Losing it[1]

Hmmm. Just did the usual 10km on the bike, 160 crunches and a Bullworker session. Oddly enough, my maximum heart rate for that was just 125.

Oh good. It’s another Doctor Who DVD! This one was first shown in 1977, and stars Tom Baker as the Doctor, and Louise Jameson as Leela.

The story was inspired by the poem Flannan Isle by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, which I remember studying in school. It’s set on a lighthouse, a perfectly isolated location for the events that unfold. One by one, the crew of the lighthouse and the survivors of a shipwreck are killed. The generator powering the light keeps failing. What is going on? Can there be a connection between the deaths and the strange light that one of the crew saw falling into the sea?

As ever, the Doctor identifies the source of the trouble, and arrives at a solution - too late for the people in the lighthouse, but in time to save Earth from invasion or destruction.

There’s the usual generous selection of extras - the now-standard production subtitles, a look at some of the huge range of Doctor Who merchandise and a couple of documentaries.

No, I haven’t got a nasty skin condition, or any unwanted “visitors”. It’s just that I’m really looking forward to moving Losing it[1] to WordPress 1.5. I’ve been spending a lot of time working with the pre-release versions, and seeing how they’re coming along. It can’t be long now - the current nightly build is described as a gamma version - one step past Beta!

I’m running a copy of Losing it[1] with the new version, and I’m quite impressed. I haven’t run into any bugs[1] personally, but I’m still going to wait until there’s an official release of 1.5.

This testing periond is quite useful - I can do anything at all to the test site without affecting the live site. Today’s fun involved going through every post and every comment to check for broken smilies[2], odd characters[3]. I also edit posts that had links to other posts, so that the links use the new human-friendly permalinks[5].

So, what can you, the regular[7] readers expect? Well, there will be an all-new look to the site. In place of this rather blocky (but all my own work) layout, you will see a smoother, sleeker, easier on the eye layout based on the new default WordPress layout. There won’t be so many posts per page, so the site should load nice and quickly.

There are some more refinements - some visible, some that make things work better. I’m really looking forward to switching over.

[1] Well, there was one issue, but it was well-documented, and easy to work around, so it didn’t cause me much grief
[2] Because the site started in one weblog system (Movable Type), moved to WordPress 1.2, and now (in the test version) WordPress 1.5, some of the text abbreviations used to make things like and appear have changed. I went through and fixed all the missing ones I could find. All part of making the new version work properly as soon as it goes live…
[3] One of the changes is a different character encoding. I should have dealt with this when I moved from MT to WP, but was too lazy. Changing to WP’s preferred encoding made things like £, è and so on appear as odd little question marks. This time, I’ve gone through posts and comments and replaced all mangled characters with the correct ones. That took a while, as there seem to be a lot of comments from Michèle[4]. It was worth the effort, though.
[4] Hi Michèle!
[5] So a recent post here would have the link http://lcb.me.uk/2005/02/06/i-was-expecting-that/[6] - which clearly shows the date and title - rather than http://lcb.me.uk/index.php?p=576, which is not altogether friendly.
[6] That won’t work just yet.
[7] Or irregular

Well, after yesterday’s slight indulgence, I’m not surprised that I’m distinctly heavier today at 206.8 pounds (14 stone 10.8 pounds, 93.8kg).

I’m intending to do some exercise later…..