This is in fact my fist post in Blogger. All the other material before this, was cut and pasted from Yahoo 360. Having been new to blogging in March, I briefly looked at Blogger, but for reasons I can't really remember now, I didn't really like it. I had a Yahoo account anyway, so I used Yahoo. Having looked at Google's Blogger again, I like it a lot better. The user interface is much more intuitive, and you need intuitive if you are going to have to cram in a bit of blogging into a busy life, and the template system makes it a lot more user configurable, which is nice - blogging is all about self expression, right?
I really like the way you can configure a unique URL in the Blogger domain. The challenge always is, try to find a word that no one else has used for your domain. OK - so geek alert! There are loads of words that writers had to make up to name planets and alien species in science fiction. So the name of the URL is actually from the first Doctor Who story that science fiction giant, Douglas Adams wrote. To be frank, it was a real mixed bag. Douglas Adams was a wonderful ideas machine. Some of his ideas I could sleep with under my pillow, he had such a unique mind. But sometimes, he couldn't really do plot. So I think he would sometimes write himself into a corner and not know how to get his characters out of the situation. The classic, which he spoke about himself, was in the "Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy", he had Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect thrown out of the Vogon ship into outer space. He had no idea how he'd get them out of that again. So he invented the "Infinite Improbability Drive", a spaceship that traveled through space, by generating fields of improbability. So, it would be pretty improbable for a spaceship to be able to pick up two hitch hikers, particulalrly picking up those hitch hikers in outer space in the seconds before they froze or asphyxiated to death, and particularly picking them up in the ship that's just been stolen by your half cousin, who used to be the president of the universe and has two heads. Douglas Adams - what a mind!
He did the same thing in Pirate Planet, but I think this script was more of a throw away than his Hitch Hikers stuff. So he painted the Doctor and Romana the first (not my favourite Romana!) into a corner, but just got out of it by some silly messing about in the Tardis. I remember being only mildly satisfied by this conclusion when I first saw it at the age of 12. It hasn't aged well since! The story did have some GREAT ideas though. A pirate captain who had some wonderful dialogue, like "by the great parrot of Hades", and "by the evil nose of the sky demon". It also had a hollow, space jumping planet, that materilised around smaller planets and ate all the goodness out of them - a rather improbable scientific possibility though, what if they wanted to eat a planet bigger than them? How did they cope with their climate changing all the time? OK I'm maybe taking this too literally......
So good old Douglas Adams, the ideas machine. Even from beyond the grave, he is amusing me with unique ideas, even providing me with a unique URL that no one else on blogger has used. My old Yahoo name was "Lochardil", which was the area I grew up in, in Inverness in the Highlands of Scotland. Imagine someone else having that already! I like Zanak better, though now I keep writing it, it does sound like it should be an expensive presciption drug! Google does not do anything much when you put "Zanak" into it - I wouldn't want to use a word that I thought was a harmless 1970's science fiction reference, but actually was slang for a perverse sexual practice!
So it took me about 2 and a half hours to do all the transferring from Yahoo to Blogger, so I have not been able to do any new posts until now. I haven't really decide how often I will post to by blog, we will see how we go.
The weather is wonderful here in the Bay Area now, I'm really looking forward to the summer. I'm trying to avoid using the air con in the apartment, but the windows have been open all night, and the temperature inside is stuck around 78F, so maybe I'll have to be a bad global warming creator and have some air con later - we all have to do our bit though.
And, happily, I'm over the jet lag already. After feeling pretty rotten on Tuesday, I was a lot better on Wed, then could hardly get out of bed at 06.00 am on Friday - hooray, back to normal. It's a beautiful day, and it's 7.52am on a Saturday morning and the Scottish Football is streaming on the internet (Dundee United, V Inverness, Dundee are playing better and are one up at half time, if you are interested......), lets see what the new day brings.
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