Alden Bates' Weblog

Pinched off Pete Wisdom: When you see this post, upload an image of your current desktop.

[Temporarily beleted!]

Though I may change that wallpaper soon: It's slightly unnerving having Billie Piper staring at me all the time.

Edit: It occured to me that the wallpaper on that screen shot was possibly a bit spoilery seeing as that episode of Doctor Who only played a day or so ago, so here's a screenshot with somewhat less spoilerly wallpaper:

The only drawback being I now have both Billie and David Tennant staring at me.

I got a spam comment today with the following text in it:

My 20 year old said to me the other day that when he grows up, he's going to be a "real entrepreneur, like you used to be." When I asked him why I was no longer a "real" entrepreneur, he said it was because I wasn't making a lot of money. I guess it's more transparent now -- the cash side of things -- since he saw the rewards of a lot of hard work. But we had a long talk about why I am an entrepreneur and what it is that motivates me -- my love of what I do, the flexibility, mature sex creating something and watching it grow. Maybe too often, http://spammysexdomain.com people look at bootstrapping or being an entrepreneur or "doing your own thing" as something "cool" without realizing the energy, love, angst and tenacity that it requires to succeed.

Which only struck me funny because they're spamming a sex site using text which includes phrases like "watching it grow". Yes, I am 12. Not sure where the text originates from, since searching for bits of it just turn up spammed forum and blog entries.

The spammed domain is owned by someone calling themselves Anry who's provided an address in the Donetsk region of the Ukraine (Any relation?). Looks like they're heavily penalised in Google. So sad.

The UK music show Top of the Pops has been screened here by TVNZ for years and years. Then a couple of years back, TVNZ opted to start making their own version, which used a NZ presenter and combined performances from the UK version with live performances from Kiwi bands. But then they stopped playing it, and the last TV Guide responded to a letter by saying that TVNZ weren't bringing it back. This made me saaaaad.

But! I emailed C4 to ask whether they're going it pick it up, and they already have! It starts on the 6th of May. Hooray!

I've noticed a couple of times an odd bug occuring when navigating forward through the issue pages on the NZDWFC site. Because they include a "next" metalink, FireFox will always prefetch the next issue's index page. This means if you click on the link to the next issue, FireFox already has the page and just needs to download the images.

However a couple of times this has somehow gone wrong. When I've clicked on the link to the next issue, nothing has happened. This seems to be a relatively rare occurance (It's only happened to me twice, as I say) but I'm mystified as to what's happening.

Because I have the access logs, I can see roughly what's happening but it doesn't help:

1. after loading the issue's index page, in this case TSV 20, FireFox loads the index page for TSV 21. This appears from the server end to have gone as normal.
2. FireFox re-requests the page and gets back a status of 206 (partial content) indicating that FireFox requested a small piece of the file. Total transferred: 15490 bytes (the TSV 21 index page is only 4978 bytes in size).
3. Whenever I click on the link or try to load the page from other links, FireFox repeats step 2 and doesn't load the page.

The only way to fix this appears to be to clear the cache. I presume the cached page has somehow become corrupted, but it's hard to tell what's happening.

I had to take my real camera today, because:

OK, I get they're happy about winning a people's choice award, but I dunno really if using the ol' hammer and sickle along with hordes of identical red-and-black clad "workers" is all that appropriate. What's next? The Burger Führer?

... the footpath is for people, not cars.

There was about 6 inches of clearance each side. What a thoughtful and considerate parking job. You'd expect better from the AA really...

In the latest TV Guide (NZ edition), there's a letter praising Prime for playing the first series of Doctor Who, mentioning the 'lost' 108 episode of the show, and also name checking the URL for the NZDWFC site! Though Prime noted that "The next series has not started playing in Britain yet", this was only true for about two or three days after the issue of TV Guide was published...

It's nice that the site got a bit of free promotion there. Thank you, William Horner!

Today's spam quoted the blurb for Ice Age 2 for no apparent reason:

NEWS MOVIES - The Ice Age is coming to an end, and the animals are delighting in the melting paradise that is their new world. Manny, Sid, and Diego quickly learn that the warming climate has one major drawback: a huge glacial dam is about to break, threatening the entire valley.

and had a humorous typo in the user agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Widows NT)

I thought for a moment when I checked out the registration info for the portal domain they spammed (which has broken graphics all over it) that I had a fellow NZer trying to spam me, but the address and probably the name turned out to be fake:
  Holdings NZ Ltd
  Patrick Rinsvelt (mak7hou@yahoo.com)
  35 Hobson Street
  Auckland
  Not Applicable,10010
  NF
(The address is that of the Heritage Auckland Hotel, and Auckland is definitely not on Norfolk Island)

The IP address, which I suspect is the spammers, is allocated to the Latin American and Caribbean IP address Regional Registry in Uraguay. Googling for identical spam only turned up very few relatively recent spams, so their is probably either a new spammer or an old one using a new style...

Tonight I got Time/Space Visualiser issue 36 online. A celebration of the show's thirtieth anniversary, the issue included a story guide and a history of Doctor Who related events covering the time the show had been off the air. In an article somewhat topical to now (with the release of "The Beginning" as a box set) titled An Unearthly Pilot Episode, Jon Preddle examined the differences between An Unearthly Child and the version as originally filmed.

On the book front, there are more reviews for the New Adventures from Deceit through to The Left-Handed Hummingbird, and a major article on the creation of Timeframe written by David Howe.

As Paul points out, TSV 36 is the halfway mark in archiving issues online, at least until issue 73 comes out later this month!

I've basically got the whole of the NZDWFC site converted to XHTML! The only thing left is the Editor's Log which is still using the default Wordpress template - I still need to find out how templates work in Wordpress...

Wikipedia defines Hype as "A hyperbole, largely synonymous with exaggeration and overstatement, is a figure of speech in which statements are exaggerated or extravagant."

So, I'm not sure exactly why someone (It's manufactured by Mmm Int. in Holland) thought this was a good name for an energy drink. Hype comes in silver (elderberry/cranberry flavoured) and gold (which tastes vaguely like Red Bull). Gold also has slightly less caffeine than silver according to the can.

The disclaimer on the side is funny though:
"HYPE should be kept safely out of reach of those whose conversation you do not enjoy! Drinking HYPE before a BBQ may lead to excessive smack talking. Any action you get while drinking HYPE will be purely coincidental. Look for HYPE! wherever things are happening."

Those crazy Dutch!