I watched the first group of the Tom Baker Doctor Who episodes today, Robot. As a show, I have to say, it wasn’t bad. I truly did laugh out loud at some of the special effects, but I also laughed at some of the things the Doctor did. It was really entertaining, albeit a kind of silly story.

Tom Baker himself, however, was just creepy. Robot didn’t have that scene I’m waiting to see – the one that scared me a way from Doctor Who as a kid. But Tom Baker was creepy just the same. I don’t know why, but something about him is just…off.

I don’t really know anyone else who spooks me on sight the way he does, and I so can’t wait to find out what on earth he did that got me this way.

Childhood superstitions are a riot, aren’t they?

I was talking to some coworkers today about how nothing you do at work is truly private – your company tracks you (or at least, I’m told mine does).

I understand the tracking of my actual work – emails and such – that’s good in the event of a lawsuit or anything where we’d have to provide evidence. I even understand tracking web activity – for example, one of my good friends can no longer access MySpace from work because her coworkers were having a wee too much fun during the day and slowing down their entire network.

I very much feel that it is fully my employer’s right to track me, and don’t feel personally invaded or any of that stuff by them doing so.

But I wonder what they expect to see, especially from my web activity at work. Obviously, I’m on MySpace all day. I do hit up some of my “must have” sites I was writing about yesterday, but mainly, if I’m not on MySpace at work, I’m probably on another social network, or new Web 2.0 site. I’m on ‘em all. I scramble for private beta invites the second they’re available, and will join anything and everything just to see what it’s like. I’ve even been known to hit up some very, very Not Safe For Work sites to check things out.

I do end up joining a bunch of awfully boring sites, but every once in a while, something surprises me. Sandy’s a great example of that – I think I heard about this site from the TechCrunch conference, and now I use it daily.

This got rambly. But my point was – look at my logs from work and all you’d see is one random website after another after another. And while I do believe my company has every right to look at what I’m doing – I don’t believe I have any right to privacy when I’m being paid to do something – I do wonder what they’re trying to accomplish

“She changed her status four times today!! Bad bad BamBam!”

Eh. Maybe not.

And I’ve been known to say as much when talking to companies. My coworkers my tease me, but when I’m a fan, I don’t deny it.

After all, when it comes to the Internet, before I am anything else, be that a blogger, an employee, a gamer, whatever…I am first and foremost a user.

That means that there are a number of websites that have become an important part of my daily routine, and it’s just weird to think about what life would be like if I somehow didn’t have them anymore.

The sites I use every day:

MySpace.com (duh)

Facebook.com

Digg.com

MyYahoo! (and the Yahoo! Widget that displays MyYahoo news on my desktop)

Gmail (although I’m starting to use the site less now that there’s imap)

Bloglines

Google

Pownce (if the AIR app worked on my PC I wouldn’t use the site at all)

LiveJournal

The sites I use “a lot,” meaning multiple times a week, but I won’t go into convulsions if I can’t see them for a day:

Amazon.com

Demonoid (ahem)

IWantSandy (http://iwantsandy.com/ ) This is quickly becoming a new favorite of mine. It’s silly, but it’s just handy to have “someone” remind you of random things daily.

Delicious

Flickr

What sites can’t you live without? Just sites, not blogs…I’ll do another entry listing out my favorite blogs.

I want it.

Actually, I think I’d prefer “strangest blogger,” but I’d take obnoxious…or freaky?

Naw, I’m too tame for that.

Are we entering the world of “blog of the day” again, where everyone on earth creates some award thing for something?

Ever have one of those moments where you go through your hard drive, cleaning out old files, deleting “extra junk.” Every time I do this, I think I should not erase my trash for a while – wait to see if I deleted something I needed.

But nooo…it’s not truly gone in my head until the trash is empty so….bye bye trash.

During today’s spring cleaning, I deleted a few gigs of files I needed.

Ohh do I wish I had a time machine…

Let’s talk about horror movies and scary tv.

I remember very clearly watching the Exorcist when I was 12, and being terrified. It gave me that same creepy feeling that I got seeing Tom Baker on TV the other day.

I’ve seen it many times since, and think it’s one of the greatest horror movies of all time. I love it.

I also remember being scared by Penocchio (yeaaah, the cartoon. That scene with the wave.), I had nightmares about Freddy Kruger (although that was the first horror movie I actually enjoyed), was terrified of quicksand thanks to an episode of Charlie’s Angels, and I’m sure there are more examples I can’t think of off the top of my head. Safe to say, I was a little spooked as a kid.

I rather enjoy scary movies now, and no amount of movie gore will ever compare to seeing the real thing (I was an EMT on a volunteer ambulance corps). The only thing that truly gets me is lightning. Well, and thunder, since it means lightning’s coming. The lightning superstition has such a weird story behind it, it’s gonna get it’s own entry. ‘till tomorrow!

How’s THAT for a subject line? I need to write an entry at some point about my inability to write catchy copy. Must add that to my list of topics I’m keeping for the month. But anyway…

I woke up around 4am this morning feeling like I had something huge stuck in my left eye. My eye was bright red and tearing, and I could barely open it. I managed to get some eye drops in, got my eye open, and stared at it in the mirror for a while. There was nothing in it, and, well, it was 4am, so I went back to bed. It took a while, my eye hurt every time I closed it, but eventually I fell back asleep.

The cats woke me up again at 7am, and my eye wasn’t any better. This is very much one one of those days where I’m glad it’s the weekend and I don’t have to go in to work, I can’t imagine walking around the office with one eye refusing to open. My eye hasn’t gotten any better in the few hours I’ve been awake now. It’s all very weird. I don’t see a sty or anything actually in my eye, but it still hurts when I close it. And, of course, it’s hard to keep it open. Kind of paradoxical.

I definately saw enough cases of pink-eye when I was a camp nurse to know the symptoms. Bright red eyes (check), tons of goop coming out of them (nope, just tears), and the feeling of needles being stuck in your eye (not really). And it tends to be both eyes, since it spreads very easily.

So not pink-eye. Just a weird eye thing that I’m hoping will go away by the time I have to look at another person – I look kind of funny right now.

I certainly don’t want to make it sound like today’s a bad day. It’s my birthday, my cat who’s been very scared of me climbed onto my lap earlier (must write the obligatory “meet the new cats” entry), and I got to wake up and open presents (I’m the person who keeps packages until the day of my birthday, then opens them). And I have friends coming to pick me up later to take me to god knows where (it’s a surprise).

Off to try more eye drops. I think there’s a limit to how much Visine a person is supposed to use in a day – I seem to remember hearing you can do bad stuff if you use too much – must look that up first.

I’ve recently started watching (and in some cases, rewatching) Doctor Who, inspired by me realllly liking Torchwood. It’s all very funny, since last year I not only missed the first few episodes of Doctor Who (all I ever knew was this girl Martha was now with him), I also saw the first few of Torchwood and didn’t like them! I’d always liked the show, but it’s definitely one of my all-time favorites now.

I’d watched some of Doctor Who when I was a kid, and liked it…until the doctor turned into a creepy guy who scared me. What can I say – I can remember a lot of the exact scene, I have this picture locked in my head of what I saw – I was spooked.

Given my new love of all things Doctor Who, it’s only natural that I’d go back and start watching the originals. I’ve seen a few scattered ones here and there, but then stumbled upon a documentary about all the seasons. I figured it would be a great way to figure out what to watch (they’re not so easy to find online or get on DVD in any real organized fashion).

The documentary started at the very beginning with the black and white episodes, then slowly stepped through each doctor. I recognized the third doctor, and then came Tom Baker. The doctor I knew by name only, based on his reputation as being one of the best doctors ever. I couldn’t have picked him out of a crowd.

The second Tom Baker came on screen I got the heebies. I don’t know how else to describe it. Just very, very creeped out. So what did I do? Hit up Amazon and immediately buy his episodes. I gotta see what he did that freaked little me out so badly!

Last year, I attempted to do NaNoWriMo – to write a novel in a month. I did really well for about a week, and then just fell apart. The novel’s still in progress, but it’s maybe 30 pages long…not quite an actual NOVEL yet.

This year, I’m going to do NaBloPoMo. That’s writing one blog entry every month. It’s a good excuse to get my butt writing more in here, and it should be fun.

Expect lots of random entries from me over the course of the next month, covering lots of random topics. I’m covered for today, so the first of the ramblings will begin tomorrow.

Fun!

(and I can I just tell you how many times I’ve almost written “Welcome to the social” as a tagline?)

From Mashable:

The official news is out on the MySpace and Google deal, first rumored earlier today. The big news: the two companies have actually been working together on OpenSocial all along, which launches officially tonight. From the jointly issued news release:

“MySpace, the world’s largest social network, and Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced that they are joining forces to launch OpenSocial— a set of common APIs for building social applications across the web. The partnership spearheads an initiative to standardize and simplify the development of social applications. Today’s announcement underscores MySpace’s commitment to supporting standards that foster innovation in an increasingly social Web.”

As I told someone on Monday (talking about something entirely different, mind you…) “we’re ALL about standards, baby.”