Slightly misleading headline in today's Sun (there's a surprise!) as they claim that "Dr Who Quits After One Episode" (no idea how permanent that link will be).
It's true that Christopher Eccleston has said he doesn't want to make another series of Doctor Who and it's also true that only one episode of the current series has been broadcast. But the Sun doesn't seem to realise that Ecclestone has already filmed all thirteen episodes of this series.
Those of you who have seen me at some point this year will know that I've had a pretty bad cough since christmas. A couple of weeks ago it got to be too much and I finally went to the doctor. She diagnosed tracheitus and prescribed a course of anti-biotics. After a few days, that didn't seem to be doing anything so I made another appointment to go back and see her. She suggested that I should see her the day after I finished the drugs, so I went in on Thursday. On Thursday morning, to add to the cough I was also covered by a vivid red rash
After checking me out again she decided that I should go the local hospital and let them look me over. To cut a long story short, I was kept in hospital until yesterday when the rash started to subside. But they still don't know for sure what is causing the cough and I have to go back as an outpatient in a couple of weeks.
More details will follow over the next few days (when I feel up to more typing) and there will be plenty to say about the state of the NHS, but this is just a brief note to explain why I haven't been replying to email for the last few days.
It seems I completely missed this wonderful letter when it was published in the Guardian earlier this month.
We were wondering if perhaps Hazel Blears couldn't help your overworked police force to identify terrorist suspects, by making dubious peoples wear some form of easily recognised symbol, for instance a yellow star. We have read this was highly effective previously in europe.
Later on, my wife also got the same call from the Labour Party that I mentioned yesterday. Unsurprisingly, she gave pretty similar answers to me.
One thing we both noticed when discussing the calls afterwards was that the party didn't seem particularly interested in our specific reasons for not voting Labour this time. I think that this is probably because they already know the reasons why people are angry with them (you'd need to be pretty stupid not to be able to work that out) but they are just trying to gauge the size of the potential rebellion.
So it's nice to see that they are rattled. This is just one demonstration. On another front you have people like Tom Watson peddling the old "a protest vote leads to a tory government" scare story.
Two short political stories from yesterday.
Firstly I got a phone call from my local Labour Party. They were interested in my voting history and voting intentions. The conversation went something like this:
LP: Can you tell me who you are going to vote for this time?
Me: To be honest I have no idea.
LP: Do you usually use your vote?
Me: I always vote.
LP: And can you tell me who you voted for last time?
Me: Labour.
LP: And who do you usually vote for?
Me: I have alway voted Labour[1]
LP: What local issues are making you reconsider your vote?
Me: It's not local issues, but national and international issues.
LP: Ok, so what issues have made you reconsider your vote?
Me: Oh, the standard stuff. The illegal invasion of Iraq. The new Prevention of Terrorism Act. Stuff that the real Labour Party would never consider.
LP: Ok, well I think that's all I need for now. Thank you.
Sounds like they're getting a bit worried. Which is nice.
Then about an hour later, I was watching Michael Howard talking to the Tory Party conference. He was talking about schools and the health service and saying how the Tories has plans to remove unnecessary layers of management in order to make them more efficient. He was harshly criticising the Government for imposing the these unnecessary restrictions on hospitals and schools. Of course he completely failed to mention that these restrictive changes were first introduced by the Tories when they were last in power. Do they really expect people to have such short memories? Well obviously they do. And, luckily for them, most of the population do seem to have the memory of a goldfish.
[1] This is a slight lie as I dabbled slightly with the Greens in the mid-80s.
The tale of my stepdaughter's iPod rumbles on. After much hassle we finally got it all working last week. Or so I thought.
I'd tested it by copying files from her large (legal, I'm sure!) MP3 collection onto the iPod using AnaPod. This worked fine. The next step was that she wanted to rip her own CDs an copy those tracks onto the iPod. She said that she was getting an error saying that with the trial version of AnaPod you can only transfer audio files.
So I go up to her PC to investigate. She shows me the files on her PC that she has ripped from a CD. They are all Windows Media Audio files. And as far as I know an iPod can't play WMA files. So AnaPod doesn't recognise them as audio files.
This is very frustrating as she has dozens of CDs that she has already ripped. None of which can be used on the iPod. It turns out that she has been ripping the tracks using Windows Media Player. And Windows Media Player defaults to ripping music to WMA files. One further investigation we discover that the vanilla installation of Media Player that she has can't rip music to MP3 format. You need some kind of plugin. And the only ones I can find are not free software - they're only $10 but that's not the point.
I'm astounded that Microsoft's Media Player doesn't, by default, rip to the de facto standard for music files. I now need to search for a free software way for her to be able to do that on her Windows 98SE system. I wonder if Winamp will do it.
So, once more, we're caught in the middle of some kind of battle between Apple and Microsoft where each company seems to be doing what it can to prevent its systems to work with the other company's systems.
And that pisses me off.
If you don't want to read spoilers about the first episode of the new Doctor Who series then you probably shouldn't read this article. You have been warned.
One of my earliest memories of Doctor Who is the image of Autons coming to life in shop windows and shooting people with the guns in their hands. This would have been from Jon Pertwee's first story Spearhead from Space in 1970. Rose, the first episode of the 2005 version of Doctor Who recreates this scene and thereby guarantees getting the approval of all fans of my age group.
That's one of the main things that I took away from this first episode, the creators of the new series are determined that we know that there will be continuity back to the old series. The Autons look just how they did thirty-five years ago and their hands drop open to reveal their guns in exactly the same way. The TARDIS looks the same as it always did although the interior owes more to the Paul McGann version than the last BBC version and there's a nice homage to all the previous "but it's bigger on the inside" scenes when Rose first enters it.
At the same time, there are a lot of good new touches. Eccleston plays the Doctor as mysterious, slightly rude but with a nice dry sense of humour. I particularly liked Mark Benton as the conspiracy theorist who has been tracing appearances of the Doctor through history. I hope be becomes a recurring character.
Not everything worked though. The programme has the usual constraints of having to tell a complete story in forty-five minutes. This means there are a few too many coincidences. In particular the Doctor turns up in exactly the right place at exactly the right time a bit too often for it to be convincing. Some of the CGI effects looked a bit obvious (though it's, of course, possible that the leaked copy I saw has unfinished effects in it). Oh, and the final scene where the Doctor persuades Rose to leave her boyfriend and join him in the TARDIS seemed very rushed to me.
But, all in all, I'm very impressed. It's a lot better than the 1996 TV film and (to be honest) it's a lot better than a lot of the old repeats that I've been watching on UK Gold. This was certainly made by fans of the show and it has enough continuity to keep the fans (or, at least, this fan) happy. I hope that the rest of the public enjoy it as much.
Now. How long until episode two is leaked?
I knew that it was likely to happen. I'd even heard strong rumours of the location. But in a blog entry yesterday Nat Torkington confirms that the European OSCON will be taking place in Amsterdam from the 17th - 20th October this year.
Hope to see you there.
Looks like the new series of Dr Who will be starting on March 26th. Expect increasing amounts of media coverage over the next couple of weeks. An early entry is this piece from yesterday's Observer.
I'm getting very excited.
Update: Due to some unscrupulous people on the internet I now have a copy of the first episode to watch. I couldn't resist the temptation to watch the first five minutes this morning. And there are Autons!
One of my favourite bands of all time are The Icicle Works. I first heard of them when they briefly entered the UK pop charts in the early 80s with Love Is A Wonderful Colour and Birds Fly (Whisper To A Scream) but I dismissed them as just another average pop band until I saw them live at the Freshers' Ball when I started my second attempt at a degree at South Bank Poly in 1984. They were one of the best live bands I have ever seen and I saw them regularly until they split up in the early 90s.
Now I see that Karma Download are selling MP3s of some of their back catalogue. They have their first two albums and a compilation available. The compilation looks particularly good value for money at 16 tracks for £7.99. If you've never really listened to The Icicle Works then I strongly recommend that you give them a try. Their recordings were never really as strong as their live performances but there's still some worthwhile stuff there.
I particularly recommend Out of Season, Understanding Jane and Nirvana.
I'm convinced that Steve Jobs hates me.
There's something embedded in every piece of Apple hardware and software that checks who is using it and if it's me then it does everything in it's power to make my life as painful as possible.
It's the only possible explaination. Everyone else seems to think that Apple products are wonderful. Within five minutes of me being near an Apple product I want to throw it across the room.
The latest example is my stepdaughter's new iPod.
Now I knew that the official Apple software only works on Windows 2000 and Windows XP and she runs Windows 98SE so I knew we were in for fun and games. I had no idea how much fun it would be though.
Firstly I found out that there were a number of alternatives to iTunes that would run on older versions of Windows. We decided to give Anapod a try so we downloaded and installed it.
Then when we attached the iPod via the USB port, it was recognised but it couldn't be used as there was no device driver installed. I assumed that a device driver would be on the CD that came with the iPod so I looked on there[1]. But I couldn't find anything useful on the CD. Everything on there was only for modern versions of Windows.
So, off to Google and we came up with this. It's a Win 98 device driver for an iPod which some random person has hacked together. We install it and it all seems to work properly.
Well, almost. The iPod is now recognised when we plug it in and Windows sees it as a removeable drive. But double-clicking it gives an error saying that the drive is unformatted. Reading the small-print on the device driver page gives this clue:
If your iPod was never used before you can get "Drive not formatted" message. Don't try formatting iPod with Windows tools! To format iPod correctly you have to use Apple iPod Updater software. This software works only under Windows 2000 or Windows XP. So you'll have to find some Windows 2000/XP machine, install software from CD you got with your iPod and Update (or Restore) your iPod. After that you can uninstall software and enjoy iPod under Windows 98.
So after all that there is still some part of the process that has to use a Windows 2000/XP machine. For some reason an iPod that is going to be used with Windows needs to be reformatted from the default (Mac) format. Now that all sounded pretty bizarre to me, but who am I to argue? Luckily I have a Windows 2000 machine in the office so yesterday I brought the iPod, the CD and the USB cable in. At lunchtime I started the process running. At 6:30pm when I wanted to leave the process was still running so I had to disconnect the iPod and bring it home (probably in a completely unstable state).
This morning I brought it in and started the process again at 9:45am. And it took about 30 seconds. So I think it should all be ready to use on my stepdaughter's PC. We'll see what happens when I get home tonight.
But it really shouldn't have been this difficult.
[1] I'm skipping the part of the story where the CD-ROM drive didn't work and I wasted three days trying to transfer the files from another PC across the wireless network. After three days of the wireless network crashing as I was transfering data I finally cracked and opened up the PC. Only to find that the CD-ROM IDE cable had become unplugged. Plugging it in again solved that problem. Try as I might, I can't find any way to blame that on Apple.
Read this. It's very good. And then add Thoughtcrime is Death to your blogroll. That is all citizens. Now return to your labours.
(Entry title lightly paraphrased from Tony Hancock's "12 Angry Men")
I'm ill and I'm grumpy, so this site hits my current mood nicely.
It's nice to know that I'm not the only one who hates to hear restaurant staff and customers singing "Happy Birthday" to some hapless soul sitting in their midst. The people who run Unhappy Birthday also dislike this as much as I do and they have a plan...
It turns out that the song is copyrighted and therefore all public performances (and restaurant parties count as public performances) should incur fees payable to the copyright holder (which is currently Time Warner). The site therefore suggests a campaign of writing to Time Warner informing them of unlicensed performances of their copyrighted material. This, they hope, will lead to a spate of requests for fees from Time Warner to the owners of small restaurants and that will lead to the restaurant owners stopping people from singing the song in their restaurant. This, eventually, creates a far more pleasant dining experience for all.
I'm all for it :)
Recent Comments