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!

Sunday In San Andreas

Today, was pretty much more of the same, except for the usual Sunday ritual of the making of the bacon butties, which were eaten while watching "The Lazarus Experiment from the series 3 box set of Doctor Who.

The villain of this story was played by Mark Gatiss, making him one of the few people to have written for and acted in Doctor Who. Mark Gatiss is mostly known as a member of "The League Of Gentlemen", however he is also the writer of "The Unquiet Dead" for series 1 and "The Idiot's Lantern" for series 2 of Doctor Who as well as several Doctor Who novels for Virgin New Adventures and BBC Books.

Afterwards, I fired up the PC and Steam announced that all Grand Theft Auto games for the PC were available for £25ish and that seemed a reasonable enough deal and handed over my credit card details and then started downloading them.

As we were still full from the bacon butties at breakfast, we decided to skip lunch, apart from large bag of thai sweet chilli flavour crisps while watching our movie for today, "Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer", which was enjoyable enough though I prefer the first film.

Not long after we finished watching the film, it was time for my wife to go to her laptop and speak to her mum (or in her case "mom") back home in the USA via skype with webcam. I, of course, headed off to the computer room and tried my morning's purchases.

The first game I tried, after the games had finished downloading, was "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City" which was my favourite of the GTA games for the Playstation 2. Well, the PC version is enjoyable enough, but the mouse control seems to be over-sensitive and the game crashed a few times.

However, most of the rest of the day and evening was spent playing "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" which I also have for the Playstation 2, but as I got it at a point where I hardly wanted to spend my time in front of a console and so have hardly played it. This game is less prone to crashing, though it did once, and the mouse control works a heck of a lot better. I played through a few of the early missions, but generally ate, worked out at the gym and "wasted" rival gang members.

During dinner (pizza!) we watched "42", yet another episode of Doctor Who from the series 3 box set which featured former Eastenders actress Michelle Collins" as the captain of the sun-bound spaceship.

I went back to "GTA: San Andreas", before heading to bed to watch the first episode of the 2nd series of "The Mighty Boosh" and then sleep.

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.