Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Working, not working and flying

The Big Finish website has been updated with all kinds of thing I’ve been up to and many things still yet to come. I’ve got a new Bernice Summerfield play to write and five more to edit, as well as keeping an eye on three books. I’m co-writing a book on Benny’s 15-year history, and judging a competition for new writers of Doctor Who. Lor.

That’s on top of bits and pieces that isn’t British sci-fi; writing and editing and the sort of architecture where you need not be good with your hands.

With the Dr away in Tunisia (stubbornly not making Haj to the Star Wars locations), I’d planned to spend today swinging between the branches of content management.

Computer, however, said no.

"Driver_unloaded_without_cancelling_pending_operations" explained the error message that’s taken all day to fix. Turns out a driver called cdr4_2k.sys got broken when I updated DivX – which appears not to like Windows 2000.

So from Safe Mode I stuck DivX on to a USB keyring and got it to play on my XPing laptop, enabling me to catch up with Heroes while trying to unfuck the PC.

Yes, it’s all the fault of Heroes, which I downloaded the new DivX to watch. But my giddy teeth, that’s a bit brilliant.

All across the world (well, across America, plus someone in India and someone else in Japan), normal people wake up with super powers – and all sort of headaches ensue. It’s sometimes a bit cheesy on knowing who you really are, but it’s thrilling and brutal and twisty. And there’s often that lovely thing of the twist that comes out of absolutely nowhere in retrospect seeming inevitable.

I have watched six episodes in pretty much a single sitting (just seen to the end of episode 10). No spoilers, no clues, just go watch the dyam thing.

Though it’s probably not worth trashing your computer for.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Must disagree; just watched episode 11, and it is, in fact, entirely worth trashing your computer for.

Anonymous said...

Indeed - episode 11 is great. Heroes proves that clifhangers on 45 minutes episodes are well and truly possible.

0tralala said...

Cliffhangers, yes. But I think if you missed an episode on broadcast it'd be difficult to pick the series up again the following week. You'd have missed too much necessary info.

At least, that's how I'd feel.

Anonymous said...

Thank you! I just updated DivX and it fucked my computer exactly as yours. Thank god I found your blog.