The Royal Mint is offering £50 for undated 20 pence coins.

Needless to say I shall be checking my pockets and all change very carefully. I've heard reports of these little beauties hitting £7k on e-bay (must check up on this). Perhaps I'll nip down to the bank and take out £100 in 20p pieces. :)

Oh yeah and I've had my bloody debit card compromised again last week. Aaaargh! this time I've no clue how it happened. I've been really careful.

We got the all clear re possible human p virus infection for Jane. She obviously had a childhood infection and was immune. Still a long time waiting for the results which somehow got lost. Next up is blood tests for me, or more exact blood typing for me. I'm pretty sure I'm bog standard O+ve but we are checking and if I'm Rh-ve then Jane will be allowed to turn down anti-D injections.

Also on the baby front we got our 20 week detailed scan and everything is healthy and in the right place. We got the baby sexed as well so Jane and I are now having friendly arguments about names. Good fun.

( Baby's sex announced under the cut. )

I've been out of the loop a bit. Nothing to write about. Plenty to talk about on Twitter but I don't believe in polluting my journal with that (though I have considered posting a log of my tweets but purely as an archive and for my eyes only).

Anyway, to Dreamwidth. So far not really used it to it's full extent but then I haven't managed to adapt either of my two main blogging clients to it. Strange since it is built on LJ's code. Ah well. So by means of an experiment I'm going to see if I can crosspost a pic from Dreamwidth to LJ.

This is Erik Rustad, Team Leader of General Survey Party "Malvik" from the Terran Exploration Service Vessel "Ibn Battuta". In the background is a CAC VX-121 Mastodon crawler, the mission support vehicle. Erik finds the glare from the F3 IV star, named Hastur by the Battuta's Captain, to be a bit harsh but not incompatible with colonisation efforts and is authorising a full survey of the planet.

Maggie's Flowers at JustGiving.com

As I've mentioned elsewhere, Jane started knitting flower brooches with hopes of selling them at car boots for charity. We then caught an appeal for help to raise funds for a new birthing pool at the BGH where Katie, Tommy and Maggie were delivered. Tommy was born in the birthing pool in a quite amazing experience for Jane (and me too!).

So we've recruited Jane's Mum and loads of others from around the country to knit and crochet flowers. Jane is now putting the pins on, backing and bagging and making postal runs every Monday.

There are a lot more styles and colours than you see here, this was just the first batch I took a shot of a couple of weeks ago.

If you would like a flower just mail me through livejournal or at dc.somersATbtinternet.com. There you can give me a postal address and if you have a colour preference. We look for a minimum £2 donation per flower and don't charge anything for P&P but be aware we only post on a Monday. We prefer it if you donate through justgiving as it goes straight to the fund for the birthing pool and you can add gift aid too (if a UK resident).

If there is one thing that gets my goat worse than a badly researched news story it is a lazily written news story. The latest furore over the Scottish Sunday Express front page article on the Dunblane kids turning 18 is a case in point.

For those who do not know about the Dunblane Massacre you can look it up on Wiki but to summarise, a handgun afficianado entered Dunblane Primary School in 1996 and let shot and killed 16 children aged 5 & 6 and their teacher. 10 children and 3 adults were wounded. Of the class of 5 and 6 year olds first targeted all but one was either killed or wounded.

Now a stupid bitch named Paula Murray with the Scottish Sunday Express has printed a front page follow up to the story now that the surviving children have turned 18. And what does she do? Interview them? Get some poignent story about the difficulty of growing up with survivor guilt? No she trawls their Bebo and Facebook accounts and gets pics and quotes of them doing the things that most teenagers in Britain would call the norm decrying them as drunks and thugs.

I'm not going to get to far into insulting that c**t Murray as someone else has done the hard work for me. Bloggerheads has done a fine knife job on her credibility here. There are other stories all over the blogosphere and the Press Complaints Commission has received over 30 complaints. This is much more worthy of a lynching than any Brand/Ross scandal in my opinion.

By now many of you are either in Coventry or on your way. Wishing I was there too but unfortunately I'm working this weekend.

Worse yet I went to check the dates and times for this year's Conpulsion in Edinburgh and found I'd booked the wrong weekend off. Not strictly my fault, I based it on shoddy info from an RPG board before the Conpulsion site was up and running. I am gutted.

That leaves Eastercon, which feels a little intimidating to a con virgin like myself and trying to justify running off at Easter to Jane. Ah well, back to the drawing board.

Despite the BBC refusing to place a Disasters Emergency Committee ad on as it would affect their "neutrality" veteran firebrand Tony Benn strikes!

"Space travel is shit"

I found that line in Saturn's Children and it has inspired a few illustrations that have absolutely nothing to do with that book. Here's the first. A Face Full of Hot Plasma.

Clan Corporate down, Saturn's Children started. Old Man's War in progress. 4th edition Players Manual and Traveller Core Book started once again in earnest. The Temporal Void has been sidelined and the Year's Best SF has been put on temporary hiatus.

I need to pick up a new copy of Emergency Care on the Streets by Nancy Caroline but have difficulty justifying the expense. One day I'll have some kind of pda with all the British National Formulary, Tox Base, ECG Made Incredibly Easy all available on pdf. Now that would make the job simpler. It would need to be ruggedized though. I don't think the procurement folk in the service realise how much we abuse our equipment. I think I go through at least one hard drive, one multi-cable and one telemetry cable a month. Of course this expense could have been spared by investing in the more expensive options right from day one.

It arrived two days ago and seems to be a massive step in the right direction by Mongoose. I can't help but feel that many of the previous books (including the Core Book) were rushed out. Still this one seems to have got it right.

High Guard starts off with expanded chargen for Navy Characters. IMO Mongoose Traveller excels in chargen and this is no different. Unlike Merc which concentrates on military careers outwith the regular Army and Marines, HG looks to give us additional options for Navy Characters.

We have;

Crewman: Planetary Navy, Subsector Navy, Imperial Navy.
Support: Training, Medical, Administration.
Engineering: Damage Control ,Mechanic, Electronic.
Gunnery: Fire Control, Turret, Countermeasures
Flight: Astrogation, Helm, Sensors
Pilot: Fighter Pilot, Shuttle Pilot, Special Ops
Command: Commander, Aide, Tactician.
Naval Intelligence: Analyst, Planner, Black Ops.
Naval Engineering: Sensor Engineer, Ships Architect, Researcher
High Command: Legendary Captain, Fleet Commander, Daredevil.

Remarkably there are only two new skills; Engineer (Naval) and Discipline. The former appears to be a replacement for Naval Architect with the advantage of substituting for other Engineer skills in the field.

Next comes Spacecraft Options. Can't fault this at all. An array of component, additional rules and optional rules all of which seem perfectly well thought out, mesh fine with the core rules and capture the Traveller idiom nicely. I'm sure if I was to sit down and think really hard about it I could pick fault in it but I'm not going to. It all makes sense to me on first reading. I can't think of anything obviously missing other than perhaps including KE guns for space combat.

There follows design additions for Capital Ships up to 1Mton and for small craft. I've not cranked anything out using these rules yet but they sync with the corebook design rules and that is a big plus.

Expanded space combat is interesting but I'll reserve judgement until I've tried it out (probably a while before this happens, I'm having a bit of a timeout ). Some nice touches as well as optional vector movement rules.

The penultimate section is a selection of Small Craft and Capital Ship designs. These include deckplans which is very impressive when you realise that this includes deckplans for a 200 kton Sylea Class Battleship.

Finally as small selection of tables for generating naval themed adventures. Nice but ultimately of limited use to many, I'll personally find it handy.

So overall? I say buy it. And the pdf when it appears. And a copy for your friend. Probably the most useful of MGT's release schedule so far which beggars the question, why was Mercenary so bad? Rushed? But this one gets 10/10 from me.

I've been laying around creating characters in Daz|Studio and one thing is irking me. All the female forms I create are just soooo bloody perfect. I want to try and make them a bit more realistic. Heavy hips, breasts too small or too saggy.

So I'm going to experiment with the morphs available to see what we can produce. In the mean time here is Shimi Venlaw, navigator of the scoutship Flarestar.

Daz 3D have released their latest poser/daz studio figure Michael 4 and I've fallen for their pro bundle deal. Exciting. This was a quick render using the new figure with the included epsilon outfit and an older facial morph.

I'll start off by thanking everyone that gave messages of support to Jane and me during this terrible time. It really was appreciated.

Although this post is very much my own attempt at some catharsis I really don't mind sharing with you but for those that might find it all either overly sentimental or too cold blooded I'll stick my ravings ( behind the cut.... )

I forgot to mention the additional weekend stress. On the way to work on Friday evening by beloved Saab 9-5 estate decided to start rattling around Lauder, a few miles on and all the power went and I found myself stuck on the A68 in the middle of nowhere, with a phone that would not call out.

Luckily I managed to contact my work and my partner brought the ambulance down and we shove the recalcitrant Saab into a lay-by. Got recovered by the AA the next morning and the engine sounded terrible, the battery kept going flat too. I was despondent, this sounded like it was going to be expensive.

So after the weekend of nights was over I made plans to find a garage to take it to. It was then I found my warranty with 500 miles left on it. YES!! Aitken-Walker Cars could not be more helpful. Pick up from my house, courtesy car if required whilst they make the repairs, no issues at all. They are a really good firm for second hand cars, they don't try to push you into a decision. Top people. Louise and Graham were quite famous in the 80's for their rally driving,

Big box of stuff from Amazon yesterday as I had an urge.

Top of the list is The Walking Dead Vol. 1 hardcover. I make no bones about being a fan of the old zombie apocalypse, just another vestige of my cold war survivalist mentality. Kirkman's comic book is excellent and I'd love to see him adapt World War Z into a graphic novel, I think that would work better than the upcoming film. More on this after I've read it a couple of more times.

I also bit the bullet and got The Dungeon Masters Guide and Monster Manual for 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons. Not really my thing but a few weeks back when I picked up 3:16 from Black Lion Games in Edinburgh my 3 year old son persuaded me to pick up a couple of boxes of D&D minis. Tommy and Katie both loved playing with them especially when I made up adventures for them so I thought maybe it was time to get the rules....and another 3 boxes of minis and a set of dungeon tiles. My children are going to be RPG geeks....yay!

What wasn't in the box was my copy of Saturn's Children. I must have put it back into my save till later option whilst I was juggling with the basket. Curses.

I don't really get to visit shops like Forbidden Planet or Black Lion (as Lucy and Liam will attest, I usually draw up in the ambulance, leap out and run round the shop in 2 minutes flat, no time to browse or chat) so Amazon is a lifesaver for me.

Also in there was a copy of the Brit horror Outpost. Not sure what to make of this. I'm sure Neil Marshall was on board this originally but it appears to be very much a work of love by the writer/director/producer team. We'll see what it's like.

Good news, paid the mortgage arrears, all two and a half grand. No more eviction. I'll be happier when I get everything straightened out but at least that's fixed. No sign of any apologies yet though they have admitted a software fault may have caused the problem.

Doing the rounds but...

Take a picture of yourself right now.
don't change your clothes, don't fix your hair...just take a picture.
post that picture with NO editing.
post these instructions with your picture.


Snapped this one on my Nokia E65 as I couldn't be arsed standing up and fetching my camera.

This is a sort of blogish thing I've been doing on the Citizens of the Imperium site. The idea was to describe and illustrate the weapons and tactics of the Solomani Confederation Marines in the Traveller RPG Universe. This is done through the viewpoint of a news reporter during the Solomani Rim War.

Now in actual fact I've had more fun illustrating the thing than actually writing it but I'm seriously considering transferring it to Blogger or setting it up with typepad on flarestar.net.

Anyway a couple of taster shots, not great but I had fun doing them despite the render times.

It's been just one thing after another today.

Firstly and potentially the most serious was a letter from Sheriff's Officers informing us that our mortgage company was repossessing us. I had been in contact with the company over rolling (and ever increasing) arrears caused by their late collection by direct debit (and the fees they were adding because of this). So I'll have to bite the bullet and pay the arrears and then claim the fees back. But it's just added stress.

I've been humping furniture up and down stairs all week as we shift the office and guest rooms up into the attic and bring the kids down next door to us on the first floor.Today I was moving the last of the big stuff when I managed to put a 4 inch hole in the plaster of the ceiling on the stairs.

Then later when I nipped out to get a curry my tyre blew out just as I parked up. I clipped the kerb but a by-stander couldn't believe his eyes as the thing just exploded. I tried to change it but despite the assistance of a one armed man (who came up an offered me a hand and gave me his artificial one) we couldn't loosen the wheel nuts. Had to get the AA out. So I trudged up the hill in the pouring rain, fetched Jane's Micra, went down and lifted out some kit for today and went home to await the recovery vehicle.

He made quick work of the tyre chnage but my battery had gone flat. The recovery man didn't have any jump cables!!? Cue another trip home to get jump leads. A quick zap and we were ready. Now I had to take my car home, go out again and fetch Jane's car. Move all the gear over to my car again. Eventually got to bed at 1am for a 4am rise. Bugger.

Not the Large Hadron Collider but the Neil Marshall film. I got it on DVD a couple of weeks ago and finally saw it last night (Sunshine too, but I'll talk about that later).

What an enjoyable romp that was. I've been impressed by Marshall's other films; Dog Soldiers and The Descent, but this Mad Max crossed with Escape from New York set in Scotland was a great revisitation to that sadly maligned genre- the post apocalyptic action flick.

The acting ranged from excellent to passable (I have issues with many Scottish actors and their tendency to shout their lines), the storyline was uninspiring, the action excellent. What impressed me more was some of the stuff on the DVD Extras. The APC was not just an obsolescent 8x8 APC "SFed" up but a scratch built and designed vehicle with actual steel bodywork.

I've read a lot of very mixed reviews of Doomsday but I thought it was great fun.