It's quite amusing really, how much I find LJ useless in many ways. They keep doing announcements with new features and I am yet to see a single one I'd use. In the case of editing comments I hate it because I keep getting multiple comment notifications, and since I've yet to see a difference in them, I only read the first (and original) one. Which means that anyone who's taken the effort to edit their comment is totally lost on me.

Even if I had a paid account, I wouldn't edit my comments, I'd delete them and paste them back in. Because that way no one else except those with notifications turned on can see that you've done anything. Notifications in LJ's inbox (the link to which, incidentally, is handily hidden across the top) just say deleted, and gmail updates the comment so you only see the final thing. Much better all round, I reckon.

If I could just get OpenID working with my blog, then add in other plugins, no one would be commenting on my LJ because it would all link back here and be much more user friendly and spam-free. Although every time I write an entry now I think about how much I need to sort out my categories and tags, but it'll have to wait till the Christmas holidays.

Oh look, a meme. As seen from various people.

Name a character from one of my fandoms and I'll give you either:
a. three facts about them from my personal canon/fanon,
b. a reason he/she sucks,
c. a reason she/he is awesomecakes,
d. five things that never happened to that character
e. five people that character never fell in love with and why.

You pick the character. I pick the letter.

I do like these spoof tube announcements, by the woman who does the real thing. The American tourists and suduko ones especially.

Ever since we moved desks a couple of months ago I'm back to sitting opposite someone who smokes. I have someone behind me who also smokes, who has to come past me on her way in from a fag break, but I don't generally notice her smelling.

The person I sit opposite, though, stinks when he comes in. Which is bad enough - I always get up and go for a wander to do something else for a couple of minutes until the smell calms down. But what's really getting to me, especially now that the weather's cold (for some reason) is that it's giving me a headache, making me feel sick and setting my asthma off. The air conditioning (which is also our heating) doesn't do much for my breathing either, which doesn't help.

I could move desks, but the only one I could move to is next to where I am now. So I'd have another smoker behind me (don't know how bad that would be) and all three would come past me when they come in from their fag break, rather than just the one. So I don't know that it would help - and I'd have far less space.

None of them show any signs of even considering giving up. I have considered getting some air freshener and spraying it liberally when he comes back in, but since that also sets my asthma off, and in the end only covers the smell up, not get rid of it, that's not going to work.

So now I'm at a bit of a loss as to what to do.

I went to London yesterday evening to the recording of the ISIHAC Christmas special, Humph in Wonderland (to be broadcast on 25th December at 12.04, incidentally). It being Sunday it meant that the trains stopped earlier, so I parked at Didcot, instead of Cholsey where I usually park. So that was a bit of adventure. I cunningly parked under a light, by accident, which was handy because the rest of the car park was really dark by the time I got back. I might go there in future because it has a much nicer drive back and isn't much further away.

I got completely lost trying to find the theatre even though I had instructions. They were misleading instructions though, as they told me the busy road to my left was Shaftesbury Avenue, when actually Shaftesbury Avenue wasn't busy at all, not in comparison to Regent's Street. And there were so many roads in so many directions, that when the instructions said to cross the road it was hard to work out which one they were talking about. Although on balance I think it was them not saying which direction to go in next that didn't help.
Read more...

I was in Borders in Washington DC of all places and found the British TV series DVD section and was amazed to discover some of the things that were on DVD. One of which is All Creatures Great and Small, based on the vet books by James Herriot. I finally got round to putting it on my rentals list and watched the first two episodes today.

Robert Hardy I don't think I've seen in anything else, so he looks exactly like I remember. Christopher Timothy I was expecting to look younger but I wasn't expecting him to look that much younger. I had forgotten that at the start he's straight out of university because the books cover such a long period of time. Since Peter Davison did Doctor Who not long after this I expected him to look pretty much the same but even he looks quite a bit younger. I looked at the date at the end of the first episode and it was 1977 (assuming I've got my roman numerals right), which is longer ago than I thought. I think this is one of the things they've repeated a lot.

The trouble with Peter Davison is I see him now and think he's Peter Davison (no matter who he's playing). Back when he was playing the Doctor I saw him as Tristan. So seeing him as Tristan and looking different, my brain dribbled out of my ears in defence.

Once I got over those shocks, and my inability to understand the Yorkshire accents in it (I really don't do Northern accents very well) I enjoyed it. It's very slow in comparison to TV now, but I like it. I can just imagine it being made more exciting to fit in and that would just be wrong because it doesn't need it.

I remembered more of the books than I thought I did too. I thought pretty much the only thing I could remember clearly was Tristan cooking sausage and mash for a week. But as things cropped up I found myself remembering them - although not before a diagnosis.

It's really great, though, I definitely need to watch more.

This is where I post about a subject that only about four people on my friends list will have a clue what I'm talking about. Hence me posting twice today.
Read more...

It's been such a long week. I was tired at the weekend, so being stupidly busy at work this week didn't really help. I really want Channel 4 to be working tonight because Ugly Betty is just my level at the moment.

Happy Birthday Sel! Yours is one of the few birthdays I remember, probably out of perverseness

Most people by now have probably heard the news that Verity Lambert has died, which is terribly sad.

Look at all these things you can plug into your (non-existent) spare USB port. I do like that you can get a USB hoover.

I can't go on a gadget site and not look through all the gadgets. I love the Jobsworth cards because they're so true!

I realised that since this has now been announced I can talk about it outside of password protected/friends locked posts.

I've been working at my current job for six and a half years, which is forever. My job title is Database Spec Writer, which makes sense inside the market research industry, but not so much outside of it. I do write databases, into which data is entered, which has been collected on a subset of the public's views on various things. Sometimes we get the data in excel, in which case I clean it up, check it and then use that data. If it sounds very boring that's because it is. But it does allow me to listen to lots of Doctor Who audio plays and narrations while I do it.

However, I am moving departments. My new job titles is going to be Trainee Online Programmer. I think. The tense in that is not quite the right one because I have both started and not started. A lot of what my new job will be will involve Flash programming. Which I've never done before because I can't learn anything unless it's useful and it's not useful to me. I currently have Flash on my computer at work and I've started learning it.

Which is all very well and good but I'm the only one in my department that knows how to do whole loads of stuff. And the rest I do much quicker than anyone else. So I'm still needed there. And at the moment I have more work than I can fit into normal hours with one job, never mind two!

So at some unspecified point in the future I'll have a new job. Properly have a new job, as opposed to sort of have a new job.

I was so tempted to watch part 1 this weekend but I resisted. So, I watched both parts of The Lost Boy this evening. In summary Arggghhhhhh! But more details:
SPOILERS
Read more...

The latest Trillian Astra update has just added in email checking. So I thought I'd try it out for gmail. The trouble with gmail is that I have a few accounts for it. The Gmail notifier that you can download only checks one account every 2 minutes that that's it. So I have the You've Got Gmail plugin in the old version of Trillian checking my RP account. Which is a bit of a pain because it means I have to have two versions of Trillian open and the old one has an annoying habit of crashing. You've Got Gmail doesn't yet work in Astra.

You have to be logged into google in Astra for it to work. Which is fine, since google IM actually works in Astra, unlike in 3.1 (and it's not a Jabber plugin either, it comes as standard). It tells you if you have mail instantly. And by instantly I mean if I have my inbox open in a Firefox tab, Astra will tell me I have email before the tab does. It can cope with telling you if you have a new email in a conversation where you already have one unread email too. And it does my email sound, so I can tell I have new email. So all that's great. Well, I don't need it to check that often, but I don't get that many emails on my RP account, so I'm hardly going to complain about that.

What's less good is that it doesn't tell you the time stamp on the email. Sometimes I leave mine unread and just go to the page, and I can't tell, in that case if it's telling me the email I know about is there, or I've had a new one. But more of a problem than that is that the subject says 'Reply to your comment/post' and that it's from ljnotify@livejournal or whatever the address is. Which is unhelpful. At least YGG tells you what LJ name it's from. Which doesn't necessarily tell you which conversation it's for, but it narrows it down a bit.

I don't know, I still can't decide whether it's liveable with despite the faults. Although the main problem I have a the moment with Astra (apart from still no support for AIM chatrooms) is that the skin you get has coloured circles for different IMs. Which Trillian seem to like for some strange reason. I can never work out which is which, so I usually have a skin where they're the relevant symbols - which is much easier to understand. But being an alpha release, there are no skins yet. I am looking forward to the day when there are.

I've been meaning to write a post about this for ages. With the stuff I watch or read, I keep finding parent & child relationships where they're not actually related (or at least, don't have that direct relationship) fascinating. I've got a perfectly normal family going on, so there's no psychological reason like that, I just like it.

asked:
1. In your fandom(s), what are your favourite parent/child relationships? (biological or non biological parents and children) Why?
so I thought I'd answer here, rather than in a comment.
Read more...

It's amazing what a bit of sleep will do. Except for the part where I only slept till 8am and wanted to sleep till 10, but I feel more awake this morning, even though it's cloudy and I haven't opened the curtains and haven't seen the sun yet.

I rewatched the Doctor Who thing from last night. I was most amazed to find it was 8 minutes long - it felt about 2!

There are still large parts of it I dislike. The Hotel Babylon thing, which was probably about the same length, was clearly poking fun at itself, whereas the Doctor Who one felt like it couldn't decide whether to poke fun or be serious and it's ended up being a bit of both and neither and doesn't work. And I dislike the Confidential where they said that Peter Davison was the first of the modern Doctors, because you could pretty much define that to be any of them.

But, I did like:

• Belgium
• Describing the console room as having a desktop theme
• The Master's beard being described as rubbish
• The Cloister Bell - it's such a great harbinger of doom
• That at the start when they say the world's only got 5 minutes left, it really means 5 minutes of real time
• How it fits between the end of Last of the Time Lords and the epilogue

I didn't watch it quite so closely, so the Fifth Doctor felt better. The trouble is that in the original episodes he's Tristan and now he's just Peter Davison. It's only in the audios that I can believe he's the Doctor.

I did really hate:

• wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey - that joke only works once and not with Five
• A black hole and supernova at the same time. I can suspend my disbelief for some science but there's a limit and that's over it. The one leads to the other - they can't possibly be simultaneous
• Ten going 'You're my Doctor'. I can sort of see Ten loving his past selves rather than hating them, but that was just OTT

I've seen lots of people talk about it this morning on my RSS Feeds (I think I'm the only person who didn't love it) but only one person mentioned giving any money. So if you bothered to take the time to watch it on TV, or go to the website to watch it, then you'll know where to go and give some money to help disadvantaged children in Britain.

I ache this morning, but collecting money yesterday morning was still the best part of the day.

Being tired last night and needing an early night was not a good start. When my day started this morning, it was dark. It wasn't really light until I left the house in the freezing cold, dressed in two jumpers and two pairs of trousers as well as other layers. It's not easy to get a pair of jeans with slim legs on over a pair of trousers with baggy legs. I'm very glad I did though, because at one point I had cold legs. At least it was the traditional cold weather for Children in Need and not pouring it down like it did last year.

Then I walked down to where I was collecting money from cars stopped at the lights on the bridge. For an hour and a half I had great fun attempting to get money from people. One bloke gave me a massive pile of coppers. Another gave me a bag of 5ps. As a result my bucket was really heavy - I am discovering muscles that ache when I lift my arms. It almost makes me wish for the American way of lots of notes. Towards the end people did mention how cold it was while they were looking for their change. By that time I was hot and looking forward to stripping down to a normal number of layers.

I have seriously not had enough sleep, though, so today has been such a struggle. But I saw Doctor Who on TV. Which I thought was a bit crap - it seemed to me like it was easy to tell you were watching something fictional. But perhaps it's tiredness - I'll watch it again on the website tomorrow. (I quite liked Peter Davison in Confidential, though).

The Bill doing the Rat Pack were very good. Although their behind the scenes thing was almost more interesting than their song! Of the four actors I only recognised two: Graham Cole (who I've met) and the one who plays Terry. I think the ginger one is the Super. No doubt all will become clear if I watch any of The Bill at Christmas - it was last Christmas that I watched an episode.

Now I'm just waiting for Sybil Fawlty on after the news. I've never seen Hotel Babylon, only trailers, but she's got to be good.

a. Post a list of 15-20 TV series you've watched (current or old)
b. Have your friends list guess your favorite character from each series
c. When guessed bold the line

1. Alias
2. The Bill
3. Buffy
4. Angel
5. Doctor Who
6. Farscape
7. Hustle
8. Life on Mars
9. Press Gang - Lynda - guessed by
10. Quantum Leap
11. Red Dwarf - Cat - guessed by
12. Spooks
13. Star Trek (original series) - Spock, guessed by
14. ST:TNG
15. DS9
16. Enterprise
17. Stargate
18. Atlantis
19. Ugly Betty
20. The West Wing

Fandom meme, nicked from :

Pick a fandom you know I know about, and I'll tell you:

1. The first character I first fell in love with
2. The character I never expected to love as much as I do now
3. The character everyone else loves that I don't
4. The character I love that everyone else hates
5. The character I used to love but don't any longer
6. The character I would shag anytime
7. The character I'd want to be like
8. The character I'd slap
9. A pairing that I love
10. A pairing that I despise

Winter seems to have arrived. It's been cold enough the past week that I've contemplated getting my scarf out. Although that's mostly because my coat leaves a nice gap at the top for the cold to get in. I think it might be cold enough for a hat as well. The trouble is that once you give into the cold that's it, you can't go back to not wearing a hat or scarf because you get used to being warm.

Mind you, it'll all be a bit academic come Friday because I'll be dressed up warm to collect for Children in Need, although since I'm collecting from cars it does mean getting to run around, so you do get a bit warmer. And as long as it doesn't chuck it down like last year it won't be that bad.

The worst part is driving because even though I have driving gloves and I've turned the car onto winter so it takes five minutes to be merely cold rather than freezing instead of the ten minutes it takes on the summer setting, it only takes one journey for my hands to get so dry they crack.

But we have had really nice weather - blue skies and sunshine, with only a bit of wind and rain and clouds - and I like the winter when it's really cold and sunny. As long as I'm walking somewhere and not waiting for a bus. And at least I don't have to de-ice the car every morning before work.

Happy Birthday ! I assume it's today as I've only seen messages on other people's LJs today.

This afternoon I watched Pirates of the Caribbean with a friend who hadn't seen it before. It's been ages since I saw it and I'd forgotten how good it was.

I was good and did some prompts. For Ian and Jo it was just thetenspot, Harry it was ROTM as usual (I like their prompts) and I wrote something long for alt!Harry that wasn't angsty. But did involve him and women as per usual.

And I was much more coherent earlier, but I need more sleep. Specially as I have to get up early on Friday to collect for Children in Need before work.

First lines of unfinished fics. It's terrible but there are some I can't quite tell whether they're unfinished or not, they're so old and I've changed my system since! Some unfinished fics are older than this computer and therefore won't open in Wordpad, and I'm too scared to go there. The rest, below, are Doctor Who, Stargate (Atlantis) and a LOTR. I should point out these are all first drafts, and had I finished them, would probably be unrecognisable from these snippets. I haven't changed anything in these, though, not even the typos.
Read more...