Alden Bates' Weblog

I say not. I mean, seriously, look at this image of Amanda Tapping from today's Stargate SG-1:

Need I say more?

NZ Gamer has some photos up from Video Games Live - you can find the photos here. Including some of the fellow dressed as Sonic the Hedgehog who won the costume competition. For painting himself entirely blue, I think he deserved it.

Unfortunately I also got caught by the camera! That'll teach me for loitering outside the venue.

A couple of months ago I bought my current computer from First In who had it as their daily special (they've featured the system several times since then). So how's it looking so far?

Well, it's nice and fast, particularly when playing Unreal Tournament, and I've finally been able to play Doom 3 (I wasn't brave enough to try installing it on my old PC). It hasn't crashed except that one time but that was because XP doesn't really deal with dud drivers well and no reflection on the hardware.

The only problem I've had with it (other than the absence of a floppy drive, though that's not really much of a handicap in this day and age, plus it has a flashcard reader instead) is that every time I play a video file, I get this popup in the top-right corner of the screen saying "Powered by ASUS Splendid video enhancement technology".

Although, I've just discovered how to switch that off, so, er, never mind! (it was hiding in the display settings)

One of my many comment spammers keeps sending spams that I should share some of my bookmarks, so here's a few of the sites I've been visiting recently:

Steampunk Star Wars Actually I nicked this link off Boing Boing last night. It is very cool though. DM of the Rings Jamas and Peter (who doesn't have a blog) mentioned this in the pub one night, and I googled it when I got home. A very funny comic imagining Lord of the Rings if it were being played by D&D gamers. This installment has been one of my favourite so far, but do start reading from the beginning. The Transformers Wiki Which I end up spending hours reading every time Dave Willis at Short Packed links to it. I'm so sad. Bowmaster Prelude Pictured left, a shockwave flash game in which you defend your castle against hordes of oncoming enemy fighters. Which I appear to have just broken. Ooops. Warning: playing this game warps the space/time continuum. You will find after you've been playing for what seems like half an hour, three days have past!

Yes, it's time for another issue of TSV! Now that TSV 44 is online, there are only 20 issues of TSV (45-64) which aren't currently available either online or in print. Issue 44 contains (amongst many, many excellent items): a scathing indictment of the New Adventures, an article on the many and varied hoaxes perpetrated on Doctor Who fans, the making of the Dark Dimension, and a response to the Seeds of Doom article from last issue.

I had two pieces in this issue. A Masterful Life is an attempt to detail the Master's life. I've updated this a bit before putting it online to cover some of the more notable canonical appearances of the Master since 1995. The other piece was this montage of the Master which I did to accompany said article. The only bit of that artwork I'm really happy with is the Cyberman. Ah well, c'est la vie.

Also in this issue is Morgan Davie's Doctor Who story generator, which I've embellished by adding an automatic generator to the bottom using Javascript. Unfortunately I was only able to test it in Internet Explorer and Firefox, so if it doesn't work in your favourite browser, please let me know.

I decided that this, too, needed updating, so I've created an automatic story generator you can use to get started on your script for the new Doctor Who series being made in Wales!

Previously: TSV 43

My original intention was to completely rewrite the PagedArchives plugin, test it over the course of the next week or so, and release it next weekend. However, having done 95% of the rewrite yesterday, I discovered that when I rebuilt all the category files, MT would only run P.A. on the last file built. Since it uses the same callback as version 1 which works fine, I can't fathom at all why that would be.

So instead I'm releasing a revised version of version 1 with some of the more pending issues raised in the comments on the P.A. v1.2 entry. The main issue which should now be fixed is the construction of navigation URLs (rather than the crappy method I was using to construct them before, I'm now using either the URL MT gives me, or constructing one using the same method used by MT).

Not fixed in this version (but hopefully should be in version 2) is the problem zero had of running out of memory.

You can get version 1.23 on the PagedArchives plugin page. If you're using this plugin, please report bugs in the comments here.

It was with some surprise this morning that I found out I was going to Video Games Live with my brother. He writes reviews for NZ Gamer and thus had procured two free tickets. I actually knew about this a while ago but had forgotten about it in the meantime...

I wasn't quite sure what to expect (Two hours of Pong?) but as it turned out it was the Vector Wellington Orchestra and Chapman Tripp Opera Chorus (I'm a sucker for orchestras with choirs) playing some bloody good music. Though I have to admit that apart from the retro games (they started off with a medley of music from the likes of Asteroids, Defender, and (yes) Pong), I haven't actually played any of the games they performed music from. Am I slack or what? All the same, I very much enjoyed the music (although not as much as some of the audience members, who seemed to be getting a little too excited) and the light show and game footage. Kudos to all people involved.

Unfortunately my good camera is broken, but here's a crappy cellphone photo:

I was especially impressed with Martin Leung's piano playing skills. I've never ever seen anyone play arcade game music on a piano at that speed. If I could play the piano half as well as him, I'd be a happy (and probably rich) man.

Almost as impressive were the audience member who got up on stage to play Space Invaders (by jumping back and forth to move the spaceship), and the two audience members who played Frogger for a $4,000 laptop. Performance anxiety much?

A great (and unexpected) evening!

I ambled in to my local dairy this morning to find a new energy drink on the shelves!

Tab Energy is a "low calorie energy drink" (sounds like a contradiction in terms but is just a diet drink with the usual high levels of caffeine) produced by Coca Cola. I suspect this is to supplement their current range of energy drinks (Lift Plus and e²) rather than replace them, and I'll be interested to see what demographic the advertising is aimed at.

Available in a hot pink can, Tab Energy is roughly the same colour as its packaging and tastes of strawberries.

I was looking at Google Webmaster Tools before and noticed that after years of languishing at at around 50th hit for the query "Alden", I'm now at 12th position. I'm headin' for the top, baby!

I'm still confused over something on the "Crawl stats" page though: For months and months now, it's reported that over half the pages on tetrap.com have "PageRank not yet assigned" like so:

I can't tell if this is a glitch in the system (it's counting pages which are blocked from being indexed or something?) or simply that it's not being updated.

I've just knocked a long-standing item off my todo list: Every page on tetrap.com is now validated strict XHTML. This means that the pages will all be a lot more compatible with browsers other than Internet Explorer.

The last section that needed to be converted was The DiscContinuity Guide, which was unfortunately last updated more than two years ago. The HTML code it contained was very old (and buggy in a couple of places) but is now all fixed up and shiny.

This also marks the first time in a few year that tetrap.com has had a uniform look to it (except the NZDWFC site which has a look of its own).

My good mood is only slightly spoiled by the fact that TV2 have resumed playing new episodes of Stargate SG-1 at 1pm on Saturdays and DIDN'T BOTHER TO TELL ANYONE! It appears I've only missed the first episode of season 9 (yes, NZ is two years behind) though...