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<rant>[removed]</rant>
Thanks Dad. Love you Claire. Will all be fine yet.
“Alcohol! Now there’s a temporary solution!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes being a geek is funny.
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.
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.
Another happy fun little weekend. Troma Night on Saturday was particularly good: we watched both Kill Bill films back-to-back, along with the usual collection of other crap. Not-gay Gareth couldn’t make it, in the end (his parents are visiting this weekend), so we may have to see him some other weekend.
We’ve proposed a few more traditions for Troma Night. The first of these – and the one most likely to be implemented – is that of the “Honourary New Person”: following in the traditions of “Honourary Kit” and “Honourary Claire”, this tradition would dictate that whenever somebody comes to Troma Night for the first time, another person (a regular) is nominated “Honourary New Person”, and has the rules and traditions explained to them, and is teased mercilessly for the real new person’s lack of knowledge.
Other proposed new traditions were ‘tried out’ at Geek Night, on Sunday, such as an “Honourary JTA And Ruth” – the latter of which punches the former every time anybody insults the real Ruth. Of course, the real Ruth is eligible for nomination to be “Honourary Ruth” or even “Honourary JTA”!
Geek Night itself was fun, but a little drawn-out. We started with a longer-than-usual game of Carcassonne, this time with both the expansion packs that we have. The latter, “Traders And Builders”, really does add an extra something to the game. I won (miraculously, I thought Andy, just one point behind me, was going to!), after a long battle over a few key farms and two large cities.
We went on to play Munchkin. A very long game, with all of us waiting on level 9 for a long time. I spent most of the game as a woman, after an early sex change. Ruth looked most likely to win for a long while, then Andy and I tried to gang up and “win together”, just to get the game over with! Eventually, I won with a lucky draw at just the right time. A little luck had me win twice this Geek Night. Good-o.
We should have played Hacker, but for some reason everybody else seemed to think that Munchkin would be quicker. Ha!
In other news, after my revelation about ACME Computer Games I gave them a bell. They have none of my stuff in stock and it may be several weeks before they do. Five minutes later the called me back and told me that, actually, he had just found a copy of Fluxx and would be posting it to me ASAP.
Oh, and JTA‘s moved his blog over to it’s new home. Go take a look: I’m quite proud of the design I helped him with.
I recently bought three board games (Munchkin 3, Fluxx and Puerto Rico) from ACME Computer Games in Bangor (yes, I know, the same guys who got confused over my order before…). Somehow, I don’t think they get many e-customers: I just grabbed this screenshot from their web site –
Notice that I’m looking at Munchkin 3, and the Customers Who Bought This Also Bought says… yes, my two other purchases. And nothing else. Hmm.
Still no sign of my order, or any word from them (I placed the order over a week ago). Better give them a bell, I think.
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
This repost was published in hindsight, on 11 March 2019.
Ruth wrote:
Dan: “Let’s play Hacker!”
Andy: “No, let’s play Munchkin. It’ll be shorter.”
General Agreement3 and a half hours later:Dan finally wins. All players have been at level nine almost constantly for about half an hour. Several attempts at winning have been made, but all have been prevented, mostly by Andy. Dan wins by one point, in the face of all the cards Matt and Andy had left to prevent him.
All cheer. Except Andy, who nearly chokes on a pringle at having his plot foiled.And now for something completely different…
…I like to call it sleep.
PS no idea why this is down this side. Pressed something randomly, too tired to try and fix it.
PPS O. Now it isn’t. Odd.
- Mood:Exhaustion… Of Doom!
Contrary to my perpetually changing plans, we’re off to see Bubba Ho-Tep at the Arts Centre tonight – 8pm. If you’re in town and need a slightly more relaxed night out, come along!
Extract from a personal (online) conversation, today:
Rockmonkey: it was very boring well no not boring but i could understand law like u and a simple web site so didn’t pay attention and explained it to others after
AvaPoet: Here, have a packet of full stops, you must have run out: [……………..]
Argh! Nothing’s happeneing on RockMonkey… I’m being forced to waste time by making phallic sculptures out of blu-tack.
