Before Strictly Come Dancing began proper, I chose my picks for good times ahead. That was before we had seen anyone dance, of course, although I had been to the Beeb’s website and seen some of their “web exclusive” training diaries.
Well, we’re two shows in now. We’ve seen the contestants dance not once, but twice, and we’ve finally voted someone off. It may just be me, but it seems like forever since Strictly first returned, particularly as we had the whole partnering up extravaganza as well.
Amazon have launched a French Kindle store to go alongside their US, UK and German destinations. The new store allows Kindle users in France to purchase books from a dedicated .fr domain, rather than being redirected to their nearest store and purchasing in differing currencies.
Along with the store, Amazon also launched a French-language Kindle, so that users can buy and read books in either language.
You can find my three books on the French Kindle store here.
I’m really loving some of the features Wordpress are bringing out. I can’t remember if I already mentioned the Copy a Post feature before - but even if I have it bears repeating. I don’t quite know how I ever managed to live without it. For anyone who is not in the know, you simply find a post you want to replicate, click a button, and it brings up that post as a whole new one, so you can tweak to your hearts content. For things like Film Watch, and the Casual Reader posts, where the formatting is all the same, it’s genius.
Way back in February, I left the comfort of a good job with a vague idea of changing careers. It felt like the right time to do it and I knew I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to leave one job with time to look for another one - the right one - to come along.
I went for a couple of interviews here and there, but was not particularly enamoured with what I found. I was worried that my dream job didn’t exist. I still think it probably doesn’t.
Yesterday, we watched Finding Nemo, partly as a way to make Mr C feel a bit better after his short but nasty bug, and partly as it seemed fitting after the sad death of Steve Jobs this week. When the news broke that he’d passed away, I wasn’t surprised to find my Twitter stream and RSS reader filled with posts about the man, but there were occasional crossover posts that surprised me. Seeing Formula One people tweet their thoughts on Jobs was a strange crossing of the streams.
With Leo being something of a podcasting hero of ours, we always like to see what’s going on behind the scenes in TWiT land. Given how much of the day is spent live streaming, it’s not hard to see behind each of the shows, but Leo and team have taken it one step further. On the Inside TWiT blog, they’ve posted an hour long chat with Leo and CEO Lisa talking about the state of TWiT itself.
Or, Why I Want My Leopard Back
When Apple released the latest edition of their operating software, Mr C declared we needed a beta tester. Seeing as he was working on some quite finicky pieces of software, and I was more into browsers and word processors, the honour fell to me. I wrote a post about my initial thoughts moving from Snow Leopard to Lion, and now I’m updating that with reasons I wish I hadn’t.
It’s been a bit of a downer month in Ambridge really, starting with Phoebe finally making her way out of Borsetshire and heading towards her extended family in South Africa. I thought the departure was really well done. Lots of nitpicking over clothes and packing, trying to brave, and in the end, it was Roy who started with the tears first. Bless.
After two kids fleeing the nest, Jennifer finds herself lonely and bored. She manages to find time to give Clarrie something of a pep talk, and denies Tony a hand out after he comes grovelling. She must be able to find something more useful to do, in the whole of Ambridge, and with all their connections and money.
For those who prefer their eBooks on the iPod/iPhone/iPad, Formula Primo Confidential has now made its debut on the iBookstore.
The first in the series, Between the Lines, is now available in six countries, with more than twenty coming shortly.
The iBookstore version offers full colour graphics, table of contents, and advanced formatting.
Visit Between the Lines on the iBookstore and get your free sample now!
“I hope you don’t think I’m rude…” she said, pushing into the queue in front of me, “but I’ve got three kids in the car.”
I would have made a fuss - there is nothing like riling up some queue etiquette anger - but I was hot and tired, and I really wasn’t in that much of a rush anyway. Even so, the brief sentence made me think a lot, and I came to three conclusions.
As mentioned last week, I was somewhat worried about this series finale. The fifth series ended spectacularly, and I loved practically all of the final two episodes. I have faith in Steven Moffat but after seeing the start of this series, my belief system was shaken a little bit. It really shouldn’t have been.
The Doctor has been wending his way towards his death, and we were treated to him repeating over and over that it was a fixed point in time. I very much enjoyed the state of affairs in the broken time stream, where everything was happening past and present, history meeting the future. The trains were excellent, and although the CGI was startlingly obvious, it was fun.
Why settle for a simple bunker underground when you can have an entire skyscraper delving into the depths of the earth? The BNKR Arquitectura company (great URL, by the way), have come up with a concept for an upside down pyramid for the middle of Mexico City. Starting with a wide opening at the top, the pyramid piles layer upon layer going down into a single point. There’s a great full-length picture here, whilst the top looks something like this.
I don’t watch that much reality TV. At the moment, I’m favouring The Great British Bake-Off, which is hard to class as reality TV because everyone involved is so nice and friendly, and it’s just like a giant tea party every week. Strictly Come Dancing returns tonight, and that is a show I do watch.
I can’t stand Tess or Bruce, I don’t like the pointless results show, I think the singing is atrocious, and the judging can be embarrassing. One of the best bits about the actual format of the show itself was Claudia on It Takes Two, and she’s not even doing that this year.
The BBC confirmed today that after this series, there will be no more episodes of Doctor Who Confidential filmed. The sister show has been sitting alongside the main BBC1 programme since it came back to our screens with Christopher Ecclestone, but is now on the way out.
The Beeb say:
The Confidential team captured the rebirth of the show back in 2005 and for over half a decade they have given an unsurpassed, access-all-areas insight not just into Doctor Who, but the magic and mechanics of making successful drama. From an episode directed by David Tennant, to the special edition that broke the news that Matt Smith would be the Eleventh Doctor, Doctor Who Confidential has always delivered the very best in must-see behind-the-scenes action.
A long while ago, I discussed the concept of Endless Pools and how very much I wanted one. Actually, back then, I wanted to set up a business - rows and rows of Endless Pools to save people having to swim in a communal pool. Now I am over that nonsense, and would just adore to have a pool to myself.
Recently, I’ve spotted a couple of adverts for Endless Pools and thought I’d have a look at the website and see what has changed.
A while back, Mr C and I went on a sojourn to the south coast to take some pictures. Actually, we went there with the specific intention to take pictures and publish them live on the go, forming a workflow as we went. I wrote more about the process we decided upon over on Sidepodcast, but we’ve now hit upon a snag.
Posterous have gone through something of a revamp, changing their website and apps to be completely different. I’m not really sure what they’re going for, adding in social networking functionality, I suppose, but all it has done is made it impossible to navigate. The website seems to take forever to load, and the app has spinning load wheels even when it’s not doing anything.
Closing Time presents the last opportunity for us to really enjoy ourselves before what is bound to be a depressing and likely confusing episode to close the series with next week. I am happy to be proved wrong and find that the series six finale is every bit as genius as the series five one was, but I will own up now and say I’m dreading it.
Last week, I talked about recipes I am tempted to make, and today I’ve got more kitchen related stuff. I managed to have a quick browse through a Lakeland catalogue this week, and it was full of kitchen related gadgets. A few of them were pretty impressive, so I’ve picked five that I would buy if I was in the mood to sort my kitchen out.
Lakeland Scrudle - £2.99 The name leaves a lot to be desired, but the description that it helps emptying casserole dishes and getting the last servings out of a pan resonated with me. They say: “A cross between a scraper, a scoop and a ladle, we’re sure this is soon to become a kitchen essential that you’ll wonder how you managed without!” I imagine it is one of those tools that you don’t know you need but once you have it, life is a million times easier.
Credit: San Diego Shooter/Flickr
Today is the 100th edition of Baby Panda Thursday, and, I’m afraid to say, the last. It’s been an absolute pleasure to scour through photos of pandas every week (give or take) for the last two and a half years, but I’m determined that Thursdays will not be bad days anymore, and they will not need the cuteness to cheer me up. Don’t think for a second that this is the last you’ll see of pandas on the site, though.
So, who has tried out The Sims Social?
I’m just starting to use Facebook more as their battle with Google+ heats up, so that I can see who is winning and who is losing. Then they went and introduced my favourite ever game as a Facebook game.
It’s not really the same Sims at all, nothing like it, really, and it’s very, very… social. That might sound crazy, given that it’s called The Sims Social - but I’m finding that you can’t do very much without interacting with neighbours - neighbours that I don’t really have yet and don’t know the etiquette for getting.
It’s taken me a little longer than I had hoped but finally, I have seen the last ten episodes of The Killing. I wrote some brief and quite vague notes about the first ten previously, but now I know how the story ends I can talk in more detail. There are spoilers ahead, so look away now if you have yet to enjoy the drama of The Killing.
The mystery is solved and we know it was Vagn. After many twists and turns, and suspect after suspect - some very wide of the mark - Sarah Lund finally got her man. In the first ten episodes, I never would have suspected Vagn. Gradually, he looked to be more and more in the frame but still the story twisted away from him. That moment, when he had been questioned and returned to the workshop was brilliant. Theis and Pernille would not let him take the boys to the toy shop, even though he protested his innocence and they should have known better, the look on his face broke my heart a little bit.
In the wee hours of the morning, I launched my latest book - Between the Lines. The book is the first in the new Formula Primo series - which you may know better as Life in the Fast Lane.
It began as a simple ten part story, in which the readers could vote in which direction the next chapter would go. Now it has been expanded and improved to become Between the Lines.
Between the Lines is the first book in the Formula Primo Confidential series - a fictional motorsport category populated by intriguing and passionate drivers. Following the highs and lows of a rookie racer as he joins the series, this first book will transport you into a motorsport universe of exciting drama.
If you ever followed my Life in the Fast Lane series, you will recognise the characters and the fundamental story behind Formula Primo. From a ten part reader-voted story, I’ve expanded on the details to create Between the Lines.
When I formed my Life List reading goal, I decided the best thing to do was pick a list of books that would introduce me to new titles and authors. There are lots of lists scattered around the internet, but I selected one and got on with it.
I set up a dedicated page to house the list, and link to the reviews of the books I read as I went along. Quite a lot of work went into that, particularly recently, when I changed all my reviews to exist on single posts.
Last time Toby Whithouse wrote an episode, it involved a strange vampire/fish hybrid that stalked the canals of Venice. This time out, he was seemingly charged with writing the end of Amy and Rory’s adventures with the Doctor. Quite a bigger challenge, I’d say.
As is often the case in some of the more recent episodes of Doctor Who, this was a standalone adventure that was really just the coat-hanger for something much bigger. It was signposted right from the start in big neon lettering - the Ponds won’t be on the TARDIS for very much longer.
This doesn’t really count as a week, it’s just one run. The final one. The 5k. According to the class, this is the race that we have been training for. I didn’t have a race, but I did 5k anyway. Walking intervals were not included, but the notes for this final run said we could do them anyway, if we wanted.
I decided not to, and ran the whole way.
Occasionally, my dad will send me a recipe that he has found and it’s usually for something sweet and delicious. So far, I haven’t made any of them because it’s hard enough to avoid the sweet things that exist already in our house, without adding any more to the mix.
Having said that, there is nothing like window shopping in the cake recipe section of websites, and here are five that I have been drooling over recently.
The BBC have a new series on at the moment called Nature’s Miracle Babies, and the first episode featured lots of cute and cuddly baby pandas. I only half-watched it really, jealous of the man getting to play around with the balls of fluff, and also slightly concerned when they practically ripped his plastic apron from him as they played.
I watched and blogged a BBC documentary on the almost impossibility of pandas reproducing, so I’m well aware of their “miracle” status. Still, they are cute when they finally arrive.
A while ago, I set up my own About.me page. It’s not the most exciting thing you are going to see today, but I quite like the simplicity of the concept. I think About.me are aiming to be the digital version of a business card - a place to send people to find a quick introduction and then all the other places you might be on the web.
The nice thing about the service is that it’s free and really quick to create. Considering that the output is simply a list of links, it’s nice that it doesn’t take too long to put together. My only problem was having too many links to put in there, but that’s because I sign up to far too many sites!
Typical that we get to the final week and I am delayed by… everything. First I went to the Steam Fair and took a day or two to recover from all that walking and all that sun. Then I was prepared to go out, got up early and everything and it was bucketing it down. Didn’t quite fancy it. Nevertheless, eventually, I managed to get Week 7, the final one, underway.
David Walliams completed an epic 140 mile swim in eight days, following the path of the River Thames to raise money for Sport Relief. He finished yesterday, and my guess is he’s been sleeping ever since. Almost immediately that he climbed out of the Thames for the last time, he spoke to the BBC for a surprisingly eloquent, if exhausted, interview.
I’m not normally one to take much notice of the crazy celebrity stunts. I vaguely followed Gary Barlow when he was climbing a mountain, but then Scott Mills walked a desert and that mostly passed me by. I was also only a little bit aware that Walliams had already swum the Channel - this Thames trip was his idea of topping that.
When Mr C and I started discussing book trailers, we did a bit of research and talked concepts and all that good stuff. I decided to make a storyboard of my thoughts on what our trailer should perhaps have in it. I am not good at art, though, as we have previously discovered. Instead, I turned to my trusty iPad, and what do you know, there were a couple of storyboarding apps available.
Since writing my two-part F1 book and releasing it on Amazon as a Kindle ebook, many people have noted with disappointment that they don’t own a Kindle device. Yet one of Amazon’s best kept secrets is the many, many Kindle apps they have created offering the ability to read their ebook content on a variety of different devices. Even if you don’t possess a Kindle, you should still be able to read an ebook.
The troublesome trio are off on another adventure. Presumably dissatisfied with the action they found back in “Eastendersland” last time, they are in search of a fun and exciting planet. Only trouble is, Amy has forgotten her phone.
“I bring you to a paradise planet two billion light years away and you want to update TWITTER!”
The Doctor has heard of Twitter!
I digress. Amy forgets her phone, takes the wrong door and gets stuck in some kind of parallel time stream.
As if I wasn’t already taking over the internet enough, I’ve set up another domain and site. If you head over to christineblachford.com you will find a quite sparse, but in progress website. That is the place where I’ll be specifically posting updates about books and writing and that kind of thing. Don’t think I won’t talk about that stuff here too, but it felt sensible to nab the domain while it was free.
Whilst wandering around the Steam Fair last weekend, we found a line of displays that showed off how smaller engines could deliver a steady stream of water. One couple in particular had a unique way of showing off their technology.
I should have taken video really, because the panda was hooked up to the lever and pumping away at the water. Back and forth he went, poor thing. It was like slave labour!
BBC Four are re-airing The Killing - 20 episodes of the Danish drama in its native language with subtitles. This is not the kind of thing I would normally watch. I love a good crime drama, but throw in subtitles as well and it all gets a bit tricky.
I tend to watch TV whilst I am busy doing other things, so it is difficult to keep an eye on the subtitles as they flash up. There’s only a certain kind of task you can do when you have to keep flicking your attention to another screen every few seconds.
Fresh from my adventures with Shelfari, I’ve also signed up to Goodreads. I investigated them both and went for Shelfari simply because the website appealed to me more, but having had quite a lot of fun with one reading site, I thought why not double it?
Goodreads does very much the same, although there are some things it does not do as well, and some things it offers that are far better. The basic review and rate, mark as read and collate your reading stats is very similar. Contacting and following other readers is a similar process and they both seem to have very sizeable book databases.
As this very wise post says, a lot of the goings on in the Archers this month have been to do with business and money. From the trials and tribulations at Bridge Farm, to Peggy’s desperate bid to keep Jack’s carer, everything has resolved around those little round coins.
The Bridge Farm situation keeps on going from bad to worse. Customers are turning away in their droves, businesses are severing ties with them, and potential partners are finding out all about the dreaded environmental health problem on the internet. Pip has been sticking her nose in, and it’s fun to hear Tom and Brenda being annoyed by someone other than Vicky. Clarrie did the right thing, in my mind, and resigned from the dairy. If nothing else, it stopped the neverending argument between Tom and Pat about whether to fire her. That does leave the Grundy’s scrabbling about for cash again, though.
The scariest place in the world is a child’s bedroom. I must say, I don’t recall finding my bedroom that scary. The occasional moment where you see a shadow and can’t figure out what it is, but not much of the “monsters in the cupboard” stuff.
However, plenty of children do find bedtime and the subsequent switching off of the lights a rather terrifying time, and this story captures that fear amazingly well. A little boy is exceptionally frightened and that leads the Doctor to make a house call. I did like how reluctant Rory was to approach the boring council estate - after flying about planets and punching Hitler, a bunch of flats did not seem much of a challenge.
Yesterday, I went to the Great Dorset Steam Fair with my dad. He’s been before and really liked it. I’ve never been, or if I have my memory has erased it. I must admit, when we were first talking about going, I was sort of expecting it to be a bit like the Gillingham & Shaftesbury Show, which is somewhere my dad and I also visited.
It is nothing like that. There wasn’t a rabbit in sight. In fact, there was not much on the livestock side of things, only some Shire horses doing a bit of ploughing, and a fake cow showing off some old dairy equipment. Other than that, the main focus was transportation, and of course, specifically steam powered items.
I am a terrible artist. I can see things in my head, but there is some kind of communication lost between my imagination and my hand, so that a pencil drawing ends up looking terrible.
Nevertheless, I recently got lost in a world of “how to draw” videos on YouTube, and when I realised it was Baby Panda Thursday today, I thought the two things would combine quite nicely.
This week was over before I really knew about it, which is odd because it felt like a really mismatched weeks. Sometimes I thought I hadn’t been running for ages, sometimes it felt like I was tying up my shoelaces all the time. Nevertheless, the end of the Fitness Class is creeping up on me. After this week, there are just four workouts left. Goodness knows what I’ll do after that.
Let’s come at this from the very beginning then. At the end of the last half of the series, I said I wasn’t bothered about watching the rest. I knew I was going to watch this first episode to see where they took it, but the rest was up for grabs. As much as I love the Doctor, there are other ways I can spend an hour on a Saturday night.
I was really looking forward to The Hour, a six part series on the BBC that followed some 1950s Beeb journalists setting up a news programme called, funnily enough, The Hour. It was compared to Mad Men from the outset, but it wasn’t much like that crazy advertising world.
In fact, the only real similarity was the bad hair and the constant chain-smoking.
After the first episode, I wasn’t sure I was going to keep watching. I couldn’t really reconcile the spy plot with the TV studio storyline, and I really wanted it to focus on one or the other. However, I gave it another episode, and then I was hooked… which was unfortunate because I found it quite slow-going.
I’ve talked about David Mitchell’s Soapbox before, I love the rants and most of them are as if he has read my mind. It’s into the third series now, but never before has one been so identical to how I feel. Even if he is speaking through a “gradgrindish persona adopted for comic effect” all of it is spot on.
A pretty quiet week. The distances have been creeping up which I find disconcerting because a) I don’t really have the time to run more than 7km, given how slow I am and b) training for a 5k should not involve an 11k, should it? That’s not this week, but in a couple of weeks time. Bah! If I could do 11k just like that, then all that 10k related angst will be embarrassing. Nevertheless, on to this week’s fun and games.
Google has made doodling famous, but the practice of scribbling away when someone is talking is still considered rude and/or bad practice. I’ve never really pondered this fact until recently, when I became aware of the Doodle Revolution. Sunni Brown heads up the revolution, with an aim of changing the perception of doodlers from inattentive listeners to engaged ears, and reviewing working practices to make creativity a bigger part.
