Went looking today to see if the old Delphi forum I’d created was still there. It is. Hasn’t been touched really since about 2002 or so — hasn’t been in active use since 2001-ish. But it’s all still there. What a blast from the past. You want to know about the original core group of fans, that’s the place to go. We were watching the later episodes at the time it all started up so there’s a decided Rosemary/Terence obsession evident there but it’s all great fun to read through. (Framisobal, I miss ya.) 

I remember now why I’ve been away from updating the site for so long. I have a reeeeaaaallllyyy hard time not trying to update the sections as I update them. Each time I open a section up, I remember what I was in the middle of doing there and what I had/have planned for it. The fight to not update takes almost as much time and energy as just doing it. So, despite the fact that I’ve been slaving over hot Web pages for the last several days, I don’t actually have many full sections completed and uploadable. But the updated site as a whole is further along the road to completion and that’s really the important thing.

After a (long overdue) kick in the butt e-mail yesterday (thanks, Ben), I went looking at the site. It’s been a year since I did more than update the DVD stuff. I haven’t even really looked at it since about November 2007.

Blog: I can’t for the life of me remember the login details for the old blog so I’ve installed a new one, this one. Had to manually add the old posts in here as I can’t even manage to get access into the old mySQL database to export the old data. Haven’t had a chance to update all of the links on the various pages so I’ve just put in a 301 redirect on the old URL. This blog just has a slightly tweaked standard template — I’ll worry about really customizing a template for it when everything else is done.

Forum: Well, it’s been offline for years. So much for temporary. I’d installed a new forum (phpBB) at a different location but forgot about completely without doing anything with it. When I went to look at it, imagine my surprise — it was absolutely filled with porn spam. I mean FILLED. Someone was having a field day there. I’ve deleted all that and turned off that forum. And the other one is still offline. I’m toying with the idea of turning it back on but, really, at this point in time I don’t have the time or the energy to sustain it.

Site Updates: Now there’s the kicker. I’m going to do my level best to get most of the redesign finished in the next month or so. Can’t guarantee the episode pages will be done but the rest should be doable. After that, I’ll look at actually updating things. I converted most of the What’s New pages over to the new format. (It’s not as easy a job as it sounds.) I’ve also updated the DVD information so that it is up-to-date, such as it is. MRA Entertainment has apparently been rebranded as destraMusic and their pages for the last known set of DVDs (series 5, part 2) is minimal, to say the least. Yet, ezyDVD says they have it in stock. I’m sure there’s more information on the ACP mailing list but I haven’t been there lately. Will have to add it to my list of “things to do”.

Wow, have I really not posted in here since November of last year? My bad. My extremely big bad.

I could have at least posted to say that the forum is temporarily offline. That would have been the decent thing to do, wouldn’t it. We were getting SQL errors and so I decided to upgrade the software in an effort to clear those up. Unfortunately that brought it’s own issues with it. I haven’t had time to look at it so unfortunately the forums will be offline for a few weeks (or possibly months) yet. Sorry about that.

The new job is going well but most of my energy is going towards that these days. I’m also taking some classes that are stealing any spare energy I have. I haven’t forgotten about this site, though. I have reams of stuff to add but I need to get that redesign completed first. Work will ease up in November/December (and hopefully my contract will be renewed by then) so I should be able to get stuck back into things by then.

I like to do the odd bit of bidding in eBay (usually on Australian magazines, I’m sure you can guess why).

Some of the magazine auctions must have their respective sellers just shaking their heads at how high the bidding goes. It has me laughing for the most part, even when I’m outbid, because I’m usually watching two or three people duking it out over a magazine when each person really wants a different part of the magazine. They *could* conceivably share articles with each other and keep the price of the magazines down to something reasonable.

Usually, the people jacking up the price of the magazine are looking for completely unrelated articles and will not be outbid come hell or high water. Other times, you can see that they’re after the same thing. I’ve only once been fighting over the same articles, with someone who was after Penny Cook articles (usually we’re after different articles) — sometimes you just want to yell at the other person to just stop bidding and you’ll share the articles. LOL There’s an auction on right now for a magazine that had a couple of ACP-related articles. I was considering bidding on it but today I see that the bidding is currently at $51.00. Both people seem to be fighting over a Rachel Blakely article that isn’t even a page long. Now, I’ve been known to pay a pretty high price for some magazines but those generally had either multiple articles or a much coveted article/poster.