I picked up my new glasses yesterday lunchtime, so now the world looks all funny. Except it doesn't, I just feel funny. Usually getting new glasses means that the world looks really bright (because they're clean) and the floor slopes. The floor's hardly sloping, the world's not that much brighter but there's something wrong with it in general. I can only type when not looking at the keyboard and I can't focus on anything close up. I also have a headache, I feel like I'm dizzy, only I'm not and I can't decide if my glasses are too loose.

But I now have glasses cases in black, red, green and grey. And spare prescription sunglasses, although I'm less likely to walk into doors wearing those because I don't tend to wear them indoors much.

At least I have the same frames as before, so I don't hate the way they look, which is always a help. But I just want to skip the adjusting to new glasses period now and go straight to the part where I can see.

Mirrored from my blog.

The upside of not sharing lifts at work is that I've listened to one and a half of the last two Big Finish audios. Half the point of subscribing to their main range was so that I listened to the ones that I wouldn't usually buy (ie the ones without the Seventh Doctor and Ace in). While listening to The Emerald Tiger I realised that I quite like all these characters.

I generally can't get excited about the Fifth Doctor era. None of his companions are any of my favourites and I can't look at Peter Davison back then without thinking that he's Tristan. But on audio it's easier to forget - and he sounds more like Peter Davison these days. I also like the friendship between Nyssa and Tegan and the banter between Tegan and Turlough. And the writers make sure to do something with all four of them, so the TARDIS doesn't feel as crowded as it was with Nyssa, Tegan and Adric.

Mirrored from my blog.

For ages at work I've been sharing lifts with someone else. Well, I say sharing lifts, but she didn't drive, so I drove and she paid me petrol money. But now she's passed her test and bought a car, so today I went on my own. Which was weird. I kept thinking I'd forgotten something. On the plus side I get to leave the house five minutes later, get home five minutes earlier and I am listening to last month's Big Finish Doctor Who release. But suddenly having to pay twice as much in petrol is less good. I worked out that the bus is now cheaper, albeit only just and does take four times as long - if I got it, I'd have to leave the house half an hour earlier and I'd get to work half an hour late. So then I'd have to stay at work half an hour longer and would get home an hour and a half later - which wouldn't be in time for me to go out to well, anything. So there's certainly something to be said for driving to work.

Mirrored from my blog.

Admittedly it's been a short week, but all I've done this week is play with computers, work and be tired due to lack of sleep. I just wake up early - on weekdays it's before my alarm on weekends it's a bit later but still before 8am. I just need one night where I sleep until 10am and I'll be fine. But no, my body hates me and is determined to make me tired. Which makes me dizzy. That coupled with work being busy means I have really loud tinnitus in my left ear

On the plus side, it has finally stopped raining (at least all day every day) and it's been warm enough the past couple of days that I haven't been wearing my winter coat and have practically turned the heating off.

A bigger plus side - I have Fruit Ninja on my computer. I have found I need to hold the mouse button down to make playing it easier, but it does mean I really have no use at all for a tablet (not that I had much of a use for one anyway) and no use for a smartphone either. My new laptop works out at not much more expensive than a tablet anyway...

Mirrored from my blog.

Today I spent pretty much the whole day installing things on my new computer and playing with settings. I had a break when I cleaned the kitchen and bathroom. It is nearly done. Currently the only way I can find any programs I want is from the Quick Launch - the Start Menu and Desktop are too much of a mess to find anything, and I haven't installed the printer. But other than that it's done.

It was very handy I have a computer running Linux. The folders with things like my Firefox profile and my RSS feeds live in folders that you need admin access to get. But this computer refused to copy them or access them from the hard drive of the old computer. Ubuntu, on the other hand, didn't care. So I copied folders from my old computer onto my netbook and then across to my new computer.

At the moment I am really struggling with the keyboard. I'm fine with typing, it's just once I need to go further right than the return key that I'm struggling. The old one had Home, End, Page Up and Page Down down the right and that was it. The new one has a number pad. Which does mean there's two of each of those four keys, but they're all in a different place, as are the arrow keys, so I keep being slowed down by having to look down and check where I am. So I have established that I like the trackpad!

Mirrored from my blog.

Dear Not Prime Time Writer,

Thank you for writing a story for me. The optional details are optional. I've just tried to give you some ideas of what I might like to see, but if none of them are your thing feel free to disregard them. I am sure I will love anything you write with the character(s) I've requested. Feel free to use any other characters you'd like - there are none that I dislike in any of these fandoms.

What I like:
- Stories that explore the relationships between characters
- Stories that explore characters
- Scenes/fic that is like it could be (part of) an episode

What I dislike:
- Sex scenes, so nothing over PG-13 please
- British people using Americanisms and American people using Briticisms
- Relationships other than those in canon - but you can never go wrong with gen

I know there are two Doctor Who-related fandoms on this list. Don't think that I'd like one of those more than the other two - I want each of these requests equally.

Below are my prompts:

Mirrored from my blog.

I now have a new computer. I have now remembered how unusable all the default settings are in Windows. Not to mention IE9, where I spent five minutes trying to find the address bar. But it has a 1TB hard drive (10 times what I need) and 8GB of RAM. It should be fast and able to cope with anything I throw at it.

Yesterday I had a party to celebrate my birthday. Which basically consisted of spending a relaxed afternoon sitting around and chatting.

Aside from the epilogue I realised it needed, I've finished the second draft of my Big Bang fic. I just need to go back and make it less boring now. And add 3500 words, which shouldn't be hard.

I'm sure there was more I meant to add, but I keep waking up early and not being able to fall asleep any earlier, so I'm tired. I'm just very glad this is a three day weekend.

Mirrored from my blog.

My three and a quarter year old computer is no more According to the error message it's either the memory, the video driver, the motherboard or the hard drive that's gone. I'm not sure they've narrowed it down there. Basically it's going to be simplest to buy a new computer. They're not expensive these days - in fact it's very likely I'll be spending more on new glasses this week than I will on a new computer.

Fortunately I have two netbooks, but it does mean I can't use anything running Windows, unless I borrow my work computer. And I can't use a big screen, unless I borrow my work computer. On the plus side, the only things I really use day to day are Trillian (which works on every operating system known to man except Linux), but Kopete is a reasonable alternative. Or at least, I like it better than all the other Linux alternatives. And there's RSS Bandit, for reading my RSS Feeds. But half of them are on LJ/DW, so I can read those there - although there's no way to tell where I've read to or mark things as unread to come back to later. And I have a load of the others in Google Reader and the rest bookmarked, so I've been adding those. I could use RSS Owl, which is the only other RSS reader I like and it works on Linux - except I have all my RP feeds in there and it's just going to get complicated. Not to mention that to get the OPML I'll need to put my backup program on my work computer to get at my latest backup.

There is at least a PC World that's walking distance from my house. So I can go and try a load of laptops and see which keyboards I like. And this time it won't involve two new operating systems (my last one didn't quite make it to Windows 7 launch, so I had to have Vista for a year so that I could upgrade to 7). It just involves setting it up and installing everything and I still vividly remember that from three years ago...

Mirrored from my blog.

I wasn't expecting author reveals until later tonight, but it's ok because it means I have time to talk about mine this evening. I wrote:

Can't See the Forest (A River Runs Through It) (1355 words) by paranoidangel
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Amy Pond/Rory Williams
Characters: Amy Pond, Rory Williams, Mels
Summary: Leadworth would be boring, if it wasn't for Rory and Mels. (Spoilers for Let's Kill Hitler)

When I signed up I secretly wanted to write Amy & Rory, so that worked out well. I also wanted to write a remix in a method I never had before. This being my seventh Remix (not including who_remix a couple of years ago) I've used quite a few different methods. This one was quite easy to come up with something. The original has Amy and Rory growing up and playing together in Leadworth. I added Mels. And changed details and changed who was doing what. And changed the romantic bit when they're adults from the original to fit in with a scene in Let's Kill Hitler. It was fun, I enjoyed it.

I will upload it to my website and Teaspoon too.

Mirrored from my blog.

This week has mostly consisted of rain. And the fun yesterday of tipping out the puddle of water collected in my bin because the binmen persist in leaving the lid open after they've emptied them. And the even more fun of spending five minutes on Wednesday morning trying to get the garage door open long enough to get inside. How it eventually stayed open long enough to get the car out (and closed once I had) I don't know. But after that my car had to spend a couple of nights outside in the rain because there's only so many times I can do that.

I've also been reading Remix stories. I'd entirely forgotten what mine was, I finished it so long ago. Now I've been reminded about it I want to talk about it, but can't do that until the authors are revealed tomorrow/Monday. But someone remixed a Doctor Who/SJA crossover fic I wrote last year as New Horizons (the Doctor in the House Remix). It's got a whole load of great Sky characterisation in it. And I really want to know who wrote it and whether some of the references in it were because they know me, they read the fandoms list on my website or coincidence.

I have also been working on the second draft of my Big Bang fic. After I wrote the first draft I realised the plot makes no sense and it's not spaced out well at all. So I spent time re-working it, with tables to work out who does what in response to what. Hopefully, when I finish the second draft and read it through it won't be too bad and I'll just need to go back and sort out the words, rather than the plot. Not least because I'm also intending to sign up for not-primetime/not_primetime and the deadline is Wimbledon. My deadline for myself for getting my Big Bang to beta is Wimbledon. Which really isn't that far away...

Mirrored from my blog.

Being back at work after ten days off (including weekends and bank holidays) is such a treat.

The weekend before last the main piece of software we use had a major upgrade. It's online, so you don't get a choice about which version you use. As per usual when it's upgraded we spent half the week finding out which things they'd broken. I think they're now all fixed and I've yet to use any of the new features...

I've also remembered the usual sorts of feedback you get when you ask someone to test something:
Them: It doesn't work. Please fix it.
Me: What happens exactly?
Them: I got an error message.
Me: What did the error message say? Can you take a screencap of it?
Them: No, I closed it. I can't remember what it said.
Me: I'll just fix it based on no data at all then.
(above conversation is simplified, but you get the gist)

Mirrored from my blog.

While I was at home Dad showed me the centre of the Chambers English Dictionary, which has interesting words in it. Too many to read in one go and most I don't remember. But I do remember some of the collective nouns - these are the ones that particularly stuck out:

A glaring of cats

An implausibility of gnus

A surfeit of skunks

Mirrored from my blog.

I had this last week off. With Easter it ended up being ten days in a row. Which was nice, except the part where I have to go back to work tomorrow.

During that time I managed to write the first draft of my Big Bang fic. I now have 7000 words of utter rubbish instead of the 2000 words of utter rubbish I had before Easter. I now just need to change most of the words and a fair bit of the plot. But at least it's a start.

I played quite a bit of Wii tennis. It improved once I discovered it started off on medium and you could change the setting to easy...

I doubled the amount of memory on my netbook. It's now less prone to think a lot a throw a massive wobbler if I open too much.

I now have garden-related stuff in my garage. I can do something about the hundreds of weeds that seem to have sprouted between the paving stones and the gravel in my garden, and I can grow the Australia flower I got from avon7 for Christmas.

I have a fifteen year old keyboard, so once I can play the songs we're singing in choir I can sing along to them and get the right notes. Quite a few of which are black ones.

I've started learning to crochet because although I can cross stitch it doesn't create anything useful on its own. When I own a house and can put nails in the walls there will be lots of cross stitched rabbits hanging on them. So far with crochet I can do one stitch and unpicking. Although I am getting worse at unpicking without leaving knots.

Mirrored from my blog.

I did a post all about my dizziness over a year ago and I haven't done one about my food intolerances, even though I've had them longer. So this is it.

Mirrored from my blog.

I'm terrible with wanting to try a book/film/TV series that's popular. There were four Harry Potter books out and a film on the way before I decided that maybe it was popular for a reason and perhaps I'd try it. Of course by that time the first book was really cheap because it had been out for a while, so that helped.

Since then I've been better at trying things. Lost, Heroes and Once Upon a Time were big hits before they were on over here. But none of those I enjoyed for various reasons.

The latest big thing is The Hunger Games. I don't know anything about it, except that it's a book and a film. I'm quite happy not knowing anything about it because I refuse to try it. Everyone else is reading it therefore I don't want to. And I definitely shouldn't go and see the film given that it gave jedinic motion sickness, so I dread to think what it would do to me.

But Downton Abbey and A Game of Thrones were series I held out on for longer and then enjoyed. Perhaps the answer is not to try something when it's popular, but wait until everyone who's going to watch it has tried it and the fuss has died down, then give it a go. I even enjoy Doctor Who less the more people it seems are watching it...

Mirrored from my blog.

This story goes back to November and was a lot of the reason I was stressed in February. The short version is don't buy from Muji Online, they will steal your money. The long version is longer.

Mirrored from my blog.

Last week I was practically not in - Monday I went out to dinner, although not at the Chinese we were intending to go to. Wednesday was the last ballet of the term. We did a move I can't remember the name of that basically involved spinning round and going along. It did make me dizzy, but I wasn't the only one. Theoretically you should always be looking in the same direction but I kept getting confused and ending up facing the wrong way with no idea of how I got there. Thursday was singing and we've just started Gilbert & Sullivan that we're going to be singing at the carnival in June. And it's really hard! But on the plus side, we have have actual books that we own, so I can at least highlight all the black notes.

At the weekend I finally managed to start my Remix fic. I've got as far as the fiddling stage, but then I realised that it's just because I know I need to add description and don't want to. I have been writing a drabble or double drabble every day or every other day for b2mem bingo. It's so much fun - it only requires you to start something and I thought a drabble was doable given that I started the month feeling crap. But writing one big story with all the prompts in might be fun too - especially as I have the 'Causes of death' card. Which means I've written lots of people dying (or having died) but also meant I got a bingo today! Which I am very excited about.

Mirrored from my blog.

About six months ago I decided to get a subscription to the Big Finish main Doctor Who releases. But the only CDs I want to keep are the Seventh Doctor and Ace ones. I have promise the Fifth Doctor ones to hhertzof, which means the next six releases are all accounted for. But I now have six CDs sitting around taking up space that need a good home. All I ask in return is that you pay the postage.

So does anyone want any of the recent Eighth Doctor and Mary Shelley or Sixth Doctor and Flip trilogies? I enjoyed them all, although I discovered the best way to listen was while assembling bookcases. Until I ran out of bookcases to assemble. The CDs are:

The Silver Turk
The Witch from the Well
Army of Death

The Curse of Davros
The Fourth Wall
Wirrn Isle

Mirrored from my blog.

Easter's suddenly only two weeks away, how did that happen? I am planning to go to the Eastercon hotel on Good Friday (ie two weeks from now). I'm not going to any of the con, I'm just going to meet up with people. I'm thinking of getting there around lunchtime ish, so I don't have to get up early, and leaving by early evening, so I don't get back too late.

So who's going to be there (who I haven't already spoken to about it) and wants to meet up? I don't know what parts of the hotel I'll be able to go in, since I won't be going to the con, or what's happening when, but if anyone wants to pick a time and rough place to meet that's good. Or I'll just be generally wandering around.

Mirrored from my blog.

I felt normal for nearly all week, so I was going to get lots of things done this weekend. And then someone down my road, I couldn't tell who, had a party with very loud music on Friday night from 8pm to midnight. I could hear the bass line, which gave me a headache and meant I couldn't think and kept me up. Of course I didn't sleep late to make up for it, that would be asking too much. So I haven't had any energy all weekend.

But I have got my Remix assignment and decided which story I'm going to remix. It was the first one I read, but then I thought I'd ought to read some more just in case there was another I thought I could remix. And then I stuck with the first. I know roughly what I want to do, I just haven't worked out the specifics yet. Or had a brain.

I did write one drabble for b2mem this weekend for the two squares that came up. And I posted my fivetimesbb fic, Five adventures companions have after leaving the TARDIS. caitriona_3 did some great art for it.

I am currently watching the Hitchhiker's film on TV. I haven't seen it since it came out and I'd forgotten more than I thought.

Mirrored from my blog.

I just got a message on WP to tell me my browser was out of date - I'm using Firefox 7. Which is really 4.3 and the most recent one is 10, which is really 4.6. That's not that out of date.

Anyway, I am finally feeling normal. Or more normal than I was anyway. I can now get through a day at work without having to lie down, which is a vast improvement. I think it helped that I had Friday off, so I had some time to relax.

I finally managed to finish all the drabbles I'd started for b2mem bingo. You only have to start something to get your card stamped, which was all I was capable of last week. But then I sat down and got them to 100 words and posted them. Now I just have to get round to reading other people's...

I also finally managed to work out a plot for my AU Big Bang. The word count is 15,000 minimum, which will feel nice and short after my last two Big Bangs, which came in at 26,000 and 24,000 words respectively. I'm hoping this means that I will be able to get it in a betable state by Wimbledon...

Mirrored from my blog.

I think it's the 'Wear Sunscreen' song that says to do one thing per day that scares you. Yesterday I did that thing - I drove into the city for the evening, rather than getting the train. It takes about the same amount of time and costs about the same in petrol as a train ticket. But because I live fifteen minutes walk away from the station and it's not a walk you can do in the dark, my choices were either to pay £6 to park at the station or £9 to get a taxi back. Whereas parking in the city was £2.

Mirrored from my blog.

Back in November I did a meme where people mention five things they associate with you and one of the things selenay936 gave me was "Having Interesting Adventures Unintentionally". I am off today due to having nearly my entire March's social life in one week and therefore needing the rest, so I thought I'd relate a small one.

I had a letter a few weeks ago to say I hadn't paid any money into my ISA this year. And ISA is a savings account that you don't pay tax on. You're only allowed one and you're only allowed to put a certain amount of money into it per year. I usually do it after they send me the yearly statement at the beginning of the financial year, but given that I couldn't find any evidence that I'd done that this year, I must have failed.

In the past I could easily transfer money from my savings account into my ISA because they were with the same bank. But now I've got a new savings account with a new bank. The only way to get money out of my new savings account is over the internet. So the obvious first step was to transfer the amount from my savings account to my bank account. Except that you first need to link the accounts and you can only do that over the phone.

Sadly, in order to access your account over the phone you need to tell them the number you gave when you first set up the account. Which was a year ago. I have a vague idea what it might have been, but I only got two attempts and they were both wrong. In order to get into my account I had to speak to a person and give them answers to security questions. Which I got with some prompting and a couple of guesses. It also generally takes me two goes to get into my account online, so I can say that it's definitely secure. If I can't get into it, I don't know how anyone else could.

So having done that, I transferred the money into my bank account and it was in there a few hours later. After some looking around at the website for my ISA, I eventually realised that I could transfer the money from my bank account online. Which worked a treat. Until I checked back at my account and found that the money had gone out... and then come back in again.

Fortunately I still have my old savings account - which incidentally, only works by post - so I could solve this problem. I have ended up getting the money into my ISA by:
1. Transfer it from my savings account into my bank account
2. Transfer it from my bank account into my old savings account
3. Transfer it from my old savings account into my ISA
Thereby using every single bank/savings account I have. But come April when I can put more money into my savings account, I'll know what to do.

Mirrored from my blog.

Tell me you want to play and I'll pick up to three of your fandoms. Then update your journal and answer the following questions:

1. What got you into this fandom in the first place?
2. Do you think you'll stay in this fandom or eventually move on?
3. Favourite episodes/books/movies, etc?
4. Do you participate in this fandom (fanfiction, graphics, discussions)?
5. Do you think more people should get into this fandom?

lost_spook gave me Spooks, Blake's 7, Chalet School.

Mirrored from my blog.

Despite not really feeling well enough I went out to singing last night. I did feel much better for getting out of the house, talking to people, and most all singing. It's hard to feel anything but happy when you're spending the best part of an hour and a half singing happy songs. I even managed not to fall over when everyone swayed during "Sweet Chariot".

For Back to Middle-earth Month I am taking part in the bingo game. The idea is that you only have to make a significant start on a square, but you have to do it within two days. I claimed five cards which meant I got two squares with yesterday's number and three with today's. My plan was to write drabbles and I claimed cards based on being able to write Elrond stories with them. Feeling crap doesn't really lend itself to writing (or thinking about writing) but tonight I did manage to write a first draft for yesterday's squares. It came out to 102 words, but making them better words will be a job for a day when I have a brain.

Mirrored from my blog.