My hard drive is deader than a very dead thing. There's one faint chance to get the data off it, involving replacing the electronics. As the disk itself is only worth about £30, we're going to try that rather than bother trying to get it replaced under warranty.

Luckily, I don't think there's too much on there which isn't backed up somewhere.

When I logged on to my desktop this morning, it took a very long time. A veeeeeeeery long time, indeed. It did log in eventually, and I did a backup of my documents folder before R took a look at the machine to figure out what was wrong. The three of you who know why I was very, very happy to have done that backup before my hard disk finally conked out completely and refused to boot any longer will understand why I'm not currently curled sobbing in a foetal position under my desk.

R has had to go out to a meeting, but when he gets back he's going to try plugging the disk into his machine and seeing what else can be salvaged. At the worst, I'll lose some footage and pictures, I think. I'm pretty zen about that, right now.

I'm now installing the world's supply of Window's updates. Apparently, I haven't used the laptop for a while.

I lost one of my diamond stud earrings. I think I pulled the butterfly off when I took off my jumper -- I found the butterfly on the bedroom floor but I'm searched the house top to bottom and no earring. I did go out shopping that day, so possibly I lost the butterfly and then the earring fell out later. :-( Oh, well.

ETA: Sue just found it! It was stuck in the bathroom mat! It got sucked up into the hoover a little bit, but it was fine.

Excellent Halloween last night. I had the pumpkin up in the window in good time, so I managed to get rid of almost all the chocolate etc I'd bought. Good constumes generally, even on the older kids. It's funny to see how the very little kids clearly have NO IDEA why they're sudden walking around taking sweets from strangers at random houses, and why this is okay.

I was bizarrely tired last night, so I ended up going to bed at half part eight and sleeping for over 12 hours, and now I feel GREAT!

Just before I woke up, I had the most fabulous Blakes7 dream. There was a new series starting, only I was reading the novelization of it, except that it was all live action and I was a character in the story, too. And although we all knew we were characters, and possibly the story was being edited around us, it was also our real lives, if you see what I mean (we weren't the actors, we actually *were* the characters).

The new story started off with Avon and Vila in a prison in the middle of a snowy forest, and Avon had a contact in the prison who was trying to help them escape. So there were a lot of tricky action sequences with Avon and Vila sneaking around, and then in between we'd sit around chatting and waiting for the next chapter to be ready. I remember us all having lunch at a kind of picnic table (lots of hot soup because of the cold), and I said that it was a good job it was a book and not TV, because if I could actually see Avon (who was, at that point, sitting right opposite me) I'd be all swoony, and he just grinned one of those oh-my-God-Paul-Darrow-how-can-anything-merely-human-be-so-damn-gorgeous grins, and said it was nice to still have fans after being gone so long. And then we went off to do a scene where Avon and Vila were getting escape equipment secretly sent to them through the prison beauty salon supplies department.

Someday, I should really finish that B7 series 5 I started writing.

We went to a Full Monty tank day at Tanks-a-Lot today, which was archie_gremlin's birthday present from my parents. I went along on a spectator ticket, which was actually a lot of fun, as there were some interesting talks to listen to, and I got to be driven around in the site between events in an APC, and to get a passenger ride in a HumVee, and a TS2 Russian tank (which was awesome) while R was driving. It was all very dusty -- it probably would've been a bit more fun with a touch of mud -- but it was a lovely day, very warm and sunny, and there was a nice lunch and all the tea, coffee and soft drinks you wanted included. All the staff were nice and friendly, and although there were a lot of people there, it was all very well organised with people split into groups and rotated through the different events, so there was always something going on.

I managed to forget my camera, but I bought a disposable one, so all I need to remember to do now is get the photos developed and scan then. Hah.

You know, sometime I feel like I just can't write anything. But if I actually stop screwing around reading LJ and forums, and open a file and find a space where words are missing, amazingly, I can write after all.

Less whining, brain! More writing!

This post is brought to you by the number 7, and the letter P for Procrastination.

I'm here to beg a favour from anyone who could spare a minute or two to help make a friend of mine happy.

JM has been nominated for the Tweeterwall No. 1 Backstreet Boys fan. Now, if you've met JM you know that it's a travesty for anyone else to win this. Also, she's awesome and now she's moved back home from the UK, she's a long way away and those of us who don't get to see her any more have to find a non-hug-based way of showing our JM love. Like...voting on the internet!

She's up to page 3 2!!!, but now she needs serious numbers of votes to get up to the next page. You can vote for her by clicking the plus next to her photo here, and you can even vote more than once so long as you don't do it more than every 20 minutes. The name you're looking for is @letterboys.

ETA: Still climbing page 2! Thank you so much, guys!

Bad science, we can haz it.


ETA: Something which isn't made clear in the FAQ, oddly enough, is that this 'research' isn't being done from for an actual peer-reviewed science paper (thank God, really, what with them changing the survey while in the process of gathering data). According to a slightly more up-front e-mail they sent to a community mod, they're writing a 'popular science'[1] book called RULE 34: WHAT NETPORN TEACHES US ABOUT THE BRAIN.

[1] Really, I don't have enough scare quotes on my keyboard to put around that "science".

"We completely understand the public's concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population..."

♥

We're in the middle of switching ISPs. Hopefully, this will go nice and smoothly, but given that one of the parties involved is Demon, I'm not wildly optimistic about that. At best, there's likely to be a point where we will lose a bit of e-mail. At worse, I guess we could end up without a connection for a while. Bottom line -- if you can't get in touch at some point over the next few days, that may well be why.

Another result is that my Demon mail address will go kaboom, probably for good. For those of you who have it, replace .demon.co.uk with .com, and that's my new address, which is already working.

I ♥ Torchwood.

That is all.

Oh, wow.

( Spoilers ahoy! )

For those of you who, like me, completely missed it, there were three Torchwood episodes on Radio 4 last week. They're set between series two and three. If you're quick (and live in the UK), you can download them here. The first was only supposed to be available until the 7th, but it was still there a few minutes ago.

( Children of Earth Episode 2 spoilers )

OMG TORCHWOOD YAY! \o/

Ahahahahahaha. Oh, Torchwood. You never, never disappoint me. I don't really have anything spoileriffic to say, I'm just going to flail around gleefully until tomorrow's episode. 22 hours and 35 minutes!

( Okay, just one reeeeeeeally big spoiler... )

GLBT bookshelf have a press release out.

I'm really interested to see how their idea of holding periodic whip-rounds to pay for site promotion works out, and whether it really will be able to push traffic and sales through to the authors. There are some issues with the site structure -- it's wiki based, which is working okay at the moment but I can see it causing them a lot of support problems if it gets much bigger. On the plus side, it's pretty easy to make your pages look how you want them to look. On the minus side, it's probably a bit more technical than some people will want to deal with.

Anyway, it's an interesting concept.

I'm guessing that 'mardy', like 'randy', is a word which does not mean the same thing in the US as it does in the UK. Either that, or tennis player Mardy Fish's parents really didn't like him.

While looking for the name of a Johnny Depp film I saw an ad for on TV, I discovered that there's a Tim Burton-directed Alice in Wonderland in post-production. I'm sure this is old news to everyone, but I hadn't heard. The cast list is fabulous (Barbara Windsor plays the Dormouse!), and I am both horrified and awed re: the potential of Alice in Wonderland to allow Tim Burton to once more extensively explore his daddy issues. Given what he did to poor, defenceless Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, this could be epic.