Alden Bates' Weblog

Princess Divine Kabore writes:

I am a female student from University of Burkina faso,Ouagadougou,I am 25 yrs old. I like any person who can be caring, loving and home oriented, I will love to have a long-term relationship with you and to know more about you. I would like to build up a solid foundation with you in time coming if you can be able to help me in this transaction.

[Dad died, left six and a half million being paid into Etruscan's Permit In burkina Faso.company(E.P.I.B.F)and Etruscan's Gold company]

Please, note that this transaction is 100% risk free and I hope to commence the transaction as quick as possible, I will send to you my picture as soon as I hear from you.

Yours sincereely,
PRINCESS DIVINE.

100% risk free, hmm? That's enough to convince me! Yes! All my 100% risk free transactions involve a complete stranger offering me 6 million dollars by email!

Ouagadougou? Again? Could Princess Divine merely be Amos Zongo in a dress? He must do it a lot (See also Princess Berryfeso and countless others I saw while googling)...

Mrs. Stella Castillo writes:

Please forgive me if this message comes to you as a surprise I was divinely inspired to pick your name among other names found in the Internet database, after series of prayers or Gods direction.

OMG! The INTERNET DATABASE! The internet has a database?

> select * from Internet where type="PR0N!"
4,563,786,549 rows returned

Hooray!

The new index page design for issues of TSV, as proudly displayed by the newly added TSV 72 is not valid XHTML. If you run it through a validator, you will get an error.

"Why is it not valid XHTML?!" you may cry in anguish. The reason for this is quite simple - the page numbers are displayed alongside each item using a "value" attribute. If you look at the relevant section of the HTML 4.01 spec you'll see that the "value" attribute has been "depreciated". However the writers of the specification did not give an alternative to "value" that doesn't look like arse.

I tried using css to fiddle with li:before, but didn't like the way it displayed the numbers. I'll demonstrate.

Continue reading "Depreciation without Replacement"

This time they pulled the Mazda logo off the boot. I could understand if it was an expensive brand of car, but a Mazda logo?

Humanity, you suck.

Every time I got to check my Yahoo! mail now, this advert is totally trying to guilt me. It's like:

<advert> If you love animals, help free them from cruelty.
* Alden ignores the advertising as usual.
<advert> YOU HATE ANIMALS! WHY DO YOU HATE ANIMALS?! WHAT KIND OF A PERSON ARE YOU?!
<Alden> WARGH! WTF?
<advert> LOOK AT THIS DOG! ISN'T IT CUTE?! WHY DO YOU HATE IT?!
<Alden> *mutter*

I don't hate animals, and I'm sure the WSPA is a great charity, but since I'm in NZ, I'm more likely to donate to the NZ SPCA...

No, stop looking at me with puppy-dog eyes.

(BTW, why is the Auckland SPCA bogarting the spca.org.nz domain?)

I was reading today Dominion Post while eating breakfast when a letter titled "Daleks out to destroy" caught my eye. It was someone complaining about a new apartment block, and only the last paragraph had anything to do with Doctor Who:

Wellington City Council and its city planners - obviously positively divine. They're not of this Earth. Maybe they're from Outpost Gallifrey? Daleks, perhaps?

You know your web site is famous when people writing letters to newspapers in far-flung countries mistake it for the planet! Not that I'm jealous or anything. :)

You can now pretty much see why I haven't posted in the past week by going and looking at the NZDWFC site. TSV 72, the first with Adam McGechan's new look design, was mailed out, so to go with the new logo (pictured right) the site also got an overhaul dragging it kicking and screaming into the 00s with validating xhtml!

At the moment, only the main pages are converted over - the archive of back issues still sports the old look (and the editor's weblog is still using the default WordPress template), but I'll be upgrading those pages in stages as well. The pages in the archive will have a special "Archive" menu to hopefully make it easier to navigate, plus I'll be improving their looks and so on. That should keep me busy for a wee while. :)

The reason for the title up there is a bit of a story. Several years ago now, I noticed that Alexa didn't have any "Related Sites" listed for Tetrapyriarbus. There was a link to suggest some sites, so I did, and Alexa dutifully added them to the list, which you can see here. Fast-forward to now, and three of the sites are now defunct.

So I looked around to see if there was any way to take, say, Flying Pig off the list, or even notify them the site's no longer there, but it doesn't seem like there is... Perhaps Alexa should look at going through their database and checking which sites are still there and which aren't?

As you've probably heard, Al Lewis who played Grandpa Munster sadly died yesterday. Coincidentally tonight I watched the Lost in Space episode "Rocket to Earth" which features Al Lewis as the wizard Zalto.

Jeff alerted me to a bizarre mystery involving Zalto. At one point during the episode he states that Neptune has three rings. Neptune does have three main rings. The only problem is that the rings appear to have been first discovered in the 80s (thinkquest.org says they were first detected in 1983) while "Rocket to Earth" was screened in 1967.

Presumably the only person who could shed light on how the rings came to be mentioned over a decade earlier than they were discovered is episode writer Barney Slater, but unfortunately he died in 1978, so the mystery remains...

(Unless my info about the year the rings were discovered is totally wrong, of course. :)

On a somewhat more advanced note than Lost in Space, today I watched the first four episodes of the recent Captain Scarlet remake.

In ther original, Captain Scarlet (member of elite security organisation SPECTRUM) was rendered invulnerable by the Mysterons. The Mysterons dwell in a city on Mars, and were provoked by humans into starting a war whereby they wish to destroy Earth and its inhabitants. The original show was done using puppets. The new show is done using CGI, and it's allowed the makers to do much more than could have been done int her original.

The updated Mysteron city looks gloriously like something from a movie rather than a TV series. In fact, all four of the episodes felt more like half-hour movies instead of episodes of a TV show. In the fourth episode, our heroes go to Mars to rescue some scientists, and the production all the way through feels more like a big-budget motion picture.

Seems to be the in-thing in Britain at the moment to do remakes that blow everything else out of the water. Excellent. :)

From the Lost in Space episode "The Golden Man", the title character Keema(Dennis Patrick) carries Judy Robinson(Marta Kristen) out from the centre of a mine field.

I have to say, I've never considered the idea of disguising mines as badly-inflated beach balls. It seems to me they'd be sorta easy to spot and avoid...

Also featured in this episode: Christmas Tree lights pretending to be barbed wire. CLASSIC!

(via Bob01): Poll Examines Music Buyers and Their Needs

While one-quarter of the nation's music fans say they've downloaded songs onto their computers — legally or otherwise — a new nationwide poll suggests music executives should look elsewhere to explain their business woes.

Three in every four fans complain that compact discs are too expensive, and 58 percent complain that music in general is getting worse, according to the poll conducted for The Associated Press and Rolling Stone magazine.

So the problem's not downloading but the fact that CDs are too expensive, and music's getting crapper? Perhaps they should stop putting crappy DRM products on their CDs and take a look at making the music better, hmm?

As you may have guessed from the title, another issue of TSV has gone up on the NZDWFC site. TSV 34 came out in mid 1993 - the "It's Back!" on the front cover referred to the ill-fated production The Dark Dimension which never really got off the ground.

One of the features of this issue was the publishing of the results of a short story contest won by Nicholas Withers with a Quatermass crossover. Then's also a feature on the amazing Kandyman costume which won the Judges Choice award at DefCon 1993, and another speculation on the future of Doctor Who.

Also, as you can tell from the artwork page Tim Hill produced a large amount of the artwork for this issue, but that quantity is dwarfed by the couple of dozen pieces he had in TSV 40!

Next up I will be upgrading the NZDWFC site to XHTML and updating the style. :)