If you’re reading this, it’s almost a miracle. In recent weeks, the web hosting company that has been home to theLogBook.com since 2003 has gone rapidly downhill, with “internal server errors” and “server restarts” plaguing the entire site and making it almost unusable. At this point, our success in transitioning the majority of the site to a database-driven format has almost proven to be a liability: with Globat’s database servers having suddenly become so amazingly unreliable and fragile, the vast majority of theLogBook.com is offline for much of any given day, and no help seems to be forthcoming from them. This has resulted in much of the site being down and staying down lately, completely out of our control; this includes the ordering page for the Phosphor Dot Fossils DVD, whose sales have dropped off dramatically as a result. Additionally, there are also some extremely troubling billing issues in play, involving very shady practices which don’t paint a picture of a financially stable entity. We’ve done some research and looked at independent hosting review sites, and have found that other Globat customers are suffering from similar problems, including the eyebrow-raising billing issues. After five reasonably good years, the message is clear: our site is being hosted by a company that seems like it may not be on the map for much longer, and the time has come to move.

As such, the site will soon be moving to a new hosting service, though it may take a few weeks as we transition databases and the rest of the site’s content from one place to another. Beginning this week and through the month of July, to ease this transition, this News section will drop back to two weekly updates; since this is the one part of the site that’s updated on a daily basis, it becomes the most problematic unless we voluntarily scale it back in such a way that the database doesn’t have to be backed up daily. As soon as we’ve migrated databases and support files, tested the site thoroughly at its new location, and basically walked all around it and kicked the tires, we’ll switch the site’s DNS pointers over to its new home and daily news updates will continue. It’s taken a while to do the research and settle on a new hosting provider, especially since theLogBook has very specialized requirements, with its wealth of video and a large number of large databases.

Hopefully the changeover will result in little or no disruption of access to the site, and frankly, even if there is a disruption, I can’t imagine it being much worse than what we already suffer on Globat. Anyone out there who’s hosting a site with Globat might wish to formulate a backup-and-exit plan, and anyone considering hosting on Globat may wish to think twice. In 2003 it was the best possible move for us, but now it’s become our greatest liability.

Earl Green
theLogBook.com webmaster / editor-in-chief

The X Prize competition helped rally some of the most inventive minds to put themselves into low Earth orbit, but now Google is putting its money where the moon is. Google has launched the Lunar X Prize competition, which will drop an astronomical $20 million into the pocket of the first group that can design, build and successfully launch its own lunar rover to the surface of the moon – with as little help from the competitors’ respective governments as possible. To qualify, a competitor’s rover has to land on the moon, travel at least 500 meters, and send back photos, HD video and sensor data…all by New Year’s Eve, 2012. On January 1, 2013, the prize incentive money drops to $15 million, and two years later the financial incentive is off the table entirely. But additional bonuses are offered for such achievements as longer roving distances, acquiring on-site video of man-made hardware left behind on previous moon missions. Anyone serious about engineering their own lunar explorer and putting it on the moon’s surface is likely to find out, however, that even winning the $20 million prize would only recoup a fraction of what they’d spend to accomplish the task. Those wanting to be spectators can make smaller donations, including $10 to have your own data time capsule sent as part of one of the missions, by visiting the official web site.

While we normally wait until news of upcoming releases is confirmed and chiseled into stone before discussing it here, these two items are still unconfirmed but of great interest to fans of the music of the Doctor Who universe. It seems fairly likely that there’ll be yet another Doctor Who soundtrack CD this fall, but the first CD of music from Torchwood is expected to be released as well, containing music by Murray Gold and Ben Foster from the first two seasons. Even more unconfirmed, but quite a find if it makes it into stores, is word that the music from both of the Peter Cushing Doctor Who movies, made in the 1960s, may be released later this year; a teaser site promises more news on the Cushing soundtracks “in the coming months”, along with a sample track. We’ll keep an eye out for all of these releases later this year.

Why have one Earth-like planet when you could have three orbiting a single star? That’s what a team of European astronomers claim to have found, using super-sensitive equipment at a Chilean observatory, designed specifically to spot and study planets orbiting other stars. A recent survey of stars with no previous planet detections yielded the surprising find: three planets, between four and nine times the size of Earth, with rocky surfaces. The bad news for any interplanetary real estate agents? The three planets are all too close to their parent star to be favorable havens for life. The star HD40307 is 42 light years from our solar system. But this find, and others (over 40 other newly discovered smaller planets oribitng other stars) which popped up during the same survey, may have a wider implication: if one considers the stars studied to be a representative sampling of all the stars in the known universe, then it means that one in three stars has smaller terrestrial planets and not just gas giants, a figure which drastically increases the odds that life has evolved in some form, somewhere.
Sources: BBC News, Associated Press

Trek alumni work on Raimi’s Wizard for a spell. Two alumni of recent Star Trek series have landed gigs on Sam Raimi’s upcoming TV series Wizard’s First Rule, based on Terry Goodkind’s book of the same name. Kenneth Biller, formerly of Star Trek: Voyager (and an executive producer on that show’s final seasons) and Dark Angel, will be the showrunner, while writer Michael Sussman, formerly of both Voyager and Enterprise, will work on the show as well. Wizard’s First Rule will be syndicated, and has already been sold to stations covering most of the country for a fall premiere.

Nation’s Survivors to be remade. Survivors, a post-apocalyptic early ’70s BBC drama from the pen of the late Terry Nation (best known as the creator of the Daleks and Blake’s 7), is being revived for a BBC Scotland remake. Joining the cast is Freema Agyeman, fresh from her return as Martha Jones in the upcoming season finale of Doctor Who. The original series, which premiered in 1973, dealt with the aftermath of a man-made plague accidentally released, reducing civilization to the pre-industrial age – think of it as the Jeremiah before Jeremiah. Nation left the show after its first season over major creative differences with producer Terence Dudley, went back to writing Dalek scripts for Doctor Who, and eventually created Blake’s 7.

K-9 spinoff to begin filming next month. Outpost Gallifrey reports that the K-9 spinoff, aimed at a younger audience, begins filming next month in Australia on a 26-episode season, with the episodes expected to weigh in around the 25-minute mark (with the extra time reserved for commercials). K-9′s co-creator, Bob Baker, is working out of offices in Queensland, writing scripts; other scripts are being contributed by local writers Shayne Krause and Shane Armstrong. The show will be a combination of live action and CGI, with an upgraded CGI version of K-9 aiding an Earth family from the future. K-9 has appeared in his more familiar, 1970s-style form in the Doctor Who spinoff The Sarah Jane Adventures, though both of his appearances were left open-ended to allow for the character to “vanish” into its own spinoff, per a contract with Baker. Baker created K-9 with writing partner Dave Martin in 1977 for the Doctor Who story The Invisible Enemy, which has just been released in a DVD box set with the character’s first attempt at a spinoff, 1981′s K-9 And Company, which also serves as a precursor to The Sarah Jane Adventures. Jetix Europe will distribute the show overseas, though it’s unknown if, when or where the show, simply titled K-9, might reach North America.

Sources for these items: Daily Variety, BBC News, Outpost Gallifrey

If you barely made it through the lengthy Writers’ Guild strike with your brain cells intact due to the major networks’ sudden embrace of “reality” TV, you may want to start making plans to read some books, make the beast with two backs, or wade through this web site for hours on end, because the studios are bracing for another strike – this time with members of the Screen Actors’ Guild potentially hitting the pavement to picket. The deadline for the studios’ negotiations with the actors is June 30th, and with little progress at the bargaining table, major productions such as the second Transformers movie have gone so far as to build breaks into their filming schedules with the assumption that their cast won’t be reporting to work. This may result in another short television season this fall, as many shows such as Heroes just began filming again in May, and another truncated season would likely bring disaster to network advertising sales, which would then trickle down to their shows’ budgets. SAG, which was a strong backer of the Writers’ Guild strike, is trying to win concessions in many of the same areas, including “new media” usage (might as well just read that as “internet video”) and DVD residual payments. Complicating the picture even further is that SAG is not the only union for performers; the American Federation of Radio & Television Artists (AFTRA) has already been through negotiations with the studios and claims to have won its key points; there’s a major SAG push to discourage AFTRA members from voting to ratify that agreement. Hope you like Dancing With The Stars!
Source: Daily Variety

Longtime special effects and makeup wizard Stan Winston, a four-time Oscar winner with a resume loaded with some of the most influential genre films in movie history, died on June 15th after struggling for seven years with multiple myeloma. His four Oscar wins – two for Terminator 2, one for Jurassic Park, and one for Aliens – are just the tip of the iceberg; his makeup and effects skills also earned him Oscar nominations for such films as Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns, and AI. Other movie credits included The Wiz, Predator, Friday The 13th Part III, The Thing, Interview With The Vampire and – most recently – Iron Man. His early career was spent in TV, with work on Roots, Amazing Stories and even creating the costumes for Chewbacca’s family in the Star Wars Holiday Special. In 1994, with James Cameron and Scott Ross, he co-founded visual effects house Digital Domain, which grew into a serious competitor in the effects business with its contributions to movies like Titanic, X-Men, Fight Club, The Fifth Element, Speed Racer, Star Trek: Nemesis, and the Lord Of The Rings and Pirates Of The Caribbean series. Mr. Winston was 62.
Sources: Daily Variety, Associated Press, IMDb

Sergey Brin, who co-founded the now-ubiquitous search engine Google.com, has put $5,000,000 on the table for a ride into space aboard a future Russian Soyuz flight to the International Space Station, because when you’ve created a site used so widely that its name has become a verb synonymous with online searching, you can do that sort of thing. There’s no word yet on when Brin will be lifting off, though it probably won’t be until next year; the next “space tourist” to take to low Earth orbit will be computer game pioneer (and Ultima series creator) Richard Garriott, son of former Skylab astronaut Owen Garriott, who is set for an October visit to the station.
Source: CNN.com

Torchwood toys to get U.S. distribution. The eagerly awaited line of Torchwood action figures will be available in North America through Underground Toys, the same distributor handling the Doctor Who figures. Though the two toy lines are by different manufacturers, those two manufacturers have enlisted the services of the same sculpting & design house, and the two ranges will be the same scale and therefore compatible with one another’s accessories. The first wave, shown here, consists of Captain Jack, Gwen, the omnipresent Weevil creature and Lisa the Cyberwoman, all as seen in season one; the second wave will include Ianto, Toshiko, Owen, Captain John Hart (as played in season two by James Marsters of Buffy fame) and the Blowfish creature (Hootie not included).

Frank pushes the button after all. Just the other day we reported that “TV’s Frank” Conniff was the lone holdout of a reunion of the entire cast of MST3K, from the original KTMA years through the end of the Sci-Fi Channel era, at San Diego Comic Con. It has now been revealed that Conniff will, in fact, be in attendance – making this the first ever all-hands public appearance of the show’s entire cast. As stated in our earlier report, the panel will be held on Friday, July 25 at 7:15pm.

Discovery has undocked from the international space station, to begin a series of maneuvers to allow the station crew to inspect the shuttle’s protective heat shielding and ultimately to bring the ship home. Discovery’s crew successfully installed the largest component of Japan’s Kibo laboratory module, adding a tour bus worth of space to the station for scientific experiments. (Kibo’s third and final component, a “porch” allowing experiment modules to be exposed to space, will be attached during a flight scheduled for 2009.) Station crew members were rotated during this mission, and crewmembers were relieved (so to speak) to see repairs made to the station’s on-board toilet system, which had been on the fritz in the weeks leading up to the shuttle’s launch. The next scheduled shuttle flight will take place in October, during which the shuttle Atlantis will bring its crew to what NASA says will be the final servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, hopefully repairing the orbiting observatory so it may continue to function at least through the year 2013. That is also scheduled to be the last shuttle mission not to visit the International Space Station before the shuttle fleet is retired. Discovery is scheduled to land on Saturday, June 14th, at Kennedy Space Center.
Source: NASA

The Maryland-based fan-made Star Trek series Starship Farragut was voted Best Fan Film of 2008 at last weekend’s Wrath Of Con convention in Florida. The episode that won the award was Farragut’s second, For Want Of A Nail, released late last year. The Farragut team has a busy year planned for 2008, including several short vignettes and, late this year, the release of two all-star animated episodes created in the style of Filmation’s early ’70s Star Trek: The Animated Series.
Source: Trekweb.com

The cast of Mystery Science Theater is reuniting for a panel at July’s San Diego Comic Con – and by the cast, we mean Joel Hodgson, Mike Nelson, Trace Beaulieu, Kevin Murphy, Jim Mallon, Mary Jo Pehl, Bill Corbett, Paul Chaplin, J. Elvis “Josh” Weinstein, and Bridget Nelson. (For those who lost count: that’s pretty much everyone except “TV’s Frank” Conniff.) The panel will be held on Friday, July 25 at 7:15pm, though anyone expecting an announcement of an MST3K reunion might do well to keep their hopes in check; all of the above are working on separate movie-riffing projects (i.e. Cinematic Titanic and Rifftrax) or MST3K spinoff projects, and live in widely disparate parts of the country.
Source: MST3Kinfo.com

Missing that Stargate SG-1 season 10 vibe? Big Finish has gathered not one, but two of the show’s stars to help you get your SG-1 fix. Michael Shanks and Claudia Black reunited in the studio to record the latest Stargate SG-1 audio story, Shell Game. As with the popular Doctor Who: Companion Chronicles series also produced by Big Finish, the Stargate audios will be dramatized audiobooks with one main cast member and one other actor. The latest Stargate audio story, Shell Game, written by James Swallow and starring Michael Shanks and Claudia Black, is now available in theLogBook.com Store.

Though he looked, at the time, a bit more like Al from Home Improvement, apparently Atari founder Nolan Bushnell is getting a Hollywood upgrade. Paramount has bought a script, simply titled Atari, from writers Brian Hecker and Craig Sherman…and Leonardo diCaprio (Titanic) is slated to star as Bushnell as well as produce the movie; since the script has just been bought and the movie has just entered development, obviously there’s nothing even remotely resembling a date to start shooting, much less a release date. With the casting of diCaprio as Bushnell, Brad Pitt can probably expect a call soon for the plum role of Pong designer Al Alcorn. (On a more serious note, since the script – as it stands – has the real Bushnell’s approval, it’s unknown whether or not it will deal with Magnavox Odyssey creator Ralph Baer at all – if so, keep your calendar open, George Clooney.)
Source: Daily Variety

We control the horizontal, the vertical, and the…compact disc? Though a CD of original music and sound effects from The Outer Limits was released many years ago by GNP Crescendo (in its soundtrack-releasing heyday), La-La Land Records is unleashing the definitive collection of music from the first season. Compiled and remastered from tapes in the private collection of composer Dominic Frontiere, this 3-CD box set boasts nearly two hours of additional music not heard on the previous release. Also included is a booklet which delves into the history of The Outer Limits, including the show’s chill-inducing musical scores, in great depth. La-La Land is only pressing 3,000 copies of the set, and they’re only taking orders directly from their web site.

Comedy great Harvey Korman, known for his long run on the Carol Burnett Show and Blazing Saddles, died on May 29th. Along with Tim Conway, he was a staple of Burnett’s comedy sketch show, though an attempt to spin that success off into his own series ran aground in 1977. A year later, still a comedy fixture, he racked up his most infamous genre credit: appearing as multiple characters in the almost-trippy Star Wars Holiday Special, including one of the better moments of actual comedy in the show, the “stir whip, stir whip, whip whip, stir!” chef. After appearing in Blazing Saddles, he appeared in several more Mel Brooks films, and did countless TV guest starring gigs. Mr. Korman was 81.
Source: Daily Variety