Merry Christmas from somewhere in the middle of the Caribbean Sea.
We're heading towards Cuba. We arrive there tomorrow morning for a four day stay. We're all hoping that Castro doesn't die in the next few days - as that could apparently be a bit of a problem for tourists in the country.
Yesterday, following a series of confusions that may never be adequately explained, we ended up having a very nice dinner in Barbados with my step-mother-in-law (is that a real term?)
During the meal, she mentioned that at some point earlier in the year she had met someone who knew me. Someone who worked in computers. But being at bit... er... disorganised she couldn't remember who it was or where she met them.
I'd be interested to find out who it was though. So if you were in Barbados earlier this year and met a rather mad woman who asked if you knew me, then please let me know.
I'm currently in St Lucia. This morning I went on a helicopter trip over the island. Then we had a nice lunch and spent the afternoon on the beach. Tonight we sail for Martinique.
It's a hard life!
I'm writing this from a ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Net access is (understandably) patchy - we're sharing a 64k pipe with all the ship's official data traffic - so I haven't kept as in touch as I hoped that I would.
We've been to Gibraltar and Madeira and for the last four days we've been crossing the Atlantic. We reach Barbados in a couple of days and from there we wander around the Caribbean for a few days before heading off to Central America.
There will be stories and photos once I get a better connection.
A couple of years ago, a friend of mine acted in a couple of episodes of the American television show 7th Heaven. At the time she told me that there was no danger of it ever being shown in the UK as it was a very American show and British audiences would hate it.
But she reckoned without the large number of dodgy British cable channels that will import any old crap from the US. And recently I noticed that the Hallmark Channel had started showing old episodes of 7th Heaven. A few minutes research with Google showed me which season they were showing and it just happened to be the one that she was in.
So last night I watched the first of her two episodes. The second is on this evening.
Now I've seen some pretty bad TV shows in my time, but this is horrible. I'm not sure what was worse - the ridiculously simple plots that were only there to hang obvious moral points on, or the stereotypical portrayal of a British person (my friend's part). It's a bit like the Waltons - but contemporary and more christian.
Obviously I've only seen one episode. But I'm really not sure that I can stand watching the second one tonight. Maybe I'll just record it an fast-forward looking for Jules' bits.
I can't believe that something this bad was ever made. Oh, no, that's not fair. Lots of bad television shows get made. But most of them don't last very long. This one had been running for eleven years. There must be people out there in the US who are lapping it up. And that's very worrying.
Ok, I haven't had the time to get the authorised commenting working correctly with the new version of MT. And allowing everyone to comment was just leading to an effective Denial of Service attack on this server.
So I've disable comments on this blog until I get back from holiday and can spend time looking at it. And I've disabled them by renaming the comment program - which means that it won't be pretty, you'll just see 404 errors.
Sorry about the inconvenience. I'm sure you all had really useful and interesting things to say.
Over the weekend, we got the final details through about the holiday. A couple of things had changed. Some were better and some were worse.
The flight has switched from Heathrow to Gatwick. That's closer to us, so that's good.
But it's switched from BA to EasyJet. That's bad.
The flight is now about five hours later in the day. Not leaving the house at 6am is obviously good.
But it means that we don't get to Barcelona until 4pm. So we've lost most most of our day in Barcelona.
And for some reason, they've upgraded us to a cabin that looks like it's about twice the size of the one we booked (we were cheapskates and booked the cheapest cabin). A bigger cabin is obviously good, but I'm also hoping that free upgrades means that the cruise isn't fully booked. Half empty cruise ships is also good.
The flight back is a bit of a disappointment too. We're flying back from San Jose in Costa Rica. But it's a Delta flight via Atlanta. So it looks like we get to spend about four hours hanging around Atlanta airport.
It's not all good but, on balance, I think we've done alright out of these changes.
I've just put Planet Doctor Who live. It aggregates stuff that it can find about Doctor Who (and Torchwood). If you can recommend good RSS feeds that it should include, then please let me know.
Obviously it has web feeds. Choose from RSS or Atom. Oh, and there's also an OPML file.
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