Titanic Days

Having largely failed at Dreamwidthing or Livejournalling in the past 12 months (I think maybe three or four entries in total during the course of the year which surely marks an all-time low) I thought it might be a good time to update online friends with what has been going on in my life these past 12 months. I'm taking a little inspiration from chris so, with the greatest of affection for himself, this may get long.

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This one first saw the light of day at Dreamwidth, but frankly, you can comment wherever you bloody well like. See if I care...

So I don't have much of a review to offer of Deathly Hallows 1; I thought it very much a case of it was what it was.

Never having reread Half Blood Prince or Deathly Hallows (and never having seen HPB either) I came into it with a certain degree of blindness and had a job remembering some of the people who I should have done.

Despite that I thought it about on par with the better early ones (Azkaban and Goblet). Thought Dumbledore's tomb peculiarly modernist for a fantasy environment and Harry peculiarly well-muscled for how his character is described. And bizarre use of Nick Cave. But anyway.

The real purpose of the post was to gauge interest in the idea of one last old school fandom 'event' viewing like the one we did for Chamber - block booking at the Leicester Square Odeon close to opening weekend, room at a pub afterwards, etc etc (please no costumes, some people are in their thirties now).

I know a lot of people who came to see Chamber twice in November 2002 are scattered to the four corners of the earth now, but how about it?

This one first saw the light of day at Dreamwidth, but frankly, you can comment wherever you bloody well like. See if I care...

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At some point on Thursday evening during a not-particularly-heavy Warcraft session (I was in Dalaran picking mushrooms) the MacBook started to make an absolutely horrific something-ain't-right whining noise. It sounded like the fan was throwing its toys out of the pram, and as I was starting to feel that the computer might actually take off I shut down WoW and turned off the computer and that seemed to work. Things carried on as normal for a little while, but then it started up again, so I shut it down and went to bed.

Friday afternoon whilst working from home it started again. This time I did some googling, found a problem that it sounded like it might be and did some kind of reset jobby that involved taking the battery out. The computer seemed to get the message and it worked fine all yesterday evening.

Today, however, it started doing it completely randomly, once or twice when I was in Warcraft, once or twice when I was out of it and doing other things, once when all I was trying to do was stream Radio 4 off iPlayer, once when I was backing up the hard drive and a couple of times when I wasn't actually doing anything at all, and once when I wasn't in the room.

I've been checking the exhaust RPM and various temperatures with a handy little widget, but it doesn't seem to be going crazy with any kind of pattern, everything is "within normal parameters". Right now I have Safari and iTunes open and things are running fine, but five minutes down the line it could well have gone shouty crackers again.

The upshot is I'm pretty sure I have a borked fan. The noise is coming from that general area, and when you put your hand on the underside of the main body the casing is vibrating with a frequency that I would find sexually arousing if this thing hadn't cost me about twice as much as a whore.

It's not that this is going - or has - put me off Apple, quite the opposite, but I'd just like to point out that I took delivery of a Dell Inspiron in September 2000 and it was June 2003 before the screen fell off. I've had the Mac barely 15 months.

This fan issue, together with the strange peeling at the bottom corner of the screen, has convinced me it's time to take it into the shop and get it seen to. That'll be seven to ten days without the computer and possibly more as it's a busy time. It's touch and go whether or not I get it back before my two week holiday time starts, or before Christmas. So likely no WoW Christmas achievement for me, and no interwebs and without the TV working 'til Thursday when the nice man is coming to screw in our Freesat dish, no means of intellectual stimulation through the medium of screens.

So unless I blow the Christmas shopping budget on an Asus EEE or something, it's cheerio for now...

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For just a short while at least. So, I'm obviously using Twitter these days, and some other sites and platforms too, and I've been getting very curious as to how everything Web 2.0-like ties together, how people find things and read things, the connections they make to get places, and what makes them stick around when they do.

Some of you will know that my primary blogging engine these days is Blogger, and if you've not already followed the links from here to there then now's your chance.

I'm doing a sort of mini-project with no real scientific basis or intent or any actual direction over there at the minute, to hopefully try and answer my own questions and maybe generate some more. It really is entirely badly worded and very self-indulgent, but if just a few of you had a look and a think and maybe shared some thoughts it would be very lovely.

Here's the link: http://thebletherforecast.blogspot.com/2008/12/big-new-media-whore-has-big-new-media.html ... hope to talk to some of you soon.

<3

The internal TV aerial we'd been using gave up on the last remaining spot where we could still get a signal, so a nice man is coming to install Freesat for us next week. We get two hundred and forty channels and I don't really want any of them but still, it is free, the nice people assured me ... and what kind of incomparable titmonkey markets a flat without a TV aerial? Seriously.

I took a look at a list of the 240 new channels we'll be getting the other day, and among the delights that await are, and I promise I am not making these up;

The Audi Channel - for cocks who drive Audis.
Horse and Country - for cocks who like huntin', shootin' and bangin' the door of one's Audi at 3am.
Ocean Finance - for people who can't afford Audis.

And yes, that would be Ocean Finance as in 'do you need help consolidating your loans into one easy monthly repayment' Ocean Finance.

There's more. There's WatchmeTV.tv, which appears to be YouTube for idiots, there's Psychic TV, which is pretty self-explanatory, and there's 'pan-Arabian edutainment' network, the Al Jazeera Children's Channel, which claims to make 40% of its own programming and in a Nancy Reaganesque twist is, according to Wikipedia, the pet project of the 'second' wife of the Emir of Qatar.

Mind you, that's the same Wikipedia that has at various times claimed that Robbie Williams made his millions eating domestic pets, Tony Blair had posters of Hitler on his wall, and David Cameron was "a bit of a bitch".

Back to the goggletube, and something for those people for whom Islam seems a bit too much like hard work, there's also a plethora of Christian networks, among them Daystar, which I'm looking forward very much to watching. A drop down menu on their website, right next to an ad for a Christian golf invitational, invites viewers to variously 'Submit a Prayer' and 'Know Jesus.'

All I wanted was BBCs One through Four, and maybe E4 for the Friends reruns...

I'll let you know how it goes.