Someone is currently selling a collection of A Country Practice articles for $199.99 AUD. Most of the other items they’re selling are either auctions with $0.95 starting bids or “Buy it Now” items with reasonable (<$10) prices. But they’ve decided that their collections of A Country Practice and Neighbours articles are going to be lucrative. Meaning they think ACP and Neighbours fans are suckers. If I were going to pay $200 for a collection of articles, it damned well better be a massive collection, not the couple of dozen articles they have on offer. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t like some of the articles in the collection but certainly not enough to fork out $200, even if I had $200.

I also have to wonder at people who sell something like a fan card, which would fit in a regular mail envelope and cost regular mail postage, with a shipping charge of $6. I realize that eBay is all about making money but really?

[edited to add on September 5: Surprise, surprise. They haven't managed to sell those clippings yet so the latest price is $49.99.]

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.

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”.

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.

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.

I’ve been thinking especially about the pending Magnolia Vale section (no, I haven’t forgotten about you, Bonnie ). It’s going to be a fan section and is intended, if you’ll recall, to contain fan fiction, artwork, silliness, and other things like that. I’ve been thinking about how to best set it up and have been considering the possibility of setting it up in a blog format with a number of people having rights to post there. Not sure if there’s an interest there or not. And I’m being hampered right now by the fact that I injured my right hand in a freak dumpster accident (don’t ask) along with the fact that I’m taking some courses and am just trying to get through my work day without killing someone.

Anyway, I might start a poll to see if anyone has any interest in that type of thing (a communal blog type thing).

They’re all idiots, I tell ya. Complete idiots, the lot of them. So much so, in fact, that a couple of them decided to bombard this blog with 120+ spammy entries today. Wasn’t that nice of them? [bastards!]

The way it used to work was that a regular Yahoo account used to get you 4MB of space for free. You could upgrade to a 10MB mail box for $9.95 a year or 25MB for $19.99 a year. And could add some additional extras for an additional minimal fee (e.g. I was paying $29.95 for the 25MB mail box with the ability to use multiple email addresses within the same Yahoo account and increased filtering capabilities). All of that was known as Mail Plus!.

Now, Mail Plus! only costs $19.95 a year and comes with a 2GB mail box and no graphical ads (that’s what makes me actually almost like Yahoo now). Don’t know if that means no ads at all ever but right now it there are none. Even if all they did was get rid of the graphical ones (especially the Java and Flash ones), I’d be a happy camper.

Gotta love unexpected improvements. My hosting company recently improved my hosting plan to an obscene amount of space and bandwidth and actually reduced the monthly fee in the process. I like this trend towards offering more for less.

The first time I took him to the vet, I was able to hold onto him for a few minutes before he freaked out and turned into a feral bobcat, all teeth and razor-sharp claws. He slipped out of the exam cubicle and into the cat-themed gift shop next door before anyone could catch him. It took five of us (one vet, three vet assistants, and me) to corner him and get him into the carrier. The next time, they actually had to spend more time patching me up than examining him because he got me good with his claws (I was taking blood thinners at the time so I bled a lot). Now, we don’t even dare open the carrier door — they have dump him into a bag and then mask him to knock him out a bit just to give him a checkup. He’s scary when he wakes up after that, let me tell you. Growling, hissing, spitting, and lunging at the front of the carrier. Scares all the other cat owners in the waiting room. LOL But then he’s a pathetic little creature when he realizes he’s really going home — the change from wild creature in the clinic to sorrowful baby as soon as we get in the cab is startling.

Have to leave him there today until after 4pm and I’m finding myself decidedly uncomfortable in my own home. We’ve been together since a couple of weeks after I moved into this apartment — this is the first time since he arrived here that I’ve been in this apartment without him here and I feel very, very alone. Weird, eh? Can’t imagine how bad I’d be when (no, IF because he’s going to live forever, dammit!) he’s no longer here.

Hopefully he won’t hold this vet visit against me for too long.

[click the image to see a larger -- full-ish sized -- version of it]

Some details of it might change before I unveil the whole site but that’s pretty much what it’s going to look like. It’s less, um, colourful than before (the whole site is pretty much the new, natural tones instead of the old separate colour scheme for each section) but the pages fill the screen and there will be added information in many sections, to make use of that new space.