It's all gone a bit quiet here...

...now that Obverse Books has its own blog.

So I've started a new reviews only blog here - http://fromastoryby.blogspot.com/

Go and have a look; it;s got Cagney and Lacey and Sexton Blake on it already.

I'm going to aim to write something most days for the first month or so, something occasionally for the next year, then forget the login details altogether...

Smooth Operator

Too good just for Facebook.

WARNING - Contains (allegedly) Doctor Who fandom.

On the Blog...

Been meaning to point these out for ages - some my favourite blogs which I haven't mentioned before...

http://thepenguinblog.typepad.com - regular but not too frequently updated blog covering book cover design mainly.

http://goldenmasks.blogspot.com - knowledgable and interesting reviews of OTR. If you're one of the idiots who didn't like The Hornets' Nest and/or think that OTR is 'old-fashioned' or 'crap' then it's probably not for you. But you are clearly thick as three week old mince, so that's no loss to anyone...

http://www.paulmagrs.com/blog/blog.php - Beautiful looking site, this one, with daily updates.

http://www.nickelinthemachine.com - my favourite blog ever and one which I would gladly buy in book format. Informed articles on obscure corners of London and its history. Go and read it now, you'll love it.

Finn's Reviews - not a blog really, more a massive collection of film, tv and book reviews by oen of my favourite reviewers (even when some of his opinions are bonkers!)

And a late entry which is also not a blog - Cav Scott (co-author of one of the fantastic stories in the Celestial Omnibus) has a new website: http://www.cavanscott.co.uk

A Few New Sites

Somenew things from friends of mine, which I recommend to your august attentions, both of you...

paulmagrs.com

Paul's nice shiny new website, written in typically half-arsed fashion by yours truly. It's got a blog and a guestbook and - perhaps slightly more importantly - writing from the cutting room floor, drawings of characters from Paul's books and a link to be his mate on Facebook or Twitter.

Finn Clark's Reviews

All I did for this was supply some server space into which Finn Clark, aka Best Genre Reviewer Ever, has dropped over a thousand reviews all laid out a nice, easy to flick through front end. If you want to read the definitive (if often totally WRONG) review of any Doctor Who book ever - or anime or horror or obscure 30s British movies - then this is the first place to go!

The Photo Project

Latest baby of Scott's fertile and cheapie craving mind, the Photo Project is a charidee affair, serving as a base for a series of high quality photo books with themed images collected from top snappers everywhere and all proceeds going to charity.

I thought a Doctor Who Locations one might work well, but Scott will listen to any and all suggestions...

Too funny not to share

http://nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com/1331079.html?style=mine

It's quite a funny story to start with but it becomes utterly classic once the author of the initial email appears in the comments' section, and then becomes hilarious when someone quotes his web commentary on Dickens' (unfinished due to his death while writing it) Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Sheer genius - could Jonathan Maberry and Magister be one and the same person?

[Thanks to Mondy for the original link]

Free Online Gaming

Twitfishing

On Twitter, pick one word and add it to a tweet (not as a #hashtag) then see how many auto-follows you get. My current record is seven for 'SEO'.

Phorm Blocking

If you have any interest in computers and that, then you probably have heard about the current furore with the EU intending to sue the UK for allowing ISPs to provide access to user data to PHORM, a company which basically records your personal on-line history without asking (potentially including webmail and other extremely private areas) and then uses it to target you with un-requested ads.

If you are a customer of one of BT or Virgin Media (Carphone Warehouse’s Talk Talk is also involved but apparently provides an opt-out) then you should be particularly concerned as they are the companies that are involved with PHORM (formerly alleged spyware company 121Media) and selling your browsing history to a company that is, imo, only a small step up from spammers. (Trend and Kapersky seemingly intend to block PHORM's cookie as adware, which tells you all you need to know really).

This post here has some good tips on anti-Phorm proofing your PC. I recommend you take them. And to be safest of all, follow the advice of Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University, who recently said: "if you care about your privacy, do not use BT, Virgin or Talk-Talk as your internet provider."

I use Virgin currently, but if I can't block Phorm then I won't be using them for much longer.

Smoke Lingers 'round your fingers...

Courtesy of Paul, a great blog with some fantastic stories about London in the last century.

http://www.nickelinthemachine.com

And could this be Iris' bus appearing through the smog?

http://www.nickelinthemachine.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/smog-g2.jpg

You know you've seen her somewhere before...

Admit it, you know this girl.

She's all over the internet, smiling her faintly impatient little smile at you as you curse the closure of a site which Google suggested might have contained exactly what you were looking for.

Or you've typed the URL in wrong, and changing 'amzaon.co.uk' to 'amazon.co.uk' might be a good idea...

Anyway, she has a life away from mildly censorious glares of approbation at your fat-fingered mistyping, as these images from a stock image site demonstrate.

http://www.istockphoto.com/file_search.php?action=file&filetypeID=&userID=39198&text=hf7

It's a shame that it is a stock photo site actually - I quite like the idea of the mystery girl getting a penny for every time her face appears on the internet. She'd be rich by now and could retire to the Florida Everglades, there to grow old and wrinkled as her Dorian Gray like image remains for ever young and ever so slightly pissed off at getting her picture taken.

GoogleCrap: Customer Service from the World's Favourite L'il Multinational

It's a funny thing about Google. In the tendency to view the company as the corporate equivalent of Mother Theresa's Missionaries of Charity, people tend to forget that - like the beatified old Albanian herself - all is not necessarily as filled with sweetness and light as might appear on the surface.

Case in point. Google products are fine when all is working as it should. Gmail gives you enough storage space to retain as attachements all of your carefully selected collection of Playboy playmates and spoofs of the Mastercard Priceless adverts. The archive facility is simplicity itself and the threading of conversations soon becomes utterly intuitive. How the hell did I cope with Outlook you will end up asking yourself, as you compare Miss January 1974 with Miss June 2006 and ponder the improvements in female grooming products in the interim.

All well and great - but if the program stops working for whatever reason then, basically you're screwed. This week my gmail account on my home PC (but not anywhere else) started locking up over and over again. An ominous warning on the page that appeared in place of my gmail page was headed "Account Lockdown: Unusual Activity Detected", followed by a list of potential reasons, none of which applied to me.

Fortunately, there was a link to troubleshoot the problem.

Unfortunately, the link just led to a page with a couple of FAQ questions, none of which were relevant.

Fortunately though there was a 'Contact Us' link a the bottom of the page.

Unfortunately, that link didn't lead to an email form, but to another page with more generic and badly written FAQ pages, none of which were terribly relevant.

Fortunately...eh, well, if you use Google.com itself to search for this problem and are prepared to wade through the the multitude of other pages and posts bemoaning the exact same problem, you can find a URL which does point to a Google Technical Query form.

Unfortunately, when you carefully enter your problem and your details, giving as much info as possible to help Google solve the problem...

...they send you an email in reply which is just a cut and paste of the original "Account Lockdown: Unusual Activity Detected" page.

So you click on the troubleshoot link...

I still haven't had the problem addressed by Google, never mind fixed, and it seems I'm not the only one. Next time I must remember that Google is as much a faceless, corporate entity with zero concern for its customers as Microsoft, Disney or the Bush Government.

Any suggestions for a replacement webmail provider?

Great Site, Daft Name

Bimbogami is the Japanese God of Poverty, Google informs me. If he gets into your house, you will end up poor, dirty and unhappy. It is also the name of a nifty new puzzle website that I've been beta-testing in a desultory manner for the past few months. The connection eludes me, I have to admit.

However, the site - which goes live this weekend - is excellent and comes highly recommended to anyone who misses Puzzle Donkey. Comprised of a linear path through a myriad of puzzles, Bimbogami has, imo, a reasonable difficulty ramping and some very clever and inventive conundrums, many of which require a good deal of non-linear thinking.*

Well done to Steve and his occasional coding monkey Scott for getting it all sorted and ready to roll - all that's left for you to do is join and test your wits against...some Japanese mythical skinflint. No, sorry, I still don't get the connection...

Also, can I just point out that I've been saying exactly this for two years now. It'll give me no pleasure to say 'told you so' though :(

Finally, damn - I just discovered that I missed the deadline by several months for submission to Myth Makers, the DWIN-organised Doctor Who fanzine. This is annoying because (a) it's my favourite source of Who short fiction and (b) I'd stopped my occasional pestering of erstwhile editor, Richard Salter, when he stood down from the editorship and hadn't realised that I should have been pestering newly installed co-editor, John, instead. That'll learn me not to pay attention.

* Hopefully (though I haven't checked) they'll have moved the stupid puzzle with a picture of Big Ben in it straight into the bucket though. That was just daft.

Random Recommendations

In proper lazy blogger fashion, here's some thoughts on stuff I've enjoyed recently, including stuff I've already posted on a mailing list.

Doctor Who - Black Orchid (1982)

The first episode of Black Orchid is the best single episode of the Davison years. Discuss.

Best start to an episode? Check. Man gets murdered by mysterious figure. Nyssa apparently sleeping in a four poster bed, tossing in her sleep. Wierd Indian looking guy with a plate in his mouth. It's like a 'proper' mystery from the start.

Best joke? Check.
"That was a performance worthy of the Master"
"The Master?!"
"Yes, the other Doctor" (pause) "WG Grace."

Best setting? Check. No monsters for once and in a country house, so properly lit and shot by the BBC. A cricket match, the world's biggest Priest's Hole and a fancy dress ball - what could be better? The Doctor wandering about in his dressing gown, that's what.

Best performances? Check. There's not a bad supporting performance in Black Orchid, and Sarah Sutton turns in her best performance on the show. Janet Fielding is excellent as a flirtatious rathen than complaining Tegan, and Terence Dudley/Matthew Waterhouse manage between them to give Adric a genuine (if shallow) personality in this story (cleverly one which is stolen wholesale from turn of the century Boys Adventure stories - Adric as the Fat Owl of the Remove is something they should have run with instead of killing him off).

Best cliffhanger? Well, no (that would be the firing squad in 'Androzani'), but it's still a decent one, with the viewer unsure if it's Ann or Nyssa under the mask, and therefore uncertain whether she might in fact be killed.

Episode 2 isn't quite as good, but the performances remain solid, George Cranleigh's make-up is excellent (his hand perhaps less so) and the ending is satisfying dramatically and never over-played, for all its obvious literary antecedents.

Other good moments worth mentioning as they pop randomly into my head - Nyssa unknowingly asking for booze and Cranleigh saying 'lemonade for the children' thereby implicitly suggesting that Cranleigh thinks of his fiance Ann as a child; the avuncular policeman failing to be overly rattled by the interior of the TARDIS; and Nyssa and Tegan doing the Charleston long before the Doctor Dances.

It was a Golden Age...

Twin Freaks - Paul Magrs (2007)

Twin Freaks is the new children's novel from Paul Magrs and is well worth taking a look at, either as a quick read for an adult or a slightly longer one for a child.

Like 2002's All the Rage, in Twin Freaks Magrs takes his inspiration from culture so popular as to leave me feeling like Sir Jeremiah Harman confronted by Gazza. Instead of the horror of boy bands, however, this time round Paul plumbs the painful depths of X-Factor.

It's a nice idea - take one beautiful, but talent free, sister and one plain, but vocally exceptional, sister (who's also a dwarf), mix them together and ta da - beautiful and talented Siamese twins.

There's not a great deal more I can say about this book - I said it was a book for 'children' rather than 'young adult' because unlike his most recent non-adult book, Exchange, Twin Freaks is most definitely aimed at the younger audience. As with the earlier Hands Up this is funny, clever and entertaining and makes a point about the problems of growing up in a non-traditional family, without descending into the preachy or forgetting that the book would be nothing without a good story as its backbone. You can't really ask for more and I suspect pre-teen readers will like this a lot (Alex will no doubt tell me when she reads it).

Description of a car journey in Mumbai

This is even lazier since it's just a link - but I think this is the best non-fiction Scott has ever written, full of lovely imagery and strange detail. Skip past the first bit, whcih is a bit dull, and go straight to the section that starts 'Night falls quickly in the tropics'. A beautiful, evocative piece of writing.

Night falls quickly in the tropics

Achewood

Another link, but today's Achewood perfectly sums up the glory of that comic strip - funny, sad, odd and with an alt tag that adds to the whole.

The Hardest Call

Scrabulous

Either via Facebook or on the dedicated website, online Scrabble is the latest craze to hit the little corner of the 'net I generally sit in. Give it a go - even better, if you're rubbish, challenge me to a game and let me boost my fragile ego by beating you!

Web 2.0 makes good (finally)

It's a pointless concept, of use only to marketing people and journalists on PC magazines, but Web 2.0 remains a buzz-word in net terms - and I've finally found something which tags itself as Web 2.0 which isn't populated entirely by fourteen year old girls and sweaty 40 year old truck drivers calling themselves Ahsley Kate and wanting to be best girlfriends.

last.fm is a streaming radio station along the same lines as the US-only Pandora. You register and download a plug-in for Winamp or WMP and from then on every song you play on your PC is remembered by last.fm. Play enough tracks and you provide the last.fm with an increasingly good idea of your music taste.

So far, so reasonable, but hardly groundbreaking - streaming radio is getting better in quality all the time and some degree of personalisation is always good, but it's not exactly a mad leap into the unknown.

What is cool though is the Group facility - get some of your mates to also use the plug-in and you can create a gestalt of your combined tastes, and then listen to a radio station based on that mix of tastes.

Even if you all have vaguely similar tastes, it's surprising how much good stuff you never came across before pops quasi-randomly up. In the last couple of days I've heard great songs by bands like El Pedro del Mar* that I'd never otherwise have heard**.

Recommended in a way that a Ryze account really isn't (hence the playlist box to the left hand side of this page - don't I have great taste!)

* So obscure it seems they have no non-MySpace web hits on Google at all.
**Also a Garbage song - when I find out who threw that in the mix, there'll be trouble, mark my words.

When Wikis Go Bad!

conservapedia.com (I'm not linking to it and thereby improving the page ranking of a shower of neanderthal bigots) is the latest Wiki to the hit the 'net, trailing in the wake of the mighty Wikipedia.

Acting as a self-proclaimed alternative to Wikipedia's dangerous liberalism (for which read, more often than not intelligent analysis), the front page of redneckpedia proclaims itself to be

"a much-needed alternative to Wikipedia, which is increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American"

and provides as evidence such terrible matters as the fact that

Wikipedia often uses foreign spelling of words, even though most English speaking users are American. Look up "Most Favored Nation" on Wikipedia and it automatically converts the spelling to the British spelling "Most Favoured Nation", even there there are far more American than British users. Look up "Division of labor" on Wikipedia and it automatically converts to the British spelling "Division of labour," then insists on the British spelling for "specialization" also.

Interesting that.

Apparently, even in the face of the special relationship and Blair's willingness to be 'Yo'ed by Bush at the drop of a Stetson, the most obvious sign of dangerous atheism and rampant anti-Americanism is spelling English words in the way they are spelled by...the English.