Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Bow-Wow

Same caveat as yesterday’s post.

(My math is off somewhere and I don’t have the desire to figure out where I’ve gone wrong, so I’m editing this post, as well as the following one with no references to actual numbers.)

Eldrad must live!

(The sound files are in chronological order by serial.
K-9 and Company: A Girl’s Best Friend is out of place.
I don’t care to correct its placement on the list.
These new mp3s will be found at the bottom of the page.
I’m far, far too lazy to put in an anchor to make your life easier.
xoxo)

I didn’t, but I’ll tell you anyway. When I get them all posted, there will be 55 and all from The Hand of Fear. I probably went a little overboard, especially when I’ve got five of S!J!S! declaring that “Eldrad must live!” And when there’s one where she doesn’t say a word because she’s bamboozled and unable to come back with a witty and sarcastic rejoinder for the first time ever.

Yeah. It’s pretty hardcore fangirl stuff, this.

I’m still out of town with the emm visiting the niecettes and will be for the next few days. It’s super muggy here right now, not to mention skies full of dark clouds and rain drops keeping the thunder and lightening company.

The flight was uneventful; the dude sitting next to the emm was seriously hung-over and the smell of booze wafting from him was disgusting. The emm tells me he was quite interested in what I was doing on the computer, kept looking over, trying to read the screen.

Star and Bar are absolutely adorable, naturally. Bar’s starting to talk a wee bit, but nothing quite intelligible yet except the words hi and bye. Star is Star and nothing there’s changed. She’s still her very own little person. Stubborn! Opinionated! Wicked smart.

Somehow, although I’m on vacation, I was able to post the second installment of Sarah Jane Smith - Fashionistsa Fever Part Two, entitled Inspiration Can Trip You Up, But You’ll Be Better for It. It’s been cross-posted at Scary-Crayon, as well. I don’t know about Wes, but I’m just going to sit back and wait for that email from Lis Sladen to hit my mailbox, telling me how much she enjoyed reading the first two parts and looks forward to the next two.

As if!

Oh, I do slay myself sometimes.

I’m quite pleased to announce Dalek Sec has arrived and has happily posed for a round of photos; the FlickrUploadr is being a real bitch and won’t upload anything to my account. I wanted to at least get a couple posted and these were two of the better ones.

And yes, I did use the lightbox. It works wonderfully! I need to make a bigger one, since this isn’t quite big enough, at least for a Dalek.

Or even every other day. That’s not to say nothing’s been going on, though. I’ve just been working on other things, like, well…finding a job, which by the way, is not going so well. But more on that later.

Taking my cue from old friend dotk over yonder on the East Coast, I’m gonna hit ya’ll up with a mega-update post. True dat, yo.

The job search. Oh, the job search. Hopefully something turns up in about nine weeks or so, because I don’t know how unemployment extensions work. I’m still looking, every day and have even given up the job site emails in favor of that crazy new-fangled RSS. I’ve gone pretty ape-shit over RSS, but that’s not for this part of the mega-update. A friend of mine from the bookclub I belong to gave me a tip about an employment agency a couple weeks ago and yesterday I had an appointment. The online testing I had to complete prior to the appointment kind of pissed me off: for the Word and Excel portions of the testing, I was unable to use keyboard shortcuts that I know work because I’ve been using them for fifteen years. Oh, that made me so mad that for those questions, I didn’t even fuck around with going through the menus. I just skipped them altogether. My emm was a bit concerned about it, but I told her my scores would be high enough for it to be apparent I knew what I was doing. I was given my results yesterday and am pleased with them overall, although I know both would have been closer to 100% had those goddamn shortcuts worked the way they’ve always worked in the past. I might be all about open source, but come on! I cut my teeth on Microsoft products. The typing test results shocked me so badly that I asked the woman with whom I was meeting if she was certain that was accurate. I do not type 62 WPM and I never have. I think maybe 50 WPM was my previous high score. The best part about the testing was this: although the testing website said a Mac could be used, upon scrolling down a bit further, I was informed the test was only available on Windows machines. Wha…? Whatever. I had to go to 101 and use the emm’s laptop!

This isn’t a well-publicized bit of intel, but I am getting ready to go out of town in a couple of days for a week. Star Tattoo Girl turns three today and since the emm and I were not able to attend last weekend’s birthday party, we thought visiting afterwards would be grand. I talked to Birthday Star just a little while ago and she is very excited about seeing Grammy and Auntie Mickey, but who’s more excited out of the lot of us, I’m not sure. It’s probably a tie. I still remember so clearly three years ago when the sister called the factory to tell me about the baby (no one knew what Smudge would be prior to birth), the (wo) answered the phone before I’d even had a chance to process it had rung and from around the corner, called to the brand new Auntie Mickey to talk to the sister. Those types of things I miss about the (wo). I’ve been giving a lot of thought to sending her an email, and from what Betty told me, the (wo)’s been thinking the same thing, but just doesn’t know what to say. Neither do I, naturally, even almost three months later, so perhaps it’s just better if I let it go and walk away totally.

The second part to Sarah Jane Smith - Fashionista Fever! has been written and posted here, but is waiting in the wings for some final edits to come from Wes at scary-crayon. This installment is much more image intensive than the first and although the opportunities to totally dis Sarah Jane regarding her clothing were not as numerous this time around, I managed to write about a thousand more words, give or take. It’s still snarky, though; I wrote to a friend of mine in New York and told her about it, saying, “…for all its snarkiness, I hope a sense of my absolute adoration of (Sarah Jane) comes through, too.” And I’ve utilized Lightbox this time around, since I really like the way it looks on other websites

More news on the Doctor Who front: I have officially bought my first Doctor Who toy - Dalek Sec! I don’t count the sonic screwdriver as a toy, per se, since not only can I scare the straights when I press the buttons and it makes noise, but I can also write notes to the straights and leave them on their car windows. In regular ink or invisible ink! I really hope he arrives before I leave so I can play with him on the airplane. If there were any air marshalls to be found on my upcoming flight, what are the chances they may be fans of Doctor Who and wouldn’t taser me into submission if I started saying, “EXTERMINATE! WE ARE THE SUPERIOR BEINGS!” in my very best Dalek voice?

And even more news, via a few different sources: The Brigadier will be appearing on The Sarah Jane Adventures next season. YES! I can’t even express how excited I was to read this and am now waiting even more impatiently than before for the new episodes.

I’m not sure when it happened or why, but I totally heart the Brigadier. And I fer realz heart Harry even more.

Around the villa, there’s not too much to report at all. The toy box project I was so stoked about a few months ago has pretty much stalled for the time being. Right now, it’s acting as my dining room table/workbench/desk away from the TARDIScloset and because it’s in such sorry shape, I don’t feel badly when I nick it with a box cutter or my water glass drips on it. I suspect that will all change once I get it gussied up, so I’m really pulling back on that right now. I made a lightbox this morning just because. It’s certainly nothing fancy and I still need background paper for it, but all in all, it came out quite well. I’m very happy with it and as soon as I get Dalek Sec, I’m going to give it a try.

strange cousin susan continues to be tweaked; I updated to Wordpress 2.6 just this afternoon, after backing up the files and the databases with a handy little plugin I found, since the directions found here about database back up might have been written in Greek for all I was able to understand until the plugin saved my bacon, so to speak. I’ve added an RSS feed and found a random image generator so I can showcase the collection of lady pictures my friend Anneke gives me trouble about. I’ve also finally gotten a PGP key, although it was generated from GPG, since that’s free and from what I can tell, the same thing. Searching for my public key on a few different key servers turned up some old keys I’d forgotten about, not to mention a couple on Mysterious Stevenson. It’s hard to believe it’s been almost eleven years since then.

I’ve realized how painfully long this post has become, so I’m going to hold off on the recent trials and tribulations with various open source programs, not to mention the overall love affair I’m still carrying on with it, despite those disappointments.

I couldn’t resist - these are my favorites. I nearly laughed myself sick working on them. Click on them to see the captions.

There have been other things filling my days and sometimes even my early morning hours. No longer am I waking up at 1:30am or 2am like I was for a while. Now there are nights I’m just going to bed at 1:30am or 2am. That hasn’t happened too often, but in the last week or so, I’ve definitely noticed a change in the hours I keep at the end of the day; mornings are still early, but not ass-crack-of-dawn early, though. A nice change, after all the years of getting up early for work and then in the last few months at the factory, getting up even earlier for work.

Sarah Jane mp3s are being uploaded pretty regularly; I’ve got only two more serials left to re-watch as back-end work for Fashionista Fever!, so I suspect this will slow down by week’s end. But, then there’s always the last two episodes of Doctor Who with which to work, not to mention season one of TSJA…

Entirely too much time is being spent creating images for lol capshunz, but I’m having entirely too much fun with it. I’ll eventually need to incorporate more than just Doctor Who capshunz, but due to the insane number of screen caps I’ve got scattered amongst two laptops, that might not happen for a while.

Fashionista Fever! has taken on a life of its own and is now a multi-part project; “A Clotheshorse is Born” has been uploaded and will cross-post on scary-crayon tomorrow. I had no idea I’d have such a blast writing it, but as I said to Wes in a recent email, “It’s been really quite fun, the obvious joy of rewatching all the S! J! S! serials again notwithstanding. Writing again has been good for me, makes me use the brain I feel sometimes atrophying.” Thank goodness, since there are at least three more installments for sure, with the possibility of at least one additional critique of non-serial specific observations - what some may call total over-analysis - but we’ll see.

In order to make these projects (and any others) more accessible, I’ve included direct links to each one’s page in the left-hand sidebar. Handy!

Lest anyone think I’ve been working on these outside projects and watching movie after movie (I’ve pretty much abandoned TARDISvision because everything I’ve watched recently has been a repeat - or a three-peat - until last night, actually) exclusively and conveniently forgetting I’ve now been unemployed for two months to the day, believe me, I haven’t. There’s a pretty rigid schedule I’ve instituted and have been very successful in adhering to it Monday through Friday. Afternoon naps are pretty much a thing of the past, although I will admit dozing off yesterday after lunch while trying to watch “How Awful About Allan.” To be honest, saying I tried watching it isn’t exactly right: I dozed off during the beginning credits. There was something about combining the talents of Aaron Spelling, Anthony Perkins, Julie Harris, and Joan Hackett into a made-for-television vehicle that signaled snoozeville.

Speaking about TARDISvision, I need to post an update. Yes, it’s true. I finally watched a current episode. With the tenth Doctor. And companion Donna Noble. Just as this season is coming to an end. Since this is the first show I’ve actually watched this season most of the references to previous current episodes went right over my head as I watched. But reading the wiki article refreshed my memory on a few others. I was going to bitch about the causal nexus/”Logopolis” reference (thank you, wikipedia!) just now, but then realized how sickly ironic that would be, since there was a certain reference to a certain companion working for a certain magazine that totally didn’t go over my head.

The only other two episodes I’ve seen from this season were “Poison Sky” and “The Sontaran Stratagem,” and I was sick as a dog for both; thus I don’t count them at all. Perfect, since I’ll have almost a full season to get me through the upcoming drought.

All business at the beginning, all play at the end!

Let me get the business out the way:

Yesterday I had my first interview in four years. The woman with whom I met was quite personable and I liked her a great deal, but when she learned my salary requirements and I learned her salary budget, friendly smiles were exchanged and we wished each other luck in our respective searches and I was on my way home.

Today I have another interview, again in Irvine, but on the other side. Well, I think it is. When the emm and I took a spin there last night, we got all fa-kyed. Add to that my general and alarming ability to get turned around at the drop of a hat. Or an unexpected the turn of a steering wheel. So, I’ll don The All Black Interview Outfit again today, cursing the near 100 degree weather, very much like I did yesterday.

I’m hoping next week turns up some better possibilities because this week was devoid of them.

Thus endeth the business of this mullet post.

While I’m on the subject of mullets and therefore being distracted, please let me draw your attention to one Billy Ray Cyrus…

Then…and now. Obviously, the hair cut has changed, but definitely not for the better. What the fuck goes through this dude’s head? Yeah, we all the know the mullet is just frickin’ bad, but who told Billy Ray his current look is a good one?

If I may continue on this tangent, please allow me to submit today’s Billy Ray and the elusive Jordan Catalano from My So-Called Life (ca 1994):

Okay, so the hairstyles might not fall into the separated at birth category, but there are strikingly unsettling similarities here. The most troubling is the fact both of these men think/thought this was a good look and no one told them to get their eyes examined. Some friends these two have, hunh?

Getting back on track to the play at the end of Friday’s Mullet Post…

After writing three pages of Fashionista Fever!, I’ve come to the conclusion there’s far too much to have the article be a one-off type thing. I haven’t even scratched the surface yet, so I’ve decided to make it an on-going series. I think there might be enough material for three parts, maybe four, which should keep me busy. While IM’ing with Wes about it last night, I came to the conclusion if it were multi-part, it would give me a better chance to really focus. My emm’s read the first draft of Part One and found it very entertaining and even laughed at one point.

Continuing with my recent infatuation with, and Johnny-come-lately appreciation of LOL, I’ve put up a new picture here. It’s totally non-Doctor Who-related…please, I know it’s hard to believe, even with just the one I’ve done.

So, when I haven’t been writing and LOL-ifying and getting screen caps, I’ve been tweaking the blog: moving, removing, and adding. At least I’m not changing the theme; I really like the five-column layout a lot. A lot-a lot.

I’ve also been downloading a mess of open-source programs and subsequently adding them to my dock. Oh, that poor dock. I used to pride myself on the austere look it had. But that austere look has disappeared, to be replaced by this:

This page pointed me to all the new apps, all of which I like quite a bit. I only know one other Mac person, so I doubt the link above will be of any interest to anyone but her.

And thus endeth the play of this mullet post.

I’ve had this picture languishing on my hard drive for quite a while now; I meant to upload it days ago, but just never got around to it. The whole thing creeps me out, but not in the “Oh my God, I can’t look at this!” way. I did express some of that the other night on the phone with Wes; it’s pretty much passed now, but that’s probably more due to the fact it’s still light outside more than anything else.

Instead, it creeps me out on a “What if it’s not fake?” level, because what if it’s really not? No surprise here: I totally believe in aliens like I believe in ghosts, although I’ve never seen any space aliens, so these types of things do stop me up when I slow down long enough to pay attention.

At any rate, here are a couple handy links to the Denver Post’s coverage:

Video captures alien visitor, Denverite says
Alien video: Puppet or real E.T.?

Okay, now that’s finally out of the way and off my hard drive and I’m off onto other things. What’s likely the most important thing is the interview I have tomorrow. It’s the first interview since I’ve started sending out resumes, although I’m the first to say not that many have gone out. Regardless, I’m glad at least there’s this one. My emm and I made a dry run this morning, so I would be sure to know exactly where I was going tomorrow afternoon; there’s nothing worse than looking for a place you’ve never been before and especially if a) you’re the only one in the car; b) you’ve got the added pressure of an expected appointment time; and c) that appointment is a job interview. I’ve tried on the only appropriate-for-an-interview outfit I own and thank goodness I’ve lost some weight; the last time I tried it on, which was just for shits and giggles, it didn’t fit all that well. So. Yeah, there we go. Got my car gassed up and washed today; it’s the first time I’ve bought gas since late April. I was only at a half a tank and it cost me $35; on one hand, that didn’t surprise me at all, but on the other hand, all I could say was, “What the fuck?”

There are a ton of new S!J!S! sound clips here, namely from “Planet of Evil,” “The Android Invasion,” and “The Brain of Morbius,” so please download them to your heart’s content. I’m still trying to figure out recording levels and all that, so if they’re not totally perfect, mea culpa. This is a totally cool by-product of needing more screen caps and finally breaking down and realizing the tele-top is just not going to work, at least as far as this is concerned. I’m still trying to figure out what the hell happened, although I’ve come to suspect it very well may have something to do with a recent momentary power failure; I was watching some Pertwee serial at the time and when the power failed, the tele-top just froze. Its battery power didn’t kick in at all, which I find a little odd, now that I’m thinking about it a little more. That doesn’t explain why only certain disks won’t play, though. But I finally stopped trying to fight it, only to be totally aggravated in the process and have pressed my trusty Mac into service. Ah, but it’s not as easy as all of that because for optimum comfort, I move the entire TARDIScloset operation into the living room and use the toy box (which remains unpainted) as a table/desk and lounge on the couch, trackball mouse resting on my leg. It’s quite lovely, really, and although I do love my TARDIScloset, it can get really warm in here even with a fan and between you and me, the whole thing about it being bigger on the inside is a bald-faced lie. I only say that because it makes people look at me cross-eyed.

I’ve also jumped on the LOL bandwagon and I’m probably quite late, just catching it on the way down to its death. This is the only picture I’ve captioned so far. Yes, it’s from Doctor Who (”Invasion of the Dinosaurs”) and yes, it’s S!J!S!, but despite that, the hard-core 70s look, not to mention the next-to-bad quality of the picture itself, I really do like the shot, and probably would no matter who was in it. But given enough time and opportunity, I could likely branch out into other television programs and movies.

That’s a great segue into the next topic, but I’m going to hold off for now because it’s time for dinner.