OMG! OMG! It's a trailer!!!
YouTube - Babylon 5: lost tales
Lost Tales on Wikipedia.
First Day filming
More on set
Statcounter
03 June 2007
27 May 2007
Desynchronized
I forgot to blog this, it actually happened last month.
After several lengthy cutouts my broadband connection finally went down altogether. The modem diagnostics program said I was 'desynchronized'. So I phoned the Orange call centre, and after the usual long list of irrelevant questions we came to 'do test'.
"The test says your connection is desynchonised'.
[Yes, that's what I said half an hour ago]
"I am going to ask BT to do an intrusive check. Please leave your modem plugged in and switched on but do not try to connect for four hours".
This worked fine, evidently the BT Engineer located the fault. Orange even phoned me the next day to make sure I was indeed synchronised again.
Call centres do work, you just need the patience of a saint.
Where does that expression come from? Saints were often irritating, impatient and eccentric people who annoyed the regular clergy no end.
After several lengthy cutouts my broadband connection finally went down altogether. The modem diagnostics program said I was 'desynchronized'. So I phoned the Orange call centre, and after the usual long list of irrelevant questions we came to 'do test'.
"The test says your connection is desynchonised'.
[Yes, that's what I said half an hour ago]
"I am going to ask BT to do an intrusive check. Please leave your modem plugged in and switched on but do not try to connect for four hours".
This worked fine, evidently the BT Engineer located the fault. Orange even phoned me the next day to make sure I was indeed synchronised again.
Call centres do work, you just need the patience of a saint.
Where does that expression come from? Saints were often irritating, impatient and eccentric people who annoyed the regular clergy no end.
22 May 2007
Did we not kill them?
How do I introduce this one? It's a conversation overheard on a chat channel within Eve, my online game. In a star system in a distant galaxy two spaceship pilots are in conversation, unaware that I'm listening...
KtB > Hey sam :)
sammual > hye man
KtB > How ya doing
sammual > great u
KtB > not bad not bad man
sammual > cool
KtB > Right, when i say :)
sammual > kk
KtB > rdy?
sammual > ye
KtB > hardeners on.
sammual > ye
KtB > Go go go
{they set off bombs in the hope of blowing up larger ships in a surprise attack. This alerts Concord, the police, who warp in and blow their ships up. They are now, Darth Vader style, in their escape pods}
sammual > argh
KtB > Lmao!
KtB > did we not kill em?
sammual > er no
KtB > eh lol
sammual > damn
KtB > have you gotta target em? lol
sammual > i dunno
sammual > maybe
KtB > holy shit look at concord lol
sammual > lmao
KtB > lmao
KtB > eh wtf
sammual > k lets go back to station
KtB > lol
sammual > lol
KtB > confused lol
KtB > erm
KtB > ive got a mining drone
KtB > stuck to my pod
sammual > lmao
KtB > :S
KtB > can you see it?
KtB > look at me when ya get to station
sammual > man we suck
sammual > lol
KtB > haha i know lol
KtB > how did it not work :S
sammual > dunno
{and this is why I play these games!}
KtB > Hey sam :)
sammual > hye man
KtB > How ya doing
sammual > great u
KtB > not bad not bad man
sammual > cool
KtB > Right, when i say :)
sammual > kk
KtB > rdy?
sammual > ye
KtB > hardeners on.
sammual > ye
KtB > Go go go
{they set off bombs in the hope of blowing up larger ships in a surprise attack. This alerts Concord, the police, who warp in and blow their ships up. They are now, Darth Vader style, in their escape pods}
sammual > argh
KtB > Lmao!
KtB > did we not kill em?
sammual > er no
KtB > eh lol
sammual > damn
KtB > have you gotta target em? lol
sammual > i dunno
sammual > maybe
KtB > holy shit look at concord lol
sammual > lmao
KtB > lmao
KtB > eh wtf
sammual > k lets go back to station
KtB > lol
sammual > lol
KtB > confused lol
KtB > erm
KtB > ive got a mining drone
KtB > stuck to my pod
sammual > lmao
KtB > :S
KtB > can you see it?
KtB > look at me when ya get to station
sammual > man we suck
sammual > lol
KtB > haha i know lol
KtB > how did it not work :S
sammual > dunno
{and this is why I play these games!}
16 May 2007
1 second of fame
Yes, I was there on the Monday 14th edition of Panorama. Near the end, the guy in the red anorak and placard in Tottenham Court Road picketing the Scientologists. And I've spent the past two days trying to keep a webpage up to date with the storm that resulted which shows no signs of dying down.
It was worth it though. To be accused of being 'orchestrated' by the BBC was hilarious.
29 April 2007
YouTube - Scientology Yellow Tent
YouTube - Scientology Package
This is an excellent Video from Josh M Peterson in which he visits the Volunteer Minister Yellow Tent that tours around the world advertising the Church of Scientology.
This is an excellent Video from Josh M Peterson in which he visits the Volunteer Minister Yellow Tent that tours around the world advertising the Church of Scientology.
14 April 2007
Vista Aero
Aero is a fancy GUI for Windows that is optional for Vista. Switching it off seems to have cured several persistent bugs for me, as well as freeing up a chunk of memory.
The Creative Audigy soundcard had a stutter that became continuous when running DirectX in a window. It's gone.
Firefox had a nasty though infrequent memory leak that became a disk rattling virtual memory fight after a few seconds. It seems to be gone.
The Internet connection has almost stopped dropping out.
The Creative Audigy soundcard had a stutter that became continuous when running DirectX in a window. It's gone.
Firefox had a nasty though infrequent memory leak that became a disk rattling virtual memory fight after a few seconds. It seems to be gone.
The Internet connection has almost stopped dropping out.
22 March 2007
Vista modems
The saga continues...
I have an old 'green frog' Speedtouch ADSL modem that is not going to have Vista drivers as part of the 'throw away your old junk, buy our new junk' drive. So I bought a cheap Zoom ADSL and downloaded their just out of Beta Vista driver. The install notes were long and if followed exactly worked.
Except that the line kept dropping. I tried this and that and the other, until one day I plugged into a different USB port... and the dropouts stopped.
I poked around in Device Manager. There are two USB Hubs on my machine, one 'full speed' the other 'high speed'. That must mean 1.1 and 2.0 USB. I'd switched to 1.1 - the slower connection!
The Data Rate meter says I'm not losing out, so I plain don't understand this one. I have the current Speedtouch modem on its way and its Beta driver ready and waiting, but I may have wasted my cash on it.
So all I need now is... more memory. 1Mb plainly isn't enough, Civ IV and Vista start to fight over memory around 1950 game time. Eve isn't bothered, it used to memory leak but this has been stamped out.
I have an old 'green frog' Speedtouch ADSL modem that is not going to have Vista drivers as part of the 'throw away your old junk, buy our new junk' drive. So I bought a cheap Zoom ADSL and downloaded their just out of Beta Vista driver. The install notes were long and if followed exactly worked.
Except that the line kept dropping. I tried this and that and the other, until one day I plugged into a different USB port... and the dropouts stopped.
I poked around in Device Manager. There are two USB Hubs on my machine, one 'full speed' the other 'high speed'. That must mean 1.1 and 2.0 USB. I'd switched to 1.1 - the slower connection!
The Data Rate meter says I'm not losing out, so I plain don't understand this one. I have the current Speedtouch modem on its way and its Beta driver ready and waiting, but I may have wasted my cash on it.
So all I need now is... more memory. 1Mb plainly isn't enough, Civ IV and Vista start to fight over memory around 1950 game time. Eve isn't bothered, it used to memory leak but this has been stamped out.
14 March 2007
Fried!
My power supply fried my motherboard. This was a sign from God, or possibly Bill Gates. I bought a Vista PC (Athlon Dual 3800, Nvidia 7300).
It's been a fun week. Vista is still in Gamma and I had some retro Blue Screens of Death and one total panic - I mean Vista panicked and wanted to System Restore, but I knew all it needed was a reboot.
Nvidia has a way to go. The current driver is slow, and DirX 10 has only reached the 8300. Setting for other than max Performance causes upsets. The Creative Vista sound driver stutters now and then but doesn't crash, and it can't cope with Direct Sound in a window at all.
There are no Vista modem drivers in the UK. I had to download... oh. I had to phone my sister and talk her through downloading one for me. "The one with the logo and the three green lights at the front please". Thank you Wendy, you were as always a treasure.
Some old peripherals are junk - Zip drive, scanner. One new buy I can recommend, an external USB hard drive case from X Craft. It whirred away transferring all my old data into the new machine very quickly.
On the software side, most XP programs just have mildly annoying bugs. AVG won't scan Emails, Firefox crashes now and then, Winamp won't Drag n Drop.
The big test was Eve Online. I went for the full 631Mb download, crossed fingers, and it ran first time. FPS are better but nothing exciting, and it seems stable. Full marks for the Devs there, though I gather it's pot luck with graphics cards still.
The GUI I'm just tinkering with, it is of course prettier but 430Mb???
It's been a fun week. Vista is still in Gamma and I had some retro Blue Screens of Death and one total panic - I mean Vista panicked and wanted to System Restore, but I knew all it needed was a reboot.
Nvidia has a way to go. The current driver is slow, and DirX 10 has only reached the 8300. Setting for other than max Performance causes upsets. The Creative Vista sound driver stutters now and then but doesn't crash, and it can't cope with Direct Sound in a window at all.
There are no Vista modem drivers in the UK. I had to download... oh. I had to phone my sister and talk her through downloading one for me. "The one with the logo and the three green lights at the front please". Thank you Wendy, you were as always a treasure.
Some old peripherals are junk - Zip drive, scanner. One new buy I can recommend, an external USB hard drive case from X Craft. It whirred away transferring all my old data into the new machine very quickly.
On the software side, most XP programs just have mildly annoying bugs. AVG won't scan Emails, Firefox crashes now and then, Winamp won't Drag n Drop.
The big test was Eve Online. I went for the full 631Mb download, crossed fingers, and it ran first time. FPS are better but nothing exciting, and it seems stable. Full marks for the Devs there, though I gather it's pot luck with graphics cards still.
The GUI I'm just tinkering with, it is of course prettier but 430Mb???
01 February 2007
Xenu Day International!
Xenu Day International is on Saturday March 10th, 2007.
Are you a Xenu sympathizer? A drunk? An irate ex-scientologist? A freezoner? An ElRon apologist? A cacophonist? A Santarchist? A trouble maker?
Then XENU DAY Is just the event YOU'VE BEEN LOOKING FOR!
In the spirit of the Cacophony Society and Santarchy, a fun new yearly bar crawl and troublemaking event is planned for L RON HUBBARD'S birthday.
Are you a Xenu sympathizer? A drunk? An irate ex-scientologist? A freezoner? An ElRon apologist? A cacophonist? A Santarchist? A trouble maker?
Then XENU DAY Is just the event YOU'VE BEEN LOOKING FOR!
In the spirit of the Cacophony Society and Santarchy, a fun new yearly bar crawl and troublemaking event is planned for L RON HUBBARD'S birthday.
25 January 2007
iframe (2)
Firefox was happy with OBJECT menus, MSIE was not - it ignored target="_top" and thought I wanted to replace the menu with the page. Fortunately it did accept targetting with IFRAME.
And the really annoying bug in MSIE that keeps warning me about unsafe Javascript that becomes safe when uploaded is driving me nuts.
And the really annoying bug in MSIE that keeps warning me about unsafe Javascript that becomes safe when uploaded is driving me nuts.
13 January 2007
iframe, scrollbars and mozilla
I wanted to embed a menu on all the pages of a website so I wouldn't have to change every instance of it. This can be done using IFRAME, but not content with that I wondered if it could be done with OBJECT since strict HTML doesn't have IFRAME.
It turned out to be possible:
<object data="sidebarframe.html">
The size of the object could be set in the website's Style Sheet. The problem then became the scrollbars that I didn't want. IFRAME has a scrolling="no" style setting, but OBJECT does not. Some CSS in the BODY of the frame solved that, complete with a Mozilla hack:
<style type="text/css">body {border:0; overflow:visible; }</style>
<style type="text/css">body {overflow: -moz-scrollbars-none;}</style>
It turned out to be possible:
<object data="sidebarframe.html">
The size of the object could be set in the website's Style Sheet. The problem then became the scrollbars that I didn't want. IFRAME has a scrolling="no" style setting, but OBJECT does not. Some CSS in the BODY of the frame solved that, complete with a Mozilla hack:
<style type="text/css">body {border:0; overflow:visible; }</style>
<style type="text/css">body {overflow: -moz-scrollbars-none;}</style>
10 January 2007
A very obscure bug
I found that bit of javascript that creates snow falling down the screen. Actually I found two versions, one had the snowflakes as tiny GIFs, the other as ASCII stars. Too late for this Xmas, but next year I'll be annoying people with them (they eat CPU time).
Except that the ASCII version didn't work in Firefox. After steadily cutting out the usual suspects - other javascript for example - the culprit turned out bizarrely to be the URL part of the DTD:
So there you are, my first trivia for the year.
Except that the ASCII version didn't work in Firefox. After steadily cutting out the usual suspects - other javascript for example - the culprit turned out bizarrely to be the URL part of the DTD:
!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"
So there you are, my first trivia for the year.
13 December 2006
Picket video
This is a link to a flash video of a Scientology picket in London last Saturday:
http://xenutv.wordpress.com/2006/12/13/the-internet-is-scientologys-worst-nightmare/
John in full rant, me telling an entheta story and at the end our cameralady being politely asked to leave.
http://xenutv.wordpress.com/2006/12/13/the-internet-is-scientologys-worst-nightmare/
John in full rant, me telling an entheta story and at the end our cameralady being politely asked to leave.
17 November 2006
My two days on the help lines
I asked my ISP if it was possible to upgrade my Broadband connection. I'm a long way from my local Exchange, so I wasn't surprised to get an Email back saying it wasn't possible yet.
Two days ago, I got a 'wrong Username or Password' message. In successive phone calls, we established that
The connection was OK.
My account was still active.
Then I noticed that my diagnostic program was saying I was connected at 2Mb.
Next phone call, we found that the engineers had retested my connection, switched me to 2Mb but not told me.
Finally we deleted my connection, carefully reinstalled it, and everything was fine. The only difference I can see is that I am now connected to a different place - 'bb4' instead of 'bb3', so either that or the reinstall was the solution.
Oh, and the next day my phone calls prompted the independent call centre assessment people to call. Did I think my ISP had responded well? I gave Orange 8/10, though if I hadn't been a geek it would have been 0/10 as I'd still be disconnected.
Two days ago, I got a 'wrong Username or Password' message. In successive phone calls, we established that
The connection was OK.
My account was still active.
Then I noticed that my diagnostic program was saying I was connected at 2Mb.
Next phone call, we found that the engineers had retested my connection, switched me to 2Mb but not told me.
Finally we deleted my connection, carefully reinstalled it, and everything was fine. The only difference I can see is that I am now connected to a different place - 'bb4' instead of 'bb3', so either that or the reinstall was the solution.
Oh, and the next day my phone calls prompted the independent call centre assessment people to call. Did I think my ISP had responded well? I gave Orange 8/10, though if I hadn't been a geek it would have been 0/10 as I'd still be disconnected.
31 October 2006
Fixed
My virus checker is AVG, my secret decoder ring is PGP. PGP 9.0 uses the same Email intercept method as AVG, so they weren't compatible. Until...
AVG popped up to tell me that it's Email checking component wasn't running. Yes, I knew, I'd turned it off. So why was it telling me? Because the daily AVG update had updated it?
I turned it on, and sent myself an encrypted message. It worked...
and then I made the mistake of playing around with settings. It stopped working and refused to display its activate button.
So I upgraded to AVG 7.5 and it's working again on default settings, so I'm leaving it alone this time. AVG 7.5 setup has a repair option, so hopefully I can use that if it stops.
Now my only minor problem is that Thunderbird won't download Email when it starts up, only by request. A PGP glitch? Some dumb ISP setting as my Email box often locks up?
AVG popped up to tell me that it's Email checking component wasn't running. Yes, I knew, I'd turned it off. So why was it telling me? Because the daily AVG update had updated it?
I turned it on, and sent myself an encrypted message. It worked...
and then I made the mistake of playing around with settings. It stopped working and refused to display its activate button.
So I upgraded to AVG 7.5 and it's working again on default settings, so I'm leaving it alone this time. AVG 7.5 setup has a repair option, so hopefully I can use that if it stops.
Now my only minor problem is that Thunderbird won't download Email when it starts up, only by request. A PGP glitch? Some dumb ISP setting as my Email box often locks up?
20 October 2006
Exploder 7
It's happy day, testing out Internet Explorer 7 to see what unexpected things it's done to webpages...
It defaults to Medium Font size instead of Smaller at last - excellent! People will stop complaining about being unable to read the text, and thousands of websites that only look good in 'smaller' will be screwed.
It defaults to Clear Type! I guess this makes sense with CRTs being displaced by LCD/Plasma.
CSS has absolute positioning enabled! Or... only in compliant mode. I had a lot of trouble kludging one layout to get round this on IE, but unfortunately I have to leave this until everyone has switched to IE7 unless someone can come up with an 'except for IE7' hack.
So far I've spotted only one positioning difference from Firefox, but it's not an important one.
It defaults to Medium Font size instead of Smaller at last - excellent! People will stop complaining about being unable to read the text, and thousands of websites that only look good in 'smaller' will be screwed.
It defaults to Clear Type! I guess this makes sense with CRTs being displaced by LCD/Plasma.
CSS has absolute positioning enabled! Or... only in compliant mode. I had a lot of trouble kludging one layout to get round this on IE, but unfortunately I have to leave this until everyone has switched to IE7 unless someone can come up with an 'except for IE7' hack.
So far I've spotted only one positioning difference from Firefox, but it's not an important one.
08 October 2006
03 October 2006
Fighting good roads and fair weather
Barbara Graham just wrote this article about her experiences as a critic of the Scientology cult. If you still think this is a Church, read it. Churches don't lie to the police, harass their opponents' relatives or send private detectives to follow their friends' cars.
04 September 2006
YouTube: scientology shorts
YouTube - The Friend of Mankind (1/4)
This link leads to a selection of short videos poking fun at the cult of Scientology.
YouTube also has a series of official videos published by the Cult of Scientology such as the Anatomy of the Human Mind course. These will give you a good insight into some of scientology's pseudoscientific beliefs.
This link leads to a selection of short videos poking fun at the cult of Scientology.
YouTube also has a series of official videos published by the Cult of Scientology such as the Anatomy of the Human Mind course. These will give you a good insight into some of scientology's pseudoscientific beliefs.
27 August 2006
Just say no to Scientology
Blogzilla: Just say no to Scientology
So there I was picketing the cult of Scientology in London when a blogger took our photograph! And posted it before we'd posted our picket reports! Is there no escaping from these guys?
It was an irritating picket, we'd booked the main Org building in a side street and the police wouldn't let us move to the main road (Tottenham Court Road) where our cult friends had set up their tin cans and Emeters for free stress tests. Still, the beer at the local pub was excellent as always and it was a pleasant afternoon enturbulating the clams.
So there I was picketing the cult of Scientology in London when a blogger took our photograph! And posted it before we'd posted our picket reports! Is there no escaping from these guys?
It was an irritating picket, we'd booked the main Org building in a side street and the police wouldn't let us move to the main road (Tottenham Court Road) where our cult friends had set up their tin cans and Emeters for free stress tests. Still, the beer at the local pub was excellent as always and it was a pleasant afternoon enturbulating the clams.
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