Alden Bates' Weblog

I discovered today Yahoo! Movies. It appears to use the old E! Online database as a base, as the entry for "Wombling Free" incorrectly lists its date was 1984 instead of 1977.

I clicked on the Message Board link and, on being told I could "Be the first to post a message!", I had a go. Unfortunately when I hit "post", I got a blank page with the Yahoo! Movies banner at the top of it. The message doesn't seem to have appeared, so I guess it didn't work, hmmm? Could do with a bit more work there...

Frustratingly, the only way to submit updates appears to be a generic Feedback form.

One of the best things about DVD is they can include many different languages without too much trouble. This gives me endless amusement switching between them to see what various characters sound like.

Voyager has three alternate languages - German, Italian and Spanish. Spanish Tuvok sounds way too smooth and sexy for a Vulcan. Neelix... well, no one could match the original. German Janeway... Cor blimey guvna!

Ahem, anyway... :)

Popular DiscContinuity Guide entries

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

Most of the Land of the Dead hits appear to be coming from Google searches. Alden's conjuncture for web pages: For any web page, over it's lifetime online, the majority of hits will come from people who will have stumbled on it from a search engine while searching for a way to get jam stains out of their curtains.

Still amusingly popular is a page of convention photos from StarFest 2002. 711 hits. The majority from people searching for picture of Toby McGuire.

The same albums on my music site keep ending up in the top 5, since there seem to be a lot of people searching for Era's The Mass and The Celtic Circle, which doesn't make for very dynamic rankings. See above.

Archived TSV items

1. Recovered clips press release
2. Who Killed Kennedy eBook
3. I exterminated JNT
4. Peanuts cartoon
5. Davros and Daleks artwork

I wish I could say my attempts to fix the indexing on Yahoo! was working. Most of the old NZDWFC urls have gone, however it's not indexing the nzdwfc.tetrap.com subdomain at all well. :P

It's not often I'm surprised by spam, but today I was spammed by Paramount studios. Apparently they had taken me for a War of the Worlds fan and wanted me to help pimp their upcoming movie. A quick search of my web site revealed that War of the Worlds is mentioned on five DiscCon Guide entries, and in the Who Killed Kennedy eBook, so, er, no, that is still a bit of a leap to make.

This is, I suspect, an overzealous marketing underling... I guess it makes a change from endless viagra, Nigerian scam and speed camera spams.

The main thing that annoys me about the daylight savings change-over is that, during the New Zealand summer, all the web comics I read update two hours later. E.G. SinFest updates at 10pm instead of 8pm.

That's when I can persuade Paradise's proxy server to actually give me an updated page, of course.

Polls swinging this way and that! Accusation! Counter-accusation! Claim! Count-claim! He flip-flops! He lies! He's dull! He's an idiot! Bill Clinton! Mass hysteria! Cats and dogs living together!

The election is only a few days away and it's still anybody's guess who's going to win. Personally I passed the point of getting the urge to scream whenever the issue is raised about a week or so back.

And I'm not even in America.

Have you committed a thought crime today, citizen?

They do it on purpose, I swear... Big Finish authors, that is. I was starting on the DCG entry for Arrangements for War on the weekend, and there was one of those annoying alien words in it that I had to listen to five times to work out what they were saying. In Arrangements the word was "Quisapen", a country on the planet Világ. I'm still not sure whether I've spelt it correctly.

Previous such words include:

• The Axis of Insanity: "Molenski Univarious"
• The Twilight Kingdom: "Ondrokkan"
• The Creed of the Kromon: "Eutermesan" (the liner notes were a great help here)

I wonder if the original DisContinuity Guide writers had this problem.

Currently we're about 6 audios behind in the Guide. Two entries are in the process of being compiled, and I've at least listened to The Harvest. The next three Doctor Who audios are sitting on my desk, still in their wrappers... taunting me... daring me to unwrap them... ARGH!

:P

People can get into heated discussions about just about everything, including whether links should be underlined on web pages. Personally I tend to have little trouble distinguishing links, whether they're underlined or not.

Tactical faux pas I've seen today on the web: black text on black background, black text on bright-green background (MY EYES!!!!)

Mind you this is mostly because I've been voting weblogs into industries on BlogShares.

I now have TSV #27 HTMLed and up on the site.

Jon Preddle's article on the chronology of the UNIT years isn't up, because it's all covered in his book Timelink. Part 2 of Murder at Midnight is, of course, plus an interesting article on the Timewyrm Quartet (Or quadrilogy as I guess it could be called :) and there's also quote a lot more artwork this time.

We'll start to catch up more quickly temporally speaking from now on, as 1991 was the last year to have 6 issues.