As counterintuitive as this may sound - the BBC rock. Not like Tea (Alternate link), or like sweets, but more along the lines of a really cool rock. Of course, if I wasn't panicking about leaving in a weeks time, I wouldn't have been so obtuse, and come out and just said I'm talking about the new series of Dr Who. It's just finished showing in the UK, and I decided that I should time (and country) shift the episodes so that I won't miss anything due to awkward airing dates between here and Germany. The show is - in the words of the good Doctor himself - "Fantastic" on two levels. Firstly the writing from Russel Davies hits ths mark most of the time with a good mix of drama and humour. The writing is quite far from the other sci-fi writing, where I was utterly ambivalent to the protagonist having his limbs chopped off and skin burnt off after he supposedly betrayed all the people he held near and dear to his now black heart. Let's hope the producers can keep attracting good writers to the show (I'm personally hoping for a stint by Joss Whedon). The second factor in favour of this show was that the actors aren't too bad. Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper are pretty convincing in their roles, although Eccleston seems to be most happy when he's having his dark doctor moments. The whole thing is backed up by dodgy BBC special effects budgets, but it makes for entirely compelling viewing. If you're not watching it yet on the ABC, you can hang around for the DVD. It'd be nice if someone set up a distribution network so that you could view episodes on demand.

In other news, a bit of vanity searching on "Hiren Joshi" (minus the quote marks) yields pretty good results (by my reckoning) on the big two search engines. Bhautik is also updating his site again, so you can go there now. I should really get back to trying to fit well over 25kg into my bag.