Least you think I sit indoors all the time, amusing myself with a cuddly cat and Doctor Who, here’s a shot of our latest pet – living out back in the pond! …
Everyone should have one – or two … they keep down the ‘skeeters!
Its not all Geeky
Just so you don’t think I’m all computers and motorcycles and sportscars, here’s 2 pictures of Dolly Lama Diva from this weekend …
Dolly Lama – because she is a Himalayan Cat, and Diva … well … if you knew her, you’d know thats exactly what she is!
The Parting of the Ways – aka – CE steps out!
Well, its over … and it’s going to be a L O N G wait until Christmas.
What’s over? – Why, the best TV show of the Season – the new Doctor Who with Christopher Eccleston as the 9th Doctor. You say you never heard of Doctor Who, or if you have, you thought it went off the air years ago? Well – it did go off the air in 1989 – but Russell T Davies brought it back to the BBC and its been fantastic!
Yep, its not a US show – its the hottest new show on the BBC and we can’t get it here!
This was a new show, but with references to the background story of the old shows. But it still played well for the folks (like Emma) who never saw any of the old shows.
And tonight was the last of the 13 episodes for this new season, and even though we knew that Eccelston was only doing this one season, it was still a great series of stories arced to this final event, when the Doctor “regenerates” into a new persona and appearance (a cat may have 9 lives, The Doctor has 13) …
If it was available to watch realtime I would have done it – I would have paid $5 or more per episode to watch it on pay-per-view simultaneously with the UK audience. Instead, I had to hunt around the dark corners of the internet to find it … and I am quite glad I did!
It has been the high point of my TV watching week – kind of like the old days of Babylon V – and its so popular the BBC has agreed to another 2 seasons!
But – no more new shows until Christmas – when “The Christmas Invasion” will air ..
Seven’s back in Town
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
Azalea Morning
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
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!
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
Heart of ’05
… my love is away, I’ve nothing more to say …
Grounded Antenna, subWoof, and the HDTV
Antenna Test: low mounted due to obvious snow issues
Test setup of my old (25+ yo) Winegard CA 9095 High gain UHF antenna with a Winegard AC 4990 Low Noise UHF Preamp, and an Alliance Tennarotor. I mounted this on a castiron staff for hanging baskets – I wasn’t going on the roof with this snow!