I wanted to have a rant about emails at work the other day but didn’t quite get to it. I’ve managed to work myself up into a ranting frenzy now, so I’ll put it below a more link as it’s quite long.

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Yesterday it cooled down to the point where I actually felt cold yesterday (because I was sat between two windows and it was windy). I’d forgotten what that was like!

I don’t quite know where this weekend has gone. There were a whole load of things I was going to do but never quite got round to. Then I thought I might watch a whole load of Third Doctor stuff that I had hanging around but only managed six episodes. I did briefly try to learn MySQL but since you can do everything in PHPMyAdmin, learning the PHP code to do it seemed a bit pointless since I don’t feel the need to use it on my website.

I did actually watch Top Gear on the telly, rather than on the internet. Although I laughed so hard at their white van man challenges I couldn’t breathe. Although now it’s finished the only thing I’ll be watching will be The Avengers and I have that on DVD. I still haven’t got round to watching last Tuesday and Thursdays eps, but I have seen next Thursdays.

But, I only have a week of work left, then I have a week off to go to a windmill in Somerset, have a driving lesson, then go to a quarry in Dorset. And Monday’s payday, yay!

Courtesy of the Daily Snitch (because I never go to the LJ front page – I only ver go to LJ to comment on people’s journals) some cool LJ-related things.

First, how to change the colour of the navbar, which improves it no end, and LJ Talk IM, although I wish it wouldn’t add all my friends to my contact list willy-nilly. Because I already have a Trillian connection through Jabber, when I connect to LJ Talk it changes my Jabber connection icon from a lightbulb to a purple trillian one.

It is still far too hot here. The air conditioning at work could definitely be colder, except that we’ve closed all the doors and turned it down to the lowest possible. It’s nice enough in the office but a little on the warm side. I took a jumper in just in case on Monday, I didn’t need to bother.

On the plus side, I’ve booked my flight and hostel in Belfast (I’m flying from Bristol cos it’s cheaper and takes less time to get there in comparison to Gatwick) and I’ve even booked for Conference and am paying £20 a month, so I shouldn’t notice that quite so much.

I also seem to be continually suffering from house invasions. Last week my landlady, her daughter and the daughter’s boyfriend all got back from Mexico and the daughter’s wedding, so they stayed for three days and had lots of people over. I got to hear the wedding video four times. Now my landlady’s boyfriend’s son and his girlfriend seem to have moved in – and by moved in I mean the son has been applying for jobs round here using this address. So I’m not sure what’s up with that because this is only a small three bedroom house and there were four people permanently living here anyway, since my landlady moved her boyfriend in just before she went to Mexico.

How did it get to be 10.30? I’m sure it was 9pm a minute ago.

So, what have I done recently? The Saturday before last was where it all started. I was at a Rotaract thing and they had a kid’s wooden climbing thing. And a seesaw. So at lunchtime I’d been on the seesaw, then thought I’d go up the climbing thing so I could go across the wooden bridge and down the slide. Except that I climbed up a selection of horizontal logs which necessitated me looking down at them and therefore I didn’t see the one at the top painted with red and white stripes and consequently hit it with my face. Quite hard. My bendy glasses were not that bendy, I cut my top lip and worst of all bruised my nose where my glasses sit and behind my ear where my glasses sit. And possibly my forehead.

So after that I started feeling tired and dizzy, which wasn’t really a good sign. As I had a driving lesson the next morning I ended up speaking to four different nurses. NHS Direct decided that because I couldn’t concentrate and my memory wasn’t great I should go to A&E or have someone with me. So I called a friend of mine who lives round the corner, who happened to be a nurse. She made me ring the out of hours doctor, who turned out to be a nurse. She recommended I go to the Minor Injuries Unit, which was a whole lot emptier than A&E. Fortunately, my friend’s mum drove me there. The nurse there eventually concluded that I either had a mild concussion or was coming down with something and it might have gone by the morning.

Turned out to be flu and I could have skipped the whole thing.

So, anyway, I spent a week desperately trying to cool down (eventually discovered a cold flannel on the face and feet is fantastic) and watching & listening to lots of Doctor Who and some Avengers.

The first Avengers on the DVDs had Steed and Peel fencing at the beginning. Which was partically him trying to convince her to go to Little Bazeley-by-the-sea and also so he could have cream in his tea. Then they had a wonderful scene on the train where they had to ‘rough it’ due to there being no restaurant car, at which point Steed had a definite Mary Poppins bag, the number and size of things he pulled out of it.

I also saw Carnival of Monsters, which is a Third Doctor and Jo episode, and a good one as well. I discovered the commentary was quite handy for lying down with your eyes closed too.

So then this weekend I’ve been feeling better, so spent it catching up, and I’ve just done, in time for doing a whole load more Rotaract things tomorrow in preparation for tomorrow’s meeting.

Not only is it far too hot but I also have flu. For the third time this year, I think. My immune system is not good. The really annoying part is that if I was at work I’d be sitting in a cold air conditioned office, rather than lying on a hot bed, heating my computer up by watching lots of Doctor Who.

Although I have now watched lots of Jon Pertwee, who I think I actually like better than Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor.

DCI Burke from Taggart was in POTC last night (lovely cold cinema) which was slightly surreal. I loved the wheel fight towards the end but overall it wasn’t as good as the first one.

Yesterday my PCMCIA card with two USB ports arrived. The booklet that came with it had instructions on how to install with various versions of Windows, but for mine it basically boiled down to ‘plug it in’. So I did and it worked perfectly. At which point I died of shock transferred everything from the old external hard drive to the new one. And I’ve still only used 100Gb (most of that is backups).

While I did that I finished off Inferno. All I knew about it was that there was a parallel dimension and the Brigadier wore an eyepatch. I thought it started off quite slow because he didn’t get there until episode 3 but once he did I was engrossed, it was really good and exciting, and a bit scary. I loved the Brigadier and Benton in this and hated Liz’s hair. You can tell it’s the 60s – all the women are in really short skirts. What I didn’t know was that the AU Brig didn’t have a moustache. Which, frankly was just not right.

I hadn’t noticed that BBC4 are now showing the black & white Emma Peel episodes. Which is a bit pointless as I’ve got them on DVD and because I’ve seen both tonight’s and this weeks. They are, however, really good ones.

I should be halfway there by now but I feel I’m going to be doing some serious reading at the end of the year:

61.7cm / 155cm (39.8%)

And these books have been:
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P7090092,
originally uploaded by paranoidangel.

Wimbledon was great. We didn’t rush there, and went backwards and forwards on the trains a bit due to not taking enough notice of which one we’d got on, but we were still there in time to claim a little patch of dead grass on a very steep bit of Henman Hill to the left of the big screen.

So we spent the best part of two hours on there, eating lunch and cheering for Nadal. But then we went to see the Woodies play in the Over 35s doubles, as we had actual tickets. And the Court 1 seats were suddenly seeming comfy in comparison (less chance of falling off for a start).

I think it’s actually the first match we’ve ever stayed for the whole of – but then there were only seven matches on the whole day and two of them we’d probably missed by the time we arrived anyway. So the Woodies won but it was a tight match and it’s always good to see a bit of doubles. And Woodforde nearly take Woodbridge’s head off (and I think they lost the point!).

I managed to avoid the score in the Federer/Nadal match but it was hard not to hear the cheering from the Hill outside, although the result was pretty much a foregone conclusion before it even started.

By that time there was just enough time to go to the shop, then attempt to find the Museum shop, which is better and sold pens. We still managed to walk round most of the place to find the food and I was completely knackered when I got home to watch the end of the men’s final, which I’d taped.

Today I’m really not awake at all. Although it was a great way to forget about Doctor Who – it’s hard to care about that just at the moment – it was so sad that it was the end of Wimbledon for another year. I’m really missing my tennis tonight, and the Five Live commentators making my afternoon that little bit more interesting.

Only 50 weeks to go… (or 2 till we play Davis Cup which might be a bit train wreck like since it doesn’t really involve many of our best players and one of theirs just won the Mixed Doubles…)

That was a cracking final. Women’s finals have a tendency to be not that exciting (you didn’t think I meant Doctor Who did you?), although last year’s was exciting. But they were serve volleying and that makes for much more exciting points. And I didn’t even care which of them won I just didn’t want it to end. And I’ve just heard from my mother that Amelie Mauresmo is the second tennis player to come out as gay. You heard it here first.

Annoyingly, I missed the end of the men’s doubles because I went to put my dinner on as I thought they’d be a while and when I got back it was all over. On the plus side, by the time I’d eaten dinner my computer had just started taping Confidential and the Mixed Doubles was starting. Although that did involve having to listen to Virginia Wade talk utter rubbish as only she could. I don’t care that she once won Wimbledon, I think I’d like to disown her from this country, please.

So then there was Doctor Who. And the second episode to nearly make me cry (the first was Jo leaving in The Green Death, although the giant maggots didn’t help). Although this time it was five minutes in because I really didn’t need to see that, thank you very much, complete with Angel flashbacks to that episode with the bugs that sucked up all the moisture in people. The rest of the episode I spent trying to recover from that and trying not to throw up at the ending. I could have done with it finishing 36 minutes in.

Tomorrow I am off to Wimbledon! I’ll be on Henman Hill for the men’s doubles and hopefully on court to see the Woodies play, which should be cool.

Some links to begin with:

419 Eater – This is a guy who scammed the scammers and a record of the emails they exchanged.

In yesterday’s Guardian, Sophie Aldred had a little column: Time travel for beginners. However, the big new spoiler is in the first paragraph and links to similar stories at the bottom includes the not-quite-so-new-any-more spoiler. The non-spoilery bit in the middle I’ve copy and pasted to the Ace comm

My dad’s obviously really busy now he’s retired and he sent me a link to that very dangerous website whose tagline is completely true – it’s full of stuff I really want but don’t actually need. This is a USB missile launcher and there are even videos of it in action.

My gupi has once again proved it’s a boy. For some reason it kept on crying and refusing to walk anywhere no matter how much I stroked it or plugged it into the mains to recharge it. Turns out he was really unhappy and wanted me to stroke him while he had his carrot in his mouth. Hmm. Anyway, now he is perfectly happy and running into things and laughing again. I will bring him to the windmill.

I really enjoyed the Baghdatis/Nadal match today. It was great when I got home and watched it. I’ve not really watched much tennis this fortnight, mostly I’ve listened to it on the radio, which isn’t that unusual. This evening they really annoyed me at one point whenever Baghdatis won a point they showed his family up in the players box celebrating. Who cares? Not me, I’m watching the tennis. They do have an annoying tendency to show really weird angles so you can’t see what’s going on and a couple of times when Nadal was actually about to serve, rather than just pissing about, as he does, they showed a very close up of Baghdatis. And what’s the point of that?

On the plus side, the Radio 5 commentators are much better than the TV ones, not least because they don’t include John MacEnroe or Virginia Wade. I’m really looking forward to going there on Sunday, just as long as we can get a place on Henman Hill (we have Court 1 tickets and frankly, I’d rather see the men’s final).

First a bit of a recap. The other weekend, I discovered, as Doctor Who was starting, that my USB hub no longer works. So I went out and bought a new one. Everything was then fine (although I could still do with more USB ports!) except my external hard drive refused to cooperate with the hub. Yet when I plugged it into one of the (two) ports in the back of the computer it worked fine. So, I did a whole load of research on external hard drives and ended up buying a 300 gig one, with a plug this time.

Cut to last night when said external hard drive arrived. I plugged it in and everything was fine and great. Although the bit at the bottom of Explorer that tells me how much space is left keeps scaring me because I’m used to seeing three figure numbers being in megs not gigs. So at this point what I want to do is transfer everything from my old external hard drive to the new one. Which for long complicated reasons which I won’t go into, involves unplugging my modem. I was watching the tennis at the same time anyway, so I could quite happily sit there and let it do its thing.

So, I plug the old hard drive in and immediately get a message saying there’s a power surge and the USB device has exceeded the power capacity of the port, or something along those lines. Which was a bit worrying, except that I could still see what was on the disk, albeit by sneaky means because Explorer wasn’t entirely happy about it. Which isn’t really anything new. Explorer is also going through a crashing phase at the moment which doesn’t really help.

But I digress. I try copying some stuff from one hard drive to another and slow is not the word. In two hours I managed about 8gig and I have about 50gig of backups and other stuff on there (40gig of it is backups, so I haven’t littered it too badly). In the end I gave up because I actually wanted to get some stuff done.

This morning I looked this problem up on the Dell support forums and lots of people have had this problem with unpowered external hard drives. Apparently, the solution is to either buy a powered external hard drive or use a USB hub…

The part of my computer that gets hottest is helpfully the part that’s under my left wrist when I type. It’s starting to get a bit warm now and make my hand sweat, and I only turned it on 25 mins ago when the tennis finished.

Basically, it is too hot. Someone turn the weather down a bit.

The Radio Times covers for tomorrow, featuring Doctor Who and football, together, are quite cool (but where’s the tennis?). Aussies, don’t look at this for another 12 and a half weeks, though.

Speaking of Doctor Who, I finished off The Claws of Axos yesterday. It seemed to me that nothing really happened in the four episodes. And as much as I like the companions who are actually useful, I did quite enjoy watching Jo Grant being screamy and useless. It actually made a nice change from all the ones I’ve seen recently!

The one interesting part is that near the end the Doctor tricks the Master into fixing his TARDIS. Or so he thinks. It turns out it will only go to the one place and time anyway, but it was interesting that he would quite happily have abandoned them all. And not for the first time, as in Spearhead From Space the minute he got the TARDIS and key in one place he tried to get away. And the Brigadier knew he would, which I thought was quite impressive on his part.

I’m really liking the Third Doctor and UNIT and his enforced stay on Earth, I want to see more of it. So just as well I’m having a Third Doctor month with amazon rentals.

P7010083,
originally uploaded by paranoidangel.

I have finally set up my blog on flickr and it crossposts to LJ, how cool is that?

Yesterday was actually a good day despite the heat and screw-ups on my part.

The London Film and Comic Con was actually quite good – somehow we managed to spend five and a half hours in it. I only came out with a book, a DVD, a picture and a postcard which is pretty good going really. Matt Irvine was there with the real K9, which was very cool. He’s bigger than I expected.

Then I got home in time to tape Confidential and annoyingly, found out one Wimbledon result. But, I started watching it once I was sure it had all finished and Nadal had just won the first set off Agassi (yes!) when it was time to switch over to BBC2. In theory, that’s what my video did. In practice, my 2 was rather more like a 1, so there were much swearwords when I found I had a tape full of football instead of tennis.

But all was not lost because when I stopped the tape I discovered Today at Wimbledon was just showing the end of the match. Whew! Next up was Andy Murray vs Andy Roddick. So it would have been helpful if the commentators had stuck to last names. But still, even when they showed Murray winning the first set I never for a minute believed he could win. I mean, Roddick’s a really good tennis player and Murray’s still a kid and not that great yet. Murray won in straight sets, although it was a really close game. I think I’m still in a state of shock.

On the plus side, my accidentally taping BBC1 now means I don’t have eight hours of tennis to watch today so I can catch up on the Doctor Who commentaries and do some other things I need to get done. And I got to see Doctor Who. Which was quite good although mostly I was just excited because it had Raji James (used to be in The Bill) in it, which I’d forgotten about. He’s a really nice guy, so good for him.