The Guild is a web series about people who play an online role playing game and belong to a guild called the Knights of Good. (The game is based upon World of Warcraft, but the game itself is never named.) Every now and then the cast produces a music video. The first one was “Do you want to date my avatar?” The new video, Game on, was just released today.
The Guild meets Bollywood! Love it. 
Disjointed and slightly disappointing. I’ll write more later after I’ve rewatched the episode a few times.
Love Wilf. He’s just awesome.
David Tennant has been brilliant as the Doctor. I’m looking forward to seeing him in other shows. Not sure about Matt Smith.
Sniff.
*waves* Bye DT. We’ll miss you, 10th Doctor.
I watched End of Time (part 1) with my parents on Saturday night after returning from watching Avatar in 3D. (If you haven’t seen that movie, it’s excellent.) We watched most of Waters of Mars before End of Time. Last time my parents saw any Doctor Who was when I lived at home and was watching Peter Davidson and Tom Baker in classic Who in reruns. I’ve been so involved in watching the series that it’s easy to forget how much back-story is left out if someone is just coming to the show.
Spoilers after the jump.
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My cell phone is dying a long, slow, painful death of the abused electronics kind. The phone has been to the barn, through dust and cat hair, riding in the rain, and all manner of abuse. It’s lasted almost three years — pretty good for a little touch phone with a battery back that comes off if you look at it wrong. It’s a good little cell phone: Motorola Ming A1200 running Monta Vista linux.
Over this summer, the phone started randomly shutting off, rebooting (and then not coming back up unless the battery was removed), and dropping calls. Nope, it’s not the signal, it’s the poor abused phone. It just wasn’t meant to take the kind of abuse I put cell phones through.
I’m looking at getting a Nokia N900, running Maemo (linux OS for cell phones). It’s an unlocked phone. Pretty, pretty phone: based upon Nokia’s line of internet tablets, so this phone has some power behind it. Multiple desktops, 32GB storage built in (plus a memory card slot), and a 5 MP camera with Carl Zeiss optics. Nice keyboard, good screen, and real email/browser capabilities. Pretty.
No carrier subsidy so it’s going to cost me more than a regular phone on a cell phone plan. However, I like having access to a phone’s full capabilities without having features locked down by a cell phone company. I have waited months to see if T-Mobile is going to offer this phone on one of their contracts. The N900 carries T-Mobile’s 3G broadband frequency, so you’d think T-Mobile would carry the phone.
The N900, of course, costs just under as much as the used saddle I bought for Isis last week. It will be another month before I can afford anything. I just hope the Ming makes it through another month or two. (Unlikely considering this past week the phone quit recognizing the memory card.)
What would happen if Facebook were done live? Would you really poke your friends? The comedy sketch team of Idiots of Ants asks this question in a hysterical sketch.
If you have ever used Facebook, you’ll get this. If you haven’t, have someone explain it to you.
Not sure about the title, but I like the percentages. Except that I like to think I’m good at hiding the inner geek and can function on a reasonable level in social situations.
I am working from home today using a virtual private network (VPN) connection. I can then connect to my desktop Windows work machine using remote access. All of these connections are done through browsers so it’s pretty straightforward.
Unfortunately, the VPN system we use is primarily setup for Windows and not Macs. Once I had heard about the weather forecast yesterday evening, I grabbed one of the IT guys to help me get my Mac laptop working on the VPN. We were (mostly) successful, enough so that I felt I could reproduce the results on my Mac desktop at home.
I tried for quite a while to get the VPN to work using Firefox and Safari and failed. Even though the VPN works through my portable, I wanted the monitor real-estate of my desktop.
I installed Parallels 3.0 so I could create a virtual machine with Windows XP. Unfortunately, Parallels doesn’t recognize the external USB DVD drive. (The internal DVD-RW causes system issues when it’s used other than for booting the machine. This is being worked on.) I tried several Windows installation disks, and each time, Parallels did not recognize that a disk was in the drive. I verified that the virtual machine’s settings said to use the external drive and to boot from it.
And then I saw the option to use an ISO image instead of a drive. Using Disk Utility, I made a DMG image of the Windows XP Pro Upgrade disk. I then used the command line utility, hdiutil, to convert the DMG image to an ISO image that Parallels could use:
hdiutil convert /path/to/filename.dmg -format UDTO -o /path/to/savefile.iso
I started a new virtual machine and used the new ISO image as the DVD drive. And you know what? It worked.
Once XP was running, Internet Explorer connected to the VPN without any hitches. Except I still got an error message when trying to access my desktop system. After a lot of instant messages, I tracked down a friend who was at work. He checked my machine — and discovered that remote desktop access was turned off. He turned it back on and I was good to go.
This work from home day could not have happened without the help and support of the gaming group at work. These guys are programmers, IT/IS, and tech support. They checked my machine’s IP address, provided suggestions, and helped me resolve the VPN-related issues. I owe them brownies!
Matt Smith was announced as the new Doctor today. Yup, I’ve never heard of him either. Even my British friends were scratching their heads and hitting the Internet to find out more information about him.
The new Doctor was announced during a special episode of Doctor Who Confidential, which can be viewed in the UK from the BBC web site but not in the US. YouTube has excerpts of the Doctor Who Confidential episode.
I’m not sure what to think. I guess I’ll just have to see what happens as Mr Smith takes on the mantle of the Doctor. I hate to see David Tennant leave, but he has had the role for a proper amount of time (four years, as opposed to Christopher Eccleston’s one year).
According to the BBC, the new Doctor will be announced tomorrow. Who ever it is, will have to fill a huge role made popular by David Tennant’s portrayal.
David Tennant’s Doctor has become one of my favourites, second only to Tom Baker.
Here’s hoping the new one is as talented.
If you haven’t seen this, it’s a classic sketch with David Tennant and Catherine Tate, just before she took on the role of Donna in Season 4. I found this video of the sketch on YouTube.
Initially, Donna was a really annoying character. As the season progressed, she grew into a character who could match the doctor, be his best friend — and finally wasn’t a love interest (unlike Rose and Martha). I won’t go into the ending, but suffice it to say that the end of Season 4 isn’t very happy.
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