Doctor Who’s oldest enemy… now a fan?!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/news/drwho/2005/06/21/20120.shtml

BBC Chairman fan of new Doctor Who series.

Nearly seven million said goodbye to Doctor Who this weekend, including the show’s most surprising new fan… Michael Grade, the man who axed Doctor Who in the 80s.

News has rearched the Doctor Who website that the BBC Chairman was so moved about the new series that he sent an email of praise to Director General Mark Thompson…

This is not easy to write – as you will readily understand. But here goes Ã¥ congratulations to all involved in Dr Who: to whoever commissioned it, those who executed it, the writers, the cast, the publicity folk that promoted it, the schedulers and of course the late Sydney Newman who invented the whole thing.

I truly enjoyed it and watched it every week with my six and half year old son who is now a fan.

A classy, popular triumph for people of all ages and all backgrounds – real value for money for our licence fee payers.

PS never dreamed I would ever write this. I must be going soft!”

At the end of another day…

Well, at least today I’ve gotten some stuff accomplished.

It didn’t bode well for me to begin with. I had actually intended to get my car’s state inspection done this morning, but after getting to the dealership and turning in my keys and all, they came over to tell me that the inspection machine had crashed and that they needed to get someone from the state to come over and take a look at it. Great. Then when I actually got to the office, they had to cut power to the building for an hour or so in order to get a fuse replaced. So, with no power, I had absolutely nothing to do.

Still, I ended up being productive. I got our cabling people scheduled to come out and finish hooking up the upstairs and downstairs extensions to the phone system either later this week or early next week. In addition, I got a network switch installed into a rack for the engineering people and our CEO (for when they move down here). I just need to get a quantity of patch cords to go from the patch panel to the switch, and they’ll be good to go. I’ll probably pick them up on Friday from Fry’s on the way in to work (after getting my car inspected).

As for tonight, I’ll probably end up making a few purchases I had been planning on for a while. I’ll probably end up getting “The Gallifrey Chronicles” (the last of the BBC’s Doctor Who Eighth Doctor series) and the soundtrack to The Lost Boys from Amazon. I’ll also probably pick up “The Least Worst of Type O Negative” and the soundtrack to Flash Gordon from the iTunes Music Store. The TON album is actually about $7.50 cheaper via iTMS than Amazon… ye gods. Oh, well. I might also pick up another DVD or two. I haven’t decided yet… heh.

Anyway, time for me to wind down what I’m doing, and possibly get ready to get home. Fun fun…

Personal Overclocked Remix faves…

Missy and I were talking this afternoon, and part of the discussion turned to the music I was listening to… namely, a playlist of music from Overclocked Remix. For those not in the know, Overclocked Remix is a site dedicated to remixing video game music. Some of the stuff is ehh, but there is a lot of truly excellent work in there. I promised I’d send her an email with my favorites, but I decided to just go ahead and publish it here so others can get a peek. Keep in mind that these are not ALL my favorites, but just ones I picked off the top of my head from browsing the site. So, here goes…

… and that’s just a taste. I actually have something like 1200 OC Remixes downloaded, not including the three collaborative projects based on Super Metroid, Donkey Kong Country, and Sonic the Hedgehog 2. (I downloaded them in bulk via BitTorrent.) If you’re interested, just head over to http://www.ocremix.org/ and check them out.

When life hands you lemons…

Well, I mentioned what kind of day I was having earlier.

I ended up having to leave to go to Cypress about an hour ago. Just after I left, the person I was going to meet there called and we agreed I should go tomorrow instead. So, I headed back to the office. I wanted a Coke, but the Coke machine by my office is busted. So, I pondered stopping and getting one. Then I remembered that there was another Coke machine in Pipeline’s shop area.

After arriving at the office, I went to the Pipeline shop area, walked up to the Coke machine, put my money in, and pressed the Coke button.

… it gave me a can of lemonade instead.

Ever get the feeling someone up there was trying to tell you something?

*sighing and going back to his work… and his lemonade*

Headache overwhelming…

Bleh.

I’ve got a splitting headache right now, I need caffeine, and I’m running on less sleep than usual. Truly, this is not one of my better days. Hell, it wasn’t one of my better weekends. Dave and I got the video from Louie’s party finished, and the three of us went to P.F. Chang’s for dinner Saturday. That and seeing the season finale of Doctor Who were about the only things that went right this weekend. Otherwise… bah.

It all started Friday night, when I decided to do an update to the web/proxy server at the office. I hadn’t done it in a while, and figured it needed doing. Problem was, it was one of those things you have to wait to do after hours. So, I ran the update… and by the time 3:30 AM rolled around, I said to hell with it and went to bed, intending on restarting the updated services when I woke up and letting it finish while I slept. At 7 AM, I woke up, got the box rebooted… and found to my horror that the proxy server was now broken. After an hour or two of frantic testing and researching, I found that the only fix I could do was upgrade the server to a more recent Linux version. *grumble* So, seeing as I already had plans Saturday, I went to the colocation on Sunday and spent a couple of hours wiping and reloading the box. Then, this morning, I had to spend time finishing fixing the timeserver implementation as well.

And if all that didn’t annoy me enough, I got into work late because of horrific traffic (which seems to have affected everyone)… and found that the Coke machine was stealing coins and not accepting dollar bills. I ended up doing a run to the Texaco station at the corner for a Diet Coke. (It was either that or coffee, and I’m not a big fan of coffee.) AND, I find I have to run to Cypress today to uninstall and reinstall SmarTeam on an engineering workstation.

*sigh* Why me?

Anyway, that’s enough ranting out of me…time to check the new NTP server install here and make sure it’s still working properly. Fun fun…

Faith in humanity == 0

*sigh*

Yesterday probably would have been a fairly uneventful day at the office, had it not been for one thing that happened in the afternoon. I’m still reeling somewhat over the whole damn thing.

I was sitting quietly at my desk, checking up on a couple of issues, when the president of one of the OU’s at our company came into my office, and asked if there was any way we could change the hold music on our phone system. It’s easy enough, really… we had a Muzak system installed here about a month and a half ago. I asked why, and he told me had been getting complaints about it from his customers. Apparently a couple of his customers had called it *ahem* music, and another said it sounded like an *ahem* funeral.

(Replace *ahem* with a very derogatory racial slur.)

I wish I could really be surprised at the use of the term, but the fact is that the industry I work in tends to lean towards either a “good ol’ boy” and/or a redneck mentality. What caused me to blink was when I went into the phone room to change the Muzak station. It was set to “Light Classical”. Since when was J.S. Bach *ahem* music?

*sigh* I’ve switched it to “Country Currents”. If anyone else complains, though, I’m going to switch it to “Kid Tunes” and let them suffer.

Sometimes, one has to acknowledge that there is more out there than what we know…

I know the subject sounds very spiritual… unfortunately, this is going to be a rant that deals more with technology and ignorance of same than anything else. If you’re expecting a deep discussion, bypass this entry. :-)

That said…

Among the entries on my links page is a webcomic called Ctrl+Alt+Del. For the most part, I find it amusing and enjoy reading it. However, I came to a realization after reading Wednesday’s comic: Tim Buckley, the author, really has no concept of the world outside of gaming. For reference, I present the comic:

http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/?t=archives&date=2005-06-08

Frankly, if I didn’t think the email would be lost among whatever juvenile flames would be sent his way, I’d send him something along these lines:

“I read your comic on Wednesday, and I was kind of troubled by the attitude you take towards Macs. Make no mistake, I use Windows, myself. My main PC at home runs Windows XP Professional. I use it for playing around and gaming. I’m at work right now, as a systems/networking administrator and support person. I also do news reporting and sysadmin work for Mortal Kombat Online, the net’s top MK fansite. I currently have terminal sessions going to four different Linux and Windows servers I’m administrating. I often find myself working out shell scripting on this machine. Image and video manipulation for MK Online is quite common. This laptop also fairly seamlessly integrates into the network here at my office, for both file and printer sharing. It is, in short, the best laptop I’ve ever used for work purposes.

“It’s a Powerbook G4 running Mac OS X 10.3.

“I also have other friends who use Powerbooks for their work duties; I’ve also read that the Powerbook is becoming the laptop of choice for sysadmins due to Mac OS X’s UNIX underpinnings. I guess what I’m getting at is that when I want to play around, I use Windows XP. When I want to get work done, whether at the office or on MK Online (especially when at Gamer’s Day or E3), I rely on my Mac.

“So, in my particular case… which is the toy OS again?”

Oh… my…

http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/Music/06/12/pink.floyd.reut/index.html

LONDON, England (Reuters) — Four members of seminal British rock band Pink Floyd will play together for the first time in 24 years at London’s Live 8 charity concert for Africa on July 2, publicists for the event said on Sunday.

Guitarist David Gilmour, drummer Nick Mason and keyboard player Richard Wright will be on stage with bassist Roger Waters for their first public performance since they played at London’s Earls Court in 1981.

The rock legends will join a star-studded line-up including Coldplay, Elton John and Paul McCartney at the Live 8 concert in Hyde Park, organized by activist rocker Bob Geldof to pressure rich nations to ease African poverty.

“Like most people I want to do everything I can to persuade the G8 leaders to make huge commitments to the relief of poverty and increased aid to the third world,” said Gilmour.

“Any squabbles Roger and the band have had in the past are so petty in this context, and if reforming for this concert will help focus attention then it’s got to be worthwhile.”

:-D