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A selection of highlights of a wonderful weekend.

Fans of

alitalf and Hibernia will be pleased to know that we had a great time and have already booked for next year.

Fans of Torchwood may be pleased to hear that James Marsters would be very happy to return as Captain name beginning with J - neither he nor the presenter could remember that he was John not Jack. :-) They may also be happy to hear that JM would rather kiss John Barrowman than Sarah Michelle Geller.

Fans of slash may be happy to hear that JM was expecting an Angel/Spike hookup if Angel had gone to another season.

Fans of Merlin may be amused to hear that Tony Head used to tell JM not to be a prat if he mucked up his British accent.

Fans of Doctor Who may not be surprised to hear that Elisabeth Sladen comes over as just as wonderful in person as she does in interviews. They may also be happy to hear that Neil Gaiman is intended to write an episode in 2011.

Fans of the Cake Slice may be amused to know that the David Tennant look-alike who got his picture taken with it at the Games Expo was at the event, and accepted the SFX award on behalf of DT.

Fans of scantily clad girls on stilts missed out on a treat, as they spent a good part of the weekend wandering around in their underwear. ;-)

Fans are posting links to their photos on this thread on the SFX forum

Current Mood: tired

Happy Birthday,

alitalf

I hope you had a better day today.

After a TS meeting on Saturday, and a nice chance to meet up with friends, I actually had the opportunity to do some stuff with our computers over the weekend.

With some helpful advice from

crazyscot, the boot problem on my parents' computer is fixed - no more seven minute waits for the Grub menu to come up. :-) All it took was installing an experimental updated version - I didn't have to switch the drives round after all, which was great.

Then it was time to finally install Mint 8 on the laptop - I've been running Mint 7 since last summer very successfully, but I decided it was time to move to the official form of Firefox 3.5 and various other updates. It was all very straightforward - keeping my home folder on a separate partition meant that most of my settings carried over with minimal problems. I'm just now making a list of the things I need to change whenever I change the operating system - the wallpaper randomiser, SMPlayer, the additions to fstab to make the data partition automount... Not too bad really, certainly compared with getting a new Windows computer.

Finally, it was time to actually make another

shiny_things entry, something I haven't had a lot of time for over the last month. I have a couple of ideas for future posts, but if there is something you want me to talk about, please feel free to ask.

Gacked from everyone. :-)

Reply to this post, and I'll tell you one reason why I like you. Then put this in your own journal, and spread the love.

So I've always thought Merlin was cute.

( But it was Bradley that I always thought was was the hot one. )

( On the other hand, this picture of Colin as Jethro, from a Doctor Who diary, shows me exactly what my Colin-loving friends have been seeing in him. :-) )

Well, installing Ubuntu NBR didn't take that long at all - an hour or so, maybe? On the other hand, getting it to boot properly has been a rather more challenging task.

To start with, it wouldn't show the Grub menu at all, and I wound up having to boot into Linux using its command line. Once I'd run grub-mkconfig, there was a slight improvement - now, when I turn the computer on, after sitting around for six or seven minutes, hey presto! Grub menu.

After that point, the whole thing works fine, and will boot into NBR or Windows as requested. Still, we used to think that it took Windows forever to boot, and that was only 3 mins or so. The only advantage is that NBR only has one user at the moment, so you don't have to sit over the computer to click on icons part way through the boot process - turn computer on, go away for 10 mins and come back to a computer booted and ready to play Frozen Bubble.

People on the Ubuntu forum have been trying to help, and there are some very useful web pages out there, with instructions that are straightforward enough for a relative newbie like me to use. The current state of play is that we think it may be a known bug - https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/420933.

I am going to try swapping the drives round, so that NBR is on the master drive, rather than the slave, as it's possible that that is part of the problem. *fingers crossed* But it may be a question of waiting for a fix for the bug - we shall see.

On the other hand, my brother, who has as far as I know never touched a Linux computer before in his life turned my desktop on, which boots into Ubuntu by default. He happily loaded Firefox and generally found his way around, with no instructions from me at all. Admittedly I've changed it to one panel at the bottom, with one menu on the left, in the standard Windows way - but still. If anyone tries to tell you that using (as opposed to installing/administrating) a Linux desktop is that much more difficult than Windows, they really aren't trying.

Current Mood: frustrated

My parents have an old lowish-spec computer, that runs XP but is rather temperamental due to various Windows bugs I haven't been able to sort out. (Basically it won't print or run 16-bit software, except as an administrator, and since one of the main things they want it for is playing our old Patience/Tetris games, that were many cases written for Windows 3.x...)

So I decided that it might be worth installing the Ubuntu Netbook Remix on it and that way they could play a whole range of Patience style games securely and with no irritating error messages. I went with NBR because not only is it designed to run on lower spec hardware but its menu system is very simple and straightforward to use - not as powerful or flexible as ordinary Gnome or KDE but that isn't what my parents need. (Mum sat down in front of it as soon as I installed it and worked out how to use it with pretty much no prompting from me.)

I started with a Wubi install, but the main hard drive in this computer was only 40Gb and I was hoping to be able to give the Ubuntu install a reasonable amount of space. So I remembered that we had a couple of hard drives knocking around that had been in older computers that no longer worked and thought it would be worth trying to put one of them into the computer in question. Since I don't do hardware, that involved waiting for my brother who does to be home for Christmas.

It wasn't a straightforward process for us - finding the right size screwdrivers, working out how to slide the drive in, and then trying to connect it, and then we booted to find that the computer refused to acknowledge the presence of either of the hard drives...

After a couple more attempts we were nearly ready to give up and call in professional help, when I spotted something rather significant in my brother's build a computer book. It really isn't a very good idea to try and connect a hard drive with a floppy drive data cable.

After that things went a little more smoothly, and once we'd worked out how to set the jumpers on the back of the drives, so that you had one master and one slave, we had a working system with an additional hard drive. Go us! Of course, at this point we realised we had used the smaller of the two extra hard drives in the machine, and really we'd be better off with the larger one. ;-)

So, open the case up again, but this time the whole thing took about 10 mins rather than the four or five hours the first time. So hopefully, if we have to do it again, the whole thing should be rather easier.

I haven't installed NBR yet - we finished the hardware tinkering at around 11pm - but hopefully that should be rather more straightforward. I'll let you know.

Another Christmas day gone and generally I had a very good time. :-)

The brother formerly known as Professional Reader made it from London on Thursday when I was at work, and we managed to finish at around 7pm. (We closed at just after 5pm but there's still the sale to set up for Boxing Day, and various things that can't be done while shoppers are still milling around getting in the way.)

The weather gradually improved here - no problems going over the hill to Winchcombe for the Christmas morning service - and we were back in plenty of time to get ready for Christmas lunch at around 1.30pm.

In our family we've always kept most present opening until after lunch - stockings first thing, and then everything else can wait. My gifts to others seemed to go down well, and I got a useful collection of things. A lovely warm Angora cardigan, which I was very much in need of and a very pretty cuddly toy (with a wheat and lavender bag for future toothaches ;-D). Ex Professional Reader gave me the Hornblower DVD set that I'd been eyeing at work for a while and no longer Perpetual Student gave me an expansion for the Carcassonne board game. :-)

We watched Doctor Who (and can't wait for the final part) and then played games - the Popular Culture edition of Trivial Pursuit, which for once at TP my Dad didn't win, Carcassonne and Monty Python Fluxx, a very silly game ;-D. All the while xPR had fun playing with the fire - we haven't had an open fire for a long time, but work in the garden had produced some excellent firewood and it seemed like a good opportunity for making use of it. We were also able to try some of his home made sloe gin - he's been taking advantage of his currently unemployed state to practice his foraging skills, and the gin was certainly well worth it.

I'm not back at work until Tuesday - Bank Holiday tomorrow - but I am working New Year's Day and Saturday this week, so I'm taking full advantage of my lazy days off. :-)

Current Mood: cheerful

Wishing all of you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Current Mood: tired

I've done better than I did last year, when I failed to send any cards at all, but I have a nasty feeling that have still missed some of you. If so, I do apologise, and it's not because I've stopped caring about you. *many hugs*

I do want to thank everybody who has sent such a range of lovely cards, but in particular I thought the Merlin fans among you might like to see the lovely card that

rhaegal made me.

( Picture under the cut... )

Dashing through the snow,
In an one-horse open sleigh,
O'er the sally_maria we go,
Laughing all the way.

Jingle Bells
from the Christmas Song Generator.

I'm not sure I approve of Christmas songs about hit and runs, particularly when I'm the victim, but each to their own I suppose. ;-)

Current Mood: amused

When I visited alitalf a couple of weeks ago, he suggested that I should create a website with links to the various useful pieces of software, web sites and browser addons that I came across and wanted to recommend. I'm not quite ready to do that yet, but in the meantime I decided that I would set up a Dreamwidth community.

shiny_things

It's very much a work in progress at the moment, with only one entry but I hope to add things to it as I come across them/have time.

If you have a Dreamwidth account, but don't check your reading page regularly you can always track the community, so it sends you an email when I post.

If you don't have a Dreamwidth account, you can always add the feed to your LJ friendslist.

I've set it up so that anyone can comment, but if you post with OpenID then it'll email you the replies.

(I should add that I don't have any intention of leaving LJ any time soon, not while you guys are still around, but I still want to support DW in any way I can, and contributing a bit of content is one way I can do that.)

Scraping in just under the wire:

Happy Birthday,

sir_guinglain!

One very good reason for supporting Children in Need, if you needed one. :-)

The whole Merlin CiN sketch on YouTube

And what happens when Merlin forgets to pack Pudsey (the U rated version) - "You forgot Pudsey, you pay the consequences. Obviously you’re too large and too bony to make a proper stand-in for my dear Pudsey, but you’ll do in a pinch." *grin wide as Merlin's*

( More under the cut - can't leave Colin out )

It's been a very hectic week, one way and another, and I realised I hadn't answered

alitalf's questions for the meme.

So, just as a reminder.

Rules:

Reply to this meme by yelling 'WORDS!', and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your journal and explain what they mean to you. Keep in mind that if I don't know you that well, your words might end up kind of esoteric/oblique. You'll only get given five words if you do include 'WORDS!' in a reply to this post, meaning you can safely comment (should you wish to do so) without having to play.

alitalf asked for

( Read more... )

Current Mood: accomplished

Not only those who were killed, fighting for home and country but also those who weren't. Those who have to live with the consequences, often for the rest of their lives.

Poppies aren't just a symbol, they're a way of supporting servicemen, ex-servicemen and their families.

We will remember them.

At the meal after the committee meeting, we were talking about an online utility that I use called Dropbox.

The website is https://www.dropbox.com/ - there's a little tour to show you how it works and what it can do. If anyone would like an invite, both I and the person invited will get a bit more storage space, or you can just sign up at the website.

I highly recommend it as a way of sharing files between computers, and having them accessible anywhere you can get at the website.

So, to make this not just an ad, does anyone else have any online services, or useful websites that they'd like to recommend?

Three posts in one day - I will stop spamming you now...

My LiveJournal Trick-or-Treat Haul
sally_maria goes trick-or-treating, dressed up as Little Red Riding Hood.
adaese gives you 14 brown cherry-flavoured wafers.
alitalf gives you 16 pink coconut-flavoured gummy worms.
atreic gives you 10 red-orange cola-flavoured gumdrops.
bouncy_elf gives you 10 mauve cinnamon-flavoured nuggets.
didiusjulianus gives you 8 softly glowing chocolate-flavoured gumdrops.
emperor gives you 18 light yellow licorice-flavoured nuggets.
gayalondiel gives you 9 brown lime-flavoured pieces of bubblegum.
gurthaew gives you 1 dark green mint-flavoured gummy bats.
muuranker gives you 12 tan watermelon-flavoured wafers.
na_lon gives you 2 light orange root beer-flavoured gummy bats.
sally_maria ends up with 100 pieces of candy.
Go trick-or-treating! Username:
Another fun meme brought to you by rfreebern.

Everyone was very generous, thank you. :-)

Since I missed linking to this when it first came out, back in the summer, I thought I'd wait for the most appropriate day of the year.

This is a Supernatural/Buffy vid, but I honestly don't think it matters whether you've only seen one or neither of them. Mostly it's a brilliant use of TV footage and editing to illustrate the song.

Thriller by Michael Jackson, by Buffyann.

The original video for this song was utterly brilliant, but this runs it pretty close, IMHO.

Rules:

Reply to this meme by yelling 'WORDS!', and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your journal and explain what they mean to you. Keep in mind that if I don't know you that well, your words might end up kind of esoteric/oblique. You'll only get given five words if you do include 'WORDS!' in a reply to this post, meaning you can safely comment (should you wish to do so) without having to play.

From

nakeisha:

Cross-stitch. I love being able to create something that other people will enjoy. I'm not an artist or a writer or a musician, but this, I can make something cute, something beautiful, and hopefully something that will have a personal meaning to someone.

Daniel Jackson. Beauty and brains. Someone who is never scared to do the right thing and stand up for what he believes in. I've had a number of fandom loves over the years, both before and after, but he's something special.

History. I'm an old-fashioned kind of history lover. I like Kings and Queens and Battles and Dates. I like knowing about people, specific people, not just populations. The Great Man theory of history may be nonsense, on a macro scale, but that's not the level I care about.

Firefox. I first started using Firefox with version 0.7, I think, certainly in the summer of 2004. I've flirted with other browsers over the years - Flock, which is basically Firefox with extras, held my attention for a while - but I've always come back to it. I learnt to edit CSS files, to choose open-source when I can and so many other practical computer lessons from hanging around the Firefox community.

Tolkien. What to say that I haven't said... I don't know whether it's that Lord of the Rings was exactly the kind of story I most love reading - characters I admire doing heroic things in a plausible world - or whether I learnt to love that because I picked it up from the school library at the age of 10, but it's still the standard against which I judge others. I'm not claiming it's perfect, or even perfect for me, all the time but my life would be poorer without it.

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Uneasy lies the head that wears a Throne.

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Fiddling with computers again...

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Shallow fangirl is shallow

Linux is hard, Linux is easy

Fun with hard drives

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Finally, answers for alitalf

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