Author Archives: Heather

Seven’s back in Town

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Super 7 in the sun - click to enlarge

One of the fun things about our relationship is just how many quirky things Emma and I both enjoy.

Last Christmas I gave Emma the A&E box set of The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan’s strange British spy show from 1967. The basic concept (shown in the lead-in credits every week) was McGoohan plays a “secret agent” who angrily resigns from the service, returns to his flat to pack and is gassed through the keyhole. When he awakes and raises the blinds, he discovers he is in a mysterious village, where the folks in charge work him over physically and psychologically to make hime explain why he resigned. The twist (there’s always a twist!), is that he never knows who runs The Village, if its his side trying to crack him, or the opposition.

One fun part is during the starting credits he roars through London in the “car he built himself”, a Lotus Super Seven.

When we went to the Motorcycle Day show in Maryland a few weeks back, I spotted a Super Seven parked in the shade and went over to take pictures. Emma was intrigued, she’d never seen one in “the wild”, she’d only seen one during the the credits for The Prisoner and didn’t know it was a “regular” car!

After a web search I found a site full of Seven links –
Clubman Links

Dr Who is Back

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Dr Who is back!

I’d heard all the hype about the new Doctor Who series … pretty much an unknown for us US fans. I’d seen some of the early 70s Tom Baker episodes on PBS in the mid 80s, but the BBC ended the show in 1989, and, other than a weird Fox TV broadcast of a Dr Who movie that didn’t go anywhere, I hadn’t heard much since then. (See
http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Contrib/SciFi/DrWho/episodes.html).

Until this year …

My friend Grant down in Georgia had been talking about a new Dr Who series that the Beeb was working on, so I kept an eye out and found a “leaked” internet version of the first new episode (aka 27×01 – as its the 1st episode of the 27th season of the show, which originally started back in 1963) .

Well, that Internet teaser, called “Rose” was quite good, if a bit frantic – so this week, knowing that a episoide 2 would air at 7PM Saturday night in the UK, I looked around late Saturday night (US Eastern time is 5 hours behind GMT) and I found episode 2. When I got up on Sunday I started to watch it on the Mac. Emma asked if we could watch it on the TV – I didn’t think so, but I burned the AVI file to a CD and took it downstairs and popped it into my cheapo JVC DVD player. Amazingly … it popped up a directory list, and when I clicked the Play button … zoom! Widescreen and all – very nice! (tho there is a shade of pinkish-red that looks … funky on screen- sort of like an old VGA monitor).

Now the hard part will be waiting each week for the new episode! In the 80s we got Dr Who a few episodes a night on PBS, but it was old cheesey episodes. Now I can watch current episodes in nearly realtime … thats VERY cool!

Mar 26 – 1. Rose

April 02 – 2. The End Of The World

April 09 – 3. The Unquiet Dead

April 16 – 4. Aliens Of London

April 23 – 5. World War Three

April 30 – 6. Dalek

May 07 – 7. The Long Game

May 14 – 8. Father’s Day

May 21 – 9. The Empty Child

May 28 – 10. The Doctor Dances

June 04 – 11. Boom Town

June 11 – 12. Bad Wolf

June 18 – 13. The Parting Of The Ways

Grant recommended the forums at Outpost Gallifrey as a great place to find out more – and – he\’s right again!

Restyling the blog

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As I get time here and there I\’ll put some more color and style back into the blog. WordPress handles styles differently than my much-hacked MovableType styling, so it may be a while before you see anything that ambitious here again, but I am bringing some color back in. I\’m not sure I like header graphic I created last night before dinner – I just grabbed a bunch of pictures from iPhoto and jumbled them together (the pond, Emma, the MCC logo in leather seen at conference a few years ago, the Triumph I’m fixing up) … Its very busy and hard to read the title overlay – but it will have to do for now while I think through a full website makeover. I’m also considering setting the blog as the homepage for the whole website.

x10 – the fun continues!

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image of plugin filter

My Home automation system recently stopped working. My bedside lights didn’t come on at sunset, and I couldn’t turn them on with the remotes either. Something blocked the signal!

But after some research through the xTension mailing list archives, and a quickly delivered XPPF plugin noise filter from PIGS Electronics http://www.pigselectronics.com/ my system is now working great again, and the problem is just a bad memory

Continue reading →

Fundamental Christian Charity?

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News from UFMCC Headquarters …
January 7, 2005

Metropolitan Community Church’s relief efforts on behalf of victims of the tsunami were saluted on Al Franken’s national (US) radio talk show, The Al Franken Show.

Franken pointed out that, as of earlier this week, none of the “religious self-righteous websites” (his words) even mentioned the tsunami disaster (Christian Coalition, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, etc — “while the United Church of Christ, Metropolitan Community Churches, and some reformed Jewish groups all had the disaster and disaster relief prominently displayed on their websites…”

The Al Franken Show is carried live on Air America Network on both Sirius and XM satellite radio, and on more than 50 radio stations across the U.S. Franken, a former star of Saturday Night Live, is the author of several books, including the New York Times #1 bestseller “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.”

Want to send some help to the survivors of the Tsunami?
I recommend you use Charity Navigator and
The Better Business Bureau National Information System
to help evaluate what charities to give to, based on ranking and percentage of donated money that is used for administration vs. money that is used for the program itself.

Merry Christmas .. cough cough hack hack …

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Its Christmas – what a wonderful relief from work!
I’m still struggling with this flu bug that nipped me last week – started with a nasty sore through and achy weakness, then shifted to a raspy unproductive cough with a constant nasal drip, then a fever … and now, it may actually be fading away!

We had a big deal going at work for the last month or so – the final stages of turning our website into a Portal – and the actual launch on Dec 20th. Of course, that came in the middle of the scheduled office party. But it went through without a flaw and everyone celebrated. Tho I didn’t feel much like celebration with this flug bug … ick!