December 2004 Archives

So after a bit of messing about with configurations, we now have a wireless network set up here, and the computers can see each other and surf the net via broadband. It's not perfect though. There's a lot of noise along with the signal and a lot of dropped packets. I suspect much of the noise is from the appliances in the kitchen. Is there any reliable way of determining the source of radio noise?

At least now we can transfer files around and possibly even play games...

For various reasons, one of these being Windows 98 was becoming increasingly unstable (e.g. halting the system when I attempted to create directories (or Folders, if you were introduced to computers after about 1995 (but I digress))) I went about installing Windows XP on Saturday. This went OK, and before long I had most of my software reloaded.

Unfortunately, after that, it all went a bit pear shaped.

Good luck to Björk, who's nominated for two awards this year for Medulla and Oceania. She was nominated for best packaging on Family Tree last year, but didn't win.

I'm not sure whether this is a good or bad thing. It may prompt more people to buy Medulla, which is good, but on the other hand Medulla is not exactly the most accessible of albums. Even Björk's fans are deeply divided on it. On the other (third??) hand, the first Björk album I heard was Homogenic, which isn't exactly accessible either, and it's still my favourite of her albums.

On a related but tangental topic: Lord of the Rings, and the "Best Song Written For A Motion Picture, Television Or Other Visual Media" award.

2002. Enya, May It Be - nominated but didn't win.
2003. ????
2004. Annie Lennox, Into The West - nominated

I guess Emiliana Torrini isn't well known enough to get nominated. Though I note that one of the nominations this year is Kylie Minogue's single Slow, which she co-wrote.

I've finally upgraded my Movable Type installation to 3.131 and also installed MT-Blacklist to see if it stops the increasing amounts of comment spam coming my way recently. The installation instructions for the plugin weren't too clear, and the configuration pages all have a "concatenation" error of some sort at the bottom of them. I may need to update another file somewhere...

At any rate, perhaps now I'll get more legitimate comments than spam. :)

Bruce Simpson writes on making electronics less attractive, having been burgled on the weekend and most of his stuff taken. Bruce was previously bankrupted by the NZ government after he designed and built a do-it-yourself cruise missile.

As he points out, even passwords on PCs can be circumvented. I suspect any such measure on electronics such as DVD players is going to have similar problems... Besides which, you'd end up with hundreds of people locked out after a power cut because they can't remember the pass code for their microwave, all calling technical support. :)

As I was driving home, I noticed the car in front of me had the number plate "SUPOOH". I can't work out what it's supposed to mean. Could mean Winnie the Pooh is now a sysadmin (Super User Pooh) or possibly it's some sort of slang (S'up Ooh. Who's Ooh?)...

Why get a personalised plate and put something that cryptic on it??

TSV 28 is now online. It includes some cool stuff like interviews with Paul Cornell and David Halliwell, the last part of Jeff Stone's Murder at Midnight, an analysis of The War Machines, and some pretty cool artwork and cartoons. :)

There are one or two pieces still to come for that issue as well...

Weekly World News: Monkeys Type Shakespeare Play

Ripshaw assembled 5,000 monkeys and an equal number of typewriters. The monkeys were rewarded with bananas every time they filled up a page with letters.

"Ninety-nine percent of it was nonsense," Ripshaw says. "But one of the monkeys put up a blog on the Internet, and it has a big following."

Snicker

MPs say I do to civil unions

This is excellent! The head of Destnazi Cult was, of course, on TV complaining that society was going to pot, but that's to be expected.

Take two, as I managed to crash Firefox last time...

Ya know what I'm tired of? Referrer spammers. Seriously, I'm tired of seeing a bizarre site pop up in the referrer list, and going to visit it, only to discover it's some completely irrelavant site selling yoghurt or something. No, really, WTF?

There were still some 3000 or so 301 redirections, again, mostly due to Yahoo, but judging by a recent post on the Yahoo! Search Blog they're on top of it. Excellent. Now about some of those other search crawlers (Grub, for instance, doesn't treat 301 redirections properly).

Anyway, on with the pointless stuff: Ze most popular DiscContinuity Guide Entries were:

1. Land of the Dead
2. The Twilight Kingdom
3. Davros
4. Storm Warning
5. The Natural History of Fear

We are behind on those. People will be punished. Or something. Anyway, the most popular NZDWFC archive items were:

1. Moonboots and Dinner Suits review
2. Who Killed Kennedy eBook
3. I Exterminated JNT
4. Build Your Own TARDIS review
5. Davros artwork

So much the same as last time, only with an added obsession for moon boots. Why, I wonder...