I'm sure it had a title, but goodness knows what it was. It was the one about 1918, though.

Spoilers: Read more...

I finally got round to listening to the last episode of the new Blakes 7 audios the other day. I only taped it back at the beginning of the month when BBC7 showed it.

Spoilers for the audio series, and for the TV series too. Read more...

Yesterday I solved all my printer problems by buying a new one. I drove to Comet, somewhere in the vicinity of Oxford and only went wrong once (it was Tom Baker's fault, he told me to turn right and made it sound like it was a closer right turn than it actually was). I got harassed in the shop, which I hate. I much prefer to be left alone, although of course when you need someone to ask something there's no one around.

On the way home I got all exciting by the big Tescos having space for chocolate buttons, which is a start. When I got home I was very good and did some things that needed doing before unpacking the printer. I read the setup guide and established it was all very simple. I managed to get the printer out of the box without too much difficulty. Then I went to plug it in. Read more...

I'm not purposely writing lots of posts today, I'm just catching up.

talked about fandom pairings she ships and why and that of course got me thinking about it. Read more...

I got the fright of my life watching Torchwood tonight, for which Torchwood itself was only indirectly responsible. While I waited for it to start, as it was a few minutes late again, I checked on my satnav where I'm going to my Rotaract meeting tomorrow night. But it couldn't find get a satellite, so I put it on the windowsill, which tends to help it. But since it didn't find one quickly I left it there till it did. And then forgot about it until 9.45pm when Tom Baker, in a very loud voice, suddenly said, "Turn right and then turn left."

I have finally started my TARDIS Big Bang fic! I have to have the minimum 20,000 first draft done by mid-March, so it was about time. I was just prevented from starting sooner by getting ill, then the past two days by everything else. But I have written two chapters of the 26 and have 2000 words. But since each chapter will be at least 1000 words I don't think the word count will be a problem, thankfully.

2 / 26 chapters (7.6%)

I have also decided to read my weight in books this year. I've recently read two trilogies:
Read more...

I love looking at houses for sale or rent on websites and seeing photos of the inside, to see what they look like. But, following on from the programme about Sandbanks last week and how expensive the houses are, I found the one I want. Only four bedrooms according to this page, or five according to another listing, it also has an indoor swimming pool, fantastic views and looks really nice. And I particularly love the entrance hall with its two sweeping staircases. Only drawback: it's just under £8million.

I'm clearly having one of those weeks. Yesterday I had pasta with some pasta sauce free from work. I'd got four of them, one I'd liked and one I hadn't, I thought the one I used was the one I liked. But I had one mouthful and it felt like it had chilli in it, which I'm allergic and intolerant to. So I checked the ingredients on the pot and chilli wasn't on there. So although I haven't eaten anything spicy for a while, I have in the past, and I hated it to go to waste so I carried on eating. I didn't get very far, though, before it was just too painful and I stopped. It was just as well I did, though, because an hour later I felt ill. So the ingredient on there that was the spice was either another word for chilli or related to it in some way. I won't be doing that again.

Tonight, I thought, had to go better. Except when I turned my computer on something crashed and I had to restart before I could even do anything. But when I went to connect to the internet my dial-up connection had forgotten my username and password. Which was a pain, but I knew where I'd written it down. Or at least, I knew it was in a pink folder and I knew where I lived before I moved...

Eventually I tracked the folder down and found that I had my old username and password in there (I had to change them when I moved). And nowhere could I find that I'd written the new one down. I knew that I didn't have the new ones in Outlook Express, but since mypipex requires logging in, I knew it would be in Firefox/Roboform. Except I hadn't been there since I moved...

Looking through my archived emails turned up my username, but no password. So I rang the number I found in there and was on hold for fifteen minutes (at least it's an 0845 number, come February it will be an 087 number). I was asked a whole load of security questions and the bloke I spoke to gave me my password, which did ring a bell. And then I found out I needed the bit after the @ for my username too. So I got online in time to go out.

When I got back I was thinking that all of this is because the letter with my details in when I got connected is in a safe place. At which point I remembered where my safe place is: the only place in the whole house with any paper that I didn't look. 30 seconds later I had my username and password. Typical. At least now I have it in multiple places.

So I've not really got much done this week so far...

But for everyone having a bad week, some legal youtube videos: Armstrong & Miller's WWII RAF men from the BBC, who can probably be best described as posh chavs. Random.
RAF Airmen do Fashion
RAF Airmen Stuck Up a Tree
RAF Airman Up in a Plane
RAF Airmen at Hospital
RAF Airmen Captured

P1190688,
originally uploaded by paranoidangel.

I went for a walk at lunchtime to look at the size of the Thames. I didn't even realise there had been any flooding till they talked about it on the local news. I didn't think it had rained that much recently, but being ill and not going out for a week, you don't tend to take that much notice of the weather.

There were quite a few other people out on the bridge, looking at the river and taking photos. I have a few at flickr. This one is of the pub by the river. The steps go down to an area right next to the river with tables and chairs. You can just see the lamps at the bottom of the set of steps - they're usually a lot higher above ground.

All that's flooded round here, though, are the flood plains (the pub know that area goes under water in winter). Sensibly, no one's built on them, unlike by Tescos in Reading.

I should point out that the Thames isn't usually that brown. I mean, it is disgusting, even this far upstream, it just doesn't usually look too bad.

Somehow, in less than a month, I have managed to put all of my fanfic into a WordPress blog. It's telling me there are 187 stories in it, but that's because each chapter of a multi-chaptered fic counts as one. I seem to have written a lot of drabbles. Anyway, I updated the whole website as well, with other little bits, and the fanfic in there is up to date, including the ones I wrote for Yuletide.

It was in my BBC news email this morning and the Technology section of The Guardian this morning, but Facebook's Scrabulous is under threat. Which is terrible because it's the only reason for Facebook to exist!

The other terrible piece of news is that Pandora is finally US only. Fortunately, when I first heard that it might I copied down the list of songs I'd thumbs upped. I just have to remember where I put it, since that was a while ago now. I was hoping I could get there through a proxy but they either don't load Pandora at all or give a technical error. If anyone has a proxy that will work, please tell the world. In the meantime, I'm playing last.fm my mp3s.

P9290642,
originally uploaded by paranoidangel.

Been there.

I accidentally bought Life on Mars on DVD, but since it arrived while I was ill, I can't say it was a bad accident. I re-watched both series (and the extras) in five days. I always meant to re-watch it after knowing whether Sam was mad, in a coma or back in time. It's interesting to re-evaluate in that light. The last episode doesn't work at all, though. The first time it's a chance to wonder what's really happened to Sam and then be disappointed and then happy with the ending. But the second time you already know, so you don't have the same feelings about it at all.

I am looking forward to Ashes to Ashes a bit more now though. Gene Hunt's great and it'll be good to see him more. Mind you, it helps that I haven't seen any old episodes of The Bill. Ashes to Ashes won't need to be a cop show in the 80s, the same way it was a cop show in the 70s, because we already have it. Even if it's changed beyond all recognition.

On the subject, last week The Guardian had a conversation between the two writers and Gene Hunt.

Taggart was really good last week and I was disappointed to find it was only an hour long tonight (I remember the days when it took them three weeks at an hour a week to solve the murders - and you got half a dozen of them). However, even though it felt like it raced along, the end of it was so emotional I felt that it was just as well there wasn't more of it.

The reason why I haven't posted for so long is that I've had the Christmas virus with added catarrh courtesy of my mother. So I've been off work all week but today I have actually been able to hear properly sometimes, which is a definite improvement.

However, my printer has died. It's only four years old too. So I'm after recommendations for a new one (inkjet).

The current one is an Epson C86. Before that I had an HP printer for six years that I only got rid of because it was slow. All I need a printer to do is to print without costing the earth. I did lots of research on this before and ruled out Canon because they didn't bother with a tray for the paper it had printed, which just means it'll throw them everywhere.

A handy list for what I want in a printer:

• cheap - but not so cheap it'll be really crap and fall apart by the end of the year
• a similar size to the current one (460mm wide, 242mm deep, 198mm high)
• a similar print speed to the current one (12ppm colour, 22ppm b&w - but that does seem super-quick to me, so I can definitely cope with slower)
• I like the idea of separate colour cartridges in theory, but given that I either print just black or all colours pretty much equally, I'm not sure it makes much difference
• I don't need it to do anything clever - like scanning or plugging my camera's card straight into it, I just need it to plug into a USB port and print when I tell it.

I possibly have the lurgy that's going round. I have really bad asthma. At the moment I think the things that set it off most are heating and cold. I have a cough but that's probably caused by the asthma. I have a sore throat but that's probably caused by the coughing. I have a bit more of a blocked up nose but that's probably caused by the cold. The practical upshot is that I'm not going to be going swimming this weekend. And have an inbox full of emails I haven't had the energy to reply to yet.

I've started playing Scrabble on Facebook, which is possibly the only thing it's useful for. Except that it doesn't send you notifications to tell you it's your go and there's no way to turn it on that I can see. Granted, I have turned off email notifications to everything because they always turned up blank, which was completely pointless. But I have discovered the RSS Feed of my notifications - although RSS Bandit refused to believe it was really an RSS Feed. Yes, my home page is full of crap telling me who got messages and cards and all sorts of stuff I just don't care about. And it also doesn't tell you if any discussions in any groups you're in have been updated and I have better things to do than to check them all by hand.

I have my Channel 4 and Radio 4 working on my TV again! Or at least it looks like it is. The problem is that 850MHz doesn't have a great signal, and that affects all of Channel 4's channels and ITV2, 3 & 4. So I have a couple of boosters which help a lot. The trouble is, they don't like the rain. Or the signal being split. The solution I've found is to unplug the lead to the TV so I can only watch TV through the PVR. Which I do anyway. So basically, my TV might as well not bother having a tuner in it at all.

Radio 1, 2, 3, 4 for some strange reason stopped working. I discovered when I brought up a list of my channels that it's because they're on there twice, once working and once not. I deleted the non-working ones and now it's happy. Bizarrely, looking at my list of TV channels, More4 is on both channel 13 and channel 14. So I deleted one of those and some others that were doubled. So now I just have UK History and Dave on the same channel (12). If I type in 12 I get UK History. One channel up is Dave. Two channels up from channel 12 is channel 13...

Someone at work summed it up perfectly when he said that the Christmas holidays seemed like such a long time but once we went back to work it seemed like no time at all.

I did get lots of things done over Christmas, which was great. I feel all caught up now.

But then I had to come back. My upstairs neighbours are still away, which normally I'd be happy about, but it just makes my flat feel more quiet and lonely. And the evenings seem so long I don't know what to do with myself. Even though I'd had entire days...

I have started using Facebook to play games, if anyone wants to play any. I have just about everything disabled on it, but have discovered the RSS feed of my notifications, so I might actually know what's going on now.

I decided that I will resolve to leave the house every weekend regardless of whether I have anything planned or for how long. Or have someone round. So anyone who wants to come round at/for the weekend, or wants to meet up, I currently have a relatively empty diary and need to put things in it.

I also need to write a chapter per day on my TARDIS Big Bang fic - starting tomorrow, as I gave myself today off to recover from having to get up early and go back to work.