Alden Bates' Weblog

Goodnight March!

Continue reading "Random Sunset Photo 2"

Dr Who Tardis on sale on eBay

"A TROWBRIDGE Christian who renounced the evil of Dr Who in favour of his religion is selling his collection on internet auction website eBay."

Yeah, another political post. This will be the last one for a while, hopefully. I hate politics.

Recently the NZ government has been working towards a Free Trade deal with China. A bunch of people, including the Green party, have said the Trade deal should be thrown out due to the way China keeps killing Tibetans, and their crumby human rights record in general. Also, there's talk of boycotting the upcoming Beijing Olympics.

Leaving aside the fact that the Olympics are actually nicely bringing attention to Tibet (and I'm sure some of the athletes will defy the ban on mentioning Tibet), I point you to Statistics New Zealand's External Trade Statistics page.

In 2005, New Zealand imported 3.67 billion dollars worth of stuff from China. In 2006, it was 4.44 billion, and the projected total for 2007 is listed as 5.28 billion. For contrast, in 2006 we exported only 1.74 billion dollars worth of stuff to China, and in 2007 the projection was 1.88 billion. So we're already dropping a fair amount of money into the Chinese economy, and whether or not we get a free trade deal with them isn't likely to change that. We'll go on buying their stuff and giving them money, and they'll go on doing what they're doing.

Or is there something I'm missing?

And so we start on the last year of the 90s with issue 56 - the major item this issue was the Bottom Ten, another Doctor Who Magazine inspired article. Writers examined the ten stories which came lowest in the DWM mega-poll. I'm going to take a look at the stories myself further down this post. TSV 56 also contains not only the first installment of a new Erato comic Pex, but one of my favourite episodes of The Karkus (and the first Christmas episode, despite the issue coming out in January).

The big news this issue was the news about a missing episode, The Lion, turning up in Bruce Grenville's film collection. Paul Scoones wrote about this in the editorial, and Neil Lambess wrote up his first impressions in Indiana Who and the Lost Crusade. The full story is already online in TSV 57.

My favourite piece of artwork is Alistair Hughes' picture of the Destroyer from Battlefield. He also did the State of Decay picture on the back cover, for which we have a colour version as a bonus! Tom Baker looks a little familiar there... :) Also there is Peter Adamson's Mel and Pex artwork for the Bottom Ten entry on Paradise Towers.

See also: write-ups by Paul and Jamas.
Previously: TSV 55

Continue reading "TSV 56"

No, not the US elections, the New Zealand ones. For while the Americans try to decide whether they want Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or John "Dubya II" McCain as president, New Zealand is gearing up for the 2008 elections. Unlike the US elections we vote all at once, so the buildup is purely campaigning.

Last election I posted about the current political parties so I guess it's time I did so again...

Continue reading "Predicting the election outcome"

Made by the same people who make Demon Energy, of course. The chief difference between this and Demon, other than the gold and white Imperial Dalek packaging, seems to be that it's sugar free. They haven't got the Angel Energy website up and running yet, but I'm presuming it won't have pictures of naked men hanging by their penises.

...

Mental scarring! Aieeeeeeee!

For reasons which are currently beyond me, Googlebot has started requesting search result pages from the MT search script I have installed here. Some 500 or so of them yesterday. I have no links to search pages, and many of them appear to be for banal words like "since" and "though", I can only assume that some spam page somewhere has linked to them. Seems odd that it's only Googlebot. I stuck a disallow for it in my robots.txt, though I'm hoping the URLs might still pop up in Google Webmaster Tools so I can see why Googlebot's been hitting them.

Wow, I can't believe it's nearly nine months since the last PagedArchives update.

This version adds two parameters to the MTPASettings tag, and three new tags.

<MTPASettings numofentries="NN"> - PagedArchives does its best to work out how many entries there are on the archive page which it's splitting up. Sometimes it gets the count wrong, usually when the <MTEntries> tag has extra arguments to it. E.g., if you have <MTEntries limit="100">, you could specify <MTPASettings numofentries="100">. You can also use MT tags in the argument, such as <MTPASettings numofentries="<mt:EntriesCount />">

<MTPASettings pagelistlimit="NN"> - Normally <MTPAPageList> will just display a list of all the pages like "1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10", but if you specify a pagelistlimit of, for instance, 5, it will only display the current page number and two pages to either side (As in our example "... 3 4 5 6 7 ..."). Naturally if you're at the start of the list, you'll get the first five pages: "1 2 3 4 5 ...".

<MTPAFirstPage>, <MTPALastPage> - These work in the same way as <MTPANextPage> and <MTPAPreviousPage>, but create links to the first and last pages in the sequence, respectively.

<MTPAEntryExtra entrynumber="NN">Some HTML goes in here</MTPAEntryExtra> - When used within the <MTEntries> tag, this will limit the contained HTML to only appear on the NNth entry on each page. For instance, if you want your Google adverts to appear after the first entry on each page, you could slip in a <MTPAEntryExtra entrynumber="1">(Advert HTML)</MTPAEntryExtra> before the closing </MTEntries>. Note: this currently only works if there are no line breaks in the enclosed HTML.

I think that covers all the changes! As always, you can download PagedArchives on the Paged Archives page.

[Edit: as first published the first argument was erroneously listed as "entrycount" which it should have been "numofentries". My apologies for any problems caused.]

If you do an image search on Google for Doctor Who title sequence, you'll see that I've managed to sneak a screenshot of the USS Voyager into fourth position. Screenshot with the image enhanced so you can see it better:

Yes, I'm proud of my sneaking Trek into a Doctor Who search query.

Man, I really slacked off last month - 5 posts total, making it my slowest month since June 2006. Anyway, I'm having an unusually productive Sunday - I've caught up on most of my backload of DVDs, so I'm listening to The Blessing Tree and messing with things. Next task: work out why I can no longer edit templates in Movable Type.