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Ooooh, online commercials (”Tardisodes,” a name that is just asking for a serious taunting) for the current (i.e., David Tennant) series of Doctor Who! I like the giant cats in Flying Nun hats:

I should make that my Flickr avatar.I just finished watching this past Friday’s installment, part I of “Aliens of London,” which featured the first I’ve noticed of the much-rumored “Bad Wolf” sightings. How exciting. (Not being sarcastic there; I’m actually rather geekily intrigued.) For me, I think the trick to not finding Rose unbelievably stupid is remembering that, compared to her mother, her boyfriend, and indeed most of those near and dear to her, Rose is actually fairly smart, or at least reasonably inquisitive and open to learning. (Actually, I like Rose reasonably well, despite my frequent eye-rolling; she seems to mean well and be a generally nice person, but she just has this habit of spouting off Deep, Life-Altering Realizations that are about as blatantly obvious as a technicolor zebra dancing the cancan in a ruffled plaid skirt, on top of a taxi in gridlocked traffic. Or something.)

The Tardis’s new console still strikes me as a busy box. I’m learning to deal, though. Maybe it got damaged in the war, and had to be pieced together from whatever was at hand, and the only bits available were from PlaySkool. Eccleston’s grin more than makes up for his preposterously short hair. The pacing still seems a little fast, but oh well. I can deal.

SciFi Network’s commercial breaks continue to madden me, though. After the poor piggy in AoL (and bravo to the Doctor for feeling sympathy for the pig and trying to protect him), I was really not in the mood to see two ground-meat products chatting to each other about which is the tastiest burger. Yeccccchh. More to the point, though, SciFi really does push the commercials beyond acceptable limits.

This is one of the many, many reasons I am so happy that my parents gave me the DVD set for my birthday. (From Amazon Canada, because, as previously mentioned, the U.S. region 1 DVDs won’t be out until freakin’ July; I do have a multiregion DVD player and could order the region 2s from the U.K., but shipping costs can be somewhat prohibitive and I tend to use region 2s only if I’ve bought them myself while in the U.K. The U.K. version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, for instance, was worth it for the proper title, and for the delightful Snape actually being on the cover.) Finally, I will be able to watch episodes in their purest form, as the universe intended, without interruption, giddily geeking out in a veritable orgy of Whovana for hours on end. (I can’t be the only one who hugs her knees to her chest, grins like an idiot, and sways back and forth in time to the theme song. Can I?)

I think that Google’s Web accelerator Firefox extension doesn’t play nicely with Flickr, at least on my computer. Ever since I installed it, Flickr pages have loaded fairly quickly, but have been completely completely blank about a third of the time, which kind of defeats the purpose. Reloading the page fixed the problem — sometimes. Hasn’t happened at all since I deactivated the accelerator.

The problem seemed to come up mostly when I was using the “go back one page” feature. My highly unscientific speculation is that, because Google’s accelerator apparently downloads only updates to pages you’ve visited before, rather than downloading the whole thing, it gets confused when you’re hopping back and forth from one page to another repeatedly, which is the way I tend to navigate on Flickr. I do use new tabs as well, but not exclusively; maybe if I were willing to switch to only using new tabs, and visiting each page only once, I could’ve worked around it, but it seemed easier just to trash the extension. (If anybody cares, this happened with Google Web accelerator v. 1.0.63.81.)

The usual caveats about mileage varying and this being only my opinion do, of course, apply.

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