vometia

I think Tom Baker definitely became my all-time favourite Doctor pretty rapidly; and though some of the special effects of the time sometimes look a bit wobbly to me as an adult, they were terrifying through a ten-year-old's eyes! Colin Baker I just can't make up my mind about. I wasn't impressed at the time but when watching some re-runs he wasn't as objectionable as I recalled; I think there was probably an element of "trying too hard" which instead of being zany was often irritating. I suspect what really stymied him and McCoy (who I think had the potential to be a memorable Doctor) is that the show had been turned from a fairly serious children's drama to a pantomime by that point, though I think there was an effort by Michael Grade who had a personal dislike of the programme to be able to point and say "look how bad it is, we need to cancel it." Russell T Davies made the programme an awful lot more credible, although I personally think it's unfortunate that he kept the pantomime element going too, which is perhaps part of the reason I grew a bit weary of David Tennant's Doctor; though I did enjoy Christopher Ecclestone's version an awful lot.

I think your wasteland needs some added greenery now! I don't care if I'm missing the point, I like mine to have blue skies and green trees. I'm using BA WastelandRestoration and Fellout (amongst other things) to freshen the place up a bit.

Jon Pertwee was awesome. Perfectly charming to the bad guys and consistently rude to his friends! I remember being in tears at school after he "died" and was replaced by this daft curly-haired yobbo (I may have already said that). I loved Dr Who until near the end of Tom Baker's tenure when they started trying to modernise it; never liked Peter Davison much, kind of David Tennant mk. 1.

Pie would be good. But failing that, medals: I guess I tend to think that the signature area is a user's personal space (unless it involves animations, in which case any offer of pie should be withdrawn.)

ooo, impressive. In spite of how long I've been programming, I wouldn't know where to start with that sort of thing!

Skin's finally stopped burning after Friday's laser treatment. I must do that less often. Fortunately, that was (hopefully) the last major session I'll need. Life would be so much easier if, er, life was easier.

I'm not sure if it ever does, does it? I'm certainly not an expert in the subject of law, but my understanding is that nothing can overrule your legal rights. Civil matters may be different, though I think the law takes a fairly dim view of unreasonable contracts.

Best wishes to our various travellers: take care. And no internet is horrible: I lost mine for a few days when some clumsy workmen dug through our phone line, it was awful!

I grew up in the same town. He's nearly 20 years older than me, though, so I didn't actually meet him. The only other guy I can think of offhand is Alan Price of The Animals (well, technically: he was actually on the other school site.)

Hah, I remember that being in the charts just as I started secondary school. Perhaps not the most cheerful Christmas no. 1 single of all time. Interesting to see John Miles there, one of the few famous people to have gone to the same school as me.

It would've been, wouldn't it? But they didn't do that and the outlook.com addresses are up for grabs: first come, first served. I imagine quite a few people are going to be a bit irate about that.

Dragging their feet, I suspect. I'm also not sure about the bit concerning class action lawsuits being enforceable: that's unlikely to be Valve's decision, I suspect (who was it that tried to claim that its users waived the right to a jury trial? Was that EA? 10/10 for optimism!)

No, they just used the same name to confuse people! Such is corporate branding; it has a web interface, as well as pop3 (no imap though, apparently: I guess that would be following too many standards for Microsoft's liking...) Grabbed myself a couple of addresses there before all the good ones went. Already found that they have a problem with their SmartScreen spam filter creating false positives; I think I've narrowed it down to them blacklisting the sending IP address since it seems they don't use the usual xBL lookup tables: again, Microsoft and standards, I guess. Even if I can sort out my own messages so they stop being flagged as spam, I'm concerned about what else may go missing, so I'm not sure I'll be an enthusiastic user of the service (besides which, I use my own domain names anyway.)

Any experts in FO3's weather settings here? I'd like to remove the yellowy-brown fog from Point Lookout but can't for the life of me figure out how it's done. I have Fellout installed (including the Point Lookout bit) and it does a great job of brightening up the Capital Wasteland and restoring proper colours, but Point Lookout remains relentlessly brown with a rather unpleasantly harsh high-contrast low light feel to it, and no amount of fiddling about with the weather records, image space modifiers etc seems to be able to banish it. The biggest difference I've managed to make is to increase the minimum fog distance but rather than continuing to blindly change stuff in the hope of eventually happening upon something that'll do what I want, I figured I'd ask here first! What I'm looking for is a brighter, softer light that brings a more even colour balance (i.e. white!) and perhaps a little more saturation while it's at it. But at present, I'm utterly clueless about how to achieve it.

I think that last point might be the case: they simply pushed their luck too far. I find it irritating that nobody said "this is unacceptable" with things like DVD region coding, but at least in this case they seem to have acted in the interests of the consumer (or rather customers, I dislike the depersonalisation of the term "consumer").

I've heard the same, though I seem to recall that Creative's support for Unix is quite poor these days, so they're only worth looking at for a Windows-only installation. Admittedly I'm a bit behind the times, so things may have changed.

Yeah, I was going to say the same thing. There's a couple of brands I'll avoid at all costs, MSI being the other one. Asus and Intel are more expensive, but much less hassle in the long run. Edit: written without reading the next post! Not trying to be clever, I've just had trouble with both brands and after reading up about it, realised I should've done so before buying...

Happy birthday DP! Have a fun 30s. And a belated happy birthday to Grond!

I think they're jealous of his hair. I rather like the colourful surroundings.

I dunno, they may try some sort of retaliatory move, but ultimately it'll risk damaging their reputation with their customers. I still think that it's unlikely that they'll either retaliate or dump the EU as a market: to look at it another way, can you see a games publisher trying to undermine the North American market if there's a piece of legislation they don't like? As someone else pointed out to me recently, DRM is most likely there to convince shareholders that their investment is protected and I suspect that most are likely to be more pragmatic about the risk of adversely affecting a very large percentage of that investment's income. But if Valve did try to pull such a stunt, I suspect that the games studios would simply find other publishers who are more prepared to cooperate with the legislation of one of the biggest markets. Part of me hopes they will do it actually: I'm a bit tired of the assertion that I'm only leasing a copy instead of buying it and that I have to beg for permission every time I want to play. Maybe it would bring a bit of honesty back to the market.

Cool. I'd love to get some photos of wildlife, but the problem with wildlife is that it has a habit of buggering off!

"Me too", etc: it does have a certain dwemer ruins vibe about it...

Games generally cost quite a bit more though, so I think that cost is covered. I understand the price difference isn't so bad in the UK, but I think I've yet to see a game that's been localised for the UK market. But even if the market is economically the same size as the US, my opinion is still that they'd be nuts to flounce off and say they're not playing, especially as it'd leave the market wide open for a competitor to come along who doesn't have a problem playing by the rules.

I'm ashamed to say I still haven't visited GHF yet: been preoccupied with another FO3 play-through and mod frenzy! I really need to get back into Morrowind...