Another fantastic Dudley’s Dungeon today. For NetHack fans only.
Year: 2004
Quote Of The Day
Heard this today:
“There’s something the Student’s Union don’t want: a silent, invisible, anonymous army of disgruntled students.”
Made me smile.
Smash My Phone
For $12.99, you can have a model smash your phone and publish the video to the internet for you to enjoy again and again. Fucking weird.
Tell Me About Your Heterosexuality
Rediscovered this online – some questions for the heterosexual:
- What do you think caused your heterosexuality?
- When and how did you first decide that you were a heterosexual?
- Is it possible that your heterosexuality is just a phase that you will grow out of?
- Is it possible that your heterosexuality stems from a neurotic fear of people of the same sex?
- Heterosexuals have histories of failure in gay relationships. Do you think that you may have turned to heterosexuality from fear of rejection?
- If you’ve never slept with a person of the same sex, how do you know that you wouldn’t prefer that?
- If heterosexuality is normal, why are a disproportionate number of mental patients heterosexual?
- To whom have you disclosed your heterosexual tendencies, what reaction did you get?
- Your heterosexuality doesn’t offend me as long as you leave me alone. But why do so many heterosexuals try to seduce others into that orientation?
- Most child molesters are heterosexual. Do you consider it safe to expose your children (if you have any) to heterosexuals, especially heterosexual teachers?
- Why must heterosexuals be so blatant, making a public display of their heterosexuality? Can’t you just be what you are and keep it quiet?
- Heterosexuals always align themselves such narrowly restricted, stereotyped sex-roles. Why do you cling to such unhealthy role-playing?
- How can you have a fully satisfying emotional experience with a person of the opposite sex when the obvious physical, biological, and temperamental differences are so vast? How can a man possible understand what pleases a woman sexually and vice versa?
- Heterosexual marriage has total social support, yet the divorce rate continues to spiral upwards. Why are there so few stable heterosexual relationships?
- Since there are so few happy heterosexuals, techniques have been developed to help people change. Have you tried aversion therapy?
- Could you trust a heterosexual therapist / councilor not to try to influence you towards their sexual leanings?
- Do heterosexuals hate or distrust others of their own sex? Is that what makes them heterosexual?
- Why are heterosexuals so promiscuous; always having ‘affairs’ etc?
Made me smile.
Simpsons, Puppets, And Alcohol
Sat up last night with Bryn and Claire with a cheap bottle of wine and the remains of an expensive bottle of whiskey and watched The Simpsons (Season 3, DVD 2) and Puppets Who Kill (Season 1, the episodes we hadn’t seen yet).
A nice night in.
Weekend
I seem to spend most of my time on this blog posting retrospectively about what I did on any given weekend. Will try to spice things up with a little more thought and debateworthy stuff in the future – I’ve got some ideas. In any case:
Friday was Andy’s gig – not as good as the last one I went to, but still a fab show (and, in particular, some great guitarwork this time around). Claire couldn’t come – she was in Gregynog on a Computer Science away-half-weekend (the replacement for what used to be the “second Aberdyfi weekend” that we used to have in the first year).
Saturday was Troma Night. Rory (visiting) and not-gay Gareth (recently discovered to be in Aberystwyth) came along, as did Claire’s friend Ruth, and a good time was had by all.
And, of course, Sunday was Geek Night. We played Hacker for the first time in ages, as well as a little Fluxx. Matt seems to be a huge fan of the latter – perhaps it apppeals to the mathematician inside him.
Oh, and: Yay!
My Greatest Weakness
This post was censored by its author shortly after its publication. The original contents are believed to be completely lost. See: all censored posts.
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Thanks Dad. Love you Claire. Will all be fine yet.
“Alcohol! Now there’s a temporary solution!”
My Very Own Googlebomb
Partially out of curiosity, partially to point out a flaw in the #aber multipass system, I’ve made my own little googlebomb. For those of you who don’t like reading, a googlebomb is where you manipulate the way that popular search engine Google into falsely linking with great priority a page that it probably should not. I’m sure you all remember “French military victories” and “Weapons of mass destruction”?
Go to Google, type in “Stuii should fix this”, and hit “I’m Feeling Lucky”. You’ll be taken to the #aber multipass page of a user who has never existed, a user called “Stuii Should Fix This”.
It’s a pain that when people search for ‘AvaPoet’, the first result is what should be my multipass (but it expired long ago). However, there’s obviously still a lot of places linking to it, so people keep getting that page whenever they look for me. Grr.
In any case; the theory’s been demonstrated plenty of times before… I just wanted to do it for myself. Yay.
Rory’s In Town
Met up with Rory this lunchtime in MGees: looks like he’s working on moving back to AberWorld whenever he can afford it, and running his business from here. I’m not sure how much of a market there is for payware RSS/ATOM newsfeed readers, but I wish him the best of luck in it anyway. Hopefully he’ll be able to find himself some part-time work to “keep the wolf from his door” <ahem> in the meantime.
Anyway; he’s promised that he’s going to drag not-gay Gareth along to Troma Night tomorrow night, so that’s all-good. On which note; does anybody have any objections to a long-anticipated reshowing Overdrawn At The Memory Bank (MST3k edition)? With Paul‘s co-operation, of course.
Improved Viagra Available From Chemists
As of next week, an improved version of Viagra will be available – without prescription – from your local chemist. Just go up to the counter and request Mycoxafloppin. Satisfy your woman! Cure your errectile disorder! Make $$$ fast! No… wait.
A Slogan For SmartData
SmartData‘s considering this as a new slogan to replace “Enjoy smart business. Make data work for you.” We’ve all been asked to ‘try out’ the proposed new slogan with friends/family/whoever and get some feedback, so I thought I’d put it on my blog. Here we go:
Free time. Work easy. SmartData.
Comments, please.
Error Message Of The Day
Sometimes being a geek is funny.
Str8Up, Fluxx, Liz’s Birthday, Etc.
Went to Str8Up at the Students Union on Monday night with Bryn, Claire and Paul. Paul complained a little about people (in general) who go to traffic-light parties (where you wear red, yellow or green to reflect your ‘availability’ and ‘desperation’ – Claire and I wore red, Paul wore yellow, Bryn wore blue), wearing green, and just sit in the corner and don’t actually talk to anybody, then complain that they’re still single. He’s right – relationships can’t be relied upon to “just happen”, particularly in such a setting. I retorted, though, pointing out that while he was perpetually complaining that he was still single, he was just sat here with his friends – a couple, and a heterosexual man – his chances weren’t that good.
Paul explained as he slowly got more and more drunk that he was particularly shy in situations like this – which I can entirely appreciate – so I decided to help. I started by bluejacking a few messages around to the nearby bluetooth-enabled mobile phones (they’re getting surprisingly common these days). I won’t embarrass anybody by sharing the messages that went back and forth on here, but suffice to say I bounced several messages to somebody, and back, before they “disappeared” themselves. They left with a photo of Paul, but missed their chance to leave with him.
Fluxx arrived, and we’ve spent several days playing games of it. It’s a funky, fancy, just-plain-weird card game in which the rules and goals are defined entirely by the cards in play, which in turn dictates what cards can be played and when. It’s also a lot friendlier than our games of Munchkin, with less backstabbing and shouting at each other… not that that’s not fun, too…
Last night we went out to celebrate Liz’s 22nd birthday. This was a lot of fun (although, even by the time we’d gotten to The Bay, I’d come to realise that it was only Liz, Claire and I who knew everybody there… and who they knew and how. We drank, we talked, we danced… then we all sat down exhausted and watched Liz and Kathleen carry on wiggling in that lovely way on the dancefloor for a little while longer. And even Bryn got dancing (I have a video I’ll have to upload at some point…), perhaps only the second time I’ve seen that (after Kit and Fiona’s wedding). Speaking of which, I’ve now finally got around to putting a photo of the bride and groom online.
In other news, I asked AQA: How cool is RockMonkey?. AQA responded: AQA: RockMonkey.org.uk is very very cool indeed as the Wiki-powered site is run by Aberystwyth’s number one dude & mountain-lover Andy Keohane. Predictable, but sweet nonetheless.
SmartRacer
Yesterday lunchtime I finished writing a program that suddenly makes our working day that little bit more exciting – SmartRacer.
SmartRacer runs quietly in the system tray of as many users want to run it – currently Matt, Haagen, Gareth and me… but I’m trying to get Alex involved, too.
When you click on the system tray icon, the race begins! A couple of quick UDP broadcast packets are passed around the network, and everybody on the subnet who’s running the program is presented with racing-style “start lights”… 3… 2… 1… GO!
At this point, all participants will race – on their wheely-chairs – around the central ‘island’ of tables, in a clockwise direction, and attempt to be first to return to their own place and click the “Finish” button. Overtaking is rare – but permitted – and usually quite aggressive. As each player returns to their desk a “score” table is presented to everybody, with all participants times appearing in ‘minutes’ (heh), ‘seconds’, and ‘hundredths’.
Of course, players can choose not to participate in any particular race by clicking the “I’m Not Playing” button. The wimps.
You can download SmartRacer here, to play at your own workplace – SmartRacer.exe (64kb). It runs on Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/2003, and requires the Microsoft .NET Framework.
