I have to admit not being much of a Portishead fan at the time, but I’m rather liking this new album so far (first listen of half an album). More interesting is that last.fm are now able to get new albums like this and have the license to stream them. Certainly better for me than having to put up with Radio 1 or local stations.

n.b. if anything thinks this is a test of the wordpress 2.5 software wouldn’t be too far from the mark

However, not upgrading meant that the blog was more and more likely to get ill, security exploits and spam making it more and more ill. The spam traps were failing and I was getting email after email telling me some spam had been written to the blog or placed in moderation. Something like 2000 odd spam messages built up, growing like a cancer. Yet still I did not act.

I thought it would be too hard, too complicated and take too much time to upgrade. I was wrong.

Yesterday, I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade. Finally, reading the instructions about upgrading from 1.5 blog, I realised that it was quite straightforward. I decided to use the SVN version of upgrading, knowing how easy it was to upgrade from other blogs I run.

I can boil it down to 7 easy steps.

1. Backup, backup, backup and check your backup. Backup again, once more for luck. Look, just make sure you backup in case, or when you mess this up. Make sure you backup the mysql database as well (this happens automagically for me on the server)
2. Disable all your plugins - most plugins that worked in 1.5 won’t work in 2.3.2
3. Create a new directory and use the SVN commands to grab the latest version of wordpress.

   svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.3.2 .

4. Copy your wp-config.php and .htaccess to the new blog
5. Move the old blog into a different directory, move the new blog to where the old blog was
6. Run http://blog.com/blog/wp-admin/upgrade.php
7. That’s it

Note, you’ll still have to do stuff like make your blog look pretty, install new plugins etc and so on, but as I was using the default theme before, all I had to do was copy an image across.

I havn’t install any plugins as a) it was so long ago, I don’t remember what plugins did what anyway and b) most of the plugins had functionality that was now part of wordpress itself anyway.

So, if you have an old blog running an ancient version of Wordpress, just upgrade it, it is not that hard.

Having now seen the season finale, all I can say is Enjoy.

The good news: The last episode of Heroes is on this Monday on the Sci-Fi channel. I love this programme. One episode a couple of weeks ago was so tense, I had to stop watching for about 15 minutes to calm down.
The bad news: The last episode of Heroes is on this Monday on the Sci-Fi channel. No more Heroes
The good news: It’s starting on BBC2 next year. I can watch them all again as see how the Heroes progress.

The good news: Following a comment on Hg’s blog I started watching Jeykll with episode 2. I liked it for all its faults.
The bad news: I’d never see episode 1 and its another program to have to watch on TV
The good news: The Harry Potter spell Torrentus Undisappartus allowed said episode to magically appear.

The good news: John Simm. Double thumbs up from me.

The bad news: Catherine Tate
The good news: erm …. Kylie ?

J. Simm: My name is Teh MASTER. I had an accident, and I woke up in the year 100 trillion. Am I mad, in a coma, or back in time? Now to take over the world, or something. LOL.

Checking my stats I noticed that I go a rather large spike of hits for “lawrence miles blog” on this page which oddly is the no 1 google result for “lawrence miles blog”.

Let’s get it off the No 1 spot. Lawrence Miles’s blog is The Beasthouse and it is a very interesting read (whilst it is up and he takes it down again). Every week he posts a review of the current Doctor Who episode (something I promised to do and totally failed at) and shortly after it disappears again. Blink and you’ll miss it.

There is an FAQ by Arfie Mansfield for it on Gallifrey One and I’ll quote just a short part of it.

1. Who is Lawrence Miles?
Lawrence Miles (aka ‘Mad Larry’) is the author of a number of controversial Doctor Who novels, including the acclaimed Alien Bodies, the two-volume epic Interference and the very highly-regarded Dead Romance. He is also the co-author of the first five volumes of the About Time series of books on Doctor Who. His 8th Doctor novels defined much of the underlying story of the series introducing, amongst other things, a rather familiar-looking time war, and Faction Paradox, later to spin off into their own series of audios, novels and comics.

2. Why do people care about his reviews?
Miles’s reviews are often in-depth, entertaining and thought-provoking. Even when they aren’t, they’re almost invariably argument-provoking, and they tend to lead to a great deal of interesting [often tangential] discussion.
Also, since he was one of the foremost Doctor Who authors while the series was off the air, his views are of interest to many of those who read the novels in that period.

I love Lawrence Miles’s books, especially Alien Bodies which was one of the first I read, everything was slightly downhill from there (if only I’d read War of the Daleks first). He does extremely interesting reviews of the current series which I don’t really agree with. If you take each point in turn, I’d agree with it, but I feel that his reviews are like examining each part of the mosaic and not looking at the whole picture to see if you like it or not. Of course, half the time, he never actually reviews the episode really.

Take for example, his review of Blink (no link as it has disappeared)

Exactly how does the Doctor “trick” the angels into looking at each other, when he has no reason to suppose that they’ll form a neat ring around the TARDIS? And when he might reasonably assume that they’re not stupid enough to arrange themselves around a wooden box which they know to be capable of dematerialising?

I wonder if I’m being unfair here. I don’t really think Lawrence is the sort of obsessive fan boy and he normally doesn’t pick holes like that. However it highlights something I want to point out for my next quote.

Unfortunately, “Blink” is only half a Doctor Who story, and the rest is almost as boring for regular viewers as it must be for any children watching.

Sorry, but my children thought Blink was the best episode ever (although also the scariest). There were stories of games being played at lunchtimes (move over Daleks and Cybermen!) and nearly a week later it is still being talked about by the neighbour (aged 6) that came round to watch it.

So what did he do on 11th June?

Obviously, the guy tapping away at his (blank screened!) laptop wasn’t using Ubuntu.

If I go, does it make be a lug nut ?

Just be careful if your child is struggling; “Recent death of parent or close relative” gives you a whopping 5%

Martha looks like she will be a very good Companion. Different from Rose, but the same in a regenerated sort of way. She impressed both the Doctor and viewers with her attitude and character under pressure.

Child’s View

My four year old thought it was excellent too, liking the Judoon and the fast pace of the episode. It scored bonus points for having a New Rose and an alien that sucks people to death with a straw.

It scored points with Dad for having an alien very much like the Sontarans and the Doctor having to solve something without his Sonic Screwdriver (even though he simply made a new one in about 30 seconds).

This Years Bad Wolf

Clearly the theme is going to be Time Lords. In the first series [1] they were very careful not to mention the Doctor’s race, only that they’d all died. Now the Doctor is telling someone he’s only just met that he is a Time Lord. Plus I’ve seen one of the later episode titles in the Radio Times.

[1] Hang on, when did I stop calling it Series 27?

So, was he mad, in a coma or back in time? And what happens at the end?

Co-creator Matthew Graham reveals in The Life of Wylie: Life On Mars: The Answers that it was all quite straightforward really.

“The truth is, when I wrote it, what I was trying to say is that’s he’s died, and that for however long that last second of life is going to be, it will stretch out for an age, as an eternity for him. And so when he drives off in that car, he’s really driving off into the afterlife.”

Basically, he was in a coma then. And if you woke up in the real world and you hadn’t been playing the game all wrong (you bunch of twonks) then maybe you’d throw yourself off a tall building as well.