The Dalek Invasion Of Ea...My Living Room 2008 AD

Nothing of note happened between getting up, leaving for work and returning home from work. In fact, the only highlight of my work day was getting a lift home from my father and arriving home 40 minutes earlier than normal.

During the evening meal, my wife and I watched "The Family Of Blood", which was the second part of the story that started with "Human Nature" from Doctor Who series 3. It's only recently that I recognised that the chap who plays the creepy alien-possessed Baines in it is Harry Lloyd who has also recently been seen on our screens in BBC's Robin Hood series.

With dinner, the programme over and being armed with the batteries I needed (this time) it was finally on to activating my 18" Voice Interactive Dalek for the first time.

I first tried it in remote controlled mode, which is rather basic. Two joysticks control movement of the Dalek, another to control the rotation of the dome with its eyestalk on and another to raise and lower this eyestalk. In addition, there's a button which causes it to utter one of the familiar lines from the modern run of Doctor Who (i.e. 2005 onwards). Unlike the ones in these later stories, it doesn't off er a rotating centre for shooting behind itself.

"Voice interactive" mode is where it shines. It can stand sentry and challenge (and "exterminate" i.e. make a firing noise while the gun lights up) anything that approaches it; go off on a wander; seek & locate (and "exterminate"); find & track moving objects. It also has a mode where you can tell it to move forwards, left or right (but strangely not backwards) a specific number of units and you can also set up a list of these movements to occur which can be triggered by another command.

It's very fun to mess around with and looks great too, which is ideal for the room I'll be setting up as my gaming/home cinema/hi-fi/reading room later this year!

Wisely, my cat chose to hide behind the sofa, which was kind of apt!

Power Of The Daleks

This morning, I got into town early enough to go to the latest Tesco before work and pick up my lunch for the first few days of the week and a lot of AA batteries as I was going to be needing them when a certain package arrived.

During work I received an email from my wife, who is currently unemployed and is therefore handy for receiving parcels from courier companies, though I'd much prefer she wasn't and earning enough so I could just receive them at work and pay the £20+ for a taxi home. This email announced that a large package was waiting for me at home to open.

It contained...an 18" Voice Interactive Dalek!

After a long day my working day came to an end and I returned home and consumed dinner while watching "Human Nature", one of my favourite three episodes of Doctor Who series 3 which guest starred Jessica Hynes (formerly known as Jessica Stephenson) of Spaced fame.

After 15 minutes of wrestling with the packaging containing the Dalek, I finally managed to get it out. I reached for the pile of AA batteries to insert them, but any hopes of playing with it tonight were dashed when I realised that it not only required AA batteries but four D and one PP3 batteries too, which of course we didn't have!

BAH!

Daleks In Manhattan (Not Taken By Muppets)

Nothing really happened today. We watched the "Daleks In Manhattan" episode from the series 3 box set of Doctor Who and "The Dark Crystal", which is a cheesy but enjoyable nonetheless film made in 1982 by Jim Henson and featuring muppets (though none from "The Muppet Show", of course).

The voice talent in this film includes actors such as Billie Whitelaw (recently seen as the hotelier in "Hot Fuzz") and Michael Kilgarriff (who is familiar to Doctor Who anoraks, like myself, as the Cyber Controller in "Tomb Of The Cybermen" and "Attack Of The Cybermen" as well as Experimental Prototype Robot K1 aka "The Robot" in "Robot") in addition to the vocal & puppetry performances of Jim Henson and many of his fellow veteran muppeteers including Frank Oz (who co-directed the film with Henson) and Jerry Nelson.

Following a few hours in front of our computers, with dinner we watched "Evolution Of The Daleks" from the Doctor Who series 3 box set which was the 2nd part of "The Daleks In Manhattan" story.

Apart from that, most of my time was spent in front of the computer.