I have managed to read all the fandoms I know in the Yuletide archive before the reveal. I was going to do a recs post but I realised that although I was bookmarking things on A03 to start with, I haven't for a while, so I can't remember what I thought was good any more. Also, the Yuletide comm has so many recs posts, it's just got boring now (and it's not helped that someone's set the RSS feed to just show the first line, so half the posts I have to open just to find out that either the recs are in a different post, or I don't know the fandoms).

So instead, since I've been saving them for this, I'll talk about the fics I got:

everywhere you're leaving something (4308 words) by Anonymous
Fandom: Spooks
Characters: Erin Watts, Dimitri Levendis, Beth Bailey, Tariq Masood
Summary: Erin comes to terms with the workings of Section D.

This is a great story about Erin joining the team and getting to know Dimitri. It's just the story I wanted about the time between series 9 & 10.

Star Wars on Bannerman Road (772 words) by Anonymous
Fandom: Sarah Jane Adventures
Characters: Luke Smith, Sky Smith, Rani Chandra, Clyde Langer
Summary: Luke is home for the holidays, so it's time to work on Sky's pop culture education.

A bonus Madness story! It has lovely friendship stuff between all four and sibling stuff between Luke and Sky.

I am rubbish about saying why I liked these things, but I did. The best bit is I put both these fandoms on my list because they just had their last ever episodes this autumn and I got fic for them both!

(And why does A03's share button create some lovely html, then randomly put paragraph tags around the summary so it appears two lines below the bit that says 'Summary:'?)

I was having withdrawal symptoms not playing with blogging sites, so I have created a fanfic blog over at Dreamwidth at pa_fic.

All of my fanfic is on my website at http://www.paranoidangel.me.uk/fanfic/. There you can get an RSS feed of the whole thing, or just fandoms and there's a link in the sidebar that tells you how to search multiple tags and/or fandoms.

Everything I've written since March 2009 is also crossposted to LJ at pa_fic. Now pa_fic will have everything from 2012. I haven't copied over the old stuff to LJ and DW because the crossposting plugin won't do that with old entries to communities. And the version on my website gives better options for finding things.

Dad's friend brought round his Samsung Galaxy tablet today. Since my sister had her iPad home I compared the two. I prefer the Galaxy Tab because I can actually navigate the panes (the iPad randomly stops recognising my finger swipe, but always works for my sister) and the screen is nicer to swipe your finger on (although you can only really tell if you have a frenzy banana in Fruit Ninja).

I thought that if I had a tablet I'd be bored with it after a week. It turns out that was an optimistic estimate: it took an hour. There's only so many times you can play Fruit Ninja (or any other game) and I constantly have to hold it at a funny angle to stop the reflections. It drove me mad surfing to find out how to use the thing (there's a manual, but you have to download it from the website). I eventually worked out to click on a link you have to click above it and the keyboard has no delete button, only backspace and it's really hard getting the cursor to the right place in the text.

Given that you can buy a laptop or two netbooks for the price of an iPad or a Galaxy Tab, there's just no contest, given how much more versatile a netbook is.

Read more...

I've not been home for a whole day and I've finished all the computers stuff. Yesterday I was at home by 10.30 - the quiet roads made leaving at dawn worth it. So then we installed Linux Mint on my old netbook before lunch. After lunch we cloned the hard drive on my netbook, so now I have one that's exactly the same but without errors. And then yesterday and today I fixed the things in WP I wanted to fix and finished customising the CSS for the comment pages in LJ.

All just in time for the Yuletide archive to open, so now I need to read it, while watching my sister play Lego Pirates of the Caribbean. And write my fandom stocking fics.

We also did presents. I read the new Simon's Cat book in bed this morning because I woke up early and now I've started Lis Sladen's autobiography. Dad's reading Gin O'Clock (which was also my present).

According to quite a few people on LJ, they have broken it completely and the world is ending. Or something of that magnitude. It turns out that the bits they changed that I don't like, can be fixed by turning on customised comment pages. So I have now gone from hating them to liking them. Of course the difference is that I hate other people's because 90% of them are unreadable, whereas mine are by definition perfect. And red - you can't go wrong with red.

The trouble with this is that when I customised my layout (and made it less red, but now the red stands out nicely) I didn't bother with anything to do with customised comment pages because I wouldn't need them... 45 minutes later I've managed to change the text to a readable size, rather than a slightly too small to read comfortably size. And changed the border colour. At which point I had to stop and do other things, but I was having fun. Frustrating fun because it's hard to find what LJ has called its CSS elements. But it's better than doing similar things at work because here I can what I like, I'm the only person I have to please, and I don't have to have it done by Tuesday in five minute bits in between dealing with all the other work that needs doing.

So over Christmas, as well as installing Linux Mint on my old netbook and putting a new hard drive in my current one, I am also going to be playing with LJ CSS and a few things that need doing on WP. I have ten days off in a row (including weekends and bank holidays), I need something to do with that time and I've been thinking I need something like that to do, but there's only so many times you can change your layout.

My sole post all week has been the latest Big Finish releases, which included the subscriber special The Five Companions. Which was fun - I want to see more of Ian and Steven teaming up now.

Friday was our work Christmas party, which I've only just recovered from. All I did was to sit around and talk (and stand for an hour) but I was tired from it I slept for 11 hours Friday night, still felt tired and slept for 10 hours last night. Now I don't feel tired.

In the work secret santa for the first year in I don't know how many, I didn't get a Doctor Who related thing. I got a rabbit instead. Which is good, because generally you can't go wrong with with rabbits. However, this one has a hole in it that you're clearly meant to put something in, but no one knows what. There was no packaging, so presumably my santa doesn't know either. The most suggested things at the party were mobile, iPod and remote control. I tried putting my phone in it and the hole holds together too well to get anything in there easily. So I am stumped.

There was also food, which I mostly couldn't eat. The chef wouldn't understand that I just wanted to know what was in it, I didn't care about contamination, which she was more interested in telling me. I don't think she wanted me to eat at all. Fortunately, I brought my own - I remember last year well when I got a salad.

I have things booked for January now. I am going to see the Gymnastics at the O2. It feels like we can't get away from that place. I'm also going to see Spamalot. For the third time. But the first and second times were on Broadway and in the West End, this one's in my nearest city.

I have finished my Yuletide fic. And uploaded it. After I had it opened and the form filled in for ages while I tried to think up a summary (the title on the other hand came quite easily). I usually try to get it finished early, but I don't generally manage quite this early. The difference this year is that work hasn't been so busy for so long and I haven't had Rotaract. Usually I'd be dealing with our stall at the Christmas fair at the start of December, Cheese & Wine in January, various Christmas dinners and all the usual Rotaract stuff. It's actually been a quiet time of year, which makes a nice change.

Next I have six fandom_stockings to write. And I've signed up to write a 2000-5000 word Five Things fic for fivetimesbb. That's 400 words a thing it can't be too hard, can it? (famous last words). The current working summary for it is Five songs Johnny Chess wrote based on the stories his parents told him of their adventures with the Doctor in the TARDIS.

Along the same lines, but not involving actual writing, I am reccing for calufrax the first week in January. I know there were fics I wanted to rec last time but had to narrow it down. If only I'd written them down...

Of course, there's still Yuletide Treats. I haven't decided if I'm going to write any of those yet.

Friday I went to see Coldplay at the O2 in London with my sister. Read more...

It's definitely winter - my hands are dry and have started cracking This is even though I wear gloves whenever I'm outside or in the car, and for doing the washing up and when it's cold in the house I wear fingerless gloves. But there's only so much you can do and I'm not feeling desperate enough to wear gloves when washing my hair or showering. It's not as bad as when I had a rabbit because there are some things you can't do with gloves on because straw and food sticks to them.

But at least there's only 11 days of work left. Well, 10 and a half for me as tomorrow I am off to see Coldplay. Annoyingly we have to be there two hours before it starts to avoid the rush hour, as it's on the wrong side of London. And by the time it finishes we'll be on the last train and I'll get home at 1.15am! Which is why all I have planned this weekend is to catch up on some of the stuff on my PVR because that's definitely all I'll be capable of. I know I will enjoy it, despite the fact that I got dizzy last time I was in the O2 and the last time I was up that late at night I couldn't stand up without falling over...

This morning I had a massive excel file I needed to run one macro on. It should have been a case of setting it off on the super computer and coming back when it was finished ten minutes later. Instead it took two hours and involved me running it multiple times when it crashed, opening and closing excel multiple times when it refused to save, and copying out bits of the file when it refused to do anything.

And then my netbook refused to boot into Ubuntu. Fortunately it's a problem I've had before and did actually take ten minutes to fix, rather than the two hours it took the first time.

Don't you just love computers?

I am so glad there's only three weeks left before Christmas, when I get ten days off in a row (including weekends and bank holidays). Although the two weeks coming are likely to be the busiest as we try and fit as many projects in as possible before Christmas in a rush.

In other news, I had mushrooms last night and wasn't ill. They were nice as well, I'd forgotten! Even better, I had them on pizza. Sainsbury's Free From pizza bases don't go completely solid in the oven either. They're just expensive, which is why pizza is a treat. But since the smallest amount of mushrooms I can buy was 150g, I will be eating mushrooms every night this week.

Mushrooms are the last thing I have to try before I'm onto wheat and wheat gluten. It's a tricky one because I don't want to eat something that I'll remember the taste of and then might not be able to eat again, but I could eat half a breaded fish from the fish and chip shop, so I will need to eat quite a bit of gluten to test it. I am intending to have a tube of Pringles because limiting yourself to one or two is really hard. I think it'll have to be pasta - I have plenty, so I can always have half ordinary, half gluten free.

At some point I will have to try an actual egg and not just egg in bread and biscuits. But since I really don't want to remember what one tastes like and then potentially not be able to eat one again, I'm not in a rush.

My fandom stocking is at http://fandom-stocking.livejournal.com/184304.html. After writing stuff for people last year, I have been more detailed with my likes and not just listed ships, as the form has, since I don't have ships in all the fandoms listed, and I'm always happy with gen.

I am keeping an eye on other people's stockings, so I intend to fill them for everyone I know, even if it's only a drabble.

For those of us who can't grow moustaches or write 50,000 words, November is picowrimo. Given that last year I managed a week and then work took over my goal this year was:

I might try and finish off some half-finished fics sitting around on my hard drive.

As November started I had a fic I wanted to write for the End of SJA ficathon that would fill in two squares on my fanbingo card. I not only started it, but also finished it. Mind you, it helped to have a deadline and since I was running the ficathon and had already extended the deadline, I didn't feel that I could miss it. The House That Clyde Built is a story written in emails. Which turns out to be harder than it looks, especially considering that it's all dialogue and that's the easiest bit to write.

Then there was a langford_u (Stargate AU) fic I started in 2006 when the comm was still active. I came across it in March and had a look at it. I was determined to get it finished and I did. I discovered, when I got it American picked, that my American has improved a lot since then (it also helps to tell OpenOffice what language you're writing in...). The fic is Just a Game.

After that I realised I didn't have much time before Yuletide assignments went out. I chickened out of anything longer and found a short Stargate Atlantis fic lying around. Since I wrote that in 2006 I can't tell if there was supposed to be more of it, but it looked pretty done. So I edited it down to a double drabble (since it was never going to make 300 words). It's a Weir/Caldwell fic: Just Chess.

Then Yuletide assignments came out, so the rest of pico was spent on that. I can't talk about it, but I have the first draft done. Or at least it's done in the sense that I need to stop endlessly tinkering with it and get it to a second draft so I can read it without getting bored and work out what else needs adding or taking out.

So that was a pretty successful pico. This month I am writing my Yuletide assignment. I am only allowing myself to think about Treats and fandom_stocking fics once my assignment is at least in beta.

(And having used the lj comm code I modified from an existing plugin for the first time, I have realised I need to modify it again now that LJ has changed the way comm addresses work)