The Weekend is in Sight

Tonight was the last of this week's batch of episodes of The Wire. It's kind of funny to think that in a couple of weeks it'll all be over.

I've been enjoying my new mobile phone. So far it is a lot of fun. I've recently put on a couple of wallpapers and screensavers to personalise it a bit.

Today was another very quiet and pretty uneventful day at work. On my way in I stopped off to renew my bus pass for the next month.

At the moment I'm sitting here listening to a country music show on the radio.

The House by the Cemetery

Last night I was watching a doucmentary called The Rules of Film Noir on TV. It was part of a weekend long season on one of the TV channels celebrating all things film noir. Later on I watched a violent Italian horror film from 1981 called The House by the Cemetery, directed by Lucio Fulci, in which an academic moves with his young family to a large house beside a cemetery in a small New England town. The house has a violent history of people being brutally murdered, and of course it's not long before the family find out why. The film is very gruesome and violent but it is pretty stylish. It was very obviously dubbed into English which creates kind of a weird thing because a lot of the children's voices heard in the film are obviously provided by adults trying to sound like kids.

I went over to my parent's house today. In the afternoon my Dad and I went out and I bought a new mobile telephone! So far it looks really good.

This evening my Mum and I went out to the Edinburgh Book Festival and saw Will Self talk. He's kind of a comedian, pundit and satirist. He was very funny. After the show we met Dad at La Tasca and had some tapas. After our meal, the three of us went back and saw Frank Skinner who is a famous stand-up comedian. He was very funny.

Disturbia

Last night I was watching the film Disturbia, directed by D.J. Caruso. The film involves a teenager (played by Shia LaBeouf) who is placed under house arrest for three months and is fitted with a monitoring device around his ankle that forbids him from going further than his lawn. To pass the time, he takes to spying on his neighbours through binoculars, especially the teenage daughter of the family that just moved in next door, and the creepy neighbour that he suspects of being a wanted serial killer. The film is very closely modelled on the classic 1954 Alfred Hitchcock film Rear Window, which was in turn inspired by a short-story by Cornell Woolrich. It was a pretty good film, and for the most part pretty suspenseful and exciting.

This morning I went over to a shopping mall with my Dad, and we had a scone and coffee at one of the cafes. Then we went over to get my mobile telephone looked at. It turned out the problem was with the SIM card, so I got that replaced. Afterwards we had a look at hi-fi equipment and then went over to my parent's house. The house was still being completely redecorated and so we went along to La Tasca, a tapas restauarant, to eat. We started off with some bread ond olives, followed by a mixture of squid, prawn and mussels in paella, mushrooms in garlic sauce, chicken on little wooden skewers, chunks of potato in tomato sauce, pieces of chorizo sausage in red wine sauce for dessert I had strawberry ice cream. Tapas is a Spanish style of eating where you order small plates of food that you can share with whoever you're with. It's quite fun.

After lunch we went back to my parent's house. When I got home I wrote out the subscription for golf magazine Bunkered, for my Dad's Christmas present. I'll be writing more of my NaNoWriMo novel this evening. I'm up to 31,418 words with it now.

I've had a really bad cold and sore throat all day today, which has been really annoying.

Saturday

It was another fairly quiet evening last night. I have got to 29,258 words with NaNoWriMo now. Today, I went out to get my groceries for the week and tomorrow I should be going out to sort out my mobile telephone, although it looks like I will probably have to get a new one.

Today I willl be trying to write more of the novel. Of course the month is pretty much half over, already. It will be interesting to see how it'll be once it's all finished with the writing. One thing is that I barely have any social life anyway, and I don't have any kind of love life, or anything like that, and not likely to get one either, so I do have a lot of time to do the writing.

New Work Photos

Last night I was doing more of the NaNoWriMo story. I'm up to about 27,122 words at the moment. It was tough going last night, I was feeling tired, and I really didn't feel like doing it but I managed to persevere. Some days it goes really easily, but sometimes it can be a real chore, at least to begin with but usually once I get into it I enjoy it. When I finished my writing for the evening, I watched the latest episode of Little Dorrit through the TV On-Demand service. It's been a good show but I've not read the original novel, so I don't know how faithful it is.

It was a very quiet day at work today. We had to get photos taken today for the new security passes, apparently they are also going to be put onto the telephone directory of the work intranet, which caused some controversy with some people.

My mobile telephone is still playing up. Hopefully it will be sorted out on Sunday.

Phone Problems

Last night as I was heading off to bed I realised that my mobile telephone had stopped working. On it's screen were the words CHECK SIM. I checked the SIM Card and the phone itself seemed to be okay, but it didn't make any dfference. It was like that all day. This evening I telephoned my Dad about it and he said that we were thinking of heading out on Sunday anyway to look at hi-fi equipment and while we're out I can either get a new SIM Card or upgrade my phone. Luckily I don't use my phone much at all these days. Unpopularity does have it's advantages.

Work was fairly quiet again, as it usually is. I got home at about half past five.

I am getting on quite well with the NaNoWriMo at the moment. I got to 25,114 words, which is slightly over half way. It'll be interesting to see how it turns out. The thing is that it was written in such a short period of time. I just hope that I actually do manage to finsh it.

The Mighty Boosh

Last night I was watching the first couple of episodes of the second season of The Mighty Boosh on DVD. In the first one I saw Howard (Julian Barratt) and Vince (Noel Fielding) head off into the wilderness for a holiday where Howard encounters a tribe of Yeti who threaten to turn him into a hippy, while Vince finds a new style magazine delivered by ninjas, which is so cutting-edge a new issue is delivered every three hours. In the second episode the duo are searching for a new sound for their band in a magical desert where they encounter a town menaced by the deadly Betamax Bandit ("an obsolete format wrecking it's revenge on the world") and reminisce about Woodstock ("I told you, we go in, play, and then get out, but no, you wanted to stay for the whole three days, and what happened? We got stuck with the tidying up... You, me and Carlos Santana hoovering for six weeks"). Both very funny episodes and completely bizarre. I remember that those were the first episodes of The Mighty Boosh that I saw when it was repeated a few months ago, and I didn't really like it much at first because it was just so bizarre, but it really did grow on me, and once I got used to the weirdness I really started to enjoy the show.

It was another fairly quiet day at work. Someone e-mailed me for a list of movies and books in which famous people from the past travel to the future. It was kind of a random question with a lot to choose from so I asked him why and he replied that he was just generally interested. I haven't had much feedback about the staff magazine questionnaire, except a couple of people who wanted to know who Rachael Leigh Cook is. Actually, I do have a picture of her next to my computer monitor, anyway. Some girl I had never spoken to came up to me today to ask whether or not I was actually interviewed for the thing by someone (I wasn't, the questions were e-mailed). Also the office comedians now have some fresh material to replace the fact that I sometimes wear a Batman tee-shirt. They don't really bother me though. They aren't exactly great comedians. I was listening to my iPod a bit at work, again, and this evening I tried to download something to get Twitter updates on my phone, but without success. I can still send updates to Twitter on my mobile though.

Saturday

When I woke up this morning I still had terrible aches all over, and so I didn't go out at all today. It's still quite painful.

Instead I stayed in and watched an all day Doctor Who marathon on TV. They showed the first pilot episode from 1963 in which the Doctor (then played by William Hartnell) was a much more sinister and ambiguous character than later on. It was an interesting episode, even if it featured several actors forgetting lines, wobbling sets and the camera bumping into props.
Then there was a story from 1989 called "The Curse of Fenric" in which the Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) arrives in England in 1942 at a top-secret military base where a scientist is working on a computer to crack enemy codes, the local waters are haunted by an old Viking curse, and the Doctor encounters a powerful enemy from his past.
After that was a tenth anniversary story, "The Three Doctors" from 1973 in which the Doctor (Jon Pertwee) finds himself being chased by various aliens, apparently from another universe, while the Time Lords discover something is draining their power, so they decide to send in the Doctors previous incarnations (William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton) to help him solve the mystery.
Finally there was a story called "The Deadly Assasin" from 1976, in which the Doctor (Tom Baker) returns to his home planet of Gallifrey only to find himself framed for the assasination of the President of the Time Lords.
It was really fun to see the stories. I remember watching "The Curse of Fenric" when it was first broadcast, I was about ten years old at the time and I thought it was pretty scary. I'd never seen "The Three Doctors" or "The Deadly Assasin" before.

I'd had real trouble all day and all last night trying to top up my mobile phone credit, but I finally managed to do it, so that's one good thing.