Tom Charman

Some day in October, 2005. Huh. You ran out of batteries after just an hour the other day. You’ve been fine today though. Probably not worth worrying about.

Some day in September, 2005. It happened again. Maybe I should return you. CRAP! It would have been free if I’d done it yesterday. $100? Bugger that. I don’t want to look like a fool and return it so soon after the date. I’ll look very clever by wandering round with a dying iPod.

Some day in February, 2006. You’re out of batteries? But I haven’t even gotten to the train yet! You could at least have the grace to konk out when I get to work. I’m not walking with you again. I can’t cope with the disappointment. I’m sending you away.

11am, 10th June, 2006. Ah, you’ve come back. Did she treat you well? Was it fun backing up icky PC data? Has your battery magically repaired itself? Let’s have a go. How long can you play Dark Side of the Moon for?

11.10am, 10th June, 2006. Oh dear. Right, it’s time to take action. Do Apple take Boodles? I’ve got 50.

15th June, 2006, $100 later. You’re being “diagnosed” are you? I told Apple what the problem was with you. They don’t trust me. Bastards. Hopefully the diagnosis will be “too old” and you will be replaced with the ONE TRUE VIDEO IPOD.

16th June, 2006. The “issue” has been “identified”. I remain hopeful, but the picture on the site still depicts your classic, ‘no moving parts’ form. Perhaps you’ll have a new shiny metal back at the very least. I am struck by a fear that the “issue” is my brief installation of linux. I mean, they don’t say “issue addressed”. Just “identified”. I’d already done that, dammit. I wanted them to fix the issue.

9am, 21st June, 2006. You have been returned to me! And by “you” I mean a completely new replacement 3rd generation iPod! So very shiny. The letter I receive with you specifies that you retain the Soul of my old iPod (but not the R&B, or the Country). I’ll charge you up and take you to work. Where are my headphones?

9.10am, 21st June, 2006. Noooooooo! Where are my headphones? Dammit. One day more.

I had a moment on the train today that warmed the very cockles of my Who fan heart. A skinny little kid on the train was reading Doctor Who novels and trying to interest a cute schoolgirl in them. Fool that he was… he gave her ‘Last of the Gadarene’ by Mark ‘Idiot’s Lantern’ Gatiss. That’s not going to impress a girl. Girls like magic realism and postmodernism. Should’ve gone for ‘The Blue Angel’, kid. You live and learn. She read the blurb, had a quick look through it and handed it back, which I thought was a pretty impressive effort.

But now, I need to talk about something less pleasant. I don’t remember getting so irritated reading reviews of Doctor Who last year. It’s like internet fandom has taken a whole bottle of wanker-pills each. Oh yes, you can get wanker pills. Just a few things I’d like to clear up.

• If you don’t know anything about science, don’t try to nitpick the science in an episode, or at least be hesitant instead of loudly proclaiming “Oh, and I notice Scooti didn’t explode in space! Hah! Wrong! I saw a movie one time!”

• The Doctor is arrogant, he’s always been arrogant, he always will be arrogant. It’s always been funny in the past, how the hell has it suddenly become an issue? He’s also pretty awesome, have you noticed? Keeps saving the day. How many times does he have to save the day before he’s justified in his arrogance?

• Rose is not a perfect human being. There’s less of them about these days; even Jesus had his selfish moments. Saying something slightly selfish to try to get your neglected but loved boyfriend to stay with you is not grounds for h8, however you spell it. I dread to think how some of you people would cope watching Six Feet Under. There wouldn’t be enough h8 in your soul to cope with all the selfish stupid things people do on that show.

• I take that back, that bit before. Stop spelling h8 with an eight. It’s silly. Unless it means ‘mild dislike’ when you write it like that, in which case I apologise.

• I agree that the technical details of how the science works are not unimportant. I’d like it if all the episodes fitted together as neatly as ‘The Empty Child’. But in the grand scheme of weighting of episodes, this factor is not the plot and does not count for half the episode’s worth. Stop making it out that because the Wire doesn’t immediately make consistent sense that ‘The Idiot’s Lantern’ is below average.

• Murray Gold writes the music — he does not mix the final edit of the show. If you don’t like the sound balance you’re blaming the wrong person. Probably.

• Stop ignoring explanations given in the show so that you can go on to criticise the show for not making sense. The Clockwork Men in ‘Girl in the Fireplace’ were broken. That’s why they do crazy things. How can you in all seriousness start saying “Waiting for Mme de Pompadour to reach 35 years of age is just silly”?

• When two people are happy, that’s not a justifiable reason to want to slap them. Seriously, it might be better if you didn’t leave the house until you work through your issues. That time with the werewolf, that was a bit off. The Queen called them on it. Making a joke when they leave the TARDIS before they meet anyone is not on the same level.

That’ll do for now. I hope this has been a learning experience for all of us.

After spotting the awesomeness that is Lightbox 2 online, I thought, I should get me some of that for the games screenshots on atypicalreview. And I installed it, and it was good. Or rather, it was good on everything but PC Firefox (except at my work, where PC Firefox could handle it). I went through many amusing days of saying to Andy — look at this! and having him ask What? When I click, it just loads the image by itself.

And then I thought; this stuff would be awesome for our canada pictures too. So here’s the relaunch of Andy’s fantastic journal of our travels at the end of 2003 and the beginning of 2004.

And at around this time, I discovered that PC Firefox seems to prefer it if you load the javascript for our stats program, Mint, first, and then the three Lightbox javascripts after that. Amusingly, IE started complaining at that point that it liked things the other way. So I’ve had to do a few IE tests to get things in the right order.

Of course, being a bit of a Javascript n00b, I have absolutely no idea why it’s doing this — but at least it’s fixed. The Canada Gallery should work on both IE and PC Firefox (and everything else). The Warrior Within screenshots might not work in IE at time of writing. Or, neither of them might be working for you at all. Let me know if there are any issues. Except for there being no thumbnails for any other game reviews save the one I sent you to. I know about that one.

[update: I switched from Lightbox to Litebox. The difference is subtle but speedy. I also discovered that I was an idiot; there was a mint extension called outclicks causing the javascript issues. It’s since been updated to fix such issues.]