January 2007 Archives

From Geoff Wessel via the Rustyverse: CBC's archive of character designs for the never made animated Doctor Who series.

Alas, it's got funky Javascript navigation, so I can't link to particular pictures, but there's some interesting image of a TARDIS interior with a very techno-organic console, a hover-converted Bessie, and what appears to be a Cyber-converted supermodel.

Recently I've been getting spam comments from someone who likes to leave a random humorous story evidently culled from somewhere on the interweb, followed by links to their pages. Here is one of the latest examples:

A Girlfriend Called Lorraine

There was a guy and he had a girlfriend called Lorraine. She was very pretty and he liked her a lot.

One day he went to work to find that a new girl had started working there. Her name was Clearly, and she was absolutely gorgeous.

He began to like her and after a while it became obvious that she was interested in him too. But, he was a loyal man and he wouldn't get involved with Clearly while he was still going out with Lorraine.

He decided that there was nothing for him to do but to break up with Lorraine and date the new girl. He planned several times to tell Lorraine but he couldn't bring himself to do it.

One day as they were walking along the river bank, Lorraine slipped and fell in to the river. The current carried her off and she drowned.

The guy stopped for a moment by the river and then ran off smiling and singing..." I can see Clearly now Lorraine is gone..."

:D:D:D:D

[links snipped]

Naturally I was immediately compelled to report the spammer to their web host. I mean spamming is one thing, but there's no call for that.

I was watching a Knight Rider episode ("Knight of the Drones", to be precise, and as the following screen grabs will demonstrate, it provides proof that KITT is programmed in BASIC:

"KITT, give me a readout"

It prints out the sin, cos and tan of 30 random number between 0 and 9, then what looks like entries from Paramount picture's phone book (Mimi Soudan and C Gibson who were listed I found mentioned on this page. Other distinctive names from the list: John Sitcom (inventer of the sitcom??), Deke Miller, David Cazarus, Bill Busak, Chris Alsip, Dave Devlin.

Then after that there's what looks like the start of a news story: "What the heck? The jury decision to deny Mayor Smith his choice of-". The Mayor of LA (where the episode was filmed) in the 80s was Thomas Bradley, so what this was in reference to is a mystery...

The latest Google Webmaster Central blog entry A Quick Word About Googlebombs announces that Google has solved the whole Googlebomb problem, which was typified most famously by the "Miserable failure" bomb. And sure enough, miserable failure doesn't work any more.

However, French Military Victories still does, at least for now. :)

When I was in Wellington this evening, my eye was caught by this poster advertising an upcoming gig featuring Wellington band The Ramps:

Recent issues of Aardvark have been about the blog CYFSWATCH, and more specifically about how the New Zealand government has been trying to get the blog shut down. Bruce Simpson compares this to the Chinese government censoring Google. I'm on the edge of my seat waiting to hear if Google is going to capitulate to their demands or not...

As of now (25/01/2007 6pm) it's still up.

Our first contestant this evening posts has been mentioned here

So far he's been posting roughly once a day, leaving comments which start off with phrases like "Pleasse Do not delete this urls , i need money for my child", "Please Do not delete it , I need lots of money urgent.", and "Do not delete it please. I need money urgent". He uses http://google.com/ as a link, probably to trigger whitelisting, but his comments a filled with links to message boards on phpbbx.de (I'm sent an email to their abuse address), myforum.ro. The email addresses he uses are along the lines of corpseh@tut.by, seomail1@tut.by, seomail2@tut.by, etc.

The message board links all redirect to pages on the domain online-deals.org (I've just informed their web host). Whois information is mostly blank, but there is this:

Registrant Name: Alexey Tesliuk
Registrant Organization: BelPromStroy
Registrant Country: BY (Belarus)
Registrant Email: wrestlerr@mail.ru

I have no idea if that's valid info or not. There's a Belpromstroy bank in Minsk...

Contestant number two posts using hotmail addresses like d87s_test994@hotmail.com and d92s_test637@hotmail.com, but all other information is randomised. Comments consist of a random text string followed by four URLs in various formats consisting of links to files on site which allow file uploads. These links redirect to rx-simple.com and rx-simple-pharmacy.com. Both domains have their details protected by WhoisGuard - I've sent them two reports, and also sent abuse reports to the web-hosts the two sites are on.

Randomly, I was driven to look up info on the other Ghostbusters.

Back in 1975, long before the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, Filmation put out 15 episodes of a live action series titled "The Ghost Busters" (IMDB Wikipedia) which featured a team of three who investigated paranormal events. The three investigators were Jake Kong (Larry Storch), Eddie Spencer (Forrest Tucker), and Tracy the Ape (Bob Burns in a gorilla costume). 70s Live Action Kid Vid has a Ghost Busters page with some fascinating pictures.

Of course, in the 80s, a completely unrelated live action movie titled Ghostbusters came out. After some legal wrangling, Filmation put out a cartoon titled "Filmation's Ghostbusters" to more or less cash in on the movie's popularity. The cartoon, which ran for 65 episodes, featured the sons of the original Kong and Spencer (IMDB Wikipedia). Eddie Spencer's voice in the cartoon was provided by Peter "Optimus Prime" Cullen. :)

This also explains why the tie-in cartoon to the Ghostbusters movie was retitled "The Real Ghostbusters"...

Recently I got hold of and watched Star Trek: The Animated Series. Not only did it introduce such concepts as the Holodeck years before The Next Generation, but it also features some of the stiffest animation known to man. I also made many screen shots from some of which I constructed this panorama of the animated bridge:

I've also made some LiveJournal icons which will made available shortly in the Trek section of my LiveJournal Icons page.

I have a few ideas for entries, but they involve things I have to Get Around To, so here's an update entry:

Work continues apace on the Harvey Norman Center:

They have some exterior walls on now!

The Foxwoods protest was apparently a bust - although twice as many people as usual called out, they were able to cover the shortfall. Bummer.

Xtra Broadband seems to have settled down speedwise, though now I keep having pages fail to load the first time I try them. Needs more work.