Alden Bates' Weblog

1. Fiddled with the format of my weblog. I don't know if I'm going to keep it, depends on whether it grows on me or not.

2. Made more Star Trek: Voyager Livejournal userpics, to bring the total to 55. Samples:

3. Managed to win another battle on BlogExplosion, bringing my total to 3 wins, 11 losses. That's sorta sad. :)

Vodafone apologised for their misleading txt last week:

2 clarify last wks TXT from Vdfn, International TXT increases from 20c to 30c frm 25 Jan 06 for Prepay customers only. Sorry 4 any confusion. 4 mor info call 222

If they were reeeeeally sorry, they wouldn't be raising the price. ;)

Since I now have a WAP-capable cell phone, the obvious step of making a WAP version of tetrap.com occurred to me. But what to put on it? Phone wallpapers? I googled and searched, but no one seems to have a list of what resolutions are common for cell phone screens. Interweb, you have failed me!

I found the same question had been asked on Wallpaper Junkie with the response "128x172". Looking at free wallpaper sites yielded various different sizes: 120x160, 132x176, 208x176, 276x132. My own cell phone appears to take wallpapers which are around 128 by 128 (Though it crops the top and bottom and prints "Vodafone" in big letters on it, so more like 128 by 96).

While I suspect it would be nigh-on impossible to get hold of statistics regarding which models are most widely used, gallery.mobile9.com has a handy feature where you can select a make and model and it'll provide you with wallpapers in the correct resolution for your phone. I took the liberty of looking at which dimensions were most prevalent:

This leads me to conclude that I couldn't go far wrong in providing wallpapers in the top 4 or 5 resolutions.

I bought a new phone from Bond and Bond on the weekend. It has a camera, WAP, polyphonic ring tones, etc, etc, and so what better way to celebrate than by posting some blurry phonecam pictures of construction?!

Lower Hutt Mitre 10 Mega, by Melling Bridge. They just started recently.

Pak n Save, which I photographed before, and which is opening the middle of next week.

Not hugely great picturewise, but OK for taking random photos of silly things.

For a moment before posting this, I had a feeling I'd written about it before, but Google revealed nothing... So here I present to you the results of trying to update a PC using Windows Update:

"Security Update for Windows (KB839645) Could not be installed because of an unknown error."

Perhaps they'd care to elaborate?

Also on the subject of broken stuff, my PC crashed earlier on today. After rebooting, I found that Mozilla's FireFox and Thunderbird had both completely lost their settings. Not only that, but Thunderbird had completely lost all of my email. The mail was, I'm glad to say, still on the disk, but the configuration file which told Thunderbird where it was was snafu. This appears to be because Thunderbird keeps the file permanently open while running, and it wasn't closed properly during the crash.

Fortunately I was able to recover the data and get my email back, but I doubt the average user would be able to do that.

It seems to be that on occasion Yahoo! Groups tries to send a mailing list message to me and it bounces (probably because the mailing server is temporarily down). Any sane person would just wait a bit and try again, but from what I can tell, Y!G simply suspends all mailing list emails to that address, waits four or five days, then sends a "reactivate your subscriptions" email. Which is fine, except that way you unnecessarily miss a whole pile of emails.

Come on, Yahoo! Try again! It's not like bouncing emails are cosing you money.

I suppose I should have noticed I wasn't getting any emails from Yahoo! Groups.

A couple of LiveJournalers drew and posted picture of Batgirl, which lead to other artists on their friends lists drawing and posting pictures of Batgirl, which lead to over 200300 pieces of artwork of Batgirl, all in different styles. The Internets is awesome! :)

The latest issue to hit the TSV archive is The TARDIS Tales Collection, a special issue which included every installment of Graham Muir's comic strip up to The Final Chapter in TSV 32, and added the epic 10-page Sauceron. As well, Graham provides commentary on the strips, and some of his pre-TARDIS-Tales comics are printed, such as this excellently funny one-page summation of the first episode of Death to the Daleks.

Of course, The Final Chapter wasn't the last TARDIS Tales, so there are more comic strips to come in future issues, though the next one isn't until TSV 35...

On a related note, Paul relates how the NZDWFC site was recently visited by award-winning NZ author Keri Hulme!

LiveJournal are retiring the icon I made for linking syndicated accounts, so a moment of silence, please, for the satellite dish icon.

I made that icon back in 2003 when they first introduced seperate icons for syndicated accounts, but now it's being replaced by a sparkly new orange jobbie. So sad.

Edit: and already someone's complained!

Yesterday Vodafone sent out a TXT message:

Want 2 TXT yr friends Overseas? If u r on Prepay,TXTing from NZ will cost u jst 30c starting 25 Jan 2006. 4 more details call 222 Or visit vodafone.co.nz

This sorta seems to imply that there's just been a price drop, however as the Dominion Post pointed out this morning, they're actually raising the price by 50% and dressing the price rise up as a good thing.

So... is the message up there misleading? Personally, I think so...