Alden Bates' Weblog

I noticed recently that tetrap.com has been upgraded to the current Basic account limits of 3GB of disk space and 125GB of bandwidth per month. Kudos to HostForWeb! However that lead me to notice something else:

At home, I pay $NZ40 a month for 10GB a month bandwidth (shared between me and 3 other people) while I'm also paying $US10 a month for a site which has 125GB of bandwidth a month.

The main reason for this, of course, is because all ADSL here is provided by Telecom, giving them a monopoly which the government has completely failed to break.

I wonder if HostForWeb would mind if I camped out in the server room...

I noticed my local Subway (Maybe I should make a category... tetrap.local.subway) has signs up proclaiming "New Satay Chicken". New? But they've had satay chicken as long as I've been going there! Asking about it illicited an odd look and "The satay chicken is new" so perhaps they've just changed the recipe?

Slightly more alarming is the "For a limited time" phrase. Does that mean satay chicken will disappear from the menu once the limited time is up? Oh noes!

I ask myself this sometimes. Like today when I went to the Lower Hutt Queensgate branch to buy City of Death, which was released last Thursday.

It wasn't in the first place I looked (the new releases section) though last month's Doctor Who DVD was. I then looked in the science fiction section, which is where Doctor Who DVDs live and, after a bit of hunting, found two copies of City of Death hiding behind a Dune box set.

Then I went to Dick Smiths and looked at the range of cellphones - while they had a big wall display, all it consisted of was dummy cellphones with no actual information next to them. Like a feature list or prices. Evidently not in a hurry to sell any then.

Level: ONS-Galadriël-System
Type: Onslaught
Download Size: 9.44 MB
Rating: 8/10
Downloaded from: Unreal Tournament Files (File Front)

Description: Zooming about in space in flying saucers to Jarre. Weeeeeeeee!

Continue reading "UT Review: Galadriël System"

One of the things I've been meaning to do for a long time now is upgrade the TSV Editor's Weblog to use a decent blogging package rather than the software I'd whipped up myself (which did little more than let the blogger add an entry). As Movable Type's licence only allows for one user, I opted to install Wordpress.

Installation is a lot easier than MT. Wordpress has almost a third of the files to upload, and they're all in the proper directories in the zip file. It's therefore just a matter of following the brief installation instructions to get started.

I wasn't as impressed with the back end. It doesn't look as elegant as the MT backend. The "dashboard" which is the welcome page you get when you log in is cluttered with news from the Wordpress development blog (MT shows titles from their blog only, and tucked away at the side). That said, the only one who's going to be looking at the back end is going to be the author anyway.

The page for adding an entry is very nice with the advanced options hidden until you click on the appropriate title (I had to google to find out what a "Post slug" was though). I also like the concept of using the blog software to add "pages" too (I.E. HTML pages which aren't actually blog entries).

Prefilling the links list with links to (I presume) the Wordpress developer's blogs was a bit cheeky though!

I haven't yet looked at how easy it is to create skins for Wordpress - that will be the next step, so I can make the Editor's weblog look like it's part of the site.

I got my site stats updated (apparently there's something wrong with the auto-update feature in the latest copy of cpanel, and I've been having to put in support tickets to get the stats updated) only to find that since the 29th, some lousy spammer's been crawling my site with their referrer set to several spam sites.

Coming from random IP addresses (probably open proxies or zombie computers, they burned through some 50mb of bandwidth on the 30th, all to spam a couple of sites in the referrer. And I don't even publish referrer stats for my site, so they wasted their time and my bandwidth for nothing.

An unrelated spammer also hit me recently: I had some odd referrers from a few other blogs - when I checked the entries didn't have links to here on them (though one was clogged with comment spam) so I checked my logs, and found it Mr 61.234.149.52. He would hit my site once to load an entry page (with the referrer set to a random blog entry from elsewhere), then attempt to post to the comments script. As I've put a couple of extra commented-out <form> tags in my HTML, he was hitting the wrong URL and so didn't get anywhere. Fortunately he always came from the same IP address and so was dead easy to ban.

What a pain.

Some kind person was nice enough to sign my car overnight:

Looks like "AMAZOL" or "ANAZOL" with a $ in the 'O'. The policeman I spoke to at the station took some pictures too.

Edit: Jif + Brasso + paint cleaner = no more tag. Nyah!

Issue 33 includes: the influence of the Bible, Norse mythology, and Quatermass on Doctor Who, Kate Orman's opinion piece on the New Adventures, an examination of Terrance Dicks' writing style, the last installment of the Novelisations covering the seventh Doctor's books, a list of actors who've been in both Doctor Who and The Prisoner, and The Box, which describes how dimensional transcendentalism works.

Though this was dubbed the "Alden Bates issue" in the next issue's letters column because of the amount of stuff I had in it, (only 7 items, really...) I much prefer the articles other people had printed. Particularly the items I've mentioned above. My excuse is that the stuff I wrote in this issue was done during my foolish teenage years, though since this issue was published in April 1993, I'm not going to be able to use that excuse for much longer. :)

The back cover also has one of my favourite pieces of artwork of the Master. Is that not great?

A scamster writes: (excerpts only)

Dearest One,

Free your mind.

I am Mrs Elizabeth Kone, the wife of Mr.Willams Kone My Husband was a highly reputable business magnet-(a cocoa merchant)who operated in the capital of Ivory coast during his days.

...and in the nightclubs of Argentina as a Flaminco dancer during his nights, not bad for a lump of magnetized metal (I think the word you're searching for is "magnate"...)

It is sad to say that he passed away mysteriously after one of his business trips abroad .Though his sudden death was linked or rather suspected to have been masterminded by his uncle who travelled with him at that time. But God knows the truth!

The butler did it! Come now, there's was an autopsy, surely?

Before his death he called me in the hospital and told me that he has the sum of fifteen million,five hundred thousand United State Dollars in a trunk box(USD $5.5m ,000) Which he deposited in one of the Security company here in Cote D Ivoire Africa.

"USD $5.5m ,000" eh? That doesn't look at all suspicious! Come now, if you're going to send me a form letter, at least get the values in the input fields right.

Now I am just a widow with two children, and really don't know what to do now, I want an account overseas where I can transfer this funds. This is because I have suffered a lot of set backs as a result of incessant political crisis here in Ivory coast.The death of my Husband actually brought sorrow to my life.

... but joy to the lives of my three children. Wait, did I say three? I meant four children!

Now permit me to ask these few questions:-
1. Can you honestly help me as your widow?
2. Can I completely trust you?
3. What percentage of the total amount in question will be good for you after the money is been transferd in to your account?

1. You want to be my widow? That's very touching, but I'm not dead.
2. Not if you're making noises about wanting to be my widow!
3. My country has high taxes on large bank deposits. There should be a good $40 left by the time they've had at it. How about half and half? I could probably buy a CD with $20...

Please,Consider this and get back to me as soon as possible.

How about NO! HA!

I watched this, only a couple of days late... Tennant is a lot less annoying than he was in the Children in Need short, which was a great relief to me, as I was afraid I was really going to hate his Doctor, and since he's likely to be in the role for the foreseeable future...

Roll on series 2!