Alden Bates' Weblog

MPs say I do to civil unions

This is excellent! The head of Destnazi Cult was, of course, on TV complaining that society was going to pot, but that's to be expected.

Take two, as I managed to crash Firefox last time...

Ya know what I'm tired of? Referrer spammers. Seriously, I'm tired of seeing a bizarre site pop up in the referrer list, and going to visit it, only to discover it's some completely irrelavant site selling yoghurt or something. No, really, WTF?

There were still some 3000 or so 301 redirections, again, mostly due to Yahoo, but judging by a recent post on the Yahoo! Search Blog they're on top of it. Excellent. Now about some of those other search crawlers (Grub, for instance, doesn't treat 301 redirections properly).

Anyway, on with the pointless stuff: Ze most popular DiscContinuity Guide Entries were:

1. Land of the Dead
2. The Twilight Kingdom
3. Davros
4. Storm Warning
5. The Natural History of Fear

We are behind on those. People will be punished. Or something. Anyway, the most popular NZDWFC archive items were:

1. Moonboots and Dinner Suits review
2. Who Killed Kennedy eBook
3. I Exterminated JNT
4. Build Your Own TARDIS review
5. Davros artwork

So much the same as last time, only with an added obsession for moon boots. Why, I wonder...

Somehow a while ago I ended up signing up for a mailing list for promoting the upcoming Spielburg version of War of the Worlds. At the start of this month they launched the web site. Well, a holding page for the web site anyway. There's currently a graphic there showing a three fingered hand wrapped in red weed, clutching the Earth. This leads me to make the following observations:

1. The Martians in Wells' novel had tentacles, whereas this looks more like the hands sported by the aliens in the '53 film.
2. The red weed is, of course, from the novel and doesn't appear in the '53 film.

I'm still interested to know if they're going to use the Jeff Wayne soundtrack, as apparently he owns the film/TV rights...

So bear with me. :) I came down with some sort of flu last Wednesday and have been suffering ever since.

We've now got ADSL connected, so once the wireless network is set up, I'll be able to use it from this computer. Xtra, apparently, is happy enough to supply the service, but they won't provide helpdesk support for it. This is typical of Xtra. Hopefully there won't be any problems with it.

Yesterday it was announced that Prime TV have picked up the license to screen Doctor Who in New Zealand. This has had mixed reactions as only about 75% of the population can actually get Prime, and in some places the signal is marginal. It's still preferable to Sky getting it, as Sky is pay TV and even less of the population has it.

Hopefully very soon now I'll be getting broadband. Because this is with a different ISP, the web space my LiveJournal icons and stuff is going to go bye bye, so I will probably move them to my main tetrap.com domain. Of course, the fun part will be when my email address changes, and I have to track down every online service I've given my old one to and give them the new one. A bit of a hassle, but hopefully worth it...

Now if only I could stop slacking on BlogShares and do some more work on my web page. :)

Just finished watching the last episode of Farscape season 4. You could probably hear the cry of anguish as it finished. Now I just have to wait until the subsequent mini-series either screens here or comes out on DVD...

NZ government seems to be very close to voting the civil union bill into law. This will allow same-sex couples to enter into a marriage-like civil union. It's about time.

It's becoming obvious that at some point I'm going to need to upgrade to Window XP... I attempted to use Yahoo! Chat today in FireFox. This required downloading Java support, which I started doing, until the Java installer announced it was only suitable for newer versions of Windows, and then stalled. So I guess I'll be using IE to access Java stuff...

Lycos is introducing a new way to fight spam. It's a screensaver which attacks the web sites of spammers, draining their bandwidth and making their site unresponsive. I'm not at all sure it's legal, but really how many people are going to have sympathy for the spammers?

Of course this could backfire. As we've already seen with SORBS, it's easy to accidentally target people who haven't done anything wrong. It's common, for instance, for a number of completely unrelated web sites to be hosted on the same server simply because the owners are signed up with the same web hosting company. An attack on one site on such a server would impact the other unrelated sites as well...

I downloaded AVG free edition version 7 last night, and was glad to find that it is actuall a lot better than version 6. The email scanner seems to work with Pegasus Mail (It may have done before and just not told me, since it seems to do so transparently) and the interface as a whole looks a lot better.

I'm hoping the new version doesn't crash my PC after doing a full scan, like 6 did... I have yet to do one though.

I administer a web ring on webring.com. At the moment I'm finding this difficult, as any time I attempt to load webring.com, it times out. If I load it via Google language tools it works fine. Webring.com Fanlisting works fine.

So evidently there's a problem somewhere between me and webring.com that's stopping me from loading the pages. I would contact webring for help in solving the problem, but all they have is a feedback form and no apparent helpdesk email address. They suggest on the support page to ask in the forums, which I would do if I was able to load the forums (directly) at all.

Thus we have a catch 22 - I am unable to load webring.com, and I am unable to obtain help because doing so requires loading webring.com.

I am going to attempt to guess a support email address in the hope someone there is monitoring that address and can help.

Today's Get Fuzzy. Egads, I say. That's a wee bit disturbing...

Edit: I didn't mean to end up ranking so high for Get Fuzzy on Google. My apologies to anyone who landed here expecting something deep and meaningful about the comic and found instead a (now) dead link and two pathetic sentences of comment.

The comic, which is no longer there because comics.com take them down after a couple of weeks, was during a period when Darby was suffering from an injured arm. ISTR it looked like Bucky was doing something obscene to Satchel.

I guess this is more proof Google is broken.