found them.
Cue facebook.
I’ve been on for exactly one week, and I have 29 friends already – 12 or so are old contacts from London, mainly ex workmates or friends from church, some of which I’ve kept in touch with… others I hadn’t had any contact with for 5 years or more! The rest are all contacts from up here in Leeds; mainly my old job in Computing at the university, but some from Harrogate. Actually that’s not true – there are one or two fairly random contacts!
It’s really nice having a connection with those guys again. Just finding out where they are, what they’re up to; that kind of thing.
Whoops – up to 30 in the time it’s taken to write this! I love it! 🙂
have you read the book on casino royal you silly little man, you have no idea what you are talking about.
I can only assume this is a reference to this blog entry from Nov 2006, which was all about how much I disliked Casino Royale the film.
This is curious in lots of ways – as far as I can tell I don’t know the sender, yet he or she waded through (at least) 3 or 4 screenfuls of my drivel before picking up on this single entry. I can’t really believe they went straight there from Google.
It’s also the first time I’ve had a response to something I’ve written that’s not from someone I know. I don’t flatter myself that there’s anything of interest here beyond to me, and perhaps one or two friends – although I do try and put up interesting snippets of code or other information I come across, especially if it took me a long time to find it.
It’s also curious because the person accusing me of having no idea what I’m talking about (an entirely fair accusation, incidentally!) cannot themselves get the name of the book/film right.
At one level I entirely agree with the sender – I have never read a Bond novel, and from what I’ve heard Casino Royale is the most faithful interpretation yet. In fact, I believe I pointed this out in my original post. My point is that I didn’t like it, and it wasn’t the interpretation of James Bond that I’ve come to know and love over the last 30 years (or whatever).
That said, reading my post again I perhaps overstated my case, but I stand by the thrust of it!
I’ve been having a go at my bicycle, which has been merrily rusting away in the garage for the last 3 years. The chain had about seized up, and both tyres were flat – and both brake cables had a lovely orange tint.
So several days of soaking in oil and working it in didn’t help – time for a new chain, I think. But rather than do this straight away, I decided to have a good go at the seized links with a pair of pliers.. lo and behold they soon free up. A bit more oil and a bit more working and the chain is functioning perfectly. All the gears and the brakes are fine too.
Back tyre had just suffered through general seepage I think – topped it up and it’s holding the pressure nicely.
Front tyre was as flat as a pancake… Can’t remember the last time I fixed a puncture, so it felt like having to work it all about again from scratch. Somehow satisfying though. Oh, except for the fact I didn’t manage to repair it, and the tyre went flat again within a few days. Ho Hum.
One fairly major discovery was that while I was re-fitting the outer tube, I noticed it had writing on the side. “What’s this?” I think. “Inflate to 35 – 55 PSI”. 35 to 55 PSI?!?!?! That’s an enormous pressure – more than the pressure in our car tyres!! I happened to have a pressure gauge with me, so I tested the back tyre (which I’d inflated to about what I’ve always inflated tyres to).
15 PSI
So I hammered away at the pump for 5 minutes.
25 PSI
Another 5 minutes, and I’m starting to get worried the tyre will explode.
35 PSI
I’m a “middle of the range” kinda guy, so I’m aiming for 45. The tyre is already like a band of steel – I could hit it with a hammer and I think the hammer would come off worse. Another 5 minutes hard labour and it’s finally at 45.
I haven’t had the chance to test the ride, because of the front-wheel puncture, but it will be very interesting to see!
Interesting, on the way to work the next day I sauntered past a police van (one of the big riot ones), and noticed that the tyres on then should be inflated to 35 PSI!! On the other hand, an F1 car is a mere 16 PSI.
For the metric monkeys, my bicycle tyres have a pressure of just over 310 KPa.
Might have peaked too soon – just finished Half Blood Prince, which means I read all 2757 pages in 23 days, or over 120 pages a day. Guess I didn’t leave it too late! I did nearly miss my stop once or twice though, so absorbed was I.
Will have to read HBP again at the start of July, I think.
About to start my Harry Potter re-read, in preparation for book 7. There’s 122 days until it lands on my doorstep, and I have 2757 pages to read before then. That’s between 22 and 23 pages a day.
Actually I’m wondering if I might have left it a bit late!
