The Lair of the SlowFox

So, I watched FF ep 2 last night - I'm still not wholly sure what I make of it just yet, and am mainly watching 'cos it's there. The script, at times, is teeth-grindingly bad, but the concept is sufficiently intriguing to keep me watching, for now.

Also, the FBI geekette, Janis, is kinda cute :-)

I can barely think straight - have been working more or less flat out since 8am this morning (lunch excepted), trying to write a collection of 12 user reports that have never been done quite this way before.

The urgency stems from the fact that they were requested on 5 October, but Project Manager didn't pass them on to me until 5pm on Monday. They were due on Tuesday, which quite simply couldn't be done.

Anyway. They're done now, 24 hours late. User not impressed.

My brain is fried.

This entry comes to y'all from my brand new different office. Yep, yesterday finally saw the phone line being connected in my target abode, so I shifted across to take up residence in the new office. The transition's been mostly seamless: still awaiting the phone extension to be mapped - the phone itself is live, but has a different extension to my old office. A request is in for the latter to be mapped to the former, so that I end up with no change, but for the time being I'm coping with the lack of telephonic contact, rest assured.

The new building being at the opposite end of the site to Castle Fox, walking home and back during lunch to check on Mali has become impractical - it was borderline before, but the extra 5+ mins each way pushes the logistics firmly into indulgent territory, so I'm back on the bike. However, secure parking is something of an issue, and I may need to investigate my options on that score (I'm explicitly forbidden from bringing the bike into the building {Reg 4(e) applies}).

The only other downside is the lack of a printer. Since we are hardly ever required to print, and really I only ever print out the daily Killers, I'm not sure how much fuss I can legitimately make... might make more sense to get a printer for Castle Fox, but the trouble then is that I find that any printer gets such insufficient use that the cartridges dry up before they run out.

In other news (quite literally), congratulations clearly due to yvi on the 300 support points that dw_news announced in the weekly update! :D

My unwatched DVDs are starting to build up: I've got BSG S4 and Prison Break S3 to watch, plus True Blood S1 should be arriving next week - Comradette K DVR'd the first episode of True Blood for me a couple of weeks back, and that on top of the bookses constituted sufficient evidence for me to plump for the discs there and then. Flicking back to BSG and Prison Break, both of those will then have only a single season outstanding for me before canon is closed, so it sort of makes sense to complete the set...</justification>

There are many reasons why I totally <3 Ione (have I mentioned this before?), but the moment were she and Tranquility broadcast Greetings to the Jupiter consensus with just a smidgen of smugness is most definitely amongst them.

That said, The Naked God is not such a fun read as the first two instalments - I think this may be a psychological thing, where I'm trying not to get to the bit where it all goes completely stupid too quickly. I mean, it's not wholly without redemption, obviously, but it does very definitely feel a step below what went before.

Whereas the Pandora's Star/Judas Unchained duality is pretty consistent with the rocking all the way through.

In other news, it's Sunday evening in Hull (and, I concede, elsewhere across most of Europe), and Mali and I suffered a mild sprinkling of rain on our last perambulation about the Avenues. It gets dark early, y'know, and that only gets worse next week :-(

Having been meant to move office for some time now, as part of our shift to The Brave New World, I'm expecting that this coming week will see the transition finally effected. But then, I was expecting that of last week, and we know how that turned out...

( Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld )

Anyway, props to ms_katonic to first linking me to this!

Prompted by carolanne5's reply to a comment elsewhere, here's the current list of podcasts to walk dogs by:

• Americana from Radio 4 - quirky storyettes from the colonies


• Discovery from Teh World Service - various sciency type documentaries


• Documentary Archive from, again, Teh World Service - slightly more wide-ranging series of docs from the Beeb


• Dan Carlin's Common Sense - American Politics by a self-styled 'independent' commentator.


• Gadgettes from CNet - Molly Wood and co take a kinda girly look at the week's tech news.


• FLOSS Weekly from the TWiT network - Free, Libre and Open Source Software podcast, which takes the format of a weekly interview with a package/system of choice, rather than being an open-discussion of all that's happened in the open source world in the previous seven days.


• Football Weekly from The Grauniad which, logically enough, is published twice per week. Various Gruaniad journos discussing all of import in the footballing world.


• Friday Night Comedy from the BBC - currently it's The News Quiz, which I find much more palatable than The Now Show, which I tend to skip


• From Our Own Correspondent from the Radio 4 (there's a World Service version too), a collection of short vignettes from different postings, all monologues from the Beeb's reporter in $far_flung_place


• Mac Break Weekly from the TWiT network - and I don't even have a Mac! The TWiT shows are always well produced, though, and the discussion format is suitably rambling enough for it to be entertaining, and there's always something that's worth picking up during the show


• A Point of View: David Attenborough's Life Stories from Radio 4. 'Sir' isn't high enough an accolade for the absolute consumate skill of David Attenborough's broadcasting. Short snippets from a man's life in natural history.


• Security Now from the TWiT network - concentrates on Windows Security issues, with side digressions into science fiction and vitamin D. Good stuff, though, although I have to work hard to keep up with some of the more technical bits


• Stephen Fry's Podgrams from, obviously, the man himself. Always listenable, but lamentably infrequent


• This Week in Google, the full title of which is 'This Week in Google and the Cloud', but TWiGatC was harder to anacronymise than the shorthand. Weekly discussion, heavily Google biased, of events happening in the Cloud. Can get a bit heavy, but as with all the TWiT stuff, well produced and informative.


• This Week in Tech, the show that kicked off Leo Laporte's TWiT network, a weekly free-for-all discussion of the week's tech news. Can blow hot, warm or cold, but usually pretty good.


• Ubuntu UK Podcast - exactly what it says on the tin - a UK-centric podcast covering all things Ubuntu.


• Windows Weekly the TWiT network's Windows show, which tends to be good stuff {although Castle Fox is Linux-based, work sadly isn't, so it's helpful to keep up to speed with all things Microsoft). Plus it's not just windows, they cover XBox and other things too


• Major Nelson's Podcast Major Nelson is some big marketing droid for XBox from Microsoft, and the podcast keeps up with releases, interviews game developers and such like

So that tends to keep me more or less soundtracked-up with the dog-walking. But the problem comes when you're in the middle of something really interesting, and decide to do another lap before heading home, just so that you can hear the ending...

In anticipation of our office move, we've been clearing out the vast accumulation of papers that both ourselves and our predescessors had built up in the office. The record, so far, would seem to be a set of papers from 1988... 21 years old, I'm figuring that they can be safely shredded/recycled.

Dust everywhere, and although we seem to have broken the back of the task, now, there's still a fair bit more to do. And unlike home, for example, where clearing out has a sort of therapeutic feel to it, the office just looks more and more impersonal the more stuff we excise...

Currently reading The Prize by Daniel Yergin, a potted history of the development of oil about the globe. It's a book that keeps on getting referenced by various people as I've maintained this resource depletion kick of mine, and Waterstones had it, so clearly it was destiny that I should so procure.

It's quite good, although it's obviously trying to strike the balance between depth and length, so some of the stuff (particularly about Standard Oil's business practices early on) is rather glossed over (indeed, you almost get the impression that Standard Oil didn't really do anything wrong, when other sources contend that actually they were downright nasty).

Does make me wonder afresh at how dynamic the late C19 and early C20 were - such change, passion and progress. Anyway, that's the book that's currently occupying my evenings at Castle Fox :-)

In just about any given situation, you can usually rely on me to sequester myself into the metaphorical corner of the room, trying to avoid intruding on any person(s) present. It's a pretty much universal rule that I've lived by for just about as long as I can remember.

UNLESS you've got a piano...

( Read more... )

I managed to get online on Friday night from Castle Fox, but about five minutes' up-time was all that was available on Saturday before the connection died completely. Telephone line continues to mainly consist of static and yes, I know, I really need to get it seen to. But it won't be this week.

'sides, not spending evenings glued to the PC might not be a bad thing anyway.

P and I saw Hull City sweep aside the mighty Wigan in a crushing, I tell you, crushing 2-1 display of awesome. To be honest, it really didn't look as though Wigan had turned up - they didn't seem that interested in attacking our goal, but we were mightily glad of Geo's goal that put us two clear when Wigan got one back. Injury time was nerve-wracking, accompanied by a deafening howl of the home fans whistling for full-time to be called...

( I finished The Reality Dysfunction )