Glen A. Larson Ate My Fandom

Other people seem to be putting shopping lists in their journals at the moment in an effort to out-do each other in the geekdom stakes. Since this sort of thing can sometimes leave me feeling a bit left out, I thought I'd throw together a shopping list of my own. Oh yes.

• Two "Premium" SCART cables.
• One pair of "Premium" phono leads.
• Shockwave. Yes. Still
• Buffy Season Seven DVDs.
• Matrix Revolutions DVD.
• A low-end laptop with docking station to replace this machine.

People who marvelled over the lovely Channel 4 Ad that I posted the link to after Spiralled pushed the link my way may be interested to read this article about it. Good to see that gratuitous use of profanity can still get you into the papers. Still don't know who all the people are, but PFD did help by finding out that the "Blue Dress Shitface Girl" (BDSFG) was apparently Rachel Bilson, which would suggest that C4 has bought The O.C. now that Dawson's Creek is finished. Although this could be totally wrong, as Alison apparently thought that the BDSFG was Katie Melua. Confused? You should be. Any helpful comments on this quandary should be sent on a postcard please to the usual address.

I have just found a bit on the FilmFour website about possible Cinematic remakes of old TV shows (in the same vein as Starsky & Hutch and Charlie's Angels, and how they personally think each possibility should be done. The bit about The A-Team is a must-read, and the Fantasy Cast is spot on. Heh.

I keep forgetting to put stuff in here.

The most important bit of news, which I'm tucking in several paragraphs down in order to try and sweep it under the carpet, is that next week I will be starting another assignment at the old place. On the one hand, this is something to do that will help me retain some semblance of discipline and will give my mind something to get its teeth into. On the other hand, say it with me, BIG FUCKING STEP BACKWARDS. I have the proviso that if any plum opportunities come up I'll be riding out of town before you can say "Bored out of my fucking mind".

Battlestar Galactica, of the old school variety, is something I've been meaning to talk about. Bear in mind that I remember little of this show, as although I don't know exactly when it was first shown in the UK, I reckon I must've been 7 or 8 when I saw it first time around. While I know there have been re-runs here and there, I've never seen any - apart from the night before the interview that got me my current job, when it was what happened to be on in the dining room at the B&B where I was staying - so working through the DVD box has been something of an education. The concept is good, as are the stories, even if they're not always well executed. The special effects have definitely been touched up, 'cause I distinctly remember being able to see the glass plates all the ships were matted onto in most of the space sequences when it was shown on TV back in the day.

Happily, the sound effects have been left untouched. This means we've still got the same two laser sound effects - one for the good guys, one for the bad guys - and the same three explosions. For those who hadn't remembered, these are also the same five sound effects that were used in the other Glen A. Larson scifi venture, Buck Rogers In The 25th Century. If memory serves the launch sequences for the fighters were pretty much the same, and you even had a few of the rarer members of the 'rag tag fleet' showing up in Buck Rogers too.

Glen A. Larson is apparently an anagram of 'No Real Glans'. I'm not sure I wanted to know that.

The rebuild that I gave this PC earlier in the week, which incidentally also turned it into a Win2K box, was not without craziness. First up, the firewall and the broadband install decided to have a fight. I thought it would be prudent to get the firewall up and running before I installed anything that gave me a network connection, but apparently that wasn't wise, because once the firewall was up and running it kept grabbing its football and taking it home. So I had to remove the firewall and try again. Thankfully, this worked.

Then neither the printer nor the webcam wanted to work. Cunts. Downloading the latest drivers instead of trusting those that were distributed on CD with both items proved to be a plus here, once the dodgy drivers had been scrubbed away with lots of Mr Muscle and elbow grease.

The worst incident was yesterday when the TCP/IP stack collapsed as if it was being used for some dodgy game of Information Super-Jenga. This horrified me, as my only previous experience of this happening was back on Broadband Day, which just happened to be the last time I did a full reinstall - the TCP/IP blow out being the reason why. However, before I resorted to throwing all my toys out of the pram and re-installing them yet again, I prodded the firewall a bit. Seemed that some network activity was going on. Uninstalling the firewall miraculously restored life to the internet connection. Reinstalling the firewall thankfully did not undo this. So, I figure the best way to describe what happened is to say that the TCP/IP stack fell down the back of the firewall. The best reason I have to explain why this happened is that the prior install of the firewall was still feeling angry about the fight it had with the broadband install. Given that a fair number of my peers regard me as being quite computer literate (and I will admit that it is the less computer literate of my peers who think this), it's quite alarming when something happens where the best explanation I have is the silly hocus-pocus one that sounded good at the time. Technology. Can't live with it, can't XBox Live! without it.