Doctor Who & The Christmas Specials

Gawd, these Christmas specials of Doctor Who have got me depressed. Half-brilliant, half-rubbish in almost equal measure, David Tennant definitely deserved a better story for his departure. Not resurrected Masters or newly escaped Time Lords could take down the Sainted Physician. No, it was a comedy pensioner!

Fair play to Tennant and Cribbins for acting their socks off in an episode where the writing was in danger of disappearing up its own arse. I’ve described it as RTD getting drunk on his own success. Anyway, I’ve written a fair bit about Doctor Who this Christmas – here’s a run-down of everything I’ve published related to Doctor Who:

The positive thing is that the inconsistent writing in these 2009 specials has probably led to many fans looking forward to the Moffat/Smith era of Doctor Who. Hopefully Moffat can avoid falling into the same trap Davies has suffered from in his finals. I definitely feel that Davies ran out of steam for the series and ended up with an over-ambitious finale that didn’t quite satisfy.

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Magazine Style WordPress Themes

I’ve been researching how to make my WordPress themes more visual and magazine-styled. The best way to do this is to download some WordPress themes that give this functionality and dissect how they work, then replicate the features you like into a custom theme of your own. How is this achieved? Well, check out some WordPress galleries:

  1. 11 Free Magazine Style WordPress themes
  2. 23 Awesome Free Magazine Style Themes in 2009, and
  3. Best Free Magazine WordPress Themes

There are some really good (and a few bad) examples of themes that remix the content from your blog posts and present it in a really sexy way, making your WordPress site look more professional and attractive.

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How to stop worrying about stuff – a gre…

How to stop worrying about stuff – a great post over on Anxiety Culture about how to undo the habit of worrying about everything.

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Happiness flow-chart……

Happiness flow-chart…

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Not-So-EasyJet

I’ve written here in the past about being obsessive about missing flights. And in my long career of taking flights for business purposes, I missed my first flight on Friday morning.

And not to do things by halves, I missed my second flight later that same day.

Missing the first flight was entirely due to the freak weather conditions around London at the end of the week. Snow? In winter? They never saw it coming.

via Not-So-EasyJet.

A horror story about what happens when your airline lets you down!

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Because eight arms are better than two -…

Because eight arms are better than two -

It just reminds me of that line in Dirty Dancing – “Spaghetti arms…this is my dance space, this is your dance space.” Except it ends with Swayze and Grey rolling around on the floor…

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10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.9

Wow – I haven’t been following WordPress developments lately, just mostly keeping up with security updates. But the 2.9 release looks jam-packed with amazing new features. I can now see WordPress developing into a full-blown CMS with some of this stuff.

Gentlemen, start your engines! WordPress 2.9 is just around the corner. Unlike WordPress 2.8, which Mark Jaquith describes as the Snow Leopard of WordPress since most of the basis of the WordPress 2.8 upgrade was complete rewrites and optimization of the infrastructure that ran WordPress instead of providing lots of new features in the same way Apple’s new OS X release is a focus on improved performance instead of features, WordPress 2.9 brings major new “bling” to the table.

via 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.9.

Themeing hooks for image thumbnails, automatic database repair and optimisation and so much more. Well done, WordPress – get the latest version from WordPress.org.

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DIY Laptop Stands

pvc-laptop-standDIY Laptop stands – If you’re anything like me, your laptop frequently burns the tops of your legs. I’ve tried all sorts of ways to make using my laptop more comfortable and keep my legs from slowly cooking.

I’ve done some digging around the web and here are some of my suggestions for rigging up your own laptop stand:

  1. Check out Lifehacker’s Top 10 DIY Laptop stands.
  2. Instructables have a great home-made stand for bedroom use.
  3. And a weird coat-hanger based stand for wall mounting.
  4. Although my favourite one is this PVC tube style one.
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Teaching the other half a lesson…

Gender stereotypes are the source of a ton of great jokes. Here’s a post with some fictional courses each gender could run for the other:

Men could teach women…

  • 101 – Avoiding Walking in Front of the TV
  • 102 - Doing Housework Without Complaining
  • 103 - Shopping: Buying What You Can Afford, Not What You Can Charge
  • 104 - Going to The Washroom Alone (formerly Coping Without My Friends)
  • 105 - Understanding the Male Response to “Do I Look OK?”
  • 106 - Exercise: How it Keeps You from Looking Like Your Mother
  • 107 – Learning How to Initiate Intimacy
  • 117 – Honest, You Don’t Look Like Kim Bassinger – But You’re Acceptable

If you want to read the full list, go here!

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Hot Cyborg Chicks Rule!

I came across this pic today – OK, she’s probably not technically a cyborg you purists. The artist is Heri Irawan – check out his portfolio here.

Hot Cyborg

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