Whoa. I’m not as surprised by Matt Smith leaving as much as I am about the timing of the announcement. With only the 50th anniversary episode and the Christmas special to go, there’s not a lot of time left to build to a transition to a new Doctor.

Spoilers ahead, if you haven’t seen the end of the latest season of Doctor Who. Also, if you’re not a nerd, you probably won’t care about the following ponderings….

Given that we’ve seen that John Hurt introduced as The Doctor at the end of the most recent season, there’s got to be some question about where he fits in. He’s pretty much either got to be between Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor (who we never saw regenerate) and Christopher Eccleston, making him the Ninth Doctor (and pushing back Eccleston and his successors), or he’s got to be after Matt Smith, making him the Twelfth.

Either way, we now have twelve Doctors on the books and, as most Who fans know, Time Lords get twelve regenerations before they ultimately die. (Of course, The Master has sidestepped this rule; perhaps so too can The Doctor.)

If John Hurt is the Ninth (or is somehow some other pre-Smith) Doctor and Matt Smith regenerates into yet another incarnation of The Doctor, that’ll mean he’s used all twelve regenerations, and the series writers are going to have to start answering the question of what’s going to happen at the end of the Thirteenth Doctor’s run sooner than I’d have thought.

Source: airstream.com via Airstream Inc. on Pinterest

Check out the Pinterest page for the Airstream Land Yacht. Some good ones in there I hadn’t seen yet. I think the Land Yacht looks great, and I really like the 28-foot layout. I probably would go that way now, were I to buy ours again.

There’s quite a lot of Airstream content in the May 2013 issue of Sunset magazine. The majority of it is about “hotels” where you can stay in a permanently installed trailer, but it’s a decent issue nonetheless, with lots of camping info. Sadly, the Airstream stuff from the issue doesn’t appear to be available online.

Val and I were in Las Vegas a couple of weeks back, and pinged some friends to get recommendations on where to get a good cocktail. Pretty much everyone came back with the same answer: lots to drink, but not much that’s good. So I relied on Google and Yelp and came up with two contenders: Herbs & Rye and Downtown Cocktail Room.

Herbs & Rye is quite a cab ride from the strip, but we gave it a shot anyway. We were there mid-week and so it was pretty dead. I had a Sazerac and Val had an Old Fashioned. Both were pretty good drinks, but we ended up sitting at the bar with a couple of young whippersnappers, one of whom couldn’t get past the fact that the bar was out of Crown Royal, so she couldn’t have her Crown and Coke.

The ambience would probably have been better on a weekend, but The Professional playing silently on the TV was the only thing here to go with the decent drinks.

Downtown Cocktail Room was a bit better in terms of ambience, but the drinks weren’t quite as good. I had an Old Fashioned that had a little fruit salad included, and my second drink was a house special I forget the name of. It was too sweet for my taste, but better than the Old Fashioned. Val had a Manhattan, which was pretty good. There was something of a crowd, and the seating was small pods of couches and tables, and made for a nice, comfortable spot to chat. It was still mid-week, but there was a slight bustle to the place that made us like it just a bit more than Herbs & Rye overall, but your mileage may vary closer to a weekend.

AKA: What happened to Serrano?

For years, I’ve used Joyent Shared Hosting, née TextDrive, to host my websites. You might recall that I was notified that those service were going away. Well, one of the founders of TextDrive announced he was coming to the rescue and that our accounts would be moved to a new home.

I was happy to hear that, although I’d already racked a Mac mini at Macminicolo. In fact, the site you’re reading is served from it. Still, some of my domains remained at their old location, because some of them were so old that moving them was a big undertaking.

About three weeks ago, the server at Joyent (called “Jones”) disappeared. I tried repeatedly to contact TextDrive, who was supposed to be supporting me.

I didn’t get any good help. After three days, I got confirmation I was screwed, and that it was an accident; Joyent had shut off the servers prematurely, before my account was migrated. I was told that TextDrive had a backup and would spin up a virtual machine.

Here we are, a couple weeks later, and still no machine nor access to backups. You might have landed here, because I’ve started redirecting domains to this. I’ll attempt to restore the other sites soon. Sorry about the mess.