Alden Bates' Weblog

Not only is it TSV's 19th birthday this month, but according to my hosting history post it's also (roughly!) the 10th birthday of this web site. In net terms, that's positively ancient. I hate to think how many hours of time I've devoted to this beast...

Suddenly I feel very old. :)

Here, have a piece of Dalek cake:

With four episodes of series 2 left to go, here's how I rank the stories shown so far:

1. The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit
2. The Idiot's Lantern
3. The Girl in the Fireplace
4. School Reunion
5. The Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel
6. New Earth
7. Tooth and Claw

... although that list is somewhat deceptive since I'd rate New Earth 6/10 and Tooth and Claw only 1/10, so there should really be a big gap in there. The series seems to be improving as it goes on, but then three of the remaining four episodes are written by my least-favourite writer, so it may be downhill from here... Incidentally, can some one please let Mr Davies know that "story arc" does not mean "name checking something in every episode"?

I'm finding that the one thing that is really annoying me this series is David Tennant as the Doctor. More specifically, every time he goes into "AWWWWWWW, you HUMANS! You're BRILLIANT, you are. Giveus a hug!" mode, I want to hit him. But the rest of the time he's all right.

This comment spammer has been hitting my weblog the last couple of days. An attack involves him hitting the same post a dozen times or so and posting a handful of spam comments. The comments all look the same:

Hi, guys. Very nice site! I saw some interesting pages:

(ten links using [url= format)
(ten links using <a href= format)
(ten bare URLs)
Please look it! Thank.

The comments are all signed "Aariz (antohach@mail.ru)". Both the oncasinogame.com and cubacigar.org domains he uses are hosted in Dallas, Texas, and have the same whois information:

alex gudsf (scrimak@mail.ru)
tverskay street 43
rostov
RU

Only a google search for scrimak@mail.ru turned up anything other than spam, but the pages are all in Russian, which I can't read. Though one included an ICQ number which had little extra information other than the nickname "Scrim", and he's been posting on a Russian forum as "dimvols".