Foreign Perspectives

Although one episode it seemed almost like an entire series packed into a one hour episode.

To kick off there’s the now typical fairly extended regeneration issues which run through most of the episode. This is used to introduce new aspects of both the Doctor and the TARDIS. This time around we have the changed tastebuds and settling down of the bones and ligaments of the Doctor. For the TARDIS there’s the mention of a swimming pool and library plus more of an emphasis on the regeneration capabilities of the TARDIS itself (don’t forget that it’s a living being). One wonders how many regenerations the TARDIS itself has.

In amongst that there’s the introduction of Amy first as a child, then as an adult in the main segment of this episode and finally we meet her the day before her wedding (which looks none too likely to happen). Meeting Amy as a child gives us the token “childrens’ entertainment” tagging whilst the majority of the episode is more clearly aimed at an older audience. For this episode there seems to have been an attempt to have something for every potential fan past, present or future which contributed to the “all over the place” feel that the episode had.

Will we come back to Amy’s family in the same way that Martha’s family popped up now and again? That could be difficult as the Doctor picked up Amy the day before her wedding so unless that’s off there doesn’t seem much chance of returning to the village or family but who knows at this point?

The new TARDIS control room retains it’s typical mix of ancient and modern devices but overall not wildly different from the previous version at first glance. Monster-wise the clips at the end of the episode didn’t turn up anything notably new but then the new is harder to pick out. There were a lot of clips of the old though.

Worth watching but overall it had little focus.

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It’s almost always the case that the best Christmas presents are things that you’d never have bought for yourself but which seem perfect when you get them.

This year my best one is very definitely the Sony Reader which Wendy bought me. It’s the one that’s with me almost constantly and in use throughout the day. Why? Well, I’m doing a couple of Open University courses at the moment and that means up to four books totally around four inches in thickness to carry around. Instead of that pile I’ve a pocket sized electronic book which means that I can carry all those books around with me and read them when I get the chance rather than having to plan in advance to take them with me.

In fact I can carry around all the course books for all the courses which would have been pretty much impossible without the Reader.

The ebook technology is one that’s quietly zoomed ahead in recent years with the arrival of e-paper. The screens in these readers aren’t the same as those that you see in laptops. They’re not backlit, they’re quite slow to refresh (fine for reading, useless as a computer screen) but most importantly use virtually no power which means that the batteries last for weeks for even the most voracious reader and probably months for most people. Even my initial flicking around all the options and from book to book barely made an impression on the battery after a week. One thing to note is that the battery is only required when you turn the page and it makes virtually no difference to battery life if you take a second or a minute to read a page.

Thanks to Google Books there are millions of free books available for download. Beyond the free ones you can buy a great many books in ebook format these days though for reasons which escape me they are currently at pretty much the same price as the paper versions.

Downsides of it all? I miss the colour and the PDF scaling feature needs work. The metal casing makes for a cold read compared to actual paper though there are fancy covers that would fix that. The Pocket Reader doesn’t have an SD card slot so you’re limited to the 1/2GB internal memory. It’s not permanently online like the Kindle so no buying books on the fly although I usually mull over book purchases anyway.

Upsides are that the 1/2GB “limit” to internal memory means that it’ll hold over three hundred books which doesn’t seem like much of a limit to me. Copying books to the Reader is a whole lot faster than I’d expected: even copying a couple of hundred books was a matter of a few minutes. For normal books the 5″ screen is more than enough to display text at the normal size and in sensible chunks. That it’s not permanently online like the Kindle is a plus to me: Sony can’t see what’s on my Reader and neither can they delete things from it as Amazon have done.

In a word, this is brilliant.

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It’s been over a year since our last enquiry re participating in a documentary so we were overdue for this one.

Thus far we’ve been getting enquiries from the various “moving to France” TV series producers but this time it’s in connection with the possibility of us setting up a B&B back in Northern Ireland.

As with the French series, there are surprisingly few people who meet the criteria for the series. For our first one for instance, we met all the criteria but weren’t able to move in January so missed the time slot for the filming.

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