|
|
|
 |
|
|
29th April Ahoy hoy, Candyman. Several things have happened since I discovered that my all time favourite radio presenter had found a way to escape his London-only confines and give forth at great speed to an eager world. The Danny Baker All Day Breakfast podcast is available (free) from wippit.com and it shows he hasn't missed a step (some say a beat) since he was last available to listen to on Virgin Radio. At present they are only prototypes but his masterplan is to do them daily and - AND - get fellow Danny, Danny Kelly to join him for some of their old school football shows. I knew this whole venture was meant to be when co-host David let slip that he didn't understand homosexuality. Fellow co-host Baylen (a gay himself) asked why and was told, word for word, the same as AussieGuy once told me - gay people serve no purpose. Indeed, the whole show seems to be a group of semi-outcasts in a small room talking nonsense for an hour or two between their real jobs. It is just like being back in our little project room. Discovering Danny Baker's online fandom has even put me on to someone who has DVDs of his old radio shows on offer. I'm being drawn back into the Treehouse and it is good. Ahoy hoy indeed. Last night's "Evolution of the Daleks" wasn't great. It had a good central idea but it got swamped by spectacle and set piece and never really made the impact it ought to have done. The idea that the Daleks had wasted their last chance at survival on an idea which turned out to be so repugnant to them that they destroyed it themselves was a powerful one. It is just a shame that we had nonsensical arsing about on a mast, some bibble about radiation and an army of "human Daleks" who were basically Robomen/Pig Slaves/Zombies who marched like (new) Cybermen and who were defeated in about four minutes. A bit of a wasted opportunity - the 1930s setting gave them a historical powder keg and the Daleks could've been working with one of the Earth governments - ostensibly to help them (and the Doctor would have the moral issue about whether he could risk altering the timeline which lead to World War II) but in reality using the resources they were given to build new Daleks. Similar to Power of the Daleks but obviously faster and more scenic. But the end result was a confusing jumble which didn't make a lot of sense and now gives us - for the Nth time - the last Dalek in existence. Unless he finds several million more in hiding somewhere. Wouldn't that be handy...
25th April Strange positions to find myself in, Number 94 - slack-jawed with disappointment when Wayne Rooney scored last night's winner against AC Milan. The reason was that I had invested my UFC winnings in a lucrative wager which would've paid out 18/1 had Milan been winning at half time and then the game ended in a draw. This was looking certain until the 91st minute. It taught me a useful lesson about eggs, chickens, baskets and not wagering against ones own team. In happier news I finally have my new car. People keep asking "how is it?" and I keep saying "she's fine". I mention this not to boast about my almost immediate ability to anthropomorphise inanimate objects, just to show that I can't get excited about cars. They are just means to ends. This is certainly a nicer means to an end but I can't enthuse about it in the same way I would, say, a V+ box or an iPod. I found an emergency kit in the boot while putting my shopping away this evening. It's a huge green faux-canvas thing and contains everything one could possibly want should the worst happen. Even a luminous vest. I might wear that anyway. I'm already using the red triangle to deter me from going in the freezer. I did almost do something typical - I tried to put a CD in before I'd even switched the car on at the garage and it wouldn't go in. Then it wouldn't come out. I had to strain to pull it out manually or I would've recorded my first problem with 0 miles on the clock. Well, 18 actually but those don't count. They weren't mine. I like the onboard computer - it tells me how many miles I've got left in my petrol tank, how many miles I'm doing per gallon, my average speed for the journey and various other statistical bits and pieces. One thing I can't make it do is display the clock on the display panel. It is only visible on the CD player panel. This won't do - it's off to one side. That is not good. I always need to be able to see, quickly, easily and safely, exactly how not-early I am at any given time. I did manage to impress someone today. Ok, it was only TheArtist but he still counts as someone. He was tapping a tune on his Starbucks cup and challenged me to guess what it was. I said the theme to the BBC's cricket coverage. It was actually Grandstand. So apparently I was spookily close. His new girlfriend is called Sarah Jane. That is such a waste. I would make much more amusing use of her - when I'm unwell I could say "My head hurts abominably, Sarah Jane", when she is upset I could said "A tear, Sarah Jane?" and when I'm showing her off to people I could said "This is Sarah Jane - she's my best friend". And so on. The long winter evenings would just fly by. And she works in a pizza restaurant and gets staff discount. That's the other reason I'm jealous. Mostly the name thing but the discount would possibly be the deal breaker in any future negotiation. And in a phrase you never thought you'd read... Blue Peter has apologised for airing scenes of the ritual slaughter of a goat
22nd April Last night's UFC show had its ups and downs. The main down being that I couldn't watch the fucker. It was on Setanta PPV and my VM box acknowledged its existence as a forthcoming event, 21st April 2007 and 8pm. Fine - absolutely right in all regards - shouldn't be a problem. On the day of the event you press the necessary buttons and order from the "Today's events" menu. Except it kept telling me there weren't any events yesterday. I kept trying right up until 7.57pm but at no point was it updated. Oh well - its their loss. I'll just get a disc from the guy who gets me American and Japanese shows. I tried to do it the legit way but the system let me down. On the plus side, my £20 in wagers is now £30.65 after one loss, one heavy favourite winning and the latest in the 2007 Parade Of Upsets. Couture beating Sylvia, Henderson beating Silva, Serra beating St Pierre and now Gonzaga beating CroCop. I'm strongly tempted to place my winnings on Rampage Jackson next month in his fight with Chuck Liddell. Oh! If only Matt Lindland had beaten Fedor at the Bodog show - that would truly have been an omen that the mighty will fall in this year of the upset. So I was pissed off that I couldn't watch what sounded like a decent show but I've well and truly shed my straight edge gimmick (at least that's what TheArtist calls it) by becoming a GAMBLER~! So what have I been doing with my week off? Well, you may or may not have noticed that I suck at holidays. I get all excited, make lots of depressingly vague plans and then fail to do anything. A dark gloom (or a gloomy darkness, whichever you prefer) descends and I become as lifeless as a sterilised pebble, hermetically sealed in plastic, kept at a constant temperature that is guaranteed to kill all bacterial life instantly and left on the moon. Or something. This past week has been better than the norm - I threw myself into a spring clean which has been pretty successful (I had to cut a few corners at the end but I got past the tipping point so I think I'm allowed a few things shoved under other things). I spent a pleasant Thursday afternoon with ShirtGuy and his little baby. It's not that I'm obsessed with babies or anything but I want one and I want one that comes with someone to clean up all the messy bits. I still don't have my new car but the garage phoned on Friday to sat it had arrived and I am picking it up tomorrow evening. Unless they phone me tomorrow to say there has been a delay. My V+ has already proved its mortality - it missed one recording entirely and Friday's "Peep Show" was 15 minutes of Jonathan Ross and a warning message which said the recording had failed. Hopefully it is just teething troubles. The service is only a couple of months old and there will be bugs. Speaking of digital television, I was in Comet the other evening buying yet another cable and there was an advert running on some of their LCD televisions. The advert was warning people that the analogue signals would be switched off over the next few years (true) and that they should take this into account when buying a new television (fair enough). It went on to say that they should buy a "digital ready" TV and strongly implied that this meant an expensive LCD or plasma TV and that old fashioned TVs were soon to be as useless as a dinosaur sent in to ensure that a bus with a bomb aboard doesn't fall below 55 miles per hour. What absolute rubbish. "Digital ready" or variations thereof has been used to flog top-end televisions for the past few years and all it means it "has a SCART socket". That's it - that's all you need. The "digital" part of "digital TV" is the set top box. It is faintly appalling the way companies are trying to scare people into thinking they have to spend a grand on a TV for it to have more than two or three years of life in it. The moral of the story is something like "don't trust the fuckers". A moral which applies equally to Sky. Is it a coincidence that most football matches on Sky Sports have had technical faults since Sky and Virgin had their falling out? Last night - in addition to a fairly lifeless performance - the picture kept getting a green glow which reminded me of a special effect from the Tom Baker era of Doctor Who. Let's hope Virgin's lawyers and boffins can prove it - no judge in England could fail to be convinced by such an obvious abuse of their parallel roles as content and service provider. Back to work tomorrow and a day spent on a course which I'm fairly sure we went on last year. At the heart of it is an exercise which is impossible to complete and we're supposed to learn something character building from it. And apropos of nothing, this is my new favourite "bad accent" clip from a Paul Temple serial. For once it isn't an American one. At least I don't think it is.
18th April I now have my V+ box and broadband capable of 1.25mbs downloading. Some sites get close to that, others don't. I'm pleased to say this is one of the ones that does. It took a while to get it working - the guy said "Just use the handy set up CD... AND DON'T PLUG THE MODEM IN UNTIL IT TELLS YOU". So I tried the handy set up CD and nothing happened. You see, Virgin Media decided that their set up process should be housed in a Flash application with bells and whistles and something in there that my computer didn't like. So I just got a white screen with the Virgin logo on it. I tried it in both drives, I tried copying the contents of the disc onto my hard drive. I disabled the firewall, closed down the anti-virus, switch off Scotty the Watchdog, paused any other security software that was running, uninstalled Firefox and IE, reinstalled both of them, reinstalled Flash and Shockwave (all from backup CDs). None of it worked. I tried the disc on father's lap top and it worked fine so it wasn't a faulty disc. So in the end I called their broadband support, got put through to an Indian call centre (or at least an Indian in a call centre) and prepared myself for a long and painful battle. But lo! She was fantastic. I told her what was wrong, she seemed to know immediately what this meant and she gave me an IP address to register the modem the low-tech way. Which was a piece of pie as I had all the necessary incantations and shit. The whole thing was done and dusty in five minutes. I don't care which continent the call centre is on if they have employees like her. But why oh why was the low-tech info not stuck at the back of the "Hi - welcome to Virgin Broadband" guide? I know they try to write in uber-plain English and make everything as simple as it can possibly be but couldn't they at least have a bit at the back which says "In the unlikely event that the broadband set up CD doesn't work, please call 0845 XXXXXX or type the following number into the address bar of your browser." I wasted so much time trying to get an installation CD to work that I was almost angry that the resolution was so simple. It spoilt the whole broadband experience for as long as it took to experience the tenfold increase in download (and equally crucially upload) speeds. My V+ box is pretty impressive too. Although I'm sad to see my friend TiVo go to the big PVR graveyard in the sky (or on top of a wardrobe, whichever is more realistic) I think V+ is up to the job of replacing her. The strengths are that V+ has three tuners (currently two can record and a third channel can be watched but they are looking at whether all three can be made recordable in the future), V+ is all in one instead of being two boxes linked by cables and wires and a frequently missed infrared signal, V+ gets its programme updates through the cable without needing to be connected to a phone line and the V+ interface seems quicker and less needlessly perky. The downsides are that the EPG isn't as lengthy as TiVo's, you can't search the EPG as efficiently with the V+ software and the remote control isn't as well organised as TiVo's. I haven't yet managed to get my SCARTs right - my TV has three inputs and currently 1 is the DVD player, 2 is the cable signal with menus but sound only if the VCR is switched on and 3 is the cable picture but without any menus or programme guides available. If I try to archive V+ programmes to DVD they go through the wrong channel and don't record (but I can record them if I watch them on the V+. It is all terribly confusing and yet strangely interesting at the same time. I haven't had time to sort out the wiring because I've been spring cleaning. Yes - me. Me that hasn't had a proper tidy up since Mrs Thatcher was on the throne. Normally I have a week or two off and have grand ideas about sorting through things and straightening things and making things less awkwardly balanced on top of other things but these detailed plans never come to much. Maybe a day or half a day's effort is expended and then I just curl up into a ball and demand (thus far without success) that the world will go away and leave me alone. This time does seem to be different - I've settled into a routine of going out in the morning and spending the afternoon hard at it. Then I do some tidying. Today was books - I've been through several hundred of them, sorted them by saleability, size and whether I have read them or not. I now have a couple of dozen more items on Amazon, a three foot high pile of things to read next and a bit more space in which to stand and think "Hmm - what shall I do now?" During one of those brief moments of thinking "Hmm - what shall I do now?" I decided to be assertive and confident and phone the wretched garage. They were going to ring me on Monday or Tuesday but didn't. He said he's be absolutely definitely faithfully on his pet mother's grave been promised they will get it tomorrow. Then, depending on whether they need to plate it or coat it or do something else to it, I should be able to collect it tomorrow or Friday or early next week or shit.
15th April I'm knackered after all that screwing. It was worth it though, even if I did feel like having a shower immediately afterwards. I have, crude and poorly thought out smuttiness aside, been doing a spot of DIY. There I go again. I couldn't face the prospect of the Virgin Media guy having to wade through the hundreds and thousands of cables behind what is laughingly called my home entertainment set up so I took the chance to simplify it considerably. And to do that I bought a new display-shelving-putting things on-unit. So out have gone two old videos and one much loved TiVo and in will come a V+ box and a SCART switcher so I can put my naughty MacroMaster into the loop once the uniformed gentleman has gone. I can't think how to connect it all up without using a SCART switcher - I've never liked them as I've tried two and they were both shite - I guess the genius which worked out my set-up two years ago has long since rotted away. "Gridlock", set in a city that had rotted away (I don't just throw these things together) was the third really good episode in a row. Just when you thought it was going to be cliché-ridden dystopian rubbish - chicken in a basket Blade Runner - it turned into quite the amusing and exciting little adventure. The resolution of the whole thing was much too quick and they could've lopped a couple of minutes off the early scenes with the drug vendors and added them to the part where the Doctor is struggling to get the worn out old city computers to work but - and we come back to this most important of points - it didn't annoy me. I laughed at the fleeting nudists, I was entertained by Ardal O'Hanlon's furry performance, I was giddy with excitement at the Macra's first appearance in 41 years and I took great satisfaction in writing a stiff letter of complaint to the Daily Mail about the disgusting spectacle of two elderly lesbians corrupting the nation's children. In fact, I enjoyed the whole thing so much I literally couldn't stop myself from digging out (by which I mean scrolling through my iPod for) the Macra Terror and listening to it for the first time since buying it on cassette tape in 1994. I'm not even sure I finished it in 1994. I may not even have started it as I have no memory of the story beyond what everyone knows. I listened to it while sorting through some boxes of miscellaneous junk and it was entirely what I would've expected from a Patrick Troughton adventure. I'm sure with pictures it would be more distinctive and memorable but on audio it is just another entry on the list of monsters-and-bases stories. And while I experienced some unheard Troughton yesterday, today I heard my first Briggs. Not my absosolute first Nick Briggs of course - he is a man of many talents and his "Garden Centre Checkout Guy" in an episode of the League of Gentlemen has set the standard for garden centre employees in grotesque comic drama. I speak of "The Time Ravagers" - Briggs's first appearance in the Audio Visuals series. I discovered last week that my bought-in-a-hurry stereo has line-in connectors and that my cable draw (yes, I have a draw filled with nothing but AV/computer cables) had a phono-to-line-in cable so I've been able to connect my iPod up to some proper speakers and listen to stuff while doing other stuff. I'd been wary of amateur productions ever since I heard the first part of an Australian Doctor Who story and was horrified by the wooden performances. The sound design in the Aussie play was excellent and the script was fine - I really wanted to like it but I had to switch it off because the acting was so non-existent. It made me feel strangely guilty because I was hating one part of something that people had obviously worked very hard on. But it was such a major part that I knew I would forever think the whole thing was unlistenable rubbish. Which of course it wasn't because so much of the rest of it was so well done. Except that I couldn't ever face listening to it again. So it was unlistenable. Et cetera. Thankfully the Time Ravager wasn't so badly performed. It wasn't perfect by any means but it didn't sound like the amateur production it was. I look forward to listening to some more of them once I get round to slipping them onto m'iPod and playing them in m'new car. If it ever comes. It has been delayed for almost as long as yesterday's system release. Having missed two proposed release dates we finally got it into production. Well, almost all of it. We also found out the real reason for all the delays and problems. It doesn't bode well for the next four years and eleven months of the IT department's five year plan. Basically, we have old mainframes which are expensive, awkward and hopelessly uncool. The plan is to gradually move the data and functionality off these mainframes and put them all into a sexy, modern and cool new system. The one to which we have already given two and a half years of our lives. But when this master plan was explained to the IT department there were two very different reactions. The sexy, modern and cool developers said "Yeah - that's sexy, modern and cool. Let's do that!" while the grumbly and crumbly old mainframe people said "Shit - we'll be out of a job if they do that so we must be as obstructive and difficult as possible". So everything has become missed deadlines, failed batch runs, lack of resources and a bubbling civil war. But don't worry - the big wigs have a plan. To counteract the recent bad press that has resulted from performance issue and release delays they are considering renaming the system. Unless the new name is fantastically geeky I can't say I'm massively in favour of it. I'm going to vote for "The Amplified Panatropic Computer Net" because "The Matrix" has been sadly cheapened by Hollywood. Speaking of moving into bizarre and unexpected parodies of reality, I've moved up to the prestigious heights of 6th in our fantasy football league. I fear I will climb no higher by the end of the season but to have made it into The Big Six is an achievement in and of itself. I've not had a bad weekend and, if Ronaldo or Lampard are rested in mid-week, I'll gain yet more points from the automatic substitution of someone called Hunt who scored ten points for Reading yesterday. I am oft mocked for my lack of sporting knowledge (some of that ignorance is an act, some is a genuine lack of interest) but I'm considering joining the heady world of online gambling now that I've found a reputable site which takes bets on UFC. Ok, so I'm wrong a lot of the time but I think I could make a profit over the rest of the year. Take the Bisping-Sinosec fight next weekend. The profit on a Bisping victory would be small but it is still a profit. The only problem (aside from losing everything because I'm ultimately stupid and unlucky and not really any good at anything) is the risk that the site would email me the yay or nay and so spoil the show when I have to wait a day or two to see it. I'll open Outlook and see "YOU LOST - LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSER" and know that my Sunday night won't be as packed with surprises as it might otherwise have been. I think I might over-think things.
12th April Freakish sporting moments. There have been a couple recently - the 7-1 destruction of Roma being one. It was a sight to behold and, were it not for the obvious "peaking too soon" (the "4-1 against Holland" effect as it is known in circles) it would be a promising omen. The other was Matt "The Terror" Serra's stunning knockout of Georges St Pierre at UFC 69. This is truly the year of the upset in mixed martial arts (I bet Rampage is feeling just a little bit more optimistic now) with first Couture beating Sylvia (which was an upset even though Couture is the better fighter) and now Serra humbling the man who only months ago humbled the greatest welterweight in UFC history, Matt Hughes. Needless to say, Hughes was at cage-side with the BIGGEST grin on his face in the aftermath of Serra's onslaught. I bet he was - facing Serra for the belt is infinitely preferable to facing GSP. It is amazing how everything can change in one night - from a summer of St Pierre vs Hughes and the winner facing Diego Sanchez we now have Serra vs Hughes, the winner facing St Pierre and the winner of that meeting Josh Koscheck. Serra was +550 to win - a double of that and United 7-1 Roma would've paid for my new car. WHICH HASN'T ARRIVED YET. They phoned this morning to say it was in Liverpool (my first choice for somewhere to leave my new F'N car) and would be with me by the beginning of next week. Bah! AngryDave says that isn't good enough and I should complain to whomever governs the car showroom industry. He complained about his road and now his MP is using that in his electoral literature. But I didn't have "MUG" tattooed across my face for nothing - I might as well get my money's worth. No doubt they will ring me on Monday afternoon when I have to stay in and wait for the Virgin Media guy to come and install my V+ box and uber-broadband. Not that he'll turn up - as the aforementioned Rampage once said, "Shit happens and shit". Good things happen too though - ITguy and Mrs ITguy have had their little baby. She had a very smooth transition from Dev to Pre-Production and finally a release into Production. All the files were transferred correctly and they got sign-off from the project sponsors after a quick once over by some highly skilled and extremely good looking professionals. He sent us a link to his Flickr page (I say "us" but he sent it to TheArtist alone, something about which I am not bitter...) and the baby looks like a baby. They showed extraordinary good taste in giving her the same name as Banana, even if it meant I lost the sweepstake having picked the name 10111001011110001001010111. Which is about how many minutes I've just spent trying to find a particular joke at OG only to eventually discover it was on a similarly titled thread at Roobarb's. Anyway, it concerns the Daily Star printing an "exclusive" about what the Face of Boe's message to the Doctor will be on Saturday.
Well I thought it was quite amusing. For a message board. And lastly we say farewell to the co-creator of K9, Dave Martin who died earlier this week. Aside from creating the tin dog, he wrote or co-wrote eight TV stories including the first ever multi-Doctor story. It's nice he lived long enough to see K9 return to the nation's toy shops and win over another generation of children.
7th April Banana is in a climbing phase. Given even the merest sniff of a chance she'll start climbing. Chairs, stairs, people - you name it, she'll climb it. She's mastered the stairs leading up to mother's bed - she likes rolling on it and bouncing on it and then looking at herself in all of mother's mirrors - but since I don't want to risk carrying her downstairs again I have to be the spoil sport who lifts her up when she reaches the third or fourth stair and whisks her back to the bottom. At which point she turns round and starts climbing again. This game goes on until one of us is knackered. And it is never her. Later she decided I was quite comfy so we curled up together and read "Roo's Big Day". She especially likes the page with the bee on it - she is at her adorable best when trying (and failing) to make a buzzing noise. I couldn't remember the name of the book just now so I had to look it up on the M&S website. I've seen about twenty books I want to buy her right now. Especially this one.
"The Shakespeare Code" was great. I don't know if the show has changed since last season or if I've changed since last season but it has stopped annoying me. We're two episodes in and there hasn't been anything I've not liked. Well, apart from David Tennant's face still being absent from the opening titles but at least they've fixed the dreary old logo - it still spins absurdly but at least it doesn't look as if someone has forgotten to plug it in. David Tennant seems to have smoothed the rough edges off his characterisation, Martha Jones is easily the best TV companion since Romana and, basically, it hasn't annoyed me yet.
Next week's promo was a strange affair - it was like
every single Big Finish trailer I've ever heard - lots of clips but
nothing either stuck with me or made me any more interested in it. Well,
except the Face of Boe - that's going to be Not that we'll necessarily see the episode next week - it follows FA Cup football and if that goes to extra time they may postpone it for a week. Which would obviously be a bad thing because it would mean United couldn't beat Watford when Watford are having to play without their star player (Ben Foster, a United player on loan who is ineligible for the match). But do not speak of such spherical matters. Speak instead of the weekend's real sporting high spot - UFC 69. Which I will admit to almost forgetting was on. It isn't the most inspiring line up ever assembled. GSP will destroy Matt Serra (which will be fun because Serra has an annoying face and demeanour) and Sanchez vs Koscheck has the potential to be the most boring fight since Arlovski-Sylvia III. Beyond those top two matches I haven't got a clue. I looked at the line up five minutes ago and can't remember any of it. UFC are in danger of falling into the same trap WWE fell into a couple of years ago - if you are lucky it is possible to either (a) run three brands at once or (b) run more PPVs but you can't do both - you can't have three companies on the go and stretch those limited rosters by running more shows. There is a difference - UFC bought WEC and Pride while WWE just split into Raw, Smackdown and ECW - but if UFC wants to run 25 or 30 shows in a year they really could've done with expanding their roster considerably instead of ring-fencing talent and pretending there really are three separate companies. It isn't that I'm against them keeping Pride as an active company in Japan - simply that they shouldn't put on lacklustre shows like UFC 69 when they could bring over a Pride guy to make his UFC debut (as Cro Cop did last month) and get a bit of buzz going. Right now the only buzz is the debate about the so called "unified rules" for MMA. With UFC buying Pride, the two biggest companies in the world now fall under the same banner. Which means UFC rules (which are also the Nevada Commission rules, give or take a few tweaks such as IFL having up to 5 three minute rounds instead of the commission's 3 five minute rounds) are as close to universal as you're going to get. The main differences between UFC and Pride rules are -
Aside from giving referees more power to punish stalling fighters, I'm all in favour of UFC's rules becoming universal. Maybe allow knees on the ground - they are no more or less dangerous than elbows - but kicks should remain banned (Wanderlei Silva's so called "soccer kicks" are brutal and go too far even for a full-contact sport like mixed martial arts).
4th April It's all ups and downs - generally more downs than ups - but I had maybe ten good days in a row. For a week and a half after I got over my 48 hours of being sick and ill and generally off colour I was on something of a high. I braved the world of dealers to buy a new car (which still hasn't been delivered yet - anyone would think they were only being helpful and efficient and calling me every day until I'd signed absolutely all the paperwork and now they've earned their commission I've gone to the bottom of the list), I got through a seven hour "plain English" course without breaking and I have guided father through the maze of Virgin Media special bundle discount special package discount very impressive special offers without tearing someone's hair out. But then it all went away again. These past three days have been torture. There has been a constant screaming in my head, I've drifted off into nowhere for minutes or hours at a time, I've done almost nothing in the evenings except sleep and feel like I'm going crazy. Reading Kay Redfield Jamison's book "An Unquiet Mind" was a very interesting experience - I could relate to most of what she wrote about but she jumped around in time a bit too much to really get a sense of the pattern of her chemical tides. But I like her writing and may have a go at "Night Falls Fast" - her 450 page book about suicide - at some point soon. She took an overdose of lithium back in the 1970s. Lithium - which she credits with saving her life many times over as it has been the only effective treatment for her condition - is paradoxically one of the most effective ways of preventing suicide and one of the most effective ways of committing suicide. For Dr Jamison the treatment dose was dangerously close to the toxic dose. But lithium worked for her in the long run as it seemed to work for someone I've not heard from in all together too long. It would be nice if there was something which worked that well for me. But it is a waste of time going to the doctor's - after a two hour wait I just want to get out of there. So nothing ever gets said. And now I can't tell him the truth anyway because that would make things worse. I can't lie because then there is no point going and I can't be honest because the consequences would be at best inconvenient and at worst rather serious. So I'll do nothing as usual and hope that another bright spell comes along in the next couple of years. I'm due one before the end of the decade.
1st April "Smith and Jones" was exactly what I needed the opening episode of the New Season to be. Before the first season I avoided spoilers so as not to ruin anything. Before the second I didn't seek them out but if they were there I looked at them in an attempt to stir up some enthusiasm. This time round I wasn't interested. Having slipped away from Torchwood after two or three episodes, not yet to return, and having lost interest in Robin Hood after the first week (and I didn't even bother with Primeval at all) I wasn't even sure I'd bother watching Smith and Jones. I'm pleased to say it was fantastic. Everything worked - I like Martha, the gimmick had a good explanation, the monsters were a nice change, the jokes were funny, the action was perfectly judged and it all fitted together in just that way that "New Earth" didn't. So, let's hear it for the Welsh. Hup hup... huzzah! This bit won't be of any interest to any of you but if I let such things bother me I'd never write anything about anything. "Paul Temple and the Gilbert Case" is the only existing Paul Temple serial which the BBC Radio Collection hasn't released in proper episodic format. It originally came out on cassette tape with two episodes edited together on each of four sides. Then the CD release used these masters but over three discs so you get two and a bit episodes on each CD. Unlike "The Conrad Case" which was edited on tape but complete on CD, Gilbert has remained stubbornly omnibused and that looks unlikely ever to change. So when the chance came to download an episode version of Gilbert via an unnamed torrent application popped up I took it. Probably from a BBC7 airing, I thought, and since I've bought it twice I am entitled to download it from unauthorised channels. I've had two goes at making my own eight part Gilbert Case - the first (a clumsy affair using Quicktime Pro on my Mac) wasn't successful but the second (an altogether more professional cut thanks to Audacity) was pretty good. With luck, the download would confirm I'd got the cliffhangers in the right place and might supply the "dramatic" version of those cliffhangers so I could insert it in place of the "reprise" version which would've been used in the edits. When, bless me down with a feather. Something rather unusual happened. You see, the Gilbert Case was made in 1954 and, for reasons best known to the BBC, was remade in 1959. The tape and CD version is the 1954 one but my download is the 1959 remake. On the one hand it is a shame that two versions of Gilbert exist while so many Temples are missing from the archives (especially "Paul Temple And The Madison Mystery" which is the only adventure starring the definitive Temple, Peter Coke not to be in the BBC's vaults) but on the other it is fascinating to hear a different reading of the same scripts. Anyway, even though it is of variable quality (not BBC7 as they would almost certainly have the 1954 version) I'm still pleased and surprised to have it. While that was on my wants list, the top items on my wish list (all time, all my life to use an Iron Sheik-ism) are the first seven episodes of Light Lunch. I've decided the time is right to put my 143 VHS episodes onto DVD (plus Late Lunch and the "Madonna Meets... Not Us" special where Perks debuted her cropped purple hair and I still didn't guess she was a lesbian). The first tape is in a pretty shocking state. It is only when you go back to 10 year old VHS recordings that you realise just what a terrible system VHS could be. Hopefully, when we move to the second or third week of recordings, they will improve as I was using a less bad video recorder. Obviously I can remember which machine every single episode of Light Lunch was taped on. It is part of my illness. People don't tend to believe me when I say that Light Lunch is my all time favourite television programme. They assume I am being richly comic. But I'm not. I don't necessarily have a desire to watch it again (even though I'm about to spend countless hours copying it) but for the year it was on it meant more to me than any other programme before or since. Speaking of programs that mean a lot to me (that was a segue), I'm trying Office 2007. It is a pretty large step up from Office 2003 because it has done away with drop down menus in favour of a tab-based menu system. Instead of "Insert" giving you a list of options, it now replaces the entire middle section with "Insert" based icons. In some ways it is easier to use but sometimes you feel it is giving you too many things at once. With Office 2007 Microsoft seem to be making a bit of a play for the home user (with the "Home and Student" version selling for well under £100 instead of the £200+ you had to pay in the past) it seems a little odd that the main change would be something that makes it just that bit more overwhelming to use. But - and here is the thing - it has the one feature I've wanted in Office for years. It was in the Mac version in 2003 but we've had to wait four extra years for the PC to catch up. It now has a live word count (instead of having to click a button to manually update it). Small things please small minds. It is somewhere between a godsend and a jolly good thing.
I've also finally had the confidence to remove the RAID configuration that PC World helpfully set up when they fixed my computer. It meant that I had two hard drives connected - 1x250Gb and 1x180Gb - but only one was available. The system wrote to both drives simultaneously as a safety measure. So, in theory, if one drive failed I'd still have everything on the other. The main drawbacks were (a) I could only use 180Gb of the larger drive because everything on that had to fit on the smaller drive as well, (b) I didn't have a second drive on which to install a second operating system were I ever to try Vista, (c) I always need more space and (d) I back stuff up to an external hard drive because I have no faith that a RAID would work since ten years of bad luck tells me that whatever corrupted the first drive would also corrupt the second. So I deleted the RAID, gained the use of the second drive for independent storage, recovered the missing space on the larger drive and now I have one drive for media and one for everything else. I also have the scope to either install Vista or a second copy of XP for emergencies. If, that is, I can remember how to activate the boot menu. And, best of all, with 500Gb external drives available for under a hundred quid, I can get one of those and back both internal drives up in one easy move. Triumph. |
 
|
