Alden Bates' Weblog

Good morning, April (I meant to post this yesterday, when it would have been 25% closer to the start of the month, but oh well...)

Continue reading "Random Sunrise Photo!"

Goodnight March!

Continue reading "Random Sunset Photo 2"

Just because.

Here's a partial image of the cover of the Wellington White Pages:

Pop quiz: What is the logo on the left there supposed to be? Is it:

1. One guy punching another guy in the armpit?
2. Two people synchronised swimming?
3. Two catapaults, loaded with ballast?

Answers on the back of a postcard.

In the paper this morning was this item: Kylie wants Wellington strip club poster removed.

London lawyers for pop princess Kylie Minogue have demanded a Wellington strip club remove what it says is a picture of the singer from its window.

Clear cut case! But the owner claims that the picture is not, in fact, of Kylie Minogue:

He said his designer downloaded the image from an internet site three months ago and used it for a window poster. It was not labelled as a photograph of Minogue and he said he could not see the resemblance.

After a five minutes googling, I found said picture on a wallpaper site, clearly marked as being a picture of Kylie Minogue. You can see it on this post, tastefully cropped so you can't see her boobies, so this blog doesn't get an NC17 rating. But even without looking, she's pretty recognisable.

"I'm not convinced, eh? What would a nice girl like Kylie be doing in a wet top like that?"

Has he seen the lingerie calendars she's put out? I smell a publicity stunt.

I suspect that fireworks are going to be banned next year, given that every Guy Fawkes their sale becomes more and more restrictive. Mostly because, as Jamas fears, fireworks result in a lot of house fires.

But hey, this is the 21st century! Why are we still lighting paper tubes filled with gun powder? The future is in holographic fireworks! Safe, fun, and recyclable! Considering how cheap lasers seem to be these days (how much can you get a CDROM drive for?) it surely shouldn't cost that much to mass produce that sort of thing by now..?

This morning I discovered all the Coke cans at a petrol station near work had been replaced. Instead of the usual standard-sized cans, they'd turned into tall thin things, which looked like slightly larger energy drink cans. Whereas the old cans held 355ml, the new ones held 300ml but were more expensive. After a spot of googling, I found this article.

Consider me boggled. Is it possible for a soft drink to jump the shark?

Dear world

If I every use the word "gutted", and my internal organs are all safely inside me, you have my permission to whap me upside the head.

(A word I suspect we're going to be hearing a lot of on New Zealand television in the next week or so :P

It amused me this morning that, of all the stories the Dominion Post could have picked to headline their front page, they picked the story about a British tourist being kicked out of Christchurch Casino because her breasts were too big. Will Christchurch Casino hire someone to stand at the door with a tape measure?

Or instead of discriminating against random people, they could maybe handle their loan shark problem.

Also spotted in the news today, hidden in this item on vote-rigging in an email poll for a show TVNZ are doing:

Details of the false emails have been referred to the police.

Exactly what cybercrime would the perps be charged with, I wonder.

According to TV3 News, they've spent the last two days bickering and attacking each other instead of, you know, making law and running the country. Exactly why do we pay them an obscene amount of money to sit in a chamber all day calling into question each other's integrity/abilities/parentage?

Bloglines pointed me at a blog entry about knitting, because I have a search subscription on Bonnie Langford. This time it's picked up on this gem, the cover of a knitting book. I recognise Bonnie, Joanna Lumbley and Richard Briers, but I'm not sure who the fellow in glasses is at bottom left...

Lots of short items which I can't be bothered writing full posts for:

Prime TV is going to start screening Series 3 of Doctor Who on August 19th. You can read more about it here (I know the page layout sucks - I'm going to tidy it up on the weekend).

Blogger: Please add a bulk submittal version of your spam reporting tool, so I when I get spammed with 200 blogspot URLs, I can report all of them at once.

I believe the hacker who's been trying to hack into my site to be a Brazilian who goes by the handle Nicksom2d. One of the scripts used to try to hack in was located on a hacked site, with a main page title "Owned by Nicksom2d from Brazil". Nicksom2d also wrote there "I never really hated the stupids admins but I hate the admin that make a website and ignore all the possibilities of invasion, sometimes I would be a hacker... just it..." Word.

Stone Age, one of my favourite groups, has a new album out, Totems d'Armorique! And it's, like, almost totally different to their other albums.

The NZDWFC site had 7720 unique visitors last month, beating its previous best of 7624 set in May.

Apparently there are approximately four times more people searching for Transformers Robot Heroes than there are for Transformers slash. This proves Robot Heroes are better than sex.

The Bill Gates eyes program I made years ago on a whim got downloaded over a thousand times last month. No, I don't know why.

Three search queries of note used to find my site in July:

• wallet with masturbate (eh?)
• how to pronounce earth (It's "urf")
• alden porn (I'm flattered, but... no.)

Because apparently posting one crappy photo of some toys got me to first position on Google for the search phrase Transformers robot heroes. And because I'm bored.

Primus being the closest thing the TFs have to a god. I hope I don't have to explain the rest of it. :)

If, for some reason, you have actually found this post while looking for Transformers slash, you could always try here (seriously).

I'm entirely too addicted to collecting Robot Heroes. What's the use of growing up if you're not allowed to play with toys any more?

Behind you! Oh, never mind.

Shamus asks Would you have survived in the middle ages?

I've actually considered this before. My main handicap would be my short-sightedness, but I can't think of anything to date which might have been life threatening enough to kill me had modern medicine not been there. Although I do wonder how people managed with short-sightedness before they invented glasses. Just bumped into things a lot, I guess, which might mean I'd have had a fatal accident by falling onto a trebuchet or something.

• I attended the Conspiracy II convention yesterday. The convention is on all Queen's birthday weekend. Among the panels I went to were A History of New Zealand Science Fiction Comics: 1928-2007 and ESP 101. The first was very interesting, as I didn't know a hell of a lot about comics in NZ, outside those which appeared in the Listener and TSV. The latter turned out to be a practical workshop, where we rolled dice and attempted to use pendulums to detect coins hidden under books, and the contents of tin cans. I found I have no ESP ability whatsoever.
• LiveJournal, last week, purged a whole pile of journals reported by a Neo-Nazi group for being paedophiles - many weren't and users were unhappy. Go figure.
• Kiwi DW fanzine Reverse the Polarity is turning their web site into a blog. I got RTP issue 24 in the mail recently, and it was great!
• As you may have noticed, the Tetrap picture on my weblog has changed. The new one was inspired by a similar image on the layout of a blog I saw on Blog Explosion (Write on Track, I think).