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Possibly of interest to people who care about such things: this blog post, in which Neil Gaiman is asked if he’ll be writing for Doctor Who under Steven Moffat’s glorious new showrunnerdom, and he really rather pointedly fails to say “no”, and instead talks about how nice the menu is at a Chinese restaurant in Soho.

‘Lo Neil,
As a great fan of Doctor Who, I’ve been dancing around the room after hearing that Steven Moffat is taking over as Chief Writer and Executive Producer of the series in 2009. [...]

Anyway- my real question is whether or not we’ll finally see a Neil Gaiman DW episode? We’re all quietly hoping the idea came up during your dinner back in March in Bar Shu… I know you’re a very busy person, but it would be the perfect combination for so many fans!
Rachel

I think it’s great news — what Russell Davies did over the last few years was remarkable: as a writer and as a show-runner he brought Doctor Who back, sure-footed and smart and with a heart. [...]

I’m really excited about Steven Moffat taking over — always assuming that it’s not just a publicity stunt on his part to try and get “Blink” a Hugo, as a countermeasure to Mr Cornell’s car-crash-to-get-the-sympathy-vote.

And it was a terrific dinner: they do fantastic dry-fried green beans at Bar Shu (it doesn’t sound like it would be fantastic from the menu, but it is).

Yeah, I know, it’s not much, but such fragile insinuations and half-percieved hints are what fandom thrives upon, no? And you must admit, it would be rather wonderful. I mean, he’s already getting his hand in at writing in the Doctor’s dialogue style:

I know that David Tennant’s Hamlet isn’t till July. And lots of people are going to be doing Dr Who in Hamlet jokes, so this is just me getting it out of the way early, to avoid the rush…

“To be, or not to be, that is the question. Weeelll…. More of A question really. Not THE question. Because, well, I mean, there are billions and billions of questions out there…”

Now, if they could just ply Warren Ellis with enough Red Bull and cigarettes that he agrees to do their bidding as well…

UPDATE: The first hints of a rumour have now been upgraded to a full category five rumour swirling just off the coast of certainty land, as somebody who actually knows about such things says that sources within the BBC confirm the existence of the rumour, and more importantly he actually asks Neil Gaiman, who trumps his previous non-denial by going all Urquhart and saying “You may very well think that, but I could not possibly comment.”

Just to mention it because Chris and I found this particular joy of the internet last night (while pondering the wisdom of my ill-formed plan to host a “come as Jonathan Meades” party) – the YouTube user MeadesShrine has a vast array of clips and full shows from the back catalogue of the perfect man himself. There was a plan for a DVD set from the Beeb, but it seems to have been shelved temporarily, for reasons that pass human understanding. As MeadesShrine says on their user page:

until the dvds arrive, lets congregate and genuflect here for a while.
“re-availablization” will be our clumsy watchword.

I’ll also take this opportunity to re-note my observation, for those who don’t follow my Twittering, that – while I have respect for Hugo Weaving – Meades should have played Agent Smith in The Matrix. A man delivering lengthy monologues in patrician tones about the state of the world while wearing a dark suit and sunglasses? Meades all over.

Quick query – does anybody know if there’s something funny about wifi in Ireland? Just come back from holiday there, and I wasn’t able to pick up a single wireless connection on my Eee the entire time. Nothing broken about the computer, as far as I can tell – it’s finding wireless connections without any trouble now I’m back in the UK – but I tried in numerous venues that claimed to have freely accessible wifi, and it didn’t spot a single connection. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t connect – it just didn’t see any signals at all. So, er… do the Irish use some kind of quirky wifi that might explain this? Or is my computer just xenophobic?

Tedious travelogues and many pictures of interesting rocks from my trip to follow shortly.

One thing I’ve been meaning to blog about but haven’t got round to is my lovely new toy, an Asus EeePC. I bought one partly on a shiny-craving whim, partly because I wanted a genuinely portable computer, and partly because I think the anti-feature-bloat approach that they took with it is something that should be generally encouraged. So I encouraged it, with money.

It’s a really neat little machine, and I’m very, very fond of it – I’ve been using it almost to the complete exclusion of my trusty old ThinkPad, largely from the sheer pleasure of having something that starts up in 25 seconds, shuts down in 12, and doesn’t interrupt what I’m doing every half an hour to nag me about some software update or another.

It does take a little getting used to, however – the keyboard is fine, although I’m still not as quick on it as I am on a regular sized one, and I wonder how well someone who doesn’t have my tiny, childlike fingers would cope. The small screen is also a little odd at first, but by and large works with most things that you need it to – you just need to get used to CTRL-plussing and -minusing a bit more than normal to optimize the font size for the screen. The one site I regularly use that was causing me grief, however, was Google Reader.

The problem essentially is that the main menu (the bit in the upper left with the Home, All Items, etc options) takes up a fixed amount of real-estate, which squeezes the list of your subscriptions – the actual meat and potatoes of the reader – into whatever space is left. Which on the Eee, is precious little. In fact, it only manages to fit in two lines, making it all but useless for looking over your feeds to see what’s new:

Even doing the old CTRL-minus to reduce the text size doesn’t help much – by the time you’ve got a usable number of lines, the text is all but illegible:

The solution, after a bit of monkeying about, turns out to be twofold. Most obviously, F11 gets rid of the taskbar at the bottom of the screen, giving you a fair bit more to play with. The extra help comes from using Greasemonkey, by way of grabbing Lifehacker’s Better GReader extension. This lets you fiddle about with the look of Google Reader – the option you want to use is the Minimalistic skin, which lets you get rid of the top bar on Google Reader by simply tapping W. The combination of these two gives you plenty of real estate to browse your feeds in, even with the normal chunky text size:

You can, of course, give yourself even more to play with by reducing the text size a bit – it’s still legible with one, or even two, reductions. Not a terribly complex or hard-to-figure out fix, but I couldn’t see it noted down anywhere on a cursory google, so I thought I’d put it here in case anybody else was gnashing their teeth over the issue…

In a continuation of my new resolution to do more with this little lump of internet, in a more Sore Eyesish quoty-blogging style, I was very fond of this from my favourite smart-writing-about-music blog, clapclap.org:

It’s unfortunate that the orchestra is so rarely the forum for respected new music these days. Aside from a few operas and film scores, people who listen to “good music” are listening to small ensembles, whether those be wind quintets, jazz combos, or the Arcade Fire. And I think something has been lost in that. What gets forgotten in the orchestra’s image as exemplar of high art respectability is that orchestras are really fucking loud.

The New Yorker piece he’s spinning off from is also well worth a read. Alex Ross does seem to be widely acknowledged as basically the best thing ever, and I should probably set aside a significant portion of my life to read his book and his blog and everything. But I probably won’t get the time. Ah well.

Blogging this because it doesn’t quite fit into a del.icio.us link or a tweet, and because, hey, I’ve decided I should blog more often. The Hollywood Reporter brings us news that the studio MGM has picked up a script called Hot Tub Time Machine.

The money quote:

“We’re always looking for ways to stand out from the rest of the pack in today’s crowded marketplace, and what better way than to combine hot tub debauchery and the complications of time travel,” said MGM exec vp production Cale Boyter…

This is almost certainly excellent news for humanity.

Fuck.