Little Storping-in-the-Swuff

RTD giveth, and RTD taketh away.

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Some Captain Jack questions have been answered (see below). But just how many times, between 1869 and 2008, did Jack actually miss the Doctor – the right Doctor, that is, so as not to interfere with the timelines? (Given that the Doctor regenerated immediately after leaving Jack, that means any Doctor >9) How many times did Jack let him slip away?

Scotland 1879
The Doctor meets Queen Victoria and visits the Torchwood estate. The news of this probably takes some time to reach Jack, wherever he is, by which time Sir Doctor of Tardis has no doubt moved on. Verdict: Excusable. Tooth and Claw.

Farringham 1913
A master name John Smith at Farringham School writes about traveling through time and space in his journal, and a man is zapped into dust at a dance. The fingerprint of the Doctor is there if you look hard, but all sorts of stories abound as Europe begins to panic, and the man is actually human. Verdict: Can’t blame him for not spotting this one. Human Nature/The Family of Blood.

London 1953
Although the Doctor climbs a television transmitter at Alexandra Palace while lots of people have their faces nicked, this probably doesn’t make the news because of that whole coronation thing. Verdict: Understandable. The Idiot’s Lantern.

London 1969
Strutting around with a timey wimey detector that goes ping when there’s stuff, the Doctor is probably trying to keep a (relatively) low profile here. But he leaves clues. On DVDs. The kind of thing you might not easily miss… unless you had a secret surveillance organisation looking for exactly that kind of thing working for you, and almost 40 years to discover the recordings. Verdict: A bit delinquent, not spotting this. Blink.

London 2007
A newly regenerated Doctor arrives on the Powell estate and a race of aliens attempt to conquer Earth. This is an obvious time for Jack to be hanging around this area, as he might justifiably assume that if she survived Rose would return home sometime after date of the Blaidd Drwg incident. Verdict: Only if he’d overdone the eggnogs and slept through the whole thing could Jack be forgiven missing him this time. The Christmas Invasion

London 2008
Jack knows the Doctor has visited recently, and that Rose is alive. So why didn’t he spot that Mickey had met up with the Doctor at a nearby comprehensive? And surely when the Battle of Canary Wharf was underway, he could have made the journey in to London to hook up with the Doctor? Even supposing that was too much, surely, surely, the arrival of the Racnoss ship would have told him the Doctor was around again? Verdict: Being given the slip by Mickey is shameful, and only if he were forced to rely on First Great Western (was the Torchwood car in for its MOT?) would he have missed Canary Wharf. The Christmas Invasion, School Reunion, Army of Ghosts, Doomsday, The Runaway Bride

Meanwhile…

In a previous post, I asked a few Harkness questions…which have now been answered.

When did Jack go to 1909 Lahore?
He did indeed spend (over) 100 years on Earth after being brought back to life by Rose Tyler. So between the end of Season 27 of Doctor Who and Series 1 of Torchwood.

Did Jack do WWII twice?
Yes. After meeting the Doctor in WWII, he lived through the whole of the 20th century including WWII, which was presumably when he met Estelle Cole.

How is Jack in a position of responsibility?
Well, actually this is still completely inexplicable.

But now there are more questions:
Why 1869?
Is there some significance to the date Jack “accidentally” when back to (the year gelth tried to come to through the rift)?

Did Jack cause the rift?
Is it coincidence that the rift was opened in the same year Jack went back to (ooh, paradox).

How will Jack get back to the Torchwood team?
Will he still be happy Jack? Will he stick around in Who for the Christmas Special?

I’m playing with the beta.

It seems a little snappier that 2, but that’s difficult to see. I’ve also had trouble with 2 hogging memory, which 3 hasn’t done yet. But then, give it time…

I notice, whilst writing this, that the WordPress buttons all look flatter, now, like they do in Firefox. Hang on – no, neither Googlemail’s GoogleTalk in-browser client nor the Custom Admin Menu WordPress plugin work with 3.

One really cool thing: try hitting cmd-F and searching for something.

Okay, so far we’ve got games. That’s a field that Macs aren’t going to excel in, they’re too far behind already. Gamers buy PCs. That’s not going to stop me buying Need for Speed Carbon, of course.

Then we’ve got the new desktop. I can’t say I follow this, from the transcript. Stacks? Eh? Still, the 3D dock looks cool. And let’s hope they’ve FTFF (fixed the… Finder).

But now this is cool – simple, but so cool, and nicely implemented: “Back to My Mac”. .Mac does what DynDNS type services do, tracks the IP address of your Mac, with a client interface as simple as iTunes sharing. How does it get through your router’s firewall, though? Anyway, upshot: you can always find your Mac when you’re both connected to the ‘net.

Update 18:50 Boot Camp. Basically a non-announcement. No virtualisation, no WINE. No surprise, though.

Update 18:53 Web Clip. Mmmm, widgets. Eat my shorts, RSS.

Update 18:56 iChat. Bated breath.

Update 19:02 Aw. No Google integration, just silly effects. I’m still liking iChat theatre, though, and this makes sense of Quick Looks too. Now then, the exciting bit: Time Machine.

Update 19:09 WHAAAAAT?

Update 19:10 Safari on WINDOWS? Not iChat, but SAFARI? Eh? Why?

Update 19:28 All over. Safari on Windows, eh? Well well well. Where did that come from?

Now here’s some exciting speculation – a Google connection for .Mac? Yeah, it’s an obvious thing for them to do, but wouldn’t it be great? I keep having to increase my storage space on .Mac, and I look enviously at the acres of free storage on Googlemail (yes, I could forward my .Mac mail to Googlemail, but I haven’t go that desparate – yet).

But even more exciting, for me, are the possibilities this offers in terms of further GoogleTalk/iChat integration. Yes, I can already chat to people using GoogleTalk and iChat - which is great with Googlemail users who don’t even know they have GoogleTalk (using the in-browser client). And I can video chat to other iChat users connected via GoogleTalk jabber. But I can’t video chat cross platform, yet (iChat lacks jingle. And I can’t access some cool GoogleTalk features, like voicemail.

My wish list for the Leopard version of iChat: dump AIM and switch to full GoogleTalk integration, GoogleTalk (and by extension iChat) to support SIP calls to the POTS network, visual voicemail in iChat and full cross platform audio and video chats.

Oh yeah, and if all that were integrated into the iPhone, too, I might even think about getting one.

Three new fish in the pond today – tiddlers fresh from the garden centre. They’re testing the water – after the last lot disappeared, and the tadpoles too, it’s possible there’s a grass snake (although the frogs seem to have survived) or that the birds have been helping themselves. But I suspect a submarine portal into the time vortex.

Anyway, it’s nice to see that flash of gold back. I hope they’ll stay.

When the subject of chitting came up before it proved surprisingly controversial. Since I’ve only planted 9 seed potatoes, sticking them on the windowsill in egg boxes didn’t really constitute chitting hell (as described by Tar Baby) but I was alarmed at the news that chitting could actually inhibit yield.

Tar Baby reports that first earlies benefit from chitting. Second earlies show no effect. Main crop is inhibited (but I’m not growing any). No news on charlotte the salad potato.

To add to the data on which these results are based, here’s my report:

First earlier were the slowest of the starting block. They’re now beginning to flower (as seen here) but in terms of pushing through the sods, back then they were trailing last. Second earlies (below) did best, closely followed by the salad spuds. So much for chitting.

“‘Sparrow and Nightingale Investigate’ Nah, it’s too ITV.”

Oh yeah? If the BBC pass up “Antiquarian Book and DVD sellers Sally and Larry investigate timey wibbley wobbly things”, they’re fools. Fools. Do it instead of Torchwood.

And wasn’t Carey Mulligan so much better (and, as the good DI said, hotter) than in Bleak House?

Time to up sticks and head off to a nice new home at www.littlestorping.co.uk. Yes, I’ve finally got round to buying a domain name, and doing all the fiddle that’s involved in moving. Little Storping started just as a try-out, and I wanted to see if I’d keep going, but I’ve been commiting my thoughts to MySQL for 2 years, now (happy birthday yesterday, Little Storping).

Moving means a few things might not work quite right. Please post a comment if you spot anything and I’ll fix it a.s.a.p.

I’ve moved with the help of this useful guide. The only problem I had was on first attempt, I hadn’t spotted old and new phpMyAdmin set to different character encoding, causing some mangling, and photopress (used on another site, not this one) needing its options reconfigured. And I edited the MySQL database in a text editor (the excellent Text Wrangler, since you ask) and this was a doddle. This will be the one post I will copy on both sites.

The old address is mine, for a while, and will redirect here (but just in case comments will be closed and all links will redirect to the new site).

RSS Subscribers: Please update your feeds!

It’s back on-line.

I never did get to finish it before I saw the adaptation – even the web archive version had chapters missing. But now it’s back, enhanced with a PDF available and, brilliantly, a version I’ve downloaded to my Palm, so I’ll definitely read it now.

From the flavour I got, the TV adapatation was remarkably faithful. But, for the most part, better; I’m not a fan such concepts as Death personified, or the Doctor as the father of the Timelords that are (apparently) hallmarks of these series of novels.

One thing I did like better in the novel, though, was the list he gives Benny of:

Things Not To Let Me Do

1: Commit suicide, if for some reason I want to.

2: Do physical harm to anyone, if you’re aware of it.

3: Eat meat, if you can.

4: Eat pears. I hate pears, I don’t want to wake up and
taste that.

5: Leave the area, or you, behind.

6: Get involved in big sociopolitical events.

7: Hurt animals, especially owls.

8: Develop an addiction.

9: Anything impossible.

Of the other eBooks, Nightshade by Mark Gatiss has also been given the PDF/PDA upgrade treatment, but none of the others. Will they follow later, or is there some significance to this choice?