In which I am a n00b, and other things...
Hello again folks - this time, livejournal is set up to automatically announce my posts on facebook and twitter, how well this will work I have yet to see but fingers crossed it'll all be nice and seamless.
Due to popular demand, there is no picture of me at the front of this post, longship-smoking or not (thanks to chiv for pointing that out - no, I can't unsee it now either). In this last week I've been pretty busy, on Monday I joined a whole bunch of friends at the Zing Vaa Chinese restaurant in town to celebrate Chinese New Year, which was great fun (and thanks to ju_bear and edy_ for organising everything!
I had a bit of a n00b moment this evening, or possibly just a glaring lack of twitter etiquette, or to be more honest, just me being lazy. The truly, truly great thing about twitter is that it links all sorts of people together who would never ordinarily mix. This means that I can follow the updates of busy, interesting people and offer my contributions no matter how inane or lazy they might be (ah, there's the rub). BBC broadcaster Claudia Hammond mentioned an upcoming broadcast of "Health Check" on the BBC World Service and I tweeted back to ask if there would be a podcast available. I just knew as soon as I sent it that it was a dumb thing to do, more sarcastic corners of the internet would have replied "let me google that for you". I did search for it, as it turns out, and found it, and sent a second reply a couple of minutes later saying that I'd found it and apologised for asking when I should have just searched for it in the first place. So yes, twitter makes it easy to be a lazy n00b. Must try harder.
The one thing that really impressed me out of all of this was that the BBC World Service replied to my inane tweet about twenty minutes later - let's put that in context, the BBC World Service replied to the inane tweets of some random bloke in twenty minutes. Whichever way you slice it, that's pretty brilliant.
Moving on, I see there is a new film adaptation of "The Woman In Black" coming out next month, starring Daniel Radcliffe of "Hary Potter" fame. "The Woman In Black" is one of my favourite ghost stories, I've read the book and I remember seeing the TV adaptation in my early teens. It scared the wits out of me in the best possible way. I think I'm going to have to go see this new version, to see how they've treated it. Mark Gatiss likes it, which can only be a good sign. I'm not sure if I'll re-read the book before seeing the film, but I might fetch out my M.R. James to put me in the mood.
On the other hand, I already have a quite large stack of books to read right now, including "Darker than the deepest sea: The search for Nick Drake", "What I talk about when I talk about running" and "Birds without wings". I've just started reading "The Last Werewolf" by Glen Duncan - and it's seriously good so far.
Finally, I have some mystery news that I can't quite talk about right now. It's good news, though - hopefully I will be able to talk about it properly in my next post. TTFN, folks.
Due to popular demand, there is no picture of me at the front of this post, longship-smoking or not (thanks to chiv for pointing that out - no, I can't unsee it now either). In this last week I've been pretty busy, on Monday I joined a whole bunch of friends at the Zing Vaa Chinese restaurant in town to celebrate Chinese New Year, which was great fun (and thanks to ju_bear and edy_ for organising everything!
I had a bit of a n00b moment this evening, or possibly just a glaring lack of twitter etiquette, or to be more honest, just me being lazy. The truly, truly great thing about twitter is that it links all sorts of people together who would never ordinarily mix. This means that I can follow the updates of busy, interesting people and offer my contributions no matter how inane or lazy they might be (ah, there's the rub). BBC broadcaster Claudia Hammond mentioned an upcoming broadcast of "Health Check" on the BBC World Service and I tweeted back to ask if there would be a podcast available. I just knew as soon as I sent it that it was a dumb thing to do, more sarcastic corners of the internet would have replied "let me google that for you". I did search for it, as it turns out, and found it, and sent a second reply a couple of minutes later saying that I'd found it and apologised for asking when I should have just searched for it in the first place. So yes, twitter makes it easy to be a lazy n00b. Must try harder.
The one thing that really impressed me out of all of this was that the BBC World Service replied to my inane tweet about twenty minutes later - let's put that in context, the BBC World Service replied to the inane tweets of some random bloke in twenty minutes. Whichever way you slice it, that's pretty brilliant.
Moving on, I see there is a new film adaptation of "The Woman In Black" coming out next month, starring Daniel Radcliffe of "Hary Potter" fame. "The Woman In Black" is one of my favourite ghost stories, I've read the book and I remember seeing the TV adaptation in my early teens. It scared the wits out of me in the best possible way. I think I'm going to have to go see this new version, to see how they've treated it. Mark Gatiss likes it, which can only be a good sign. I'm not sure if I'll re-read the book before seeing the film, but I might fetch out my M.R. James to put me in the mood.
On the other hand, I already have a quite large stack of books to read right now, including "Darker than the deepest sea: The search for Nick Drake", "What I talk about when I talk about running" and "Birds without wings". I've just started reading "The Last Werewolf" by Glen Duncan - and it's seriously good so far.
Finally, I have some mystery news that I can't quite talk about right now. It's good news, though - hopefully I will be able to talk about it properly in my next post. TTFN, folks.