The landlords…are also investigating the cost of entering into a Deed of Variation to clarify the service charge payments….Unfortunately, completion of your purchase will be delayed whilst the title is being rectified.

Aaaagghhh. I was hoping to be moved in for November so I’d be all ready for the NaNoWriMo, but that’s looking a little dodgy now. Still, I’m going to take part no matter what - moving at the same time will just make it all the more exciting Also, I’m happy because a cool teapot arrived in this morning’s post.

The idealistic speechwriter is well-liked by just about everyone. He’s known for his excellent writing, sense of humor, and tendency to be clutzy. Younger than the rest of the staff, he’s often treated as such, much to his dismay.

:: Which West Wing character are you? ::

Spotted on Jo’s blog. There weren’t any spoilers in the quiz that I noticed, but I’m not promising anything. Sam’s always been my favourite character This reminds me of a conversation I had with Kate once. I think I blogged it back then, but…tough:

Me: I want to be Sam from West Wing when I grow up, but Horatio from CSI: Miami is pretty cool too. Hey, maybe I could be both! A writer who also fights crime.
Kate: What, like Jessica Fletcher?

Not funny.

Serenity is #1 in the UK charts, and #2 in the US. Fantastic. My enthusiasm hasn’t waned since last Friday. The DVD is rumoured to be coming out on December 20th in the US, too. I don’t buy many DVDs these days, but that’s a certain purchase!

The Argos purchases arrived today, and they’re all boring. Well, not boring boring, just only as interesting as non-stick oven trays, ironing boards and pillows can be. I ordered two sets of plates by mistake, and rather than have crockery for 8 people who wouldn’t fit into the room all at once returned one via Argos’ 16-day no-quibble promise. Hell, this is riveting stuff.

I still haven’t heard anything about said flat. If the current owner pulls out now then, well, I’m screwed.

Daylight inspection of the damage from yesterday’s car prang has resulted in news both good and bad. The good is that my car is pretty much ok. There are a couple of patches where the paint’s gone, but nothing that can’t be filled in with touch-up paint, or a blue felt-tip pen. The Focus, however, is scratched more deeply. I’ll ask the local ford garage to take a look tomorrow, since they owe me a favour or two
Waxy points out today that the Cary Grant / Audrey Hepburn film Charade is now in the public domain due to a clerical error, and can be legally downloaded here. I haven’t seen it, but Miss Hepburn is always engaging imho.

Google Reader is now (almost) fully Opera compatible, although saying that it’s not actually loading for me atm.

I caught The Daily Show on more4 for the first time this evening. It’s a ballsy show to schedule, as it doesn’t really fit into the UK advert-break system. At one point there was an obvious jump-cut, and another time the title graphics appeared briefly. The NTSC av quality is noticably poorer, too. Thankfully, the content more than makes up for it. I don’t know how accessible it is to anybody without a rough knowledge of the US political system, but, frankly, I don’t much care Extra digital channels are perfect for this kind of show.

Yesterday’s Daily Source Code had a particularly creepy moment when Adam played a listener’s audio comment about how to chat up women in the gym. Noting their exercise bike inputs of age, weight and stamina is apparently great because you can “see how long they’ll last in the sack”, as well as the best chat-up line to use - “you look slim” if they’re particularly overweight, for example. Ugh, sometimes it’s embarrassing to be male. Adam was also rather unimpressed. Then, though, one of the podcast promotional clips was from two young women clearly trying to attract a certain kind of audience - ‘we don’t know RSS feeds from our tight little asses!’ - and was similarly degrading. It was an interesting contrast.

Finally, my friend Lil is moving to Devon to live with her boyfriend, which makes them the first couple I know to move in together. Congratulations, Lil and Tom!

Via Let’s Be Sensible, the graph in this BBC News article is a work of art:

A couple of odd events happened within a few minutes this evening. Firstly, somebody outbid me in the last two minutes of an eBay auction. Nothing surprising about that, you may say. Well, the item I was bidding on was…an egg cup. Somebody sat around waiting to win an egg cup. Who would do that? Who would spend that much effort on an egg cup? Oh, wait. Anyway, the good news is I just found another identical model on Buy It Now for half the price, so I’m happy
Then, moments later, I reversed into Mum and Dad’s Focus on the drive. Damn. I have no real explanation. I reversed out exactly as I do normally, except when I looked in the mirror I saw the cars colliding. I must have thought the car was further away, I guess, but I was completely on auto-pilot and don’t remember thinking anything at all. There are dents on both cars, but I can’t tell how deep the scratches are until the daylight. I’ll get them both patched up as well as I can. I don’t think it’s too bad, but it’ll probably leave a visible scar on both cars. Oops. I’ll certainly make sure to double-check the exits from now on!

What the hell?! This had better be in preparation for a full ban in all public places. Much as I though the previous idea was a bit odd (smoking’s only bad for you if you’re eating at the same time?), I was looking forward to being able to eat out without the stink of cigarettes all around me.

• Antichrist Slideshow - Just because it looks like a spoof, doesn’t mean it is.

Despite only starting at lunchtime, I did have a productive afternoon. I spent a good few hours on the Argos and eBay websites, and have ticked many items off the Stuff Needed for Flat list. Choosing cutlery, oven gloves, plates etc. was strangely fun! It’s great to be able to put my own mark on a place right from the beginning.

I’m quite impressed with the Argos website. Three items were unavailable for home delivery, but the site gives you the option to check stock at local stores and as a result all three have been reserved at the Solihull branch, providing I pick them up tomorrow. I wish they saved the shopping basket server-side, though, as a crash (wtf, incidentally) emptied all of my items - thankfully I’d been making a note of the product numbers just in case, but it was still a pain.

While we’re talking web shopping, buying furniture online is such a pain in the ass! Almost every website decides that the best way to subdivide their catalogue is via brand. So when you click on ‘desks’, the subcategories consist of ‘ventura’, ‘dingleberry’, ‘flarkledoyk’ and ‘romplestein’. Usually they all look exactly the same anyway, but having to check each one is irritating. The product pictures and descriptions are godawful, too. Does anybody actually click ‘buy’ after looking at a 200 x 200 image and the words ‘700×1000x700 beech corner desk’? I swear somebody could make a mint by designing a website properly.

Hmmm, it appears late-night blogging causes me to rant.

It’s Fleet Week in San Francisco apparently. I guess that means it’s exactly a year since I was there. Cripes. My wanderlust was sated for a while, but thinking of that day brings it back with a vengeance. I’d best start making some money!

I should probably be going to bed, but am not feeling tired yet. I think I’ll watch a Scrubs episode then head upstairs…Night!

My sleep pattern is completely screwed at the moment, and it’s entirely my own fault. Why do I have such trouble getting up in the mornings?! I’ll wake at a reasonable time, but then decide to give it “just a few more minutes of rest”, which is enough to send me into snoozy-doozy-woozy-land. I have very vivid dreams - this morning I was on a train full of attacking zombies with lions prowling outside - and I’m always out of it for another two hours minimum, normally waking up every so often with all sorts of strange ideas running through my head. It’s not even a pleasant experience; I feel awful even after I do manage to drag myself into the shower, and the dream imagery stays with me all day. Then breakfast’s late and I don’t get enough lunch…Argh - I hate it!

The silly thing is that I really like being up early - I work far better in the mornings and get far more done than if I catch the hours up late at night. I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t get up today until 1125, which is entirely pathetic, and I wasn’t much better yesterday. Of course, I then can’t get to sleep until the early hours, hence the witching hour blogging. I’ve got to do something about this. Have kids, maybe I’ve got to get out of the habit before I’m living by myself, or I’ll go nuts. Anybody have any suggestions?

Via J-Walk blog, again, comes this health advice from Richard Dawkins:

Gerin oil addiction can drive previously sane individuals to run away from a normally fulfilled human life and retreat to closed communities from which all but confirmed addicts are excluded. These communities are nearly always limited to one sex, and they vigorously, often obsessively, forbid sexual activity. Indeed, a tendency towards agonised sexual prohibition emerges as a drably recurring theme amid all the colourful variations of Gerin oil symptomatology. Gerin oil does not seem to reduce the libido per se, but it frequently leads to a prurient desire to interfere with, and preferably reduce, the sexual pleasure of others. A current example is the horror with which Gerin oil users view homosexuality, even when expressed in long-term loving relationships.

Simply changing one word does a remarkable job of revealing the inherent absurdities.

Well, this is the most offensive thing I’ve read in rather a while. I was really hoping that it’s a spoof site, but apparently not.

Republican lawmakers are drafting new legislation that will make marriage a requirement for motherhood in the state of Indiana, including specific criminal penalties for unmarried women who do become pregnant “by means other than sexual intercourse.”

…

Sen. Miller believes the requirement of marriage for parenting is for the benefit of the children that result from infertility treatments.

“We did want to address the issue of whether or not the law should allow single people to be parents. Studies have shown that a child raised by both parents - a mother and a father - do better. So, we do want to have laws that protect the children,” she explained.

When asked specifically if she believes marriage should be a requirement for motherhood, and if that is part of the bill’s intention, Sen. Miller responded, “Yes. Yes, I do.”

There is simply no way people will stand for this. Only the craziest of right-wing evangelicals could possibly think this is a good idea…right?

My computer blue-screened twice yesterday, once when I was two paragraphs into a blog post, and now I’m obsessively saving every thirty seconds. I haven’t investigated the causes of the crashes yet (the MS debugger is wittering on about symbols being broken), but it’s really annoying.

Just off to pick up various kitchen stuff, but wanted to link to Dignity is Deadly - somebody else who thinks professionalism is to progress what salt is to slugs. There’s also the new Guinness advert at the end of yesterday’s Rocketboom - it’s brilliant.

• go anywhere disposable scrabble game. - Scrabble on the fly. Genius. “Here’s a scrabble board that conveniently prints on an A4 or lettter sized sheet of paper. if you are ever stuck on a plane or in a pub with no scrabble board you can use this sheet to get your fix.”
• Cell phone radiation doesn’t cause cellular stress, doesn’t promote cancer - Another study finds no link

I don’t think you could ask for more - I’m so glad it didn’t disappoint. If you’re at all a fan of sci-fi, please go see it! There were only 25 or so people in our screening. To quote Penny Arcade:

I’d already seen Serenity before this weekend, but of course one must see that sort of thing again.

Entirely true. I think another cinema trip is called for
The others were critiquing it on the way home, and it always takes a while for this to wash off. I obviously have no problem with them giving their opinions, but it takes me some time to realise that it’s ok to completely disagree, and I’m no less intelligent if I do so.

You know how I just said I’d be avoiding the internet? Well, Google Reader came out this afternoon, which I’d heard nothing about at all. Like Bloglines and Newsgator, it’s an online RSS reader, but with the interface goodness we’ve come to expect from Google. The guys at Feedlounge must be cross - Google’s reader has much of the same functionality, particularly in terms of ajaxy-no-page-refresh-needed operations. Unlike Feedlounge it works in Opera, which is nice I’m off to play…

Update: I’d hold off for a while - the whole thing’s currently very slow and various error messages are popping up. Opera’s not working as well as IE, either. I imagine their servers are getting hit pretty damn hard currently. Hopefully they’ll get it patched up soon, it looks very interesting. The Unofficial Google Weblog is the place to go for reactions.