Pirates, Interrupted

It looks like a fingerprint smudge (there’s another on the opposite edge), but it’s actually a disc defect that goes all the way through the second layer. It’ll play up to the scene in Tia Dalma’s shack, then the DVD player freaks out. Bah! Hopefully I’ll finally get to see it Friday.

On the bright side, tomorrow’s  Doctor Who episode has Shirley Henderson (AKA Moaning Myrtle) and Peter Kay! After such a crackin’ start, I’ve been mostly disappointed with the second series. The Cybermen were a bore. Mark Gatiss’s Idiot’s Lantern had a good premise, but the ending felt slapped on. Ditto for the Impossible Planet. ”The show’s running short - just have David Tennant make faces at the Devil for ten minutes. That’ll fill the gaps!”

Other than complaining about TV and DVDs, not a lot has been happened around here. I still haven’t gotten the new computer fitted so I can abandon the old. Part of the difficulty is that I’ll trying to start on the right foot with a firewall, anti-virus software, and Windows Update up-to-date. Now I remember why I gave up on all that – it takes hours and hours to download all the new updates on dial-up. The anti-virus updates alone were 30 MB (~3 hours) and it wanted to download even more last night. Windows Update had 48 critical updates  - another 35+ MB. If I don’t get DSL soon, I shall pull my hair out. On the bright side, I’ve started toying around with DVD copying backing up. All that extra ROM is super nice. :)

 

An Open Letter to BBC America

Dear BBC America,

On Thanksgiving, while the rest of the family is in the kitchen catching up on recent events and generally being sociable, I can frequently be found in the living room playing with my uncle’s glorious digital cable. Thus, Thanksgiving is the one day of the year when I can watch your fine channel, and what programming do you choose for this magnificient day? A marathon of What Not to Wear! *sigh*

Do better next year!

Signed,
-Me

 

Enough with ‘Heros’ Already

Edit (12/5): The “save the cheerleader…” promo line has been retired! Yay! [TV Week via EW]

If I hear/see the phrase “save the cheerleader, save the world” one more time I swear I’m going to scream. Much like SciFi and Battlestar Galactica, Bravo and Top Chef, you can’t turn on the channel without seeing something about Heros and I’m getting fed up about it. I don’t watch much NBC, so if they could just keep it out of Days of Our Lives’s timeslot, I’d be super happy.

Anyway, I’ve spent the majority of today with WS_FTP backing up every element of the old blog that I could ever conceivably want or need. Three thousand, five hundred and sixty-eight entries (my 6-year blogging anniversary is later this month) and every one is saved in three methods: mySQL database dump, Movable Type export file, and static HTML files. Considering how much cringe-worthy stuff that’s in there, it is doubtful I’ll resurrect those entries elsewhere on the web, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. [Incidentally, Kevin Donahue's method for exporting large MT blogs works great. Most of the other ways I came across needed command line access or involved writing special perl scripts or other overly technical ideas.] The domain expires today, and I’ve received a cancellation confirmation from 1and1, so the old blog should disappear in a matter of days, if not hours. Farewell, old blog. Farewell, Movable Type. And thanks for the 3 free years, 1and1.

So, on to the future. I fear my time here at wordpress.com will be short. My knitting blog has been on wordpress.com for many months now, but since I use BlogDesk to post to it, I didn’t realize just how sloow these servers are. Why don’t I use BlogDesk here? Well, I tied both blogs together under the same wordpress.com username. That seemed like a good idea at the time (no logging in and out all the time), but whenever I try to post to this blog using BlogDesk, it shows up at the other blog.  So I’m stuck using the slow and buggy (see all these weird line breaks? I didn’t put them there) web interface. At the moment, though, I’m too lazy to seek out an alternative. November isn’t a good month for decision making - or at least it isn’t in my head (think ADD to the max ), so I’ll stay put for the present - and perhaps try out Firefox to see if it works any better with it.

BTW, have I mentioned that I’m getting a new computer? :) Dad has surprised me with a Dell! It’s supposed to arrive late this week or early next week. Plus, I think I may have talked Mom into DSL. I’m trying to do the same with TiVo too, but I’m probably pressing my luck. ;)  2007 is going to be a good year!