Oh dear. Australians. What can you do with them? *
Linky link link if the video doesn’t play
*that they haven’t already done with themselves
And the one with the beard? I work with him. Take pity on me.
distressedI take it that all the shouting and honking of horns outside means that England did okay in the footie?
( Spoilers, not for the football... )
cheerfulOkay, so yesterday I actually managed to speak to a “genius” at the Apple Store and he restored the iPod software on my Nano. And that’s all okay, except… quite often whilst the iPod is connected to the computer it will suddenly wipe all the data. All songs, gone. I can make it happen predictably by trying to copy album artwork over with the songs, so that’s disabled now, but it’s still happening unpredictably for some other reason. Grrrr.
My computer also had trouble with the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs CD. It decided that the first track was 49 minutes long (i.e. it contained the whole album) and that the second track was 15 hours long (maybe it contained a secret message from an alien intelligence?). Track three onwards are fine. I must check it an a regular CD player to see if it’s the CD and not the computer.
Doctor Who starts two weeks yesterday, and the BBC promotions machine is in full swing. Tennant and Piper are in all the weekend newspapers (oh dear, the David Tennant fashion article in the Guardian…). But much more excitingly on the web site there are trailers and “Tardisodes” (BTW, who would pay through the nose to download these to a mobile rather than watch them online?). And Mickey’s updated his web site as well (be sure to follow all the links.).
I’m trying to catch up with the 8th Doctor novels. I’ve reached The Last Resort and now have a dilemma. I have six of the remaining nine books but not Timeless or Sometime Never. The latter is definitely crucial to the ongoing arc and I think the former is quite important as well. Yesterday I looked in three Waterstones, two Borders, two Books Etc., Forbidden Planet, Blackwells, Foyles[1], WHSmiths and the BBC Shop. No luck. Amazon are saying that they dispatch in 4 to 6 weeks, which if past performance is anything to go by means that there’s only a 50-50 chance at best of Amazon being able to dispatch them at all.
At least Oxford have run the boat race.
Oh, and the flat is currently full of knitters. But they brought cake so that’s okay.
[Update] – I just remembered that whilst I was in Foyles I noticed a stocky, balding chap staring at me as he walked past. Just after he left the store I realised that this was almost certainly Dom Sandbrook, whom I have mentioned before on this blog. Gosh, he has a Wikipedia entry, and I wonder whether if anyone I know was responsible for the ‘vandalism’ shown in the revision history. No, scrap that, I don’t wonder “whether”, I wonder “which”.
crankyRight? No talking about the rugby. Got that?
distressedWell, that was a bit of a surprise. No grand slam this year. And whoever wins tomorrow (and that will be Wales, won’t it?) is also in with a chance of winning the tournament.
surprisedI’m officially middle aged now as today I wore novelty socks bought for me by my wife.
However, they were Welsh Dragon socks and Wales did beat Scotland today (they seemed to be overpowering the Scots in the parts I saw, though the last Scottish try looked like a classic from what I saw on the news) so I see a new superstition in the forming.
happyFirst half was okay. Second was just painful. 
Okay, okay. England did play well – powerful, accurate and fast. Wales need to take the way they played in the first half, add that little extra oomph, and then keep it up for a whole match. From what I saw of Italy – Ireland it doesn’t look like a very promising start for the Irish either. So let’s see how France and Scotland fair tomorrow, but, so far, if the English keep this up all through the tournament then there won’t be any stopping them.
In other news I got my hair cut today. First time since the wedding; that’s five months. Lettice will be sad – she would like to turn me into a James May clone (except younger, non-smoking and less sexist, I presume) – but at least it’s now somewhere near to controllable.
365 days ago I made a post about things I was looking forward to in 2005. How did they turn out?
Obviously, getting married and the subsequent honeymoon was fabulous beyond words. (If you haven’t seen them already Lettice has stuck a whole load of photos online.) Also on a personal front I moved house and got a new job, so a very good year.
Doctor Who was incredible. Listened to some of the commentaries on the DVD box set (and is that a wastfeul piece of packaging or what?) yesterday and was thrilled all over again by the passion and dedication of the people who brought the Doctor back.
The market share of Internet Explorer did continue to fall. On the SFSFW site it fell from 77% to 67%. This is also the year that Opera became totally free. I also finally got around to learning a bit of XSLT which I’ve been meaning to do for ages.
Serenity was the best film of the year for me (yes I have middle-brow sci-fi tastes, didn’t you know?) and well worth the wait. Can we have a sequel (or two or three or…) please? Batman Begins and The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse were also very good whilst The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Revenge of the Sith were better than expected (but as we expected total train wrecks that’s not actually saying much).
And finally, I was looking forward to the general election, but it turned out a bit dull. It did give us one last chance to be rude about Tim Collins before he vanished into well deserved oblivion. But for my political fix this year I’ve been watching the post-election leadership battles (Brown vs. Blair; Davies vs. Cameron; everyone vs. Kennedy) with much glee. Politicians spending so much time shafting each other means, we can but hope, that they have less time for shafting us.
Good things I didn’t predict at the start of last year included, Wales winning a Grand Slam; England winning the Ashes; London winning the Olympics; Judge Jones putting both boots into the Intelligent Design movement. 
Went up to town today for a bit of shopping. Took one look at the wall of rucksacks in the tube station and decided to walk from Victoria to the West End (nice little stroll past St James’s Park and the Admiralty, etc.). Then at Forbidden Planet there was a huge queue ‘cos Simon Pegg was doing a signing, but they’d put the queue out the back so it didn’t interfere much at all with normal shopping (well what passes for normal in FP). But if the queue for Simon Pegg was as long as the one I saw today I dread to think how long the queue will be next week when Neil Gaiman is signing…
I nearly made it out of FP with wallet intact. Then I saw something that I had to have. So I spent £25 on a tee-shirt. Gulp. So, quick quiz. Who can guess what’s in the tee-shirt?
Lettice is out doing karaoke tonight so I’m home on my home listening and sometimes watching the fireworks. We’re nice and high up so I can see loads of displays. Tomorrow is the big display at Crystal Palace and I hope we get a good view of that as well.
Wales 3 – New Zealand 41.
As tagged by Littlebun here are ten things that make me happy.