Alden Bates' Weblog

Someone googling for railway line buyers found my post back in July and apparently decided that I was, in fact, an interested buyer. I guess the word "scam" in the title was too subtle to tip them off.

... right.

A huge swath of material from TSV 38 is now up on the site.

Included are interviews with director Michael Hayes and New Adventures author Gareth Roberts. There's also the fourth and final instalment of Paul Scoones' series on the Novelisations, covering this time the second Doctor. The Novelisations series never covered Doctors four, five or six, because five stories were never officially novelised (the NZDWFC versions are gradually going up on the site too!).

In amongst the comic strips (including the return of Tardis Tales after a one-issue absence), is Lesser-Known Who-Gear, the first of many pieces by Peter Adamson which the zine published. Another first is the first Script to Screen covering Dragonfire, which has the alternate ending in which Mel stays on as companion. :)

Now days you can buy remote-controlled Daleks, but back then Stephen Prichard built his own using a Sevans Dalek kit and wrote an article on it. I wonder if he ever did make the accompanying Davros he mentioned...

Right! What's next? :)

Edit: As usual, Paul's put up a far more elegant write-up!

Just when I thought I'd seen every wacky Transformers concept, the Japanese prove me wrong.

BEHOLD! TRANSFORMERS KISS PLAYERS!

(Yes, that site is in Japanese, here's a page with a flash demo of Optimus)

Back in the old days, we had Powermasters, where you had to link a smaller robot to the larger robot to make him transform. This is a similar concept in that Optimus can only transform when he receives a kiss from the anime girl he's supplied with. (I have no idea if there's some sort of mechanical functionality here, and I don't think I want to know).

Here Optimus snuggles up with his human friend Melissa. Optimus, you dawg.

Optimus also has a hot pink sword which transforms into a surfboard for Melissa to ride.

See also today's Shortpacked.

That's going to make one crazy tie-in cartoon.

Blokes-only barber faces sex discrimination case

Swan Barbers says it has a policy of not cutting women's hair.

This infuriated student Maddy Drew who had been a loyal customer of Swan Barbers for five years. In May, everything changed when the barber, a woman, refused to cut Drew's hair.

"She said to me she couldn't serve me because I was a woman. She said it was company policy." ...

... It is an offence under the Human Rights Act to deny services to someone because of their race, colour, ethnic or national origin.

Drew's case will test the principle in terms of gender. Her sexual discrimination claim against Swan Barbers goes to mediation on August 24.

I completely agree it should be illegal to discriminate on the basis of gender, however my question is: assuming her case succeeds, what will this mean for all of the women-only gyms? Will they be forced to allow men to join or face possible prosecution?

I like reporting spammers. It's fun knocking out their web sites when they spam me.

I tried doing that just now when I got one on the NZDWFC message board, and got this response back:
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 554 5.7.1 Rejected 210.54.141.245 found in dnsbl.sorbs.net

Looks like Xtra's mail server has been added to SORBS. I'm sending the spam report again via gmail, along with a suggestion they might want to switch to a better system for blocking spams.

[Previously: SORBS strikes back]

I've installed quite a few custom characters on Unreal Tournament since getting it. Being a bit of a Transformers buff, when I saw someone had created Optimus and Megatron characters, I immediately downloaded them.

Copy of Unreal Tournament: $40
Downloading Transformers character from the internet: free
Seeing Optimus Prime doing victory pelvis thrusts for the first time?

PRICELESS.

The paged categories plugin I mentioned here is all done and I've put it up for people to download and use. I've also added a Paged Categories plugin page from which it can be downloaded.

Next I'll submit it to the MT plugin directory, and then I promised someone I'd make some more Greg the Bunny Livejournal icons...

OK, so a few days ago I complained about Movable Type not having a static paging option for category archives. There's several dynamic solutions out there, this one which uses mt-view.cgi, and MTPaginate which does it using PHP, but I'm old fashioned when it comes to web publishing and like my files static if possible.

Over the last few days I've been developing a plug-in for Movable Type, and it's finally in working order. My category archives are finally paginated, and the pages are all static so you don't get database hits every time someone looks at it. There's a bunch of tags defined so you can print things like "Page 1 of 15!" and have navigation links.

There a number of non-portable things at the moment, like it hardcoding the file extensions to html, and the back-end is really ugly and a bit hacky in places, but once I've tidied it up, I'll be able to release it into the wild...

Here's an interesting bit of information I wasn't previously aware of: If you tell Internet Explorer that you're working offline, then MSN Messenger loses the ability to connect. Even if you're actually online. Once you tell IE that you're working online again, off MSN will go.

Computers! Can't live with them, can't insert them into Bill Gates.