Nothing in ‘The Idiot’s Lantern’ was as scary as the bald Mark Gatiss in Confidential afterwards.

So Cliff Richard gets name checked in Doctor Who, which will make pink_weasel very happy. But who’s a Cliff fan? That won’t make her so happy.

And bless the weasel, she phone this afternoon to say that she was in a bookshop where they were selling DW novels for £1.99 and did I want any? And she read out all the titles so I could yea or nay them. So that’s cheap copies of Last of the Gaderene, Eater of Wasps and Casualties of War on their way home to me.

Current Mood:  cheerful

So I noticed that I was getting link back from isolani to a post here on Very True Things about the shortcomings of a certain site checking tool.

And that made me think “hmm, I haven’t had any of the automated messages from that site recently”. So I just tried to login. Failed. Try again. Failed. Try the forgotten password tool. “E-mail address not recognised”.

Sneaky, cowardly, gits. Couldn’t take a bit of criticism so deleted my account without even informing me?

Or maybe I’m being a bit hasty, maybe they just had a clear out of free accounts. Maybe my e-mail bounced once and they deactivated the account after that. Maybe they’ve taken their service offline to improve it. Maybe.

Current Mood:  angry

This morning I got on the wrong train. I have never done that on the way to work before, and I’ve only done it twice on the way home (and drink was definitely involved in one of those cases). So I was heading towards Victoria rather than London Bridge, and having a plain return season ticket rather than a travelcard I couldn’t jump off at Balham and hop on the Northern Line. So I jumped off at Balham and waited for the next train to London Bridge, which was late and even if it hadn’t been late would have gone back through West Norwood half an hour after I left.

My web server has been up and down, but mostly down, all day. I think that one of this weekend’s jobs will include taking a complete backup of everything.

For some reason I bought another issue of .net magazine. This one comes with a free CSS reference poster. The credits for which read:

Reprinted courtesy of the W3C
www.w3schools.com

The poster is indeed a version of the w3schools CSS chart which explains why it’s not very good, ‘cos w3schools aren’t very good. w3schools are also nothing whatsoever to do with the W3C. Whoops.

Current Mood:  grumpy

Via snapesbabe

Your Virtues!

Prudence	85%
Justice	100%
Faith	18%
Love	63%
Temperence	17%
Hope	52%
Fortitude	13%

Link: The Virtue Test
Written by Forest.

Current Mood:  tired

Some confusion at work as to whether a book on cookery and one on household cleaning products should have been bought with the company credit card.

It did cross my mind on Saturday whether VL had a contingency plan for the unlikely event of the UK winning Eurovision. Sure most of the burden would fall on the BBC (and more importantly the last two times we hosted it we did so in Harrogate and Birmingham) but if it did come to London we’d be involved to some degree. There wasn’t any chance of that this year though.

Really looking foward to a week off work next week. At the moment I’m perpetually tired, grouchy and making all sorts of cock ups with just about everything I touch.

Current Mood:  cranky

Under no circumstances should anyone with a heart look at this game.

Current Mood:  shocked

Look what I saw in my Gmail inbox. And if you can’t guess what’s going on, look at the full message.

I don’t know what’s more distressing. That people still have no idea how to write text for alt attributes. Or that people send e-mails out without stopping to think how they will behave in the major webmail systems.

Okay, I’m going to pretend that the first is a bigger sin (it probably is anyway) because I’m just as guilty as the next man of the second. (Scurries off to sign up for all the newsletters from work with his Gmail account…)

Current Mood:  frustrated

Via snapesbabe

Which Doctor Who are you?
this quiz was made by Auntie Krizu(:>)

Via sharikkamur

( Star Wars Personality Quiz )

I was tied between Qui-Gon Jinn and Han Solo this morning, now I’m one percent more QGJ. That’s just not fair!

Current Mood:  irritated

The latest entry spellfecker is priceless and seems very apt at the moment. Two clubs/societies I belong to are on the verge of shutting down due to problems with getting enough members to volunteer to do what needs to be done to keep them running (I do my bit for both but I’m aware that I could do more if I wasn’t so crap). I’m hoping things will sort themselves out ‘cos they’re both good ventures. Time will tell.

Current Mood:  blah

Doctor Who reviews for this week and last. There may be spoilers here.

The Girl in the Fireplace

As the episode ended I said to pink_weasel that this one would divide the fans. And as predicted people seem to be either loving it or hating it.

Carrying on from the week before it looks at what it means to be the Doctor and what it means to be a companion. As with many themes explored in the new series, this has been done in the novels and audios but was never really touched upon by the old series.

Here we follow up on the idea raised the week before that the Doctor must leave all his human friends behind - by compressing Reinette’s life into one episode we see in microcosm what Sarah Jane and all the other companions (well, not Adric, just those that survive) must go through. Rose will need to come to terms with this sooner or later and no doubt future episodes will return to this theme.

The Doctor proclaims himself as “The Lord of Time”, but is the fact that he can’t use the TARDIS to return to Versailles to rescue Reinette (either time) a sign of the more restricted universe that exists after the Time Lords?

Gorgeous clockwork robots, nice horse, sudden intrusion of an Adam Ant video ;-), good performances (Tennant’s best yet) from everyone. And a cracking script, Steven Moffat can’t half write them. More please.

10/10

Rise of the Cybermen

It’s all about the parallels. Themes and lines of dialogue recur throughout this episode. Just as the ill fated scientist says of the cyberman at the start, paying homage to the classic Frankenstein films, “it’s alive” so the Doctor says the same when he sees that glimmer of light in the depths of the TARDIS. (And when the Doctor breathes life, literally, into the crystal, did you wonder just how more valuable than it seemed at the time was his gift of “the air from my lungs” in The End of the World?) The Micky/Ricky joke from last year is here made flesh. And Pete Tyler instinctively trusting and confiding in Rose, and Jackie not doing so, is repeated from Father’s Day. No surprise that at the climax the Doctor says that “it’s happening again”.

With so many parallels to the past, perhaps the similarity of Lumic and Davros is intentional?

A quick thought - in the parallel world the Torchwood Institute is mentioned on the news and at the party. So here the Institute is much more public than in the real world. But is it the same institute? If it is then either there was a parallel Doctor to partake in the events of Tooth and Claw and prompt its creation (where is he then?) or this ‘parallel’ branched off from our own universe sometime between 1879 and 1987 (the year of Rose’s birth).

Apart from the parallel earth setting this was the most traditional story so far this year. Lumic is a traditional villain (and sadly Roger Lloyd Pack’s performance is as hammy as anything seen in the classic show); Mr Crane is a traditionalhenchman; Ricky Smith and the Preachers (sounds like a blues band) are a traditional set of rebels (um, okay that’s an oxymoron but you know what I mean). And then there’s a classic monster and a traditional cliffhanger.

The Cybermen look and sound good - there was little chance of them meeting the scare levels of their 60s forebeard but this version easily surpasses the 70s and 80s versions.

After seeing the first 35 minutes last night I would have given this 7/10 at most, but the last ten minutes and a repeat viewing of the earlier portion brings the score up to 8/10

Oh and you can see my office in the aerial shots of London.