Alden Bates' Weblog

I got hold of the Farscape box set finally yesterday and, bam, I've watched five episode already. I've got to slow down and ration them, because after this there's nothing until either the mini-series (or whatever it was they made) plays on TV here, or comes out on DVD.

But Jeff keeps sending me Star Trek and Stingray DVDs to watch, plus both seasons of I'm Alan Partridge, and Kylie's lent me the first season of Dark Angel, not to mention a pile of videotapes which Meg sent me a while back, so it's not like I have nothing to space the episodes out with...

Farscape season 4 comes out on DVD here today. Seasons 2-4 of that series haven't screened here other than on pay TV, so I have been waiting (im)paitently for the release of the fourth season so that I could watch it finally. I was going to buy it at lunchtime, however (having gone to the trouble of printing out their $20 coupon) Whitcoulls didn't have it on the shelf.

It turned out that they were sent the wrong items by the distributor. Hopefully they'll get it in before the coupon expires on Sunday...

On a whim last night, I signed up for Blog Explosion, as site which lets you earn credits by looking at other people's weblogs, and then use the credits earned to direct other BE members to your weblog. You can also refer other people to the service in a sort of pyramid scheme dealy and earn credits from that.

After having surfing on blogs using their system for a while:

1. On dialup, weblogs often take more than 30 seconds to load. :)
2. The six credits I earned were gone before I finished surfing.
3. It's also a useful way to find weblogs to vote into industries on BlogShares

I suspect I would have to surf quite a lot of weblogs before experiencing anything like an "explosion" in traffic, but as at the moment most of my hits appear to come from blog spammers, it's worth a go.

Good old SORBS (Spam and Open-Relay Blocking System) is still at it. Not only are they blocking whole ISPs, they're apparently also blocking email from servers hosted on dynamic IP addresses. Once again, SORBS is throwing the baby out with the bath water.

The reason thay're blocking anything from dynamic IP addresses is because virus-ridden PCs can be used to send spam. Gosh, wait until they realise that 100% of spam emails are sent via the SMTP protocol! "OMG! By blocking any email sent with that protocol, we can block 100% of spam! We'll be saviours!"

As I mentioned a while back on my LJ, SORBS came to my attention because I tried to email a friend of mine, and it bounced. If there's one thing I hate more than spam, it's having a perfectly valid email bounce for no good reason. (I've been able to email George since, and it looks like Paradise was taken off SORBS' list.)

Blacklisting is bad, it stops legitimate emails and doesn't really affect spammers much, because they use fake email addresses and don't get the bounces. Of course, if everyone used the blacklist, that would stop the spammers... for about five minutes before they found a way around it. Spammers make quite a lot of money, you see, so they're determined to keep doing it. The only way to stop spam for good is to cut it off at the source. Blacklisting doesn't do that, it just makes the problem invisible, like taking painkillers for a brain tumour.

Of course, people will still use blacklists. However if you consider using SORBS, you might stop to consider what valid emails you might miss out on.

Incidentally, SORBS is currently in fourth position for a worthless project.

Adoption Centre

This makes me wish I had the software to make SWF files, so I could make a pet Dalek.

It's that time of year again, when I become mysteriously unable to get a decent dial-up connection. When I tell my modem to dial in, it re-negotiates twice and I end up with a sub-56K connection. At the moment I'm connected at 28800bps

I'm pretty sure it's not the modem, as I borrowed another modem from work last year and it had the same problem. Besides which, the modem connects at high-speed fine for most of the year - it's just between November and sometime early the next year that it starts becoming a problem.

Perhaps Telecom lowers the quality of their phone lines to "encourage" people over to its highly-expensive broadband "offerings". Perhaps it's just that the warm weather does something to the phone lines to lower the quality. Maybe it's Paradise's modems. Maybe it's solar flares. Whatever it is, it makes the internet surfing experience more painful than it should be.

I started today by pulling my PC apart and giving it a good dusting in order to try to get rid of the resetting problem. This segued into a general tidy which reduced the amount of clutter.

Then I watched Heaven's Gate because I'd never seen it before. Long long loooooong movie, with lots of nice scenery. It really needed a counter at the corner keeping track of the money spent. :)

Meanwhile in America, Left versus Right continues.

There's a new version of Firefox out. The only problem I find with updating Firefox is that some of the extensions you've installed and gotten used to will immediately stop working. This time it was Googlebar, and I had to uninstall it then reinstall it to get the toolbar back (And now it's not appearing in the Extensions dialog).

It's still several thousand times better than Internet Explorer, of course.

My brother bought a bunch of Hayao Miyazaki movies recently. He's responsible for the award winning anime Spirited Away, which I enjoyed a great deal. I've already watched:

Princess Mononoke: This one seemed confusing, mainly for the reason that the main character Ashitaka seemed to swap allegiences at the drop of a hat. I guess what he was really rooting for was peace, but I didn't think that came across well.

Laputa: Castle in the Sky: Steampunk is cool. This has Anna Paquin and Mark Hamill providing voices for the English dub. I highly recommend this one.

And tonight I have Kiki's Delivery Service to watch...

The additions to Westfield (or Queensgate as it's still known) in Lower Hutt seem to be coming along nicely. They should hurry, as we vitally need the extra 50 women's clothing stores!!!!!1one

There's also a bit of work going on on Logan's Plaza (or Maidstone Mall as it was originally known) in Upper Hutt. Must be the season to build on to your shopping mall.