The Journal of the Browncoat Cat

I have just written this entry on the laptop, using an offline web log editing tool. All seems to be in order. When I first ran the applet, it asked me for some details, so that it could connect to my web log. Then everything was plain sailing, once I got into range of my network, I uploaded it without a problem.

Apparently the London 2012 Oplympic Committee is annoyed with a butcher in Weighmouth for hanging up a sign featuring the Olympic Rings as interlinked sausages.  The reason being that the butcher is not an official sponsor, and only companies that have spent large amounts of money becoming official sponsors are allowed to display the Olympic Rings.  This from the organisation that has foisted the Technicolor Turds as the logo of the Games of the XXXth Olympiad.  Another classic example of how to lose friends and alienate people.

The Netgear WG511T 108 Mbps Wireless PC Card I ordered from Amazon arrived yesterday.   It fitted into one of the slots on the side of the laptop, I had expected it to be flush witht he side of my  and as soon as I installed the MadWIFI driver, it came to life detecting my network.  So I was able to download the latest upgrades for Ubuntu Linux, install Automatix2 and download and install some additional software, and generally have a fun time with my new Technotoy.

My brother-in-law Andy asked me if I could find a use for his old laptop computer. It is an IBM Thinkpad 600X, which has a Pentium III processor, 20Gb Hard Drive, 256Mb of memory and a 13.3 inch screen. It originally had Microsoft Windows installed. I was in two minds about whether to go to the trouble of installing Ubunu Linux on it, as the first few attempts were like wading through treacle, and crashed the installer software in the last stage of the process. A little bit of research told be that I had to disable the fastbook option of the BIOS. That made the third attempt so much faster, and eventually I had a laptop running Linux.

So, why bother, I have only just bought a desktop and I have the old RISC OS IyonixPC upstairs. Its simple really, because I am downstairs on my computer, then I tend to delay and delay going to bed. If I am upstairs surfing on the laptop and already in bed, then when I get tired, it will be so much easier to go to sleep at a decent time. So from now on, at 10.30pm, off goes the desktop, and on goes the laptop.

However, there is still one fly in the ointment. I am waiting for a PCMCIA wireless network card to arrive, so that I will be able to connect to the Internet from my new technotoy.

One of the things I like about this machine is that it has a little pointer button like a very small joystick for controlling the movement of the pointer arrow. This is a great advantage over the silly glidepad widget that most laptops have, and which I have absolutely failled to get a grip with.

My life is SO exciting.  Last night I went shopping with my family to B&Q in Cyfartha, and bought a sink and draining board for my back kitchen, and I am really excited about it.  A special offer, a round stainless steel Astracast Onyx sink and mixer tap, round Astracast Onyx draining board, a metal basket for the sink, a chopping board and all the various bits and pieces for plumbing it in for £99.99.  Be still my beating heart. 

I will soon have a tumble dryer to go with my washing machine, and once the sink is plumbed in, I will have finished another room.  There is only the  Shower Room left after tis room, it really should have been be wallpapered, as pink plaster looks a bit naff, but next year it will be time to repaper the bathroom so I will have them done together.

It has been another roller-coaster month for fans of Doctor Who.

The month began with the sad news that David Tennant’s mother Helen MacDonald had died at the age of 67 from cancer. My deepest condolences are of course extended to David Tennant and the whole of the MacDonald family at this sad time.

A press release issued on 9th August, after Voyage of the Damned wrapped and work started on the main body of Series Four [31] announcing that in the up-coming news that the Doctor and Donna were to meet the author Agatha Christie back in the 1920’s. Fenella Woolgar would be playing the great author. Felicity Kendall was also cast in this episode. There was speculation that the story would be set during the ten days in December 1926 when Agatha Christie famously vanished like a character in one of her novels. However, it is unlikely that Matthew Pritchard, the guardian of all things Christie would have been so enthusiastic about a piece of science fiction set during his grandmother’s darkest days. I hope that the set early in 1924 when Agatha Christie was writing The Man in the Brown Suit, a mystery revolving around a mysterious stranger in a brown suit who claimed to be a doctor.

In a news report about the damage done to part of the “Imperial Rome” standing sets by a fire at the Cinecitta Studios, another snippet of news was revealed. Members of the Doctor Who production team had arrived in Rome the previous day, as they are planning on using the set, constructed for the HBO/BBC historical drama Rome in Series Four [30]. As I understand it, filming will continue as scheduled in September in Rome, as although the fire was impressive, the amount of damage was limited to a small area of the set.

That waste of good trees, The Sun has been up to its old tricks again:

• At the beginning of the month it was announced in that sordid rag that James Nesbitt had been cast as the Doctor and would replace David Tennant at some point in the middle of Series Four [30]. Nesbitt had recently appeared in Stephen Moffat’s drama series Jekyll, and as the rumour is that Mr. Moffat is due to take over as chief writer and executive producer of Doctor Who the lazy hacks at the old current bun decided to run a bit of fan speculation as gospel truth. This annoyed Stephen Moffat so much that he started a thread on the Outpost Gallifrey Forum scotching the rumour.

• Later in the month, The Sun launched a story stating that Oscar winning actor Sir Ben Kingsley had been cast as Davros, creator of the Daleks. Another load of old bobbins, as there is no way that the makers of Doctor Who would cast an actor of Kingsley’s calibre and then bury him under the latex and silicone of the Davros mask.

• Finally, The Sun announced today that Peter Davison was returning to Doctor Who to play Doctor#5 along side David Tennant’s Doctor#10 in a special episode to be broadcast as part of the annual BBC Children in Need Appeal telethon. I actually hope that they have got this one correct. I am not a fan of multi-Doctor stories, however, fitting a small multi-Doctor snippet into the annual fund raising event would be extremely interesting.

The month looks to be ending on a downer. It has been rumoured for ages that David Tennant would be staring in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Hamlet at Stratford in the summer of 2008. This has now been more or less confirmed by the web site of the Stage Magazine. Now given the way the RSC operates, a Summer season of one of Shakespeare’s in Stratford inevitably leads to an Autumn tour of the UK and a Winter World tour followed by Spring season in the West End. So, if Tennant goes of to play the Danish Prince with the RSC, a dream role for any actor, then that is more or less be the end of his involvement in Doctor Who as there is no way the BBC would halt production of the series for a whole year to accommodate the lead actor. We would have a regeneration at Christmas and onwards with Doctor#11.

At the last meeting of TIMELESS, it was decided to start up a merchandise shop with Cafe Press selling t-shirts, mousemats and all sorts of goodies with the TIMELESS logo on it. The aim is to make the web site self-financing, as so far I have paid all the various fees and charges involved in setting it up and maintaining it. I had previously ordered a baseball cap with the logo on, and this is what tipped the ballance in favour of starting the Cafe Press shop. Designing the logo was one of the first things that my friend Tim Farr did when he created the SF Fan club TIMELESS in Cardiff. A few years ago, when I started the TIMELESS web site I decided to update Tim’s original drawing. Using piece of software call WebFX3D, I created a golden globe and overlaid Tim’s original drawing, converting the white in the drawing to a transparent mask, so that the gold would show through. This is the logo that you can see in the thumbnail above. I was not happy with it, so I went back to WebFX3D and created the 3D lettering and used the golden globe as the background. The version on the web site similar to the one you see below. Also, I created a series of buttons and icons for the web site based on Tim’s original concept.

The logo above is actually version three, as when I uploaded it to the Cafe Press web site so that it could be used on the merchandise, it became apparent that whilst it worked on the internet, the image was not of a high enough quality to be printed on garments. The problem came when I was marrying the two elements on my IyonixPC, as soon as I saved what had been a high quality vector graphic image as a bitmap image, the quality would go down hill drastically. So, I ended up using the GIMP software that comes with Ubuntu Linux to marry the two elements, and they tidy-up any imperfections. Also, I had to produce a version of the logo with a transparent background for use on dark coloured items, this was also done with the GIMP.

As you can see on the polo shirt, some items have the logo as a small badge on the breast pocket. With the polo shirt this was an obvious option, as these are supposed to have tasteful logos on them. Another item that I decided needed to have the breast pocket option was the maternity t-shirt, as it struck me that the last thing a heavily pregnant lady would want to wear would be a large golden globe on their belly, emphasising their bump.

Thumbnails of some of the finished products can be seen below, clicking on them will take you to the TIMELESS Shop.

1. Plot
Stephen Gordon is a bit of a loser. A talented athlete, he was nick-named Flash by his father, who was a physicist working on something called the Portage Initiative, Gordon still lives at home with his mother and really doesn’t know what to do with his life. Flash discovers that his father did not die in a fire at his laboratory, but disappeared into a wormhole he had created.

Strange alien creatures are coming to Earth through wormholes in search of the Imex, a mysterious alien device. Flash and his ex-girlfriend Dale Arden, with the help of Dr. Zarkof travel through a wormhole to Mongo, where they are captured by the troops of Ming the Merciless, ruler of the planet.

Princess Aura helps Flash and Dale escape and travels to Earth with them. There they discover that hiding place of the Imex, and all hell brakes lose.

2. Thoughts
Lets be perfectly honest, ever since Alex Raymond first created the characters of Flash, Dale and Dr. Zarkof back in 1933, Flash Gordon has been a byword for all that sucks in Pulp S.F. So it should come as no surprise that the new series of Flash Gordon created for the SCI-FI Network in the US sucks on all cylinders. There is a sort of touching naivety about all the people who were hoping that this would be any good, fundementally denying the fact that this is Flash Gordon and therefore destined to be tripe.

Where to begin? Wooden acting, paper thin plotting, desperate special effects and above all no understanding of the characters at all. For starters, there was nothing at all threatening about Ming the Merciless, or Ming the Middle Manager as a friend of mine has called him. Then there was Dr. Zarkoff, who instead of being a Nobel Prize winning scientist is a lab technician with delusions of grandeur; and where exactly does this conspiracy theorist nerd get the cash go finance all the hi-tech kit in his secret laboratory?

The main problem with this episode was that far too much time was spent on Earth. Things picked up immensely when that action moved to Mongo. However, I suspect that the budget does not stretch to that far, especially as the special effects looked like something out of an old episode of the Gil Gerard Buck Roger series, so action quickly moved back to Earth, where I suspect the bulk of the stories will take place.

This episode should be made compulsory viewing for all the malcontents on the Outpost Gallifrey Web Forum. An object lesson in how bad Doctor Who might have been Russell T. Davies had not relaunched that series.

Stars:
1 out of 5

I was flicking through today’s Daily Mirror today and I spotted a picture of David Jason with the long bushy beard he is growing for is up and coming role as Rincewind in SKY Televisions adaptation of The Colour of Magic.  I loved the recent adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather that  SKY made for last Christmas, that was perfect in just about every way.  Unfortunately this piece of casting is just plain wrong on so many different levels.  David Jason is too old, too short and to well rounded to play Terry Pratchett’s cowardly wizard. 

This was a role that was tailor made for a long gangly actor.  For years I thought Nigel Planer, who appeared as another wizard, Mr Sideney, in Hogfather, would have been ideal for the role.  I now think the role should have gone to Kris Marshall, who can do the terrified innocent look with great aplomb.

Well, I have just come back from up the Rhigos mountain, watching the meteor shower, whilst dodging the rain showers. Every year in August the Earth passes through the dust left behind by a comet and that dust will burn up spectacularly if it enters tha atmosphere. Because the dust is concentrated in the constellation of Perseus, the shower is known as the Persiad. Last time I did this was when I was 14 years old, and I went up the mountain with my parents and our next door neighbours. This time I went up with my mother and my nephew James.

What really surprised me was the number of cars parked in the lay-by at the top of the Rhigos Mountain over looking Hirwaun Common. At least ten cars, filled with people of all ages. Not just nerds like me. In the hour that I was up there,in between the rain, I saw about a dozen meteors, which is twelve more than I saw last time. I would have stayed slightly longer, but James was getting bored and I was getting cold, despite the fact that I had a warm jumper on and a warm fleece jacket.