RIP Sarah Jane

Elisabeth Sladen, who played Sarah-Jane Smith in Doctor Who has died, aged 63, from cancer.

I think the Mitch Benn song above summarises what she brought to the role, both in the original series, the relaunch and the Sarah-Jane Adventures.

RIP

Yes Please.

 

Image from NuclearPowerYesPlease.org (Creative Commons 3.0-BY-NC-SA licence)

Hysteria about a 40 year old design that survived a 70% higher than design basis catastrophe and has yet to produce a significant contamination level does not help stopping global warming. Indecision (and using more fossil fuels) will kill, we cannot afford to delay. Even the BBC couldn’t resist getting hysterical, with anchors talking about a ‘nuclear explosion’ at one point.

Check out the IAEA site for facts on the incident at Fukushima.

The new generation reactors are significantly better in design than the 40 year old BWRs, and another generation may see the introduction of Thorium reactors, which have significant safety and non-proliferation advantages.

Two Kids on the Block

Me and my Tractor John Deere

We went for a walk ‘around the block’ last night at Nathan’s request. Both the Boys did cute very well.

Big Smile for the Camera

Bad, Sad Mac

 

Non-geeks leave now...

IT-wise, it's been a lousy week. I'd upgraded to OS X 10.6.7 when it came out, but decided to leave it a few days before I did a clone back up to make sure that everything was stable. What I hadn't done, which I should have, was to clone the 10.6.6 build immediately before the update. Stupid, I know.

Anyway, I decided to install XCode 4, Apple's development tools for the Mac and iOS devices, because it allows you to enable the iPad as a development device which allows access to the expanded multitouch gesture set. First mistake - I didn't realise that XCode was so big - 4.5 Gb compressed big, expanding threefold when installed - nor that, unlike other apps from the Mac App Store, it needed further installation when it was downloaded. Duly downloaded, it started to install and then hung up. No CPU activity (so not decompressing anything), no HDD activity, and the task manager reporting that it was "not responding". Never a good sign.

Anyway, long and short is that after a couple of ours I restarted the computer, and was immediately faced with a folder icon adorned with a question mark. For those of you that don't speak Mac OS, that means the computer cannot find a valid operating system folder.

I am prepared for this kind of thing; the clone back up allows me to externally boot the computer up, and Time Machine (the built in operating system back up routine) covers the gaps in between. I realised that the clone backup was the previous OS version and more than two weeks old (bad Dom!) so decided to restore from Time Machine, going back to two hours before it all went pear shaped so I'd be reinstalling OS 10.6.7 not 10.6.6. A scramble to find the Snow Leopard install disk followed so I could do this.

However, every Time Machine recovery I tried (four if I remember correctly, at around 6 hours a piece) failed to produce a computer that would boot. The clone worked, but even restoring back a day before failed.

In the end, thanks to a great suggestion by Neil Ford, I reinstalled the cloned back up, updated to 10.6.7, and then restored the user folder using Time Machine. This had one further problem - the 45Gb space I had left wasn't adequate to do a Time Machine restore, so I was deleting individual folders, for example Music and Video, to make sure there was enough space. It was painful, and reminds me why I really need to back up regularly. I've not lost any data, but it was a pain.

The restore did trigger a complication; I had to resync all the photos on the iPad (at 10 Gb for the last 12 months not a quick thing to do as it includes optimisation of the local copy).

Once everything was back to normal, I decided to install the iOS 4.3.1 update that had just been released. The iPad worked fine, but the iPhone update got messy, as iTunes froze during install and lost the USB connection. This bricked the iPhone, requiring a full installation and restore from backup. As I manually manage my music, it was a pain as I had to add everything back in. On the more positive side, I now have 3Gb of space on the iPhone compared the 800Mb I had before.

I'm hoping that everything will be simple and happy from now on, like it usually is.

The Children of Húrin

'The Children of Húrin' sees me return to one of my favourite authors, JRR Tolkien, whom I haven't read since I last visited the Maldives on holiday (2004). Like 'The Silmarillion', this is another of the post-humous tales that Tolkien's son Christopher has pieced together. The story is set in the First Age of Middle Earth, well before the events of 'The Hobbit' and 'The Lord of the Rings'. It's an expansion of a story within 'The Silmarillion', a tale of men within the story of the Elven war of the Silmarils.

Just like Ronseal, it does what it says on the tin; the story tells of the human hero Húrin, and his children, especially his son Túrin. It has fantastic imagery (Túrin predates Moorcock's Elric, but has a black sword and a similar feel of doom), dragons, battles and an all powerful dark lord. The tale is very black and bleak, and reads like a saga. Stylistically, it's very similar to 'the Silmarillion' in form rather than 'The Lord of the Rings'.

This was a welcome return to Middle Earth for me, and I think that I shall read some more there soon. I'd love to find an RPG engine that does the setting justice so I could play some games there; I may find one in October when Graham Spearing runs a First Age game with Heroquest based around these events.

Collected Ghost Stories of MR James

I came very late to MR James, especially considering that I read Lovecraft and Poe back in my early teens. Somehow I missed one of the best English writers of ghost stories, but it's made finding James' work so much more enjoyable now. I became aware of his work from a review in a UK roleplaying magazine called 'The Black Seal', which is dedicated to modern-day Lovecraftian material for the Call of Cthulhu RPG. The review was of the BBC TV adaptation of 'Whistle and I'll come for you my Lad', and peaked my interest.

I bought the DVD (which the BFI had issued as part of its classic British Television series) and both Jill and I enjoyed it. This last Christmas, as we were waiting for the baby to arrive, I was fortunate enough to see another more modern adaptation on BBC 4, 'Number 13'. Both stories were extremely good at building a feeling of menace without the gore that you usually see in modern horror material. This made me decide that I had to read more of James' work, so I went into Wetherby and ordered the collection for the princely sum of £1.99! An absolute bargain.

All the stories are well written – although stylistically they are better if you read them out loud in your head as if you were telling them to an audience – and the plots of most are good at building tension and giving a subtle sense of horror. I think I may well recycle one or two into an RPG scenario in the future. The only issue I have with the collection is that the stories are best read (or should that be devoured?) in a single sitting, so it can take a while to work through the book if you're reading it late at night around a small child.

Since I read this, I've also been fortunate enough to watch 'A Warning to the Curious', another BBC adaptation of an MR James story. I whole-heartedly recommend that as well!

High Chair, High Jinks

It's not Nathan in this picture

We've been trying to buy a high chair today for Nathan, and had all sorts of fun. It's been driven by the fact that he doesn't yet sleep through the night (he did for a bit, but now the milk isn't enough for him), and he's reached a size and an age that initial weaning can begin. Anyway, Jill did a look at all the options on the internet and using her Which? subscription, and we settled on a Tripp Trapp chair, as shown above. We knew that Mothercare stocked it, so Jill phoned Harrogate, Leeds and York to see if they had it in in the colour we wanted, and it turns out on Leeds had stock. So we went on an expedition just before lunch to go and buy it.

On arriving at the Leeds Mothercare store, the assistant went out to the back to get the high chair, then returned to tell us that they only had the cherry colour in stock. Jill explained that she had called earlier and they'd said they have it in, but really only got a mumbled half apology. Anyway, disappointed and annoyed, we went and collected the other things we needed and headed to the cash till. At the till we were asked did we get everything we needed, so Jill told the assistant (a different one) that no, we hadn't. The assistant looked surprised and said she was certain that the chairs were in stock. A few minutes later she came back with one, and we walked out happily having parted with some of Nathan's vouchers from the Christening. (Thanks all!).

Fast forward to getting home. I opened up the box for the Tripp Trapp to discover that it was a Walnut colour, not 'natural' as we had asked for. 'Right', we thought, 'let's not waste time' and we arranged to drop it off back at the Harrogate store (far closer and easier to get to) and get a refund. We decided to use the internet to mail order it again rather than go back into Leeds. Jill first tried Blooming Marvellous, a site she uses regularly, but no luck there. Another site she tried needed her to phone them to order it, and when she did she was cut off by the store most of the way through sorting out the order. It was starting to look like it wasn't to be, until Jill remembered another store on the net which sold it. The order is placed, and hopefully it'll be here this coming week. Now all that's left is to start preparing the food for the little tyke!

Currently feeling: Tired (bad night's sleep)
Currently listening to: Nothing, as I'm hiding up in the Baby's Room as he sleeps.
Currently reading: 'Thud' by Terry Pratchett (just finished 'Karavans' by Jennifer Roberson)

Christening Pictures

 

The pictures from Nathan's Christening are on my Flickr page.

RapidWeaver 3.6

Well, Realmac Software have just released RapidWeaver 3.6, which sees a significant number of upgrades. I've upgraded one license to play with it first on my own blog before trying the BITS and Birkenhead History Society ones. The upgrade isn't too painful at £19, and as it's the first one that I've had to pay for in two years it's not bad at all!
I've tried a new theme on the site [edit: pre-Blogger] just for an experiment! No glitches so far!