Alden Bates' Weblog

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.

Onto the first issue for 1995 - TSV 42 would have come out right after I finished university, in fact. Among the major items this time are a guide to the Doctor Who annuals, a script to screen on The Happiness Patrol, and an article on the TARDIS key. There's also a follow-up to TSV 41's Lovecraft article this time examining the Cthulhu references in the new adventure All-Consuming Fire, which makes a nifty counterpoint to an article from TSV 58 which has been online for a while and examines the Sherlock Holmes side of the same book.

I had one item in this issue, a "Dr Hoo" cartoon which no doubt shows off the fact I had no photo-references for the control room from Planet of Fire. Note also that the Doctor is always facing away from us so I didn't have to attempt to draw his face (the Master's a lot easier - just slap a goatee on him) and Tegan doesn't appear at all despite the Doctor mentioning her in frame 1!

And that was the last Dr Hoo strip I did for TSV, though I've done one or two other cartoons - the latest being Dr Who in "The Crap Pun", a collaboration with Jeff Stone which appeared in TSV 73 which you can order in paper form...

Next time, in TSV 43: Andy Lane, Paul Cornell, Steven Moffat and David Bishop; the return of TARDIS Tales, More than 30 Years in the TARDIS, and lots of other cool stuff. :)

Previously: Doctor Who and the Pirate Planet

I was sifting through the spam comments which my protective measures had stopped, and found to my surprise I was getting spammed with google.com URLs. It looks like there's a security hole in Google Groups beta which allows users to upload files containing Javascript redirects. Observe the following URL:
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/pharmed/

When I tried to report this through the abuse form Google have set up, I got the following error:
The following errors need to be corrected:
• Sorry, we are unable to find the message you specified.

I've sent them a message through the contact form, but had no response, or apparently any action taken so far...

I gave a friend of mine a copy of Star Trek: Legacy for Christmas. This game, published by Bethesda Softworks, is the latest and greatest in the Star Trek computer game franchise, and he'd been looking forward to playing it immensely.

Alas, it was not to be. After he installed it, the game refused to play. Windows reported an Access Violation and that was that. Then the PC began resetting abruptly at random intervals. Uninstalling the game didn't help. Reinforcements were called in (Unfortunately as both friend and PC are halfway up the North Island from me, I couldn't render much assistance) and it turns out that Star Trek Legacy had deposited a somewhat nasty piece of work named Starforce on his machine.

Said computer is now undergoing reconstruction, and I'm trying to see if I can get a refund.

Foxwoods Resort Casino is, according to its Wikipedia entry, the largest casino in the world and is extremely profitable for its owners, bringing in millions of dollars a day.

So why are their workers angry at them? Why are they cutting their worker's benefits and expecting them to work long hours and take few holidays? At madatfoxwoods.com the desperate employees are organising to stage a walkoutcallout. The guest book is full of outraged entries:

"anyone heard that new dealers have to sign paper saying they get no benefits (ever) & never fultime status- boy, thats fair. Wanna work here?"

"I am angry!!! I have been at foxwoods since I was a teenager and I am now in my 30s I have seen the way that things have gone from bad to worse! We are the lowest paid in the gaming industry. imagine living in an area that pays 25-35% more than what we ge-"

"My husband works as a valet attendant and the things I see and hear are awful. Tips being taken away for 90days right before christmas might I add. So many peak days, when he was sick he had to call out and lost tickets which is 40% of his pay for 90 da-"

Good luck to all of Foxwood's employees on their callout. I hope your employers sit up, take notice, and start treating you better.

Sometimes I'm apt to clean up the hard drives on my PC. Last night I was doing just this and happened to notice that the directory c:\Program Files\Java was taking up some 360MB. I peeked inside and saw this:

In the Java folder were six more folders named jre1.5.0, jre1.5.0_02, etc, each apparently containing a complete installation of Sun Microsystem's Java runtime environment at 60MB each. It seems that every time JRE prompted me to update, it was installing the update into a new folder, leaving the old one cluttering up my hard drive.

WTF, Sun?

I completely uninstalled the JRE and all patches, and reinstalled the latest version, thus saving myself 300MB or so in disk space, at least until the next time it needs to update...

I've been somewhat lax recently in getting stuff done, and this entry is one of those things. As you probably don't remember me mentioning back in July, there were five¹ Doctor Who stories (from the original series) which were never novelised by Target. All five of these were novelised by the NZDWFC but went out of print last year. In July we put the first of these, Shada, online.

The second book to be put online is The Pirate Planet, the second story of the Key to Time arc season, originally written by Douglas "Hitchhiker's Guide" Adams, and rewritten into book form by David Bishop, author of Who Killed Kennedy, amongst other things.

In the Pirate Planet, the search of the six segments of the Key to Time² brings the Doctor, Romana and K9 to the planet Zanak, which confuses them because they were aiming for an entirely different planet. Equally puzzling is the fact that the ground is littered with precious gems such as diamonds, emeralds, and oolions. The story is peppered with Adamsian humour ("You'll never get it open, it's impossible." "Ha! Impossible? That means it will take 73 seconds.") and touches by David Bishop such as the Pirate Captain's violent premonitions.

There are a few special features such as a guide to the material which is from the original scripts and didn't appear in the televised story (Deleted Scenes) and the original Author's notes from the paper version. The book's also available in PDF format, if that's your thing.

For further reading, check out Paul's entry on the book.

Now I have some time off work, I should be able to catch up a bit on my todo list. :)

¹ Shada's canonicity is arguable since the TV story was never completed and screened, but I give it the benefit of the doubt.
² Which looks like a cuboid puzzle made of crystal and has the power to reshape the entire universe.

Previously: TSV 41