bluefacedpixie

I’m in the basement surrounded by LCDs and flickering lights. There are no real lights on.

Unfortunately the recent trials and tribulations with the house Internet have driven me to this.

Since Sunday our usually-pretty-rock-solid Internet has been playing silly buggers. I think it’s the Apple TimeCapsule Airport thing, but I’m not too sure, although I’m pretty convinced.

It’s at times like this I wonder what normal folks do when technology doesn’t work. And then I wish I was a normal person as I have just enough knowledge to be dangerous and maybe I wouldn’t be so concerned that the only solution seems to be to pull the cable out of the TimeCapsule (Apple didn’t give it an on/off switch) and plug it back in with that little pretty blue spark for about 12-hours of use before it somehow… stops working… and our backups haven’t run since last Friday…. With all lights green and happy of course.

Tonight’s adventures in the attempted resolution (for I have no idea if, this time tomorrow, I won’t be using the F-word in REALLY LARGE CAPITALS) have involved downloading a lot of stuff to find out I have it already, using the cable direct from my DSL modem and doing a PPoE connection from my Mac to the outside world so I can google “TimeCapsule sucks randomly fails at simple internet”, running a full reset and reconfig on the TimeCapsule, being happy it currently works, and just waiting….

However, thanks to the wonder of said Internet (when working) I have passed a small part of the evening quite wonderfully with the Christmas 2008 episode of Doctor Who. This was following (also in a not-connected-to-the-outside-world patch) an equally (if not more so) pleasant experience with the Easter 2009 episode of Doctor Who.

These 2008 and 2009 specials are the swan song of the current Doctor (David Tennant, pretty damn fine), he’s retiring/due for regeneration, as is the Producer/Director Russell Davies who brought Doctor Who back to the BBC. I’m excited to see the non-Davies Who as I think the current Who-franchise is fun, cheesy and way too rah-rah-London to be sustainable and will age badly but does have complete strokes of genius.

But the current Doctor is sensitive and caring the way the Fifth Doctor (aka my Doctor in the same way folks have my James Bond) was (although many folks never gave Peter Davison the credit he deserved for that until later) and these two episodes were good, even more so as they were isolated nuggets of goodness in a week fraught with frustration.

Planet of the Dead (Easter 2009 Special): 4/5
The Next Doctor (Christmas 2008 Special): 3/5