Last Tuesday my mobile kept doing the thing where it randomly switched itself off during a conversation. The battery was low, but it wasn't that low. I've had it do that before, not long after I got it, so I know it means the battery is going. And it's only going to get worse, to the point where it's completely unusable as a phone.

I established at Christmas, by accident, that there are now such things as cheap phones that don't do all the million things the manufacturers seem to think you need them to do, but actually don't. Which makes it cheaper to buy a new phone than a new battery.

Since I was off on Friday I went into town where there is at least one phone shop for every network. After going into Carphone Warehouse, Phones4U and the Orange shop, I went to the cheap shop. And then to the other Orange shop where there were three members of staff and the only other customer walked in at the same time as me.

I tried out a few phones and bought the only one that doesn't have moving (ie breakable) parts and keys big enough to press (seriously, I only have little fingers and if the keys are too small for my fingers no one else has any chance). Annoyingly, you're not allowed to just take your SIM card from your old phone and put it in the new one. I never satisfactorily found out why. Except it means you have to wait for your number to be swapped over. Which the woman in the shop told me takes 24 hours.

48 hours later I rang them up and they told me it would take a maximum of 72 hours. It finally changed Sunday night. The trouble is that I had a text message I wanted to keep, so I forwarded it to mum's phone, then dad forwarded it to me Sunday night. Well, first he forwarded me a message that said 'forward', then sent it to my landline (no Tom Baker to read it out any more, though) and by the time I got it I found it was still on my old phone anyway.

So now I have a new phone. It was £15 more than the old one, doesn't have Tigger on it and has annoying polyphonic ringtones that some bright spark thought would be a good idea. And it does more than my old phone. But handily you can get a cut-down menu on the main screen that just has phone and text. Much more useful!

Since it's now after time, I can reveal that for remix I wrote Drowning (The Hero Remix), which is Doctor Who (it was almost strange not writing Atlantis for remix!). It's got Four, Harry and Sarah and I really enjoyed writing it. As evidenced by the fact that it took me two days

It probably helped that I'd read the story before and liked it and could see what I wanted to do with it straight away.

I was planning on posting about all sorts of real-life things today, like my new mobile (and why I have a new one) and my opinions on the news of the Blakes 7 remake, but then I heard that Humph died last night of the aortic aneurysm he went into hospital for last week.

The article doesn't say, but the aorta is the main artery bringing blood from the heart and an aneurysm is where the walls have been weakened. When he died it would have been instant and he wouldn't have known anything about it.

However, I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue won't be the same without him. The stage show in Bournemouth last Tuesday had Rob Brydon stepping in and The Guardian liked it, but didn't say how well he did, except to say that he sang (and he's very good at singing).

I do feel lucky that I've got to see Humph three times, at two recordings and the stage show. On two of those occasions he played too. Tomorrow at noon they're going to repeat a classic episode (how classic, I don't know) and there'll be a tribute to him at 9am on Wednesday, I assume also on Radio 4.

Edit: The Guardian has more details and says that he was admitted to hospital on 16th, had surgery on Monday and died Friday night following complications. So we don't know exactly what happened, and given he was 86 it could have been anything, but he probably didn't know anything about it.

45 stories in 10 fandoms - these are the ones I read and enjoyed.
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I had post on Monday. I hadn't had any all last week, so I wasn't expecting any at all, and it had fallen to one side of the doormat, so I trod on it. One of the letters was from the hospital telling me I had an appointment the day after my birthday. Now, I've been referred to the hospital to have my wisdom tooth taken out and I couldn't tell from the letter whether they were going to do it that day. It's a bit of a standard letter.

Fortunately, there was a number on there you could ring for enquiries. After twenty minutes on hold I finally got through to a person who told me she couldn't tell me whether they would be taking my tooth out or not. And couldn't understand why I might want to know. But she gave me the direct line for the oral surgery department at the hospital.

So I rang them, but they had done for the day. I rang them again at 9am and got voicemail. And again at 9.30am. So I gave in and rang the number on the letter again on the basis that speaking to another call centre peon might tell me something different. I only spent ten minutes on hold this time and instead asked how long my appointment was for, on the basis that if they told me it was ten minutes that would be a bit of a giveaway that they would just be looking at my tooth, not taking it out.

Let's first bear in mind that my appointment is at 9.30 and the letter says to come half an hour early in case they want to do x-rays and it says they might be running late. Which means I have to get to somewhere two buses away by 9 o'clock. I'm not driving there at that time, and besides, the booklet they sent with it is very keen to describe just how hard it is to park there.

The woman I spoke to told me that my appointment was an hour long, but they tell people to allow an hour and a half! When I asked she did confirm that they wouldn't be taking my tooth out during that hour to an hour and a half.

Basically, the upshot of this is that I might end up getting into work until lunchtime that day. Which given that it's the day after bank holiday Monday is rather going to make things interesting. And if they're going to try and choke me with a x-ray, I want to see it.

Yay!

(I am up stupidly early - I thought my clock said 7.35, which is 25 minutes before my alarm goes off, so I thought I'd get up, it actually said 6.35. In my defence, I have been sleeping on the wall side of the bed so my bedside table is a long way away, especially when I don't have my glasses on)

I sat down this afternoon, with a print-out of my TARDIS Big Bang fic, and worked through it, editing. Four hours later I was done. Well, actually, I stopped for dinner, but it was four hours of actual work. Which is quite a long time. Now, though, I need to read my handwriting to write it up. And then go through it again.

But I'm slightly further on than I was before.

So, remix went live while I was asleep. So far I've only read the remix of my fic: Might not last, but it's no big deal (the Hometown Blues remix). I read it and thought it was a good fic but a few of the lines nagged at me. So I went back and read the original: I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For and realised that the author has also done some really clever stuff with shifting events to different times and giving the same lines in different circumstances. Plus it's also Jack O'Neill/Elizabeth Weir, of which there needs to be more of.

I got lots of things done yesterday, but completely failed to do any Rotaract stuff. Today I really, really need to do it, but also do some work on my Big Bang fic and start reading all the Remix (and accompanying originals) before the reveal next weekend. Expect a recs list later this week.

I had this email about Humph through the ISIHAC mailing list:
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I was thinking the other day about what sort of man is Jo Grant's type. The men she falls for are:

• Mike Yates (possibly) - soldier
• Peladon - king
• Thal in Planet of the Daleks whose name I've forgotten
• Cliff - scientist

And what they all have in common is a love of adventure, leadership, intelligence. Then I realised that describes Ian Chesterton quite well...

I had to think about whether to make this my 1000th post (as calculate by WordPress - LJ is wrong because some posts aren't crossposted and some are crossposted twice), but I decided to in the end because it's probably quite typical at the moment really.

I shouldn't be in tonight. I should be at a meeting about the National Rotaract Conference in 2009. We can start publicising it after this year's over the May Day bank holiday weekend, so this is the last meeting before that. I didn't make the last meeting because it got changed at the last minute. I made the one before, but before that I was ill, I think. And the one before that my back was bad, I think. There's a pattern here.
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I've been meaning to do this for ages because I don't talk about roleplaying much because I know most of the people reading this will either not have a clue what I'm on about, or will be thinking of a different type. So this is a bit of a story of my experiences with roleplaying. Read more...

On Saturday I saw Potted Potter, which is all Harry Potter books in an hour and a bit. It was really funny and well worth going to. Interestingly, although it was definitely aimed at kids, there were a few jokes in there that only adults would get.

Sunday I bought a new mattress. After first negotiating some roadworks. They're on a short, busy piece of road between two roundabouts and for some inexplicable reason, the traffic lights are set not to change very often. This means that the traffic builds up on the roundabouts. I wanted go turn right once I'd got past the roadworks, but discovered they'd blocked the roundabout. So I had to sit on it and wait until the lights had changed - and then the people from my left decided they weren't going to let me go despite the fact I had right of way.

The woman showing me beds was insistent that memory foam was great. So I tried some, just to see, but in fact they are really soft. I don't care how good they may or may not be, I just can't sleep on something that soft. I ended up buying the only mattress I liked - which is what I did a year and a bit ago, so I hope I can't feel the springs in it in six months time.

Then I went swimming. The leisure centre has a circular car park so it feels like you park at a slightly funny angle. For some inexplicable reason, instead of painting white lines to show you where the spaces are, they have different coloured bricks. Because it was sunny when I left I had my sunglasses on, but it wasn't sunny when I got there, so I couldn't see the markings for the spaces at all. Fortunately, the car park was only busy close to the leisure centre, because people are incapable of walking, so I abandoned it at the other end of the car park and no one parked anywhere near.

Yesterday evening I updated WordPress to 2.5. Since the one I was using was 2.3.something that sounds like a big change. But they haven't fiddled with anything that affects themes or plugins (apart from the LJ crossposter), so it was really easy. I haven't investigated any of their changes yet, but the biggest thing they've done is changed the admin interface.... to make the text too small to read. And I can't find anything. That I definitely have to play around with at some point. Even this text I'm typing now is slightly too small to see comfortably.

Tonight I went to Tesco, who have car parking spaces that are far too wide, so I open the car door to work out where I am in the space and it looks like I'm miles away. Except I get out and find I'm miles away on the other side too. They completely failed to have the apples I wanted, so it's handy there's a Sainsburys nearby. They also changed the orange squash I have. They definitely changed the packaging, I can't tell about the contents, but the packaging says that it's double concentrate so you only need half as much. Which confused me completely, so I bought Sainsburys' own instead. The moral of this story is don't change things!

melliyna asked me some fandom questions in a meme last week, that I've only just got round to answering. Not least because she asks hard questions. Read more...

I've been really busy this week working on my TARDIS Big Bang fic. There's a deadline on Wednesday that, on last Monday, I was sure I was never going to make. I thought I was never going to finish the thing at all.

But yesterday morning I finished the second draft! It did help that I reduced the number of chapters from 26 to 20, but now I'm feeling a lot more hopeful about it.

It's gone off for a plot beta, so I'm not going to think about it this week (I'm not in most of the week anyway) and I now have time to get some other stuff done that I've been meaning to. I did get quite a bit done yesterday, which was good. Although those were the quick things...

I've got very good at parking really close to the wall to the right of my parking space. So good that tonight when I got back from Tesco I had to get out from the passenger side...

Last weekend I went home for the District Rotary Conference, which quite a few Rotaractors were going to. Since it was in the town next to where my parents live, it makes it nice and cheap for me. I took Friday afternoon off work to drive down, although I stopped off on the way (although it's in the wrong direction) at the hospital to have my back x-rayed. Slow was not the word for them, as I spent the best part of an hour there and there were only three people in front of me. By the time I got home it was four hours after I left, and it's only a two hour drive (without a stop). Read more...

Via Wil Wheaton: 3 steps to find out if you're a Trekkie.

For reference my answers are:

1. Yes, but haven't you spelt it wrong?
2. Yes, although it is purple and furry
3. Oh, let, me think...