There were all these things I was going to do with my week off (apart from watch/listen to a lot of tennis). I knew I’d be fine because I’d get a lot of sleep and wouldn’t have to do much.

At least, that was the theory. In practise yesterday’s random asthma has turned into a cold and sore throat. I don’t have a blocked up nose, but the rest of me feels bad enough to make up for it.

So everything will have to be wait and I’m just hoping I’ll feel well enough to go to Collectormania on Saturday, not least because I’ve paid for some bits of it already. I really wish I was the sort of person that sleeps when they’re ill, because at least then I wouldn’t feel like this.

Mirrored from my blog.

My week off means posting more often, now that I have nothing better to do apart from watch tennis. And do all the other things I need to get done this week (Yuletide, Ch secret santa, baking, Rotaract stuff…).

I got to thinking last night about how people use their journals/blogs mostly because I keep coming across people who use it completely different to me.

Personally, I post everything in my blog (which is so much better to post to than the LJ/DW interface) and have a plug-in that crossposts to Livejournal and Dreamwidth, so people who want to read on those sites rather than by RSS feed can do so. On the extremely rare occasion I post something I don’t want the whole world to see (which is usually a rant about something/something specific and I don’t want them to happen upon it), then I password protect it on my blog and friends lock it on my LJ and DW. Anyone can ask for the password and if you look back in my blog carefully enough (or use the search, it’s pretty good) you can find the password.

When it comes to reading, I read everything, no matter what site it’s on, by RSS Feed. It means I don’t see LJ cuts and I can mark things as unread if I haven’t got time to read them at the moment. Or I can mark things as read without reading them if I know I’m not interested or know I’m not going to get time to read. I also don’t have to try and remember where I got to, like you do on the LJ friends page.

My LJ friends list is a copy of all the people I’m reading by RSS Feed. If I stop reading I take them off and if I start reading I add them on. I never use filters because I personally feel like that’s lying to people about whether you’re reading them or not. I sort of expect other people to do the same thing – so if they have me friended then they’re reading me, and it annoys me when they defriend me the minute I defriend them – it feels as if they’re too much of a coward to take me off their list before I do.

Dreamwidth is a bit different because on that one I allow access to everyone that has friended me on LJ but i haven’t friended back. That way they can see my friends entries, but I’m not reading their journal, and they know I’m not. I am subscribed to a few people on DW that I’m not on LJ because they’re the ones I’m occasionally interested in reading and I read my DW list on the site every few days ish. Course, that system falls down rather a lot because a lot of people have accounts at DW but aren’t posting there.

To conclude: My LJ friends list is nothing more than a reading list and the word friend is a misnomer.

So, how do you use yours?*

*I know it’s not Easter, but I haven’t had a Cadbury’s Creme Egg since 2004 and I don’t watch adverts

Mirrored from my blog.

It’s that time of year again… Well, it’s a new time of year. This is the first year the ATP tour final (formerly known as the Masters series final) has been held in London. So, we went yesterday afternoon. As a result I feel terrible today while not lying down, but I have the week off, and anyway, it was worth it.

We saw Nestor and Zimonjic play a Polish pair I’ve never heard of, can’t spell and certainly can’t pronounce. They’re ranked 8, so they’re the lowest ranked pair in there. It was a bit odd because they played a variation, so when it got to deuce whoever won the next point won. And if they won a set each they’d play a tie-break, but to 10 points. It made it very quick, but it felt like it all turned on those deuce points because the Polish pair broke once per set on those points. But it was a good match and now I’m reduced to seeing the rest of the doubles matches online.

We had half an hour’s break after that and then there were a lot fewer empty seats for Murray’s match. This was back to usual point scoring and because they spend a lot more time than the doubles per point, made it seem really slow. The doubles match was an hour long, this one was two and a half. But it was a battle and Del Potro played well, apart from in the middle of the first set and towards the end of the third. That was a good match too, but we really wanted it to end because the seats just go so uncomfortable after sitting in them for the best part of five hours, I was really dizzy and it was really hot in there, which didn’t help.

But we had a good view, even though we were near the back. People at work were trying to tell me we wouldn’t be able to see a thing, but it was no different from being at the back of Centre Court.

And there are photos, some of which are a bit blurry because they’re all taken with the flash off and the lighting was terrible (really bright on the court and we couldn’t see a thing, which made eating lunch interesting).

Mirrored from my blog.

I keep meaning to update more often but I’m just so unmotivated by everything at the moment. I think all that time reading and watching videos and not doing a lot else and I’ve got used to it. But there isn’t nothing on tonight (I’m most upset that The Bill’s off for Celebrity nonsense), so I am determined to do something constructive with my evening.

In Yuletide news I am currently reviewing the source material in the hopes that I might manage a plot at the end of it. I’m quite excited about what I’m writing and it helps that my recipient likes a lot of the same things that I do. I’m hoping that writing that will help remind me about the whole doing something constructive thing.

It’s Children in Need tomorrow, so it’s guaranteed to rain, since it’s not that cold. Normally I’d be running around in the road with a bucket before work, but I’m not well enough to do that, so I am counting money after work instead. I don’t think I can quite cope with the idea of not doing something for Children in Need any more.

I’m having a week off work next week, which I will mostly be spending listening to the tennis, since the BBC aren’t showing much. I was very excited by a twitter post of Andy Murray’s today because he revealed that he’s playing Sunday afternoon and that’s when I’m going. We’re further back than we were for the gymnastics, so expect pictures of ant-sized people.

I am most distressed my today’s paper when they announced they are discontinuing the Technology section in the Guardian. I liked it best when it was the Online section with the Science section inside, but it’s still been worth buying the paper once a week for it. Without it there’ll be no reason to buy the paper any more – and I don’t like reading the paper online, it’s not the same. These days I tend to get my news from Radio 5 on the way home from work.

Mirrored from my blog.

I’ve been wanting to write about this for ages, but wanted to wait until I had the complete story first.

Back in January, once I’d settled in, I remembered that the last time I moved the water company insisted on installing a water meter, on the basis that I’d just moved in. I didn’t get as far as ringing them up about it before they sent me a letter. So that was all good because it costs a whole lot less to have a water meter.

So a man came round, handily the day I had off before I went to Redemption. He told me there was already a meter there, it just needed connecting. It all went a bit downhill from there…

Mirrored from my blog.

Dear Yuletide Writer

First of all, feel free to ignore anything I’ve said in the prompts. If you can write any of those then that’ll be great, but they’re mostly just what I’d most prefer to get. At the end of the day I’d far rather get something you’re proud of than something you’re less happy with but fits in with what I’ve put down. Feel free to add in any other characters you like to these prompts – as long as the one(s) I’ve requested are in there, you can bring in to the story whoever else you like. There aren’t any characters in these fandoms that I dislike.

Generally speaking, I love stories that have an emotional punch in some way. Whether it makes me laugh, cry, be happy, be all gooey inside, be shocked etc. What particularly fascinates me, as you might have gathered from my prompts, are relationships between characters, whether they’re romantic or not. I don’t mind whether you write something shippy or gen for any of the prompts, so long as you stick to canonical ships. I’d just rather not have any sex above a PG-13 rating.

If you’re writing for one of the British TV show prompts and you’re not British, then please get your fic Brit-picked. There’s nothing likely to annoy me more than characters being out of character because they’re speaking American English when they should be speaking British English.

If you want to do more research then my fic recs can be found at this site. There are recs from a few people on there, mine are the ones that say they are recced by Paranoidangel.

Just a few notes about the prompts:

Mirrored from my blog.

I had an MRI on Monday, which I’ve been meaning to write about all week, but it’s been a bitch of a week. So have a review of my week, including what it’s like to have an MRI (when you’re dizzy).

Mirrored from my blog.

This is really hacking me off now and I can’t find the answer, only lots of people complaining that you can’t turn Gmail’s threading off.

I have random emails that aren’t being threaded at all. And other random ones that only thread if I keep the previous emails unread. Sometimes. This is in my RPG account, so most of the emails I have are LJ notifications. None of the non-LJ emails I get have this problem, but there are so few of them it’s hard to be sure.

I haven’t had this at all in the nearly two years I’ve had this Gmail account and I can’t even work out a pattern of why it’s happening. Someone please tell me they’ve got the same problem and it’s not just me? Or someone tell me they know the solution, which would be even better. It’s just really driving me round the bend.

Gmail’s help tells me that sometimes it doesn’t thread emails properly, which is basically a catch-all for anything that might have buggered up so they don’t have to deal with it.

Mirrored from my blog.

I didn’t have anything on this weekend and I didn’t have to go anywhere, so I thought I’d get a few things done, housework and writing and so on. Well, I managed the first. I thought I was doing well for getting all my washing done, until I thought “that’s making a bit more of a watery noise than usual”, opened the kitchen door and found water on the floor. Which is just what you want from your washing machine. It was just the waste water pipe from the washing machine that had come out of the pipe that takes it to the drain, so it was at least easily fixed.

Recently I discovered Pidgin, which is the messenger program I use on my netbook, doesn’t belief AIM exists any more. Since I was awake annoyingly early this morning I thought I’d get up and see if anyone was in any of the RPG related chats. Which they weren’t, but I discovered that Trillian in your browser doesn’t do chat. After lots of searching on the forums I uninstalled Pidgin then reinstalled it. At which point it refused to open. But I did discover why it refused to open links in Firefox and just did nothing. In the end I installed Kopete, which I’ve decided I like far more than Pidgin anyway, but not as much as Astra.

Just because it seems to be that sort of weekend, the netbook keeps randomly disconnecting from the network (it just seems to be a common bug with it, which is unhelpful, but at least I know how to get it back on without restarting). And I watched a DVD using my computer as a DVD player and the wireless keyboard as a remote and twice the computer decided that every keystroke was actually me right clicking and wouldn’t acknowledge me left clicking. Why it decided it didn’t like the wireless keyboard today when it’s been fine up till now, I don’t know.

On the plus side, since Azureus kept disconnecting my computer from the internet (which also seems to be a common problem with Vista) and there’s something clearly not right with it, I thought I’d install μTorrent, which seems to work perfectly and looks pretty much the same.

So that was my weekend of trials and tribulations. Next week I have an MRI, a flu jab and a trip to the dentist and the week after is a trip to the balance clinic. So it’ll all be a bit medical.

Mirrored from my blog.

This post contains spoilers for the latest SJA episode, but nothing else.

Mirrored from my blog.

I am very behind in talking about SJA, not surprisingly given that I was at the gymnastics when the first one was broadcast and my copies of the audios had only just turned up that day.

There are going to be spoilers here for Prisoner of the Judoon, The Mad Woman in the Attic, The White Wolf and The Shadow People in that order.

Mirrored from my blog.

Last week I went to a quiz and one of the questions was who was Superintendent in The Bill. I was amazed to find it was Jack Meadows, although less so when I found out he took over when they went to once a week because I don’t think they’ll have got to those episodes in Australia yet.

So I thought I’d watch an episode.

I quite enjoyed it, although I was struggling not to fall asleep halfway through, but I think that was mostly due to me being tired. It was, amazingly, all crime. I can’t tell you anything about the personal lives of a single person in it and neither was the case uncannily like something that had happened to one of the coppers. Mum told me it would be like that but I didn’t believe her – I thought she was exaggerating! The only trouble was that it felt like a half hour episode that was stretched out to 50 minutes (I presume that’s how long it is without adverts since they have so many these days and they’re so long).

I had remembered that they’d said at the time that they were getting rid of the music, but I had thought they were replacing it. No. I still miss the days of the pullover, but at least the intro was short, even if it wasn’t at the start (I hate the way British programmes are doing that – it gives you less time to sit down and get yourself sorted before it starts). I don’t quite know why they felt the need to show shots of London where Sun Hull isn’t even vaguely close to. I was a bit paranoid that they’d suddenly moved it to a part of London where they could show the well known landmarks, but they haven’t, so I’m relieved.

My netbook was a big help because I could look up people on thebill.com and work out their names as it went along. Well, I didn’t need to look up Jack, Dodgy DI, Smithy or Roger. I just need to see an episode with Terry and Twiglet in and I’ll have the set.

I wondered what they’d done with the DCI’s office now that they don’t have one. My question was answered when they showed various parts of the station and the only part I recognised was reception. They had a room with coloured tiles on the floor and flatscreen monitors on the wall! Admittedly the last episode of The Bill I watched was from 1985, but I only stopped a few years ago and it’s moved on a lot from then. Their radios look a lot like my first mobile phone, which confused me at first.

I disliked the incidental music, which I knew was going to be there. It was only in a couple of places but I felt like they were trying to make me feel sympathy, which I already did, but I didn’t need it hammered into me with the background notes that made it hard to hear what they were saying.

Overall, I think I’ll watch some more. There’s been a bit lack of crime drama in my viewing schedule recently, although I really ought to get some Old Bill on DVD.

In other crime related news, the episode of Midsomer Murders that’s on next Wednesday had some scenes filmed outside my office featuring Jesse Birdsall dressed as Neptune(?) who had a dinghy covered in fish and lobster etc. Although my TV guide answers the question that bugged us as to what on earth was going on.

Mirrored from my blog.

On Friday I went to the World Gymnastics Championships in London. And took lots of photos, which mostly consist of blurry gymnasts upside down. I really must check if my camera has a sport setting. My sister’s are better, not least because she can zoom in further, but hers are set to friends and family only.

It made me really dizzy, but was good fun. We went to the women’s all round because the men are boring and we got to see every piece of apparatus. We were sat high up and behind a metal bar, which hid the vault completely. So you’d keep checking to see that there was a girl still stood there, and the next thing you knew everyone was clapping because she’d vaulted and you’d missed it.

There were two Brits competing and you could tell when they were up next because the crowd would go mad. So I made sure to watch them, but apart from that I watched a bit of everything. What you can’t tell from watching it on the telly is how much of nothing goes on. While they’re busy showing you slow motion replays and discussing the routine there’s just waiting around for the score. Which adds up to quite a lot of waiting sometimes.

It was nice not to have to get annoyed with camera angles. Which I did at the weekend when they kept moving the camera around unnecessarily and made it impossible to watch some of it.

Mirrored from my blog.

42.30 / 50kg (85%)

Mirrored from my blog.

I am off to see the World All Round Gymnastics Finals tomorrow, in the Millennium Dome, so I have tomorrow and this afternoon off. Which is probably just as well because I’m quite dizzy and a bit snotty. I suspect the two things are related. On the plus side, when I’m recovering on Saturday there is at least plenty to watch, despite there being no Merlin (the TV series).

Everyone who signed up for the Sarah & Harry ficathon got a story in, which I am glad about. I wrote Not Just a Pretty Face. There was quite a bit of time between me putting everything into the posting box and actually coming up with a title…

I got all excited looking at fandoms for Yuletide. How I’m going to narrow it down to four, I don’t know.

Mirrored from my blog.

Exciting news: Red Dwarf is getting a new series! Despite Back to Earth not living up to series I-VI I’m excited anyway.

I spent last weekend updating all my Firefoxes to 3.5. My laptop and Firefox Portable were on v3 already, so it was just a case of clicking the button and updating a couple of my add-ons manually. The netbook was a different story…

The trouble with it is that Acer made some programs dependent on Firefox 2 and disabled the check for updates button, so I hadn’t bothered updating. It was faster than my old computer, but it had got to the stage where it was really slow, specially in Gmail where my typing was ahead of what was appearing on the screen. So I found some instructions on the internet about how to install Firefox 3 alongside v2. So I copied Firefox files on the netbook so I could make sure to get back to the old version and followed the instructions.

I briefly had both versions open before I restarted, which made all my old Firefox menus and icons open v3. Which, because it wasn’t installed over the top of the old version meant that it didn’t have my profile. The instructions said that it was easy to get the old version back, but didn’t say how. After spending ages searching the internet and trying things I gave up and set up the new version of Firefox.

Which was all fine except that whenever I opened it it opened up four tabs, which wasn’t what I wanted. I assumed this was a problem with Tab Mix Plus restoring things. A week later I found this was because I’d accidentally set my home page to be all four tabs, which it didn’t even occur to me to do…

It’s worked out ok in the end because 3.5 is much faster, nothing seems to be broken, and I have the Penguin Racing game that’s on the Asus Eee on my netbook. Not that I can play it because it moves, but it’ll be there for future usage…

I’ve also watched lots of new things on TV that all seems to be American. But how exciting is Friday evenings going to look with SJA, HIGFNY and Armstrong and Miller?

Mirrored from my blog.

Merlin is being such a pain this series. First we get McKenzie Crook, who was Servalan and in Pirates of the Caribbean (well, and The Office, but I couldn’t make it through a whole episode of that, whatsisname annoyed me too much). Then last week we get a King going something along the lines of “Are you this great assassin?” when the answer was clearly, no, he’s Micky Bricks from Hustle with a silly beard. It amused me that after the beginning credits they put up a big “With Adrian Lester” credit, when it was clearly obvious he was in it.

Then this week I noticed in the beginning credits that Colin Salmon was in it. So I was prepared when he turned up, but was completely floored by a blonde woman, who I have no idea what her name was or what she said because I spent most of the time she was on screen trying to work out who she was. Eventually I realised she was Kerry from The Bill (the blonde PC, obviously, not the DC).

I could just really do with Merlin (and Doctor Who) not casting these big names because it really distracts from the story. I’m still trying to get to grips with it having Anthony Steward Head and Richard Wilson in it.

Mind you, what can you expect from a program named after the cat?

Mirrored from my blog.

I just watched Armstrong and Miller on Jonathan Ross from last night and it’s back on 16th October. So there’ll be a double dose of Alexander Armstrong on Friday nights and a lot less chance of me not laughing at Mr Smith in SJA.

Rather than talk about how crap I feel today after the fun I had yesterday at work, I thought I’d talk about what DVDs I want to buy. I have trouble with buying DVDs because I constantly tell myself I can’t afford them and spend all my money on books instead. Which isn’t a bad thing in itself, but does mean that I the list of DVDs I want constantly gets bigger. So six months ago I decided I was allowed to spend up to £10 a month on DVDs. Consequently I now have Red Dwarf I-VI, Doctor Who: The Green Death, The Princess Bride and Harry Potter: The Order of the Phoenix. And have spent October’s budget…

But still, here’s what else is on my list:

Mirrored from my blog.

Today, or yesterday depending on how you count it, I’ve been ill for seven months.

Things I have been doing:

Watched Generation Kill, which turned out to be surprisingly good. After seven episodes I can name seven characters, which is pretty good going (Ray, Trombley, Reporter, Brad, LT, Captain America (who I recognise from somewhere but can’t work out where), Godfather). Plus there’s also the bloke that wears glasses who lost his helmet. There may or may not have been other speaking characters, I got a bit confused – they all dress the same, it doesn’t help!

I finished v2 of my Sarah and Harry ficathon story. So I have a draft or two to go and it will be about 5000 words. Handily, the SG Rare Pairings ficathon starts up once that’s done and I’m hoping there will be some Jack/Elizabeth prompts for me to write (and I’ll be leaving some, just as soon as I work out what). Then there’ll be Yuletide and I so want to add Teachers to the list of fandoms. And after one episode of Merlin I want to request Gaius & Merlin again.

I’m meeting Avon on Sunday, yay!

I have a new shower. It’s cunningly fitted into the corner of the bath so if you want to stand under it you have to stand on the bit of the bath that starts going upwards. So I take it down – which required me to take the shower head off so I could get it out from the middle of the soap dish so it would actually stretch far enough to shower with, and to rinse the bath with.

There really isn’t anything else at all going on in my life at the moment. Just lots of things I want to do.

Mirrored from my blog.

It’s been a weekend of thrills, excitement, hope, nervousness, patriotism, doubt and ultimately relegation. Yes, it’s been a weekend filled with British tennis. It’s really depressing when you think that we put our best men in there and couldn’t beat Poland, yet the Spanish B team still won their semi-final match. I think maybe we deserve to be down in Group II for being shit at tennis. Apart from Andy Murray and one man does not make a team.

In other news, there is no other news. I just really can’t be bothered this weekend and I’ve had a weekend of mostly just sleeping and watching the tennis.

Mirrored from my blog.

I am so bored. It’s not lack of things to do, it’s not being able to do things I want to do. It’s a really nice day outside with sunshine and blue sky and probably getting quite warm by now. I’d love to go and do something active, but the best I can really do is a slow walk to the shops and back again and then I’ll need a lie down afterwards. But I want to play on the Wii and go swimming and go off somewhere on the train since the station is so close. But I can’t do any of those things.

Instead I’ve taken a load of people off my LJ friends list, mostly because they didn’t post and it’s not as if there aren’t other ways of reading my friends locked posts on the rare occasions that I make them. I can’t remember when the last one was. I added people on Twitter, though, on the basis that I play with them in TR regularly so I feel like I ought to know them a bit. I did add loads of people before but it was just too much to keep up with, so I am keeping the numbers of people I’m following on Twitter down for the moment.

The most exciting thing I’ve done all week was yesterday when I got my hair cut and bought some coconut ice from the olde sweet shop that’s new in town. And then found my shower didn’t work when it came to washing my hair… I need to phone my landlord but can’t quite work up the enthusiasm. It doesn’t help that my letter from the estate agents with his name and number just gives his first initial and last name and I failed to write down his first name. I might be able to remember it except that his first initial and last name are exactly the same as someone at work, so all I can remember is that his first name isn’t the same…

Mirrored from my blog.

It’s been an… uneven week this week I think. But I am up to 2000 words in my Sarah & Harry ficathon fic and the high single digits in my first head exercise – which is a big improvement on the two I could manage at the weekend.

I discovered my freeserve account has been deleted. I was about to say it was my first email account, but it wasn’t, because we first had a general family one, that’s now just dad’s, and my second was my uni one. And the third. So it was my fourth email address in fact. I’ve had rather a lot since then…

It’s no good to me anymore anyway, since all I get on it is spam (which I had Gmail filter for me anyway) and I only used it for dial-up access. But Zen, who provide my ADSL, also give you a dial-up account, so I can just use that.

I also haven’t logged into my Gateworld account for a while, so all the emails will have been deleted and I’ll let it delete my account as well, I think. I just used it as a spam trap, so all that happened was that it was full of spam.

These days I filter my main email account through Gmail, so it gets spam checked twice and I rarely get any. Although Gmail likes to randomly decide emails are spam, which is less than helpful… And it would also be nice if hotmail and yahoo would believe my email address isn’t spam. It seems to be universally hated by both of them, which is really annoying.

Mirrored from my blog.

This week hasn’t been too bad a week. It helped that it was only four days long and working from home Thursday afternoon. Although I spent the whole week confused so I forgot that it was the day I buy the newspaper until Thursday evening. It is all on the website, it’s just such a pain to read that way, I’d far rather have the paper.

This weekend I even felt well enough to clean the flat and go out to Sainsburys, so that’s an achievement. I’d quite like to go out for a walk at some point, as I currently get no exercise. I couldn’t fit that round cleaning, though, but maybe next weekend I’ll do that instead.

I’m onto the head moving exercises, which are really hard. But I knew they were going to be because I already don’t nod or shake my head, and try not to turn round at work when I hear something interesting from behind me.

I am working on watching all the stuff on my PVR so I actually have some space to tape everything that starts this autumn. After having had the prompt for a week I managed to come up with the whole plot for my Sarah & Harry ficathon story. I even started writing it. I seem to be on about 300 words at a time at the moment, which is about half my usual, but will get there in the end as long as I keep up with it.

For some inexplicable reason half the week’s TV is on tonight (Last Chance to See, Miss Marple (who I don’t like as much as Poirot) and Joanna Lumley doing something with cats. And the US Open is on the radio from tomorrow, so hopefully there’ll be lots of exciting tennis to listen to and they’ll get it done quickly because I really can’t stay up late these days.

And now I need to have a lie down so I won’t be too dizzy to cook dinner.

Mirrored from my blog.

Nearly there now!

40.53 / 50kg (81%)

Mirrored from my blog.

The (Doctor Who) Sarah & Harry ficathon sign-ups close tomorrow! (Well, they’ll be closed once I get up on Saturday).

All it involves is writing a story of min 750 words featuring Sarah and Harry by mid-October. How hard can it be?

Currently I only have four sign-ups. I can, and will, run it with only four people but I am greedy and want more stories to read than that.

So if you write Sarah and Harry, why have you not signed up? And don’t think I won’t be asking people on my friends list for a good excuse if they haven’t signed up by tomorrow evening.

Mirrored from my blog.