…and certainly not The Pit

I said at the end of my review of the last Doctor Who episode: “I do have a bad feeling about part two though.”

I was right and wrong. Or to put it another it, The Satan Pit was better than I feared but not as good as I hoped.

( Oh all right, spoiler warning )

Design work, performances and directing were all excellent, and the number of old series references raised a smile. If only the script had been just a bit tighter and the resolution made a bit more sense then this would have been an all time classic.

I think this was a very good 9/10

Next week looks like another rummage through the Virgin scrapbook. This time taking Who Killed Kennedy and playing it for laughs.

Very True Mood:  hot

Oh okay, next post but one.. Very short reviews ‘cos my brain isn’t up to much.

( The Age of Steel )

( The Idiot's Lantern )

( The Impossible Planet )

Very True Mood:  chipper

Is it possible to sneeze so hard that you pull a muscle?

I think I did last night: I sneezed violently and something went just below the bottom of the rib cage on my right side, and it still aches today.

Very True Mood:  aggravated

So Steve, what did you do with your week off work?

Oh bugger, I was afraid you’d ask me that. Certainly I wasn’t blogging much. I spent a lot of time staring vacantly at this computer screen whilst marshalling my energy for an intense period of beard growing.

You’ve grown a beard?

What’s all this ‘you’ business? Who do you think you are? Yes, I’ve grown a beard. Started off as laziness, then Lettice decided she liked it and now my puny razor couldn’t get rid of it if I tried. [update] - Just for gleet, a beardy icon.

Surely even you (I, whatever, get a life) couldn’t spend a whole week just growing a beard?

Well, Tom H is over here from Singapore so there was beer and curry. Somehow I got lost between Liverpool Street Station and Williams Wine & Ale House -it’s a two minute walk. Don’t ask. Anyway, they had a barrel of Ruddles behind the bar and the evening went very well. At eleven o’clock we staggered down the road to the Bengal Trader for a curry. Not sure they really wanted to still be open, and not sure we got what we actually ordered, but it was still very tasty.

Oh my, look at the Bengal Trader web site. Not just text done as graphics, but individual lines of text or even words done as individual graphics. That’s scary. Ha! <meta name="Generator" content="CorelDRAW8">

And then on Thursday, we won the celebrity pub quiz. Once again, I have no idea who the “celebrity” host was but who cares? They’ve moved from bottles of Cava to cash for the prizes, which is a very good thing. So, pub quiz tally for the year: entered five, won four.

The rest of the week was spent in studied idleness.

Whatever happened to your Doctor Who reviews?

Oh bugger. Next post. Promise.

Very True Mood:  cheerful

What kind of Sixties Person are you?

You are a Radical. Right on!
Take this quiz!

What’s that? That’s the output from a rather nifty applet that draws diagrams of the HTML structure of web pages (technically, it produces a graphical representation of a first order approximation of the DOM tree by examing element nodes only). In this case that’s the front page of Very True Things as of Thursday evening.

The big grey blob at the middle top is the page head, here full of the <link> elements that Word Press generates. The main content of the page is to the left and the side bar is to the right. The red clusters at top left and bottom right are tables - a meme result and the calendar respectively.

Have a look at the examples given by the creator to see how some big name sites compare. And then see the graphs for everyone else’s sites on Flickr. (Via Pharyngula.)

What’s really scary for me is that when I look at the graph for VL I can instantly spot where one extraneous (but harmless) link has been inserted by accident.

Got a good one today.

Dear Webmaster,

We found your web site, stevepugh.net from the internet and liked it very much! We hope you’ll consider exchanging links with our site, Octopus Links.

Our web site provides cutting edge Automated Link Exchange Services.
Lifetime membership to our services is currently FREE!
Please DOWNLOAD the attached web file to visit our site….

When you exchange links using our system, you can also exchange links with ALL our members. No more begging for links!

Have a nice day!
Jay, the Octopus

P/S: link exchange the fast and easy to to boost your web site search engine ranking and get an avalanche of free web traffic!!

There was no attachment for me to download to “visit their site” (i.e. get infected with a nasty virus). Fairless clueless even by spammer standards.

I decided to visit the domain used in the e-mail address, expecting to see either a link farm or something totally innocent and unrelated to the spam. Instead I saw a one page site with broken links and this:

( Be afraid... )

Very True Mood:  confused