A Jolly Good Fundraiser

Just got back from three days of fundraising for Aberystwyth Nightline, selling hot dogs, burgers, and fries at a stall at the University “Fresher’s Fair”. That was pretty successful.

In other news, a large padded A4 envelope arrived at The Flat today, addressed to Paul. The stamps, letter header etc. all seem to imply that the letter has been sent from NATO‘s “Public Diplomacy Division.” That’s a little alarming.

Beer and curry tonight, usual crew. Meet at 7pm at Scholars or 8:15pm at Cafe All Spice if you want in.

The Aber Effect

Last night really works as a great example of the ‘Aber Effect’. Claire and I went along to Sundeep‘s housewarming party, where she was feeding curry to her housemates and those of us who came along to welcome her back into Aberystwyth. I’d also promised to help sort her computer out with an internet connection, but I’d forgotten to take the network card I’d agreed to lend her.

Having eaten, as some folks were packing up to leave, I suggested that Claire and I go and pick up the network card from The Flat, then come back and install it into Sundeep’s PC. That’s when we heard about Sundeep’s flatmate, who’d managed to lock himself out of his room. So we went back to The Flat and picked up the network card and also a set of lockpicks and a can of oil, and so when we got back Claire was able to install the network card while I picked the lock of the housemate’s room.

Having succeeded in my lockpicking attempt (after some jiggerypokery with the lockpicks and a filed-down Somerfield saver card [knew those things would come in handy]) and opened the room, the housemate offered Claire and I a pint in Scholars, which we accepted. Leaving Sundeep, we joined him and some of the other housemates in the pub for a congratulatory pint each of Old Speckled Hen.

And that’s where we bumped into Matt (in the hat), Andy K, and a friend of Andy’s who will henceforce me known as MOT. Jokes about having to renew him every year aside, we explained our plan to return to The Flat and decant the wine we’ve been brewing in our wardrobe for the last fortnight, and invited them to come join us when they’d finished their drinks. Then, needing to get a head start on them so as to start processing the wine, we set off.

On the way home, we were greeted by two separate groups of strangers, the first of whom overheard our conversation and with whom we briefly debated “the Aber effect”, and the second of whom wanted to use their camera phone to take a picture of Claire and I (although we’re not quite sure why).

We siphoned the wine into bottles, dissolved some fine sugar into it (the yeast had been somewhat overenthusiastic over the first few days and had made the wine slightly bitter and extremely alcoholic), and corked them, right on time for Matt, Andy, and MOT to arrive. We lounged, and drank wine, and were joined by JTA and Gareth, with whom we watched a few episodes of American Dad and listened to some music while the wine kicked in. Which it did, quite remarkably.

So, from a housewarming in Llanbadarn we met a guy who’s lock I picked for which he bought me a pint at a pub where I met some guys I knew and a guy I didn’t who came back to my flat where we drank homebrew wine with some folks who were at the party to begin with. This is the essence of the Aber Effect. And I love it.

Interview With Hayoa Miyazaki

The Guardian ran an interview with Hayao Miyazaki, director of such films as Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and Tonari no Totoro. My favourite bit of the interview:

Miyazaki taps a cigarette from a silver case. The Disney deal suits him, he explains, because he has stuck to his guns. His refusal to grant merchandising rights means that there is no chance of any Nausicaa happy meals or Spirited Away video games. Furthermore, Disney wields no creative control. There is a rumour that when Harvey Weinstein was charged with handling the US release of Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki sent him a samurai sword in the post. Attached to the blade was a stark message: “No cuts.”

The director chortles. “Actually, my producer did that.”

scan.co.uk

Ruth wrote:

We are in the process of ordering a new computer. Most of the bits are coming from Scan. Now, their range is lovely, and their postage policy is reasonably sensible, but they have a dumb policy on debit cards.

If you pay with a debit card (instead of a credit card), you can only have the goods delivered to your registered home address. Now, that might seem ok, because where else are you going to want stuff delivered, right? Wrong. You might want thehardware delivered to your place of work because you’re never home during the day. It might be something your buying for a technologically inept relative and you might want it to go to their home, not yours.

Or, like me, you might be a lazy student who uses their mother’s address in far-off North Yorkshire as their home address so they don’t have to change it twice a year.

Things like this which penalise people who don’t use credit cards make me cross. If anyone knows otherwise, please say, but to me it seems that it’s all just a big conspiracy by the banks to make us all use a really, really inferior product.

Anyway. Out of a desire not to have the computer bits go to Yorkshire, we’ve given the money to Dan who’ll be placing the prder with his credit card and getting it sent to our new house in PJM.
—-
On the subject of the post, my mother called me last night to ask for my new address so she could re-direct some letters from the university. So the items in question will have travelled from the campus to PJM (that is, over the road) via North Yorkshire. How very, very silly.

Anyhoo folks, I’ve got to go to work. Oh yeah, and house-warming party tonight, number 72 PJM. Punch and cake provided; if you want anything else, bring it with you.

Forcing people to have deliveries sent to their registered address cuts down on card fraud, which is moderately freqent at mail order computer hardware stores on account of the high value, discreetness, and availability of the goods. It’s not possible to accurately perform such checks on credit cards, but it’s easy to with debit cards.

Many banks give special dispensation on their student accounts; allowing them to – for example – submit two addresses which they will automatically switch between throughout the year – or allow two registered addresses to function for card checks (while still delivering the statements to one). Ask your bank if they can do this, and, if they can’t, write a letter to inform them that there are banks that can. If you’re not willing to let your feet do the talking, there’s no way to let these large organisations listen to you.

There’s no reason not to own a credit card unless you feel you cannot trust yourself to do so – or the banks won’t give you one! For many such cards, there is no interest if you pay them off immediately each month (which can be automated thanks to wonderful schemes like Direct Debit): this increases the flexibility of your purchasing power (particularly when purchasing from overseas) without costing you a penny. On a side note, owning one that you only ever use in this fashion increases your credit rating (which is checked when buying a contract mobile phone, getting a mortgage, applying for credit on a car, or whatever). Just for examples’ sake; if you owned an unused credit card, you could have ordered these computer parts and – odds are – immediately transferred the money from the bank account to the card, thereby giving you the bits sooner.

All of that said, I think I’ve quite aptly (and almost entirely) undermined the sense in preventing expensive goods being delivered only to the registered cardholder’s address, because as we’ve just seen there’s always a way to circumvent such checks by routing the money other ways: this leaves a longer paper-trail (banks and credit companies are, by law, required to keep better records for longer than companies that happen to process card transactions), but is otherwise a sensible way to commit fraud without triggering the little alarm bells that debit cards have hanging from them. So yeah; perhaps Scan should be a little less draconian.

Now Chip-And-PIN in the UK: there’s a flawed, insecure, badly-implemented system.

 

Magic Story

Inspired by Andy‘s PassThePageGame on the RockMonkey wiki – a collaborative storytelling game based on that silly game you used to play at school, I’ve written my own tool:

MagicStory is a collaborative wiki storytelling tool designed to be harder to “run away” with than normal wikifiction. Having read the story, participants can write a suggested “next sentence”, and after three suggestions have been collected a fourth person will be able to choose which one is used. Give it a go!

You’ll need a RockMonkey account, of course, but they’re free and simple to set up.

Stressy Bear

Eek! That’ll teach me to procrastinate! I’ve been putting off various jobs I’ve needed to do for work this last week and a half, thinking that they all needed to be done by Friday this week. But it turns out there’s a mighty amount of stuff that needs to be done by tomorrow morning.

Back to the code…

Rock Exchange

This weekend I hope to release Rock Exchange, my latest WikiGame on the RockMonkey wiki. I’m just finishing performing some tests and fine-tuning on it now. Here’s a screenshot:

Rock Exchange game on the RockMonkey Wiki

In Rock Exchange, players will be able to invest their hard-earned Rocks (a unit of currency) in shares in the various pages on the RockMonkey wiki. The value of these shares will fluctuate based on several characteristics, and players will have to play the odds in order to know when to buy and when to sell to gain a return on their investment. A page’s shares fluctuate based on:

  1. Popularity: so if a new page seems likely to attract the attention of a lot of passing Googlers, it’s worth investing in, whereas an “in joke” that’s died out is not. Similarly, players can manipulate wiki page links in order to attract interest. The most valuable indicator of popularity is how many people come to the site for the first time, entering on a given page.
  2. Investment: investment in pages will put positive pressure on their value, but selling shares damages this value by flooding the market – who’ll be first to pull out of a high-flying page, thereby forcing other shareholders to suffer?
  3. Interference: there will be several methods for people to drastically interfere with the value of their shares and the shares of the other traders, but these won’t necessarily be immediately apparent.
  4. Random factors: the rock market, like the stock market, is an unpredictable animal, and there’ll be a small amount of luck in any investment.

The game’s pretty much “ready-to-play” in it’s most basic form right now, but I want to run it alone awhile longer and see if I can improve the balancing factors in it.

×

Client Of The Day

Oh, some of our clients are funny. A client of ours, who hosts her web site and e-mail with us, calls me up because she has difficulty getting access to her webmail:

Her: “My e-mail doesn’t work.”
Me: (not knowing much about her configuration) “Are you using a web browser to check your e-mail, over the web? Or are you using some other program, like Outlook or Outlook Express?”
Her: “What?”
Me: “Are you using Internet Explorer?”
Her: “Yeah. [my co-worker] sent me a link and I went to the page and it worked. So to make it easier in future I saved it to my desktop. But now when I click on it I get the user name and password thing and then it doesn’t work.”
Me: “So… you’re clicking a shortcut on the desktop, and you see the user name and password boxes. You put in your user name and password… what do you get?”
Her: “Page Not Found.”
Me: “Could you tell me the address your web browser says it’s at?”
Her: “The what?”
Me: “The thing written in the white bar at the top of the screen.”
Her: “Okay, it’s C:\Documents and Settings\Meriel\Desktop\login.html.”
Me: “Umm. When you made this link on your desktop, how did you do that?”
Her: “I clicked File, then Save. Why?”
Me: “Right. What you’ve done is you’ve saved a copy of the login page onto your computer, isn’t it? But your webmail is online, so that’s not working.”
Her: “But I wanted to be able to read my webmail offline, because I’m only on dial-up and it’s a lot faster to open things from my desktop.”
Me: (bangs head on desk)

Frag!

Frag! arrived this afternoon, earlier than expected. If anybody wants to come around to The Flat in advance of Naruto Night this evening, we can have a quick blast at it… what do you think?

In other news, Predictive Solutions, with whom we share the offices on this, the first floor of the Aber Technium, are closing down. Now who’s buffets am I supposed to gatecrash?