The Six Nations starts this weekend. With the England team weakened by injuries and retirements there’s a good chance for France, Ireland and Wales to do well. (Sorry Italy, Scotland, but…)

Wales have an interesting schedule with their matches falling into the pattern - harder, easier, harder, easier, harder. As ever with Wales winning and losing is more a matter of psychology than of talent. If they can perform well against England this Saturday then everything could go their way.

So time to buy some beers and settle down in front of the telly for a few weekends. Sorry Lettice.

So Enterprise has been cancelled. Not a huge surprise, though it does seem to have come at a time when the show was finally starting to produce some good episodes (or so I hear - I’ve only seen the first two seasons).

With the panning received by the last Star Trek film, Nemesis, it looks like this could be last on screen Trek for some while. Probably not a bad thing. It’s been eighteen years since TNG started and television and the world at large has changed a lot since 1987. In many respect Trek has failed to keep up with those changes.

If there is another Star Trek TV series a few years down the line it can start afresh and reflect the views and hopes for the future of those years in the same way that TOS reflected those of the cold war/space race era and that TNG reflected those of the glasnost era.

One positive thing that may happen in the meantime is a flowering of fan efforts. Some of the most imaginative fan works (and also, it has to be said, the works that originally gave us the term “slash”) came out of the 1970s when there was no new Trek being produced. Likewise the most fertile period for Doctor Who fandom has been the years since 1989.

There is, of course, a Save Enterprise campaign.

http://www.lettice.net/yarn1.jpg

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 03 Feb 2005 16:42:28 GMT
Server: tigershark/3.0.114 (dn6.directnic.com)
Last-Modified: Tue, 01 Feb 2005 11:25:40 GMT
Connection: close
Content-Type: image/jpeg
Content-Length: 12964

http://www.stevepugh.net/lettice_pics/yarn1.jpg

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 03 Feb 2005 16:42:22 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a mod_auth_passthrough/1.8 mod_log_bytes/1.2 mod_bwlimited/1.4 PHP/4.3.9 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 mod_ssl/2.8.22 OpenSSL/0.9.7a
Last-Modified: Wed, 02 Feb 2005 10:34:02 GMT
ETag: "a04b5-32a4-4200ac9a"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 12964
Connection: close
Content-Type: image/jpeg

Why does the first one not display for a large number of people but the second one displays with no problems? The image files themselves are identical.

Spent the past few days struggling to get Live Press to work. This promised to be a more fully functioned method of posting from Word Press to Live Journal than the hacks I’d been using.

But it wouldn’t work. I overcame the problem that I lot of people had reported of the LJ fields simply not showing up on the Post page (the documentation lies when it says you can leave the list of approved WP users blank to allow all users to post). But nothing I posted appeared on LJ.

Bleargh, so back to the hacks we go.

Latin quiz on the BBC

Easy, but I’m ashamed to say I only got 9 / 10.