So now eight more days have gone by, and for what? I did try to log in a few nights ago and was told the system was down for maintenance, this at 8 or 9 in the evening eastern time, not very user friendly. Usually maintenance like that means something crashed and we're desperately trying to put it back the way it was. In the wacky world of production support, apps don't always behave the way they're supposed to, whether its prime time or the middle of the night.



Last night I was up until 3 am, not like the old days, watching old movies, but watching log screens scroll by and e-mailing back and forth to our users in Sydney as it was their first day with the second phase of our application. Sydney is used to being guinea pigs because they're the first foreign exchange site to see the sun rise, and this was no exception, since even though this same software had been in use in Boston for six months, and gone through a few minor upgrades already, this was the first foreign site to use it, and naturally they encountered a few things that their American counterparts had been spared all this time. But nothing too earthshattering, no one was demanding we turn it off and go back to the old system, so hopefully they can plug away for another day or two until we can fix the most annoying problems. Invariably when you first distribute a brand new, rewritten from the ground up application that's supposed to make their lives easier, it initially makes more work for them instead, but it settles down fairly quickly. It's partially their own fault because they barely participated in the UAT test, so a few things that might've been caught went unnoticed until it was too late. If I could be there to help smooth things over it would do wonders for our own PR, but such is not to be. We've got four more sites to go, supposedly in the next month, but I wasn't exactly planning on staying up all night for the rest of them. Give somebody else a chance, why hog all the glory?

Whoa, where did the week go? How embarrassing, I aspire to do better this week. It must have something to do with the time warp we are currently in the midst of, where the calendar says it is the first week of June, but the weather report puts it at around mid-April instead. The last couple of weeks have been mostly 60 degrees, rainy and depressing, very English weather, which is great if you're in England, but wasn't supposed to be part of the package for living in the northeast.



Bid on a few groups of Target novelizations in the last week. The first batch was won easily, with no competing bids, then I didn't hear from the seller for like a week. Apparently he put a bunch of stuff on eBay, then went on vacation. It's unusual in this day and age to have to wait more than 24 hours to hear from the seller after winning an auction, but this guy was in the UK and obviously a little more laid back. Then it happens again, I won eight separate auctions from the same guy, also in the UK, for eight more Target books on June 1, and have yet to hear from anybody. He must be "on holiday" too. So I find a group of three lots of books which nobody has bid on and are from the good old US of A and aren't listed in under Doctor Who, so I bid on a couple of those, and right before the end a bidding war ensues and two of them end up going for almost twice what I wanted to pay (its the same problem with Doc Savage books, where when you're bidding on a lot you want your top price to be a multiple of the number of books you don't actually have, so that when you end up with duplicates they were essentially free. Sometimes this works, but in many cases such as today you end up getting outbid either by someone who doesn't have any of the books in the lot or else doesn't care). Almost had a heart attack too when I accidentally countered a prevailing bid of $8.50 with a bid of $1250 instead of $12.50. Figured out how to retract the bid, then you're supposed to immediately bid the amount you originally meant to, but in the meantime somebody else had already outbid that, so hopefully they don't pull the plug on my account. Usually I'm more careful, don't know quite what happened there.



I counted up now I've got (if this group of 8 ever materializes) around 100 Target novelizations, which actually have some prospect of being read during my lifetime since they're extremely short and in true fanboy fashion I've been watching the Pertwee episodes in order and reading each novelization right after. It takes longer to read the story than to watch it, so it tends to slow down the process if you have to do it for every story (for the Hartnells and Troughtons, I only read novelizations of missing stories). Its a bit of a break from the Hugo nominees, which are all great of course but can be a bit heavy at times (with two doorstops still to go in the next two months). Not going to make it to the classics group this month so I can focus on getting the Hugos done in time. I also ordered a couple of books from amazon.ca for the first time, including Christopher Priest's "The Separation" which won this year's BSFA award, and since I won't be going to England to pick up a copy personally, and also its stuck in publishing limbo, but amazon.ca had it in stock at 25% off, and I threw in the second "Arabesk" book of John Courtenay Grimwood, another BSFA nominee and sequel to the first one, "Pashazade" which was nominated last year and was probably the least interesting of the nominees, only nominally science fiction and more of an alternate universe mystery novel, but it was ok, just didn't stand up to "Chasm City" and "Lust". The other two nominees to get are M. John Harrison's "Light" and the sequel to last year's nominated Gwyneth Jones novel, which won't be available in paperback until November, but I figure I can wait until then since I probably wouldn't get around to reading it any sooner than that. Still want to get to "Redemption Ark", the third Alistair Reynolds novel which, surprisingly, wasn't nominated for the BSFA this year. It's another hefty tome, so that plus the second Uplift trilogy and a few classics group books will probably take me through to Christmas. So a liberal sprinkling of Target novelizations may be just the thing.

Couldn't get too motivated to write anything the last few days, but that's not to say that there's nothing to write about. In the cycling world, Gilberto Simoni wins his second Giro today in decisive fashion. The first Giro I watched was a mere two years ago when Simoni ran away with it (helped that time by Dario Frigo getting booted out for drugs just when he was emerging as Simoni's main challenger in the mountains), and last year he was given the boot himself after a drug test found cocaine in his system which turned out to be from dental surgery he had just undergone. So this year was payback time for him and he performed in spectacular fashion. This year and in '01 he looked very cool and collected in the most difficult mountain stages, one might say almost Armstrong-esque, and the descents he would make (even the ones in the rain) were so death-defying they were hard to watch sometimes. It would be interesting to see him go head to head with Lance in the Tour, he seems to have improved his time trialing since last year and could pose a significant challenge if everything worked out right, although his team isn't as much help in the mountain stages as the domestiques of USPS. This was a clean Giro for once, too bad about Cipollini crashing out through no fault of his own, good to see Pantani actually making a difference, again with an unfortunate crash that wasn't his fault keeping him out of the top 10, but still his best finish in a grand tour in five years.



So in between stages I've been taking a break from season 4 of MST3K and started up watching Doctor Who in earnest again (partly because I finally got caught up on the DVDs after watching Armageddon Factor), picking up where I left off with Season 9 and Day of the Daleks. This is the watch the stories in order plan, along with reading the novelizations, following along in the Discontinuity Guide and the DW Magazine's Complete Third Doctor special. Day of the Daleks is, incredibly, the first Dalek serial since Evil of the Daleks at the end of season 4. Apparently Terry Nation took them away for a time to try to make their own series, in both the UK and US, but nothing ever came of it. As it was, their appearnce in this story was tacked on after it was written, so they don't have much to do, and, famously, there are only three of them. There's plenty of time travelling nonsense, but its still a good yarn, and really sets the tone established by Colony in Space in the previous season of what the series will basically look like for the next 10 years or more. I've always like the first two Pertwee seasons the most because they varied a ways from the norm with their mostly location filming and mostly grainy black and white look and their longer, primarily earthbound, verismo style. So season 9 is less exciting on the whole, but it has a few good ones coming up, and should lead up to the release of Carnival of Monsters in Season 10 next month right on schedule.



Technically, Pertwee should be "my" doctor, as, if I'd been living in the UK as a kid, he's the one I would've remembered watching first, contemporaneous with a kid's discovery of real tv. In the US, there was something of a lacuna in the early 70s, after the end of Star Trek and before Battlestar Galactica, although probably the Six Million Dollar Man and shows like that were around, but that's hardly the same thing, so some Doctor Who might've come in handy then if PBS had been showing it at the time. I don't remember the first Pertwee episode I saw, but since I was watching the Tom Baker episodes regularly by 1982, chances are it would've been when WTTW reintroduced the Third Doctor to Chicago audiences, which they would probably would've kicked off with Spearhead from Space. I do recall at the time that the first several runs through the Pertwee episodes they only showed the color ones, so it was probably after the move to Boston before I saw ones like Ambassadors of Death or Mind of Evil. The older I get the more I like the older episodes, even back before Pertwee's era, so I think its just a natural adjusting of equilibrium to the shows I would've watched when they were first made, had I been in the right country to do so.