This Friday’s Troma Night will be Troma Night 300! It’s hard to believe how much time I’ve spent at this, our weekly film night. I wonder how many pizzas, in total, have been eaten? How
many awful films we’ve groaned at?
I’m planning that for this special Troma Night we’ll temporarily revitalise some of the old traditions. I’ve already been in touch with Kit, and he’s happy to phone in the pizza order for us (“Kit, order the pizza!” // <sighs> “What does everybody want?”)
in the traditional style. I’m hoping that Paul will be available to throw a sponge through a window (if he’s working, of
course, we’ll try to arrange for him to fling a sponge around the cinema projection booth while we simultaneously throw a substitute sponge at The Cottage). We’ll aim to start a little
early with a Flash Gordon short, for those who miss watching those before their Troma Night experience, too.
As for those of you who are no longer around, you’re welcome to join in from afar, too. Alec: why don’t
you buy yourself a four-pack of beer and drink exactly three of them? “Strokey” Adam: perhaps you can
arrange for somebody to molest you with unwanted physical contact on Friday evening? Liz: you ought to get
a date for the night, introduce him to all of your friends, and then never see him again. See: traditions are great!
In other news: if you haven’t yet played Lost Pig (And Place Under Ground), you should. It’s a fun,
puzzle-oriented piece of interactive fiction that’s full of charm, with a wonderfully lovable (and not your usual) protagonist. It’s a lightweight bit of adventuring that’ll take most
of you under an hour, so go play! Install Gargoyle (for Windows or Linux) for the
simplest-possible play experience, and have fun!
I sent a letter to Google, today. Click to see it in large-o-vision.
I my letter, I suggest that the search giant should add a feature to their UK search, as they already have to their USA search, that would provide the details of an appropriate emotional
support helpline service to people searching for suicide-related topics (such as “how to commit suicide”, etc.). This would provide minimal disruption to users merely interested in the
topic, but could potentially provide a critical lifeline to somebody in dire need.
This afternoon, like last year, we took the
opportunity to spend Easter Sunday hiding one another’s Easter eggs in the woods and then running around looking for them.
Paul & Rory
For some reason, this year Rory didn’t want me to be responsible for hiding his egg (something to do with his
eventually being found up a tree, last year), so I ended up hiding Adam‘s, instead. I didn’t even put much
effort into it: just propped it on a branch. This turned out to be a bad hiding place because Adam walked right back past it on his way back from hiding JTA‘s egg.
Adam's egg
Paul, meanwhile, hid my egg. He did a pretty good job of it, too, and eventually had to give me a couple of clues. “It’s
near Barking Up The Wrong
Tree,” he said, knowing perfectly well that this was a geocache that I hadn’t yet hunted for. I pulled out my GPSr and found the cache, and then started looking for my egg in the
vicinity.
Adam in a Forest
In a particularly special bit of hiding, Rory managed to hide Matt P‘s egg so well that he himself couldn’t
find it again. Eventually we all had to help hunt for Matt’s lost egg. Rory had helpfully taken a photo of the egg in it’s hiding place, but this photo was ultimately useless because it
depicted nothing more distinctive than “a wood”, which we were unable to see for all of the trees. I suppose that if we were trying to get to a particular spot and then ascertain that
we were in the right place, it would be useful, except for that fact that being in the exact right place would probably have been pretty obvious by the time we were standing on top of
an Easter egg.
Hunting for Matt's egg
Finally, Adam basically “tripped over” the hidden egg, and all was well.
Matt finds his egg!
All in all, it was a fabulous afternoon out, and a great way to work off all the calories of Ruth‘s
most-excellent Easter lunch (and just in time to be able to scoff down cakes and chocolate later in the afternoon).
Ruth, JTA, and Paul near the edge of the woods
In other news:
If you haven’t yet played the Flash game “Gravity Hook“, you should. Be warned, it’s kind-of addictive. Can anybody
beat my top score? (1642 metres)
For those of you following our fun little local geocaching craze, here’s the geocaching.com usernames of some Abnibberswho you might not yet know about:
It may come as a surprise to you that the stuff I write about on my blog – whether about technology, dreams, food, film, games, relationships, or my life in general – isn’t actually
always written off-the-cuff. To the contrary, sometimes a post is edited and re-edited over the course of weeks or months before it finally makes it onto the web. When I wrote late last
year about some of my controversial ideas about the ethics (or lack thereof) associated with telling children about Santa Claus, I’m sure that it looked like it had been inspired by the run-up to Christmas. In actual fact, I’d begun writing it six
months earlier, as summer began, and had routinely visited and revisited it from time to time until I was happy with it, which luckily coincided with the Christmas season.
As an inevitable result of this process, it’s sometimes the case that a blog post is written or partially-written and then waits forever to be finished. These forever-unready,
never-published articles are destined to sit forever in my drafts folder, gathering virtual dust. These aren’t the posts which were completed but left unpublished – the ones where it’s
only upon finishing writing that it became self-evident that this was not for general consumption – no, the posts I’m talking about are those which honestly had a chance but just didn’t
quite make it to completion.
Well, today is their day! I’ve decided to call an amnesty on my incomplete blog posts, at long last giving them a chance to see the light of day. If you’ve heard mention of declaring
inbox bankruptcy, this is a similar concept: I’m
sick of seeing some of these blog articles which will never be ready cluttering up my drafts folder: it’s time to make some space! Let the spring cleaning begin:
Title: Typically Busy Unpublished since: March 2004
Unpublished because: Better-expressed by another post, abandoned
In this post, I talk about how busy my life is feeling, and how this is pretty much par for the course. It’s understandable that I was feeling so pressured: at the time we were having
one of our particularly frenetic periods at SmartData, I was fighting to finish my dissertation, and I was trying to find time to train for my upcoming cycle tour of Malawi.
The ideas I was trying to express later appeared in a post entitled I’m Still In Aber. Yay, in a much more-optimistic form.
Title: Idloes, Where Art Thou? Unpublished since: June 2004
Unpublished because: Got distracted by rebuilding the web server on which my blog is hosted, after a technical fault
In anticipation of my trip to Malawi, I was prescribed an anti-malarial drug, Lariam, which – in accordance with the directions – I began taking daily doses of several weeks before travelling.
It seemed silly in the long run; I never even saw a single mosquito while I was over there, but better safe than sorry I suppose. In any case, common side-effects of Lariam include
delusions, paranoia, strange dreams, hallucinations, and other psychological
effects. I had them in spades, and especiallytheweirdtrippydreams.
This blog post described what could have been one of those dreams… or, I suppose, could have just been the regular variety of somewhat-strange dream that isn’t uncommon for me. In the
dream I was living back in Idloes, a tall Aberystwyth townhouse where I’d rented a room during 2002/2003. In the dream, the house caught fire one night, and my landlady, Anne, was
killed. Apparently the fire was started by her electric blanket.
Title: Are We Alone In The Universe? Unpublished since: March 2006
Unpublished because: Never finished, beaten to the punchline
Here’s an example of an article that I went back to, refining and improving time and time again over a period of years, but still never finished. I was quite pleased with the
direction it was going, but I just wasn’t able to give it as much time as it needed to reach completion.
The Drake Equation
In the article, I examine the infamous Drake Equation, which estimates the likelihood of
there being intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy (more specifically, it attempts to estimate the number of intelligent civilizations “out there”). Which is all well and good, but
the only way to put the formula into practice is to effectively pull unknowable numbers out of the air and stuff them into the equation to get, in the end, whatever answer you like. The
only objective factors in the entire equation are those relating to the number of stars in the galaxy, and everything else is pure conjecture: who honestly thinks that they can estimate
the probability of any given species reaching sentience?
The post never got finished, and I’ve since seen other articles, journals, and even stand-up comedians take apart the Drake Equation in a similar way to that which I intended, so I
guess I’ve missed the boat, now. If you want to see the kind of thing I was working on, here it is
but better-written. I wonder what the probability is that a blog post will never end up being published to the world?
Title: Why Old People Should Be Grumpy Unpublished since: October 2006
Unpublished because: Never finished, possibly bullshit
In this post, I put forward a theory that grumpy old people are a positive sign that a nation is making just enough change to not be stagnant: something about the value of
keeping older people around crossed with the importance of taking what they say with a pinch of salt, because it’s not them that has to live in the world of tomorrow. I can’t even
remember what the point was that I was trying to make, and my notes are scanty, but I’m sure it was a little bit of a one-sided argument for social change with an underdeveloped
counter-argument for social stability.
In any case, I left it for years and eventually gave up on it.
Title: The Games That Didn’t Make The List Unpublished since: July 2007
Unpublished because: I could have kept refining it forever and still never finish it
After my immensely popular list of 10 Computer Games That
Stole My Life, I received a great deal of feedback – either as direct feedback in the form of comments or indirectly in other people’s blogs. Reading through this feedback got me
thinking about computer games that had stolen my life which I hadn’t mentioned. Not wanting to leave them out, I put together a list of “games that didn’t make the list”: i.e.
games which could also have been said to steal my life, but which I didn’t think of when I wrote my original top ten. They included:
Castles and Castles 2
The original Castles was one of the first non-free PC computer games I ever
owned (after Alley Cat, that golf game, and the space
command/exploration game whose name I’ve been perpetually unable to recall). It was a lot of fun; a well-designed game of strategy and conquest. Later, I got a copy of Castles 2 – an early CD-ROM title, back before developers knew quite what to
do with all that space – which was even better: the same castle-building awesomeness but with great new diplomacy and resource-management exercises, as well as siege engines and the
ability to launch your own offensives. In the end, getting Civilization later in the same year meant that it stole more of my time, but I still sometimes dig out Castles 2 and
have a quick game, from time to time.
Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates!
Early during the development of Three Rings, I came across an existing company with the name Three Rings Design, based in the
US. Their major product is a game called Yohoho! Puzzle
Pirates, an MMOG in which players –
as pirates – play puzzle games in order to compete at various tasks (you know, piratey tasks: like sailing, drinking, and swordfighting). Claire and I both got quite deeply involved during the beta, and played extensively, even forming our own crew, The Dastardly Dragons, at one point,
and met some fascinating folks from around the world. When the beta came to an end we both took advantage of a “tester’s bonus” chance to buy lifetime subscriptions, which we both
barely used. Despite the fact that I’ve almost never played the game since then, it still “stole my life” in a quite remarkable way for some time, and my experience with this (as well
as with the Ultima Online beta, which I participated in many years earlier) has
shown me that I should never get too deeply involved with MMORPGs again, lest they take over my life.
Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri
As a Civilization fan, I leapt on the chance to get myself a copy of Alpha
Centauri, and it was awesome. I actually pirated my first copy of the game, copying it from a friend who I studied with, and loved it so much that I wrapped up the cash value of
the game in an envelope and sent it directly to the development team, asking them to use it as a “beer fund” and have a round on me. Later, when I lost my pirated copy, I bought a
legitimate copy, and, later still, when I damaged the disk, bought another copy, including the (spectacular) add-on pack. Alpha Centauri is the only game I’ve ever loved so
much that I’ve paid for it three times over, despite having stolen it, and it was worth every penny. Despite its age, I still sometimes dig it out and have a game.
Wii Sports Tennis – Target Training
Perhaps the most recent game in the list, this particular part of the Wii
Sports package stole my life for weeks on end while I worked up to achieving a coveted platinum medal at it, over the course of several weeks. I still play it once in a while:
it’s good to put on some dance music and leap around the living room swinging a Wiimote to the beat.
Rollercoaster Tycoon and Rollercoaster Tycoon 2
In the comments to my original post, Rory reminded me of these games which stole my life during my
first couple of years at University (and his, too!). RCT2, in
particular, ate my time for years and still gets an occassional play out of me – but was pipped to the post by OpenTTD, of course.
X-COM series
Another series of games which hooked me while I was young and stayed with me as I grew, the X-COM series (by which – of course – I mean Enemy Unknown, Terror From The Deep, and Apocolypse; not Interceptor and certainly not that
modern travesty, Aftermath). Extremely difficult, each of them took me months or years before I completed them, and I’ve still never finished Apocalypse on anything higher that the
lowest-two difficulty settings.
I wanted to write more and include more games, but by the time I’d made as much progress as I had, above, the moment felt like it had passed, so I quietly dropped the post. I suppose
I’ve now shared what I was thinking, anyway.
Title: Rational Human Interaction Unpublished since: September 2007
Unpublished because: Too pretentious, even for me; never completed
I had some ideas about how humans behave and how their rationality and their emotions can conflict, and what this can mean. And then I tried to write it down and I couldn’t find a happy
medium between being profound and insightful and being obvious and condescending. Later, I realised that I was tending towards the latter and, besides, much of what I was writing was
too self-evident to justify a blog post, so I dropped it.
Title: Long Weekend Unpublished since: April 2008
Unpublished because: Too long, too wordy, and by the time it was nearing completion it was completely out of date
This post was supposed to be just an update about what was going on in my life and in and around Aber at the time. But as anybody who’s neglected their blog for more than a little while
before may know, it can be far too easy to write about everything that’s happened in the interim, and as a result end up writing a blog post that’s so long that it’ll never be
finished. Or maybe that’s just me.
In any case, the highlights of the post – which is all that it should have consisted of, ultimately – were as follows:
It was the Easter weekend on 2008, and town had gone (predictably) quiet, as many of my friends took the opportunity to visit family elsewhere, and there was a particular absence of
tourists this year. Between Matt being in Cornwall, Sarah being out-of-town, and Ruth, JTA, Gareth and Penny off skiing (none of them wrote anything about it, so no
post links there), it felt a little empty at our Easter Troma Night, which was rebranded a Troma Ultralite as it had only two of the requisite four people present: not even the three
needed for a Troma Lite! Similarly, our Geek Night only had four attendees (but that did include Paul, unusually).
Claire and I took a dig through her wardrobe about found that of the skirts and dresses that she famously never
wears, she owns over two dozen of them. Seriously.
I played and reviewed Turning Point: Fall Of Liberty, which turned out to be a second-rate
first-person shooter with a reasonably clever alternate history slant. I’m a fan of alternate histories in video games, so this did a good job of keeping me amused over the long bank
holiday weekend.
Paul and I were arranging for a beach-fire-barbeque with Ruth and JTA when they got back, to which we even anticipated attendence from the often-absent not-gay-Gareth.
And finally, I had something to say about Jimmy‘s recent experiences in Thailand, but that’s as far as my draft went and I don’t
remember what I had planned to say…
Title: Confused And Disoriented Unpublished since: April 2008
Unpublished because: Never finished; abandoned
Having received mixed feedback about my more-unusual dreams over the years, I’ve taken to blogging about a great number
of them in order to spread the insanity and let others comment on quite how strange my subconscious really is. This was to be one of those posts, and it catalogued two such unusual
dreams.
In the first, I was at my grandma’s funeral (my grandma had died
about two years earlier). A eulogy was given by both my mum and – confusingly – by Andy R. Afterwards,
the crowd present booed them.
In the second, I revisited a place that I’ve dreamed of many times before, and which I think is a reference to some place that I found as a young child, but have never been
able to determine the location of since. In this recurring theme I crawl through a tunnel (possibly of rock, as in a ruined castle) to reach a plateau (again, ruined castle-like), from
which I am able to shuffle around to a hidden ledge. I have such vivid and strong memories of this place, but my faith in my own memory is shaken by the very “dreamlike” aspects of the
event: the tunnel, the “secret place”, as well as the fact that it has appeared in my dreams time and time again for over 15 years. Perhaps it never existed at all: memory is a fragile
and malleable thing, and it’s possible that I made it up entirely.
Some parts of it are less dream-like. For example, I’m aware that I’ve visited this place a number of times at different ages, and that I found it harder to fit through the tunnel to
re-visit my secret childhood hiding place when I was older and larger.
A few years ago, I spoke to my mum about this dream, and described the location in great detail and asked where it might be, and she couldn’t think of anywhere. It’s strange to have
such a strong and profound memory that I can’t justify through the experience of anybody else, and which consistently acts as if it were always just a dream. Maybe it’s real, and maybe
it isn’t… but it’s beginning to sound like I’ll never know for sure.
Title: The Code In The School Unpublished since:May 2008
Unpublished because: Never finished; abandoned
Another dream, right after Troma Night 219, where it seems that the combination of the beer and the trippy nature of the films we watched inspired my brain to run off on a tangent of
it’s own:
In the dream, I was visiting a school as an industrialist (similarly to how I had previously visited Gregynog on behalf of the Computer Science department at Aberystwyth University in 2005,
2006 and 2007). While
there, I was given a challenge by one of the other industrialists to decipher a code represented by a number of coloured squares. A basic frequency analysis proved of no value because
the data set was too small, but I was given a hint that the squares might represent words (sort of like early maritime signal flags). During mock interviews with the students, I used the challenge as a test, to see if I
could get one of them to do it for me, without success. Later in the dream I cracked the message, but I’m afraid I didn’t make a record of how I did so or what the result was.
A particularly famous message represented in maritime signal flags (click for bigger version)
Title: Absence
Unpublished since: May 2008
Unpublished because: Forgotten about; abandoned
At the beginning of the long, hot summer of 2008, I wrote about the immenent exodus of former students (and other hangers-on) from Aberystwyth, paying particular attention to Matt P and to Ele, who left for good at
about this time. And then I forgot that I was writing about it. But Matt
wrote about leaving and Ele wrote about being away, anyway, so I guess my post rapidly became redundant, anyway.
Title: =o( Unpublished since: June 2008
Unpublished because: Too negative; unfinished
I don’t even know what I was complaining about, but essentially this post was making an excuse to mope for a little while before I pull myself together and get things fixed. And that’s
all that remains. It’s possible that it had something to do with this blog post,
but without context I’ve no idea what that one was about, too. Sounds like it was about an argument, and so I’m happier just letting it go, whatever it was, anyway.
Title: Spicy Yellow Split Pea Soup Unpublished since: November 2008 Unpublished because: Got lazy; unfinished
I came up with a recipe for a delicious spicy yellow split pea soup, and wanted to share it with you, so I made myself the stub of a blog entry to remind myself to do so. And then I
didn’t do so. Now I don’t even remember the recipe. Whoops!
In any case, the moral is that pulses make great soup, as well as being cheap and really good for you, and are especially tasty as the days get shorter and winter tightens it’s icy
grip. Also that you shouldn’t leave just a title for a blog post for yourself and expect to fill it in afterwards, because you won’t.
Title: (untitled) Unpublished since: December 2008
Unpublished because: Too busy building, configuring, and working on my new PC, ironically
December is, according to Rory, the season for hardware failures, and given that alongside his troubles, Ruth’s laptop died and Paul’s computer started overheating, all at the same time, perhaps he’s
right. So that’s when my long-serving desktop computer, Dualitoo, decided to kick the bucket as well. This was a particularly awkward time, as I was due to spend a weekend
working my arse off towards a Three Rings deadline. Thankfully, with the help of friends
and family, I was able to pull forward my plans to upgrade anyway and build myself a new box, Nena (which I continue to use to this day).
I began to write a blog post about my experience of building a computer using only local shops (I was too busy to be able to spare the time to do mail order, as I usually would), but I
was unfortunately too busy building and then using – in an attempt, ultimately successful, to meet my deadline – my new computer to be able to spare time to blogging.
But I did learn some valuable things about buying components and building a mid-to-high spec computer, in Aberystwyth, all in one afternoon:
Daton Computers are pretty much useless. Actual exchange:
“Hi, I need to buy [name of component], or another [type of component] with [specification of component].”
“Well, you’ll need to bring your computer in for us to have a look at.”
“Umm; no – I’m building a computer right now: I have [other components], but I really need a [name of component] or something compatible – can you help?”
“Well, not without looking at the PC first.”
“WTF??? Why do you need to look at my PC before you can sell me a [type of component]?”
“So we can tell what’s wrong.”
“But I know what’s wrong! I only took the shrink-wrap off the [other components] this morning: all I need is a [type of component], because I don’t have one! Now can
you sell one to me or not?”
“Well, not without -”
/Dan exits/
Crosswood Computers are pretty much awesome. Actual exchange:
“Hi, remember me? I was in here this morning.”
“Yeah: how’s the rebuild going?”
“Not bad, but I’ve realised that I’m short by a [type of cable]: do you sell them?”
“We’re out of stock right now, but I’ve got some left-over ones in the back; you can have one for free.”
/Dan wins/
It’s possible to do this, but not recommended. The local stores, and in particular Crosswood, are great, but when time allows it’s still preferable to do your component-shopping
online.
I later went on to write more about Nena, when I had the time.
Title: Child Porn Unpublished since: April 2009
Unpublished because: Never finished; too much work in writing this article
I had planned to write an article about the history of child pornography, starting well before Operation Ore and leading up to the present day, and to talk about the vilification of paedophiles (they’re the new terrorists!) – to
the point where evidence is no longer as important as the severity of the alleged crime (for particularly awful examples of this kind of thinking, I recommend this article). I’m all in favour of the
criminalisation of child abuse, of course, but I think it’s important that people understand the difference between the producers and the consumers of child porn, as far as a
demonstrable intent to cause harm is concerned.
Anyway, the more I read around the subject, the more I realised that nothing I could write would do justice to the topic, and that others were already saying better what I was thinking,
so I abandoned the post.
Title: 50 Days On An EeePC 1000 Unpublished since: May 2009
Unpublished because: By the time I was making progress, it had been more like 150 days
Earlier in the year, I’d promised that I’d write a review of
my new notebook, an Asus EeePC 1000. I thought that a fun and engaging way
to do that would be to write about the experience of my first 50 days using it (starting, of course, with reformatting it and installing a better operating system than the one provided
with it).
Of course, by the time I’d made any real progress on the article, it was already well-past
50 days (in fact, I’d already changed the title of the post twice, from “30 Days…” to “40 Days…” and then again to “50 Days…”). It’s still a great laptop, although I’ve used it less
than I expected over the last nine months or so (part of my original thinking was to allow me to allow Claire to feel like she’d reclaimed the living room, which was being taken over by
Three Rings) and in some ways it’s been very-recently superceded by my awesome mobile phone.
Title: El De-arr Unpublished since: September 2009
Unpublished because: Too waffley; couldn’t be bothered to finish it; somewhat thrown by breaking up with Claire
Over the years I’ve tried a handful of long-distance romantic relationships, and a reasonable number of short-distance ones, and, in general, I’ve been awful at the former and far
better at the latter. In this blog post I wrote about my experience so far of having a long-distance relationship with Ruth and what was making it work (and what was challenging).
I’m not sure where I was going with it in the first place, but by the time Claire and I broke
up I didn’t have the heart to go back into it and correct all of the references to her and I, so I dropped it.
Title: Knowing What I’m Talking About Unpublished since: October 2009
Unpublished because: Never finished; got distracted by breaking up with Claire
On the tenth anniversary since I started doing volunteer work for emotional support helplines (starting with a Nightline, and most recently for Samaritans), I wrote about a talk I gave at BiCon 2009 on the subject of “Listening Skills for Supporting Others”. It was a little under-attended but
it went well, and there was some great feedback at the end of it. I’d helped out with a workshop entitled “Different Approaches to Polyamory” alongside fire_kitten, but strangely it was this, the workshop whose topic should be that which I have the greater
amount of experience in, that made me nervous.
This blog post was supposed to be an exploration of my personal development over the previous decade and an examination of what was different about giving this talk to giving
countless presentations at helpline training sessions for years that made me apprehensive. I think it could have been pretty good, actually. Unfortunately a lot of blog posts started
around this time never ended up finished as I had other concerns on my plate, but I might come back to this topic if I give a similar presentation at a future conference.
So there we have it: a big cleanse on my perpetually unfinished blog posts. I’ve still got about eight drafts open, so there’s a reasonable chance that I might finish some of them, some
day: but failing that, I’ll wait until another decade or so of blogging is up and I’ll “purge” them all again, then.
And if you had the patience to read all of these – these “17 blog posts in one” – well, thanks! This was more about me than about you, so I don’t mind that plenty of you will have just
scrolled down to the bottom and read this one sentence, too.
After JTA and I’s monster plan for a great April Fools’ joke got rained-off this year (maybe another year), I just
had to go ahead with two smaller April Fools’ gags this year.
The Photocopier Prank (click for full-size)
The Photocopier Prank
A nice simple joke at the expense of the people in the office building I work in (and far less complex than last year’s prank against the same): I found a document online, printed it
out, and stuck it to the photocopiers.
It instructs users that the photocopier has been upgraded with voice controls, so you can just “tell it” to copy, collate, staple etc. and it’ll follow your instructions. The document
goes on to explain that it’s in “learning mode” right now and it might not get everything right while it learns your voice, so be patient and take the time to repeat yourself slowly and
carefully.
I haven’t got eyes on the copier, so I’ve no idea how many – if any – people it caught.
The Abnib Announce/Joke Of The Week Prank
For the last few years, I’ve run two a text-message based mailing lists (I’ve got unlimited texts as part of my mobile contract, so it’s as-good-as free for me to do this). The first,
Abnib Announce, lets people in Aber know about Troma Night, Geek Night, and similar events. The second, Joke of the Week, goes to a far wider audience and shares, every Friday, the best
(by a loose and arguable definition of the word) of the jokes I’ve heard over the previous seven days.
This morning I sent out the following message to both lists:
Abnib Announce/Joke of the Week Update:
Bad news, everyone. My network has been in touch to say that running these regular bulk SMS lists is a violation of their Fair Use agreement, so I can’t run them from my “free texts”
package any more. The good news is they’ve offered an alternative. These lists will now become subscription-based SMS services. This will cost you no more than 15p per message
received, and a maximum of £1 per week (so £2 per week if you’re on both lists). I’m supposed to ask for your permission before subscribing your number, but I know you’ll all agree
anyway. If for some reason you DON’T want to continue receiving Joke of the Week or Abnib Announce at 15p per message, please text me back BEFORE the first message, this afternoon.
Ta!
I’ve had a handful of great responses, so far, including:
Nice try.x
Them: The rotters, what a bargain, keep the jokes coming please sir
Me: Seriously? When I made up those prices this April Fools’ Day I should have put them higher!
Them: Hahaha, got me, first one too. Love to the crew
Halfway through a serious response to this i remembered what day it is…
April fool?
Totally not falling for that, sorry! Happy April Fools
Them: Hey dan. Sorry i cant do that on my phone as my mum Pays my contract
Me: Happy April Fools’!
Them: Hee.very good
Them: I dont want to pay thanks. I have enough problems with arguing with orange over my phone bill at the minute, thanks. Hope you are good.
Me: April Fools’!
Them: Is it april already?! Damn i fell for it again! Nice one :-)
Them: Take me off the lists please! Ill get info from [other subscriber] and jokes from sickipedia
Me: Tell you what: because it’s you I’ll negotiate with your network: you’re on Orange, right? I’ve kidnapped the dog of the CEO of Orange; I’m pretty sure I can get
him to waive the charges in your case.
Them: Is vodaphone, and their ceo only has a parrot and 5 fish.
Me: =op
Them: Im confused, if its 15p per message why is it £2 a week?
Me: NO MORE THAN £2 a week (well, £1 per week per list). So 4 Joke Of The Week messages would be 60p, 8 would be £1, 20 would be £1. Remember that it’s usually a
multipart message spanning 4/5 messages each week. Full terms and conditions apply.
Them: Lol, sounds confusing, being a poor student i’ll have to pass i think, though i’ll miss moaning at your messages ;-)
Me: Really? You’re actually going? And, even more unbelievably, you’re actually falling for this obvious April Fools’ gag?
Me: Gotcha ;-)
Them: Yup and yup lol :-P
Happy April Fools day!
Them: oh arse, i can’t as i don’t pay the phone bill. is it possible for you to put them online?
Me: April Fools’, dummy!
Lol, good one. Did you manage to snare anyone?
Them: Textin back.no joke
Me: Gotcha! April Fools’.
It’s been a bit of a day for nostalgia. It started even before I woke up, when I was dreaming about an argument that could have marked the end of Claire and I’s relationship, if it weren’t for the fact that it didn’t even slighly
represent the actual circumstances of our seperation (I’ll spare you all the details). I was woken by a phone call from a company with whom I used to deal. Later, I caught up
with an old friend via instant messanger, in what was probably my only delibrate act of nostalgia of the day. Finally, while working this evening on a techy project that’s been part of
my life for about the last eight years, the random number generator in my MP3 playing software decided all of its own accord that what I’d really like to listen to is the same music
I was listening to when I first started on the project.
Did I not get the memo that this is National Nostalgia Day, or something? Is everything conspiring around me, or is this all a coincidence?
The thing I’ve learned about nostalgia is that it’s generally best left as it is: a collection of figments in your mind. Some are accurate, some mis-remembered, and all are seen through
glasses tinted with the colour of hindsight. And that’s great: that’s exactly how your brain is supposed to experience times past. If you’re an optimist, like me, it’s easy to pick out
your favourite memories and pretend that your life gone by was all as great as your happiest moments. If you’re a pessimist, well: you probably do the same thing, but compare those
great memories to how awful things are right now (and you’re wrong, but I can’t just tell you that and give you a more rational worldview, just as your cynicism won’t “fix” me, either).
That’s inevitable, of course: think back to the moment in your life at which you felt the most content that you ever have – at least that comes right to your mind. Unless your time on
the planet has been a continuous curve of improvement, with no ups-and-downs, then there’s something remarkable about that moment: it’s not right now. Well duh, of
course it isn’t. The most elementary mathematics would indicate that of all of the experiences in your life, there has to be some kind of regression toward the mean going on: what
you’re experiencing now should, on average, be representative of your life so far even before you factor in the Von Restoroff effect and other cognitive biases.
But I digress. My point was this: I would love to be able to finish what I’m working on and go play a game of Chez Geek in the Ship & Castle with folks like Bryn and Kit and Liz and Strokey Adam, just like I did over six and a half years ago. But
that’s not my life nowadays. And while I can get all doe-eyed about how awesome the Ship & Castle used to be before they gutted it and made it look like a trendy wine bar (apologies to
those of you for whom this is the news being broken of its demise), or I can pine for the days that those friends – now long-gone – used to all live a stone’s throw away from me, but
that’s not the full story. I don’t miss being even poorer than I am now, I don’t miss having to juggle my academic life with holding down a job, and a certainly don’t miss being quite
so arrogant as I was back then (for those of you who’ve only recently met me; think of me now, only more so).
Nostalgia is like alcohol: it’s great in moderation, but if you get too much of it, or you become dependent upon it, then you’re liable to get stuck and not be able to move on. And I
think that’s the message I should be taking away from this morning’s dream.
(and now, in a somewhat ironic and roundabout way, I’d better stop writing so I can go and play board games with the current Aber crew, as part of a tradition that
started with Chez Geek in the Ship & Castle, all those years ago…)
Right now, I’m out in Oxfordshire for this a “code week” – a get-together for the purpose of hacking some code together – for the Three Rings project. That’s got nothing to do with this post, but helps to offer a framing device by which I can explain why I was in such
proximity to London in the first place.
JTA at the Ops Room table
Last night, y’see, Ruth and I hopped on the bus down to London to meet up with Robin, her brother, for his
21st birthday. Starting out at The Dove in Broadway Market, we began an adventure of epic proportions, backed up by some
of the least-consistent planning ever encountered in a pub crawl. At times, the revellers and I were as one unit, moving together through the capital, shouting “Dave!” in unison. Other
times, keeping the group together and headed in the same direction was a little like trying to herd cats.
But progress was made, and a milestone birthday was celebrated. Highlights included:
Pub Jenga
Pub Monopoly is so last week: Pub Jenga is the new hotness. At each bar, we brought out a set of Jenga, the bricks of which had each been emblazoned – using a marker pen – with
the names of diferent areas of London. When the tower collapsed, the brick responsible dictated where we would go to next.
Pub Jenga – The Next Big Thing
The person responsible for the destruction of the tower was required to drink a penalty shot of Jägermeister and be the bearer of the Jenga set and The Trowel until the next pub. Oh yeah, The Trowel. Robin’s plan was that, at
the end of the night, the Jenga set would be buried forever at a secret location. As we’d left before this point to catch the bus back to Oxford, I’ve no idea whether or not this
actually happened.
Another gripping turn of Pub Jenga
Mystery Pockets
Ruth and Robin’s older brother, Owen, had come prepared: having numbered each of his eight pockets and placed a mystery item in each, Robin was periodically charged with picking a
number, at which point the contents of the pocket were revealed and used. Some of the items revealed were:
Face Paints
One of the first Mystery Pockets contained red and green face paints, with inevitable results. Also, I’m not sure what was in them, but quite a lot of people at the table started
itching quite a lot after they were applied: whoops! Click the thumbnails for bigger pictures.
Party Poppers
After these were chosen, everybody managed to get ahead of Robin by sprinting down a tube station fire escape staircase, and hiding around the corner at the bottom. Which might have
been more effective if not for the fact that it’s quite hard to hide a dozen people in a tight stairwell. Also, that Robin had decided by this point to “fall” down the staircase.
Silly String!
Silly string! It’s so silly!
It’s silly. ‘Nuff said.
People Of London
Our travels put us into contact with a variety of people from around the city, like:
The Moon Man
In Covent Garden, we got a small audience as a result of our various exploits, but this one – persuading a random stranger to bare his colourful underwear to the world, might be the
best. In the background, you can just make out an unrelated group of partygoers, about to tie themselves together with a long rope left lying around by a street performer.
The Moon Man pulls his trousers down
Owen’s Fans
The two women at the next table from us in a bar in Oxford Circus, who seemed quite pleased and impressed when Owen tore his shirt in half in a show of manliness. I’m pretty sure that
if he’d have asked, they’d have paid to see more.
Jamaican Me Crazy
A busker with drums who we persuaded to play the most reggae interpretation of Happy Birthday To You that has ever been heard.
Lay down some beats! Dancing might have been involved on my part.
Dave!!!
I can’t even remember how, but it quickly became our callsign that – in order to make sure that everybody was together (at least, after we’d lost the enormous Papa-Smurf-penis-styled
balloon, fresh from Owen’s mystery pockets, that had previouly been our beacon), we’d all shout “Dave!!!”, as if we’d lost somebody by that name. No, I can’t explain it either.
But… where’s Dave? DAVE? DAVE!!!
A Cornish-Pasty Themed Pub
Seriously, such a thing exists. We almost gave this one a missing, mistaking it for merely being a late-night Cornish Pasty Shop (yes, that was more believable to us at this point),
before we noticed that it had a bouncer. “What kind of bakery needs security?” “Ohhhhh.”
I’m still amazed that we didn’t attract a larger audience than we did, playing Jenga in this famous spot for street entertainers.
Racing Around The Transport Network
You know all of those signs about not playing on the escalators, not running up the escalators: all that jazz. Apparently some of the group didn’t think that they applied to them, with
hilarious consequences. Honestly, I’ve never seen somebody slide all the way down the central reservation of a 100-foot escaltor before, “bouncing” over every sign and
emergency-stop-button as they rocketed down along the polished steel. And if I never do again, that’ll be fine, because I’ve seen it now.
Meeting Some Fabulous People
Turns out, everybody who came along to Robin’s birthday – most of whom I hadn’t previously met – were all awesome in their own unique ways. It’s been a long time since I’ve hung out in
the company of such a lively crowd. Thanks to you all for a fantastic night out.
Much thanks to Welsh Water, where a friendly man talked me through the quirks in my stop tap (who’d have thought that it would be so hard to turn
a tap off and drain a system). Now I suppose I ought to start mopping. Then I suppose I ought to find out what’s burst, and why.
Alongside all of this, I need to work out how to stop my washing machine from being so confused and let me have my bedsheets back. I don’t think the engineers that programmed it ever
thought of the possibility that the water supply might be interrupted mid-cycle.
Last weekend, I found myself in Macclesfield to celebrate the engagement of Liz and Simon. Highlights in brief included:
Board games with the happy couple and their friends, as well as the Aberites who were present. Just like old-school Geek Nights.
Liz & Simon’s awesome new house. Also, their cats, one of whom took a special interest in Bryn‘s crotch for the
duration of his visit.
Seeing people I don’t see often enough. Meeting lots of fabulous new people.
A surprising heavy dump of snow, tramping around in it, and attempting to sledge on a sleigh made from – by the looks of things – a plank of wood and two chair legs (not
particularly successful).
Tasty pizza. Followed by the chef coming out to ask me how it was, presumably because I’d been overheard talking about the art of pizza making, the consistency of their dough, etc.:
I’ve been eating a lot of pizza, recently, as I’ll explain in a future post.
Dancing until late to awful music on a knackered old sound system by a foulmouthed transvestite DJ. It’s always a pleasure to get the chance to dance with Liz, one of the few people
who seems to enjoy flailing around to music almost as much as I do.
Brief game of I Have Never… in Liz & Simon’s kitchen, after the night out: even more “just like old times” than old-style Geek Night, for a handful of us at least.
Today, I had to explain to somebody that Mozilla Firefox is free*.
Let me elaborate slightly. Today, I had to explain to an IT professional that Mozilla Firefox is free.
Let me go a tiny bit further. Today, I had to explain to an IT professional with decades of experience, working for an very large government-funded body, that Mozilla Firefox
is free. This isn’t some kid who got started on Windows XP. This is a man who remembers the first browser war. A man who works on UNIX systems in his day-to-day work, I gather. A man who should know better.
Surely! Surely?
This is where your tax money is going. I think the UK FOSS advocacy scene just died a little inside.
A few months ago, I spent one lunchtime writing a One-Time Pad Encryption/Decryption Engine in
Javascript. I’d meant to blog about it at the time, but I forgot, but I came across it again today and thought it was cool enough to share with you all.
If you already appreciate why that’s cool, go play with it. If you don’t, allow me to explain.
What is a One-Time Pad and why is it awesome?
One-time pads are a form of cryptography which are simple enough to do by hand (you don’t need a computer, but it helps), versatile enough to transport any message, and – this is the
clever part – completely unbreakable.
Yes, completely unbreakable. It doesn’t matter if you have a billion supercomputers and a billion years, a one-time pad is mathematically sound. So long as it’s used properly,
it’s unbreakable, but it’s the difficulty and discipline required in using them properly – as well as difficulties in finding secure ways to share keys over long distances – that makes
them impractical for widespread use.
They did, however, see a lot of use in espionage during the Second World War and the Cold War, and continue to be used today for some diplomatic messages, as well as occasionally by
particularly paranoid civilians.
So what’s the story?
You’re probably familiar with the concept of a Caesar Cipher – you may have
even played with them as a child – which is perhaps most-often seen nowadays in the form of ROT13.
Put simply, a caesar cipher “rotates” letters through the alphabet, so perhaps A becomes B, B becomes C, C becomes D, and so on (in this example, Z would become A). So my message “IF
YOU READ THIS YOU ARE GAY” becomes “JG ZPV SFBE UIJT ZPV BSF HBZ”. I can send that message to you, having already agreed with you the code, and you can roll each letter back by one (so
A becomes Z, B becomes A, etc.), to get back the original message.
This is fundamentally flawed and offer no real security at all, of course. But suppose we made a couple of enhancements to our plain old Caesar Cipher. First, let’s add some punctuation
to our alphabet (space, full stop, comma – we’ll treat these as letters in their own right which come after ‘Z’). Then, instead of rotating each letter in our message the same number of
steps around, we’ll vary it. So let’s agree that the first letter will rotate 3 places, the second by 18, and the third by 11: then the fourth by 3 again, the fifth by 18, the sixth by
11, and so on. If we encode the same message now, we get:
I becomes L (rotated by 3)
F becomes X (rotated by 18)
[space] becomes I (rotated by 11)
Y becomes a comma (,)
And so on. Suddenly that’s a lot more secure than our plain old Caesar Cipher! Congratulations: you just invented the Vigenère Cipher. Unfortunately for you, it’s almost 500 years old already. Even more unfortunately, it’s still not very secure.
It’s fine for passing notes in class, but it won’t do for sending orders to your agent on the other side of the Iron Curtain!
How is a One-Time Pad different?
The “key” to the cipher we used above is 3, 18, 11, and the problem is that the key ends up being re-used (repeated) throughout the course of the message. If the message was the word
“ELF” (encrypted to “HAQ”), and we agreed never to use that same key again, then anybody who intercepted the message – even if they knew we were using a Vigenère Cipher – wouldn’t know
what we’d said, except to say that it had three or fewer letters. We could equally have said “MAN” (using the key 8, 17, 8), “EAT” (using the key 0, 17, 14), or “EGG” (using the key 0,
23, 1). If we ever used the same key – 3, 18, 11 – again, our code would become vulnerable to frequency analysis, which is a technique for working out what the key might be based on the likelyhood of particular letters or
words (especially common ones) being used in combination.
It’s pretty easy to see how to fix this: all you have to do is to choose a key that is at least as long as the message you want to encrypt, and never reuse the key.
This is how a one-time pad works. Suppose you and I agree a series of numbers, like this: 64191 25746 89891 93406 33604 89879. You keep a copy, and I keep a copy, and we never
tell anybody else those numbers, or the order in which they appear.
When I want to send you a message, I first convert that message into a series of numbers, using a codebook or codetable. In the example codetable below – which has been optimised for
the English language – the most-commonly used letters are represented by one digit each, while less-frequently used numbers are represented by two digits. So the message “STEAL THE
PANTIES” becomes 82832 17890 83752 80148 33282. It’s important to remember that this still isn’t encrypted; it’s just encoded: turned into a format suitable for encryption.
If we often talk about “panties” in our messages (and who doesn’t?), we might add that word to our codebook to make it faster to write: for example, we might assign it the code “11” –
in the table above, the prefix “99” means “look it up in the codebook”, so instead of writing “panties” as “80148 33282”, we’d write it as “9911” – cold war spies had whole dictionaries
of most-common words assigned to numbers to make them shorter to write out! That makes our message: 82832 17890 83752 99110. In this particular implementation, we add a padding zero to
make it up to a nice round block of five digits.
Next, we encrypt the message using our pre-arranged secret key, 64191 25746 89891 93406 33604 89879. To do this, we just take each digit in the message and add it to each digit in the
key, ignoring any “tens” column. So 8 plus 6 is (1)4, 2 plus 4 is 6, 8 plus 1 is 9, and so on, to get our encrypted message.
All you have to do to decode it is run the whole thing backwards. From each digit in the message, deduct the corresponding value in the key – if you get any negative numbers, just add
10 to them so that they’re not negative any more. Then run the resulting encoded number through your codebook to get back the secret message.
In practice, using a codebook is optional, but very-highly recommended. In the basic codebook I’ve provided with my implementation, the word “condition” goes down from being
“71547 23833 54” to just “99114 7”. A well-designed codebook will contain not only common words in your language, but anticipated words for the things that you expect to talk about in
your messages (like “MISSION”, “CAPTURED”, and – of course – “PANTIES”).
Messages encrypted using one-time pads are so secure that it’s safe to send the message itself completely in the clear, which is exactly what we used to do. Especially during the cold
war, but still today (and increasingly), governments have been able to communicate with spies in foreign countries simply by broadcasting strings of numbers over conventional radio,
from what are called numbers stations by radio enthusiasts (and also by
conspiracy theorists, of course). Of course, nowadays it’s perhaps more-feasible to send many kinds of messages by e-mail – and there are a number of one-time pad systems optimised for
fully-computerised use, although there exists a greater risk of being traced online than by simply tuning in a radio.
Now: go have a play!
Click the link – One-Time Pad Encryption/Decryption Engine in Javascript – to try out my
one-time pad engine and encrypt and decrypt a few messages of your own. It’s quite deliberately written in a way which does not communicate with my server at all, once the program has
downloaded (unplug your computer from your Internet connection if you like, and you’ll find that it still works), so I’m not able to see what you’re encrypting. You can use your own
codebook if you like, and the entire source code for the page should be reasonably easy to read, if you’re that way inclined. Have fun!
However, you certainly shouldn’t actually use it for passing secret messages around: read the caveats below if you can’t work out why for yourself!
Caveats
The first challenge with using one-time pads is finding a good secret key. People have used all kinds of things – patterns in music, entire text of books – that are all flawed and
imperfect. The only secret key good enough for use in a one time pad is a cryptographically-random set of number. The random numbers generated by a conventional computer are not good
enough: I suggest you get yourself five ten-sided dice and roll them all simultaneously, writing down the numbers which come up as they appear in front of you from left to right.
Repeatedly. Yes, this is a boring process. For convenience, my implementation will generate random numbers for you, if you like, but they’re not good enough for actual use. The United
States broke a German one-time pad in 1944 because the machine they used to generate the random numbers was not sufficiently random.
The second challenge is getting your secret key to the friend to whom you want to send secret messages. This must be done in person. If you transmit it by any other
medium, it could already have been compromised. Even if you encrypt it, the system can only be considered to be as good as that encryption, which defeats the point entirely.
During the cold war, KGB spies were issued with tiny keybooks like the one shown on the right. A book this small can be hidden in any number of places, as anybody who’s been geocaching knows! After receiving and decoding a message, the page used to provide the key could easily be burned,
eaten, or otherwise destroyed.
A third challenge comes from the fact that no key must ever be re-used. As soon as a key is re-used, the code is no longer unbreakable. A combined U.S effort broke a 1945 Soviet
one-time pad after the same key was used several times: once the U.S. knew something about the contents of some of the messages (they contained leaked British intelligence), they were
able to partially break the key.
There must be no way for an unauthorised party to observe the plaintext before it has been encrypted or after it has been decrypted. Your desktop PC won’t do, because your enemy can
read your screen through the wall, install
a keylogger, or just peep through your window!
And, of course, as with all cryptography, your system is only as secure as the people involved. If your friend can be bribed, blackmailed, tricked or tortured into giving up
information, the system fails. Obviously to maximise your ability to protect your system you should issue different keybooks to each of your trusted friends – this also helps to prevent
them from talking to one another and organising a coup against you!
Dan and Paul watch as Kit resets his GPS receiver and Fiona packs up a geocache
For those who’ve not heard about it before, geocaching is often described as “a global game of hide & seek played using GPS technology”. Personally, I prefer Kit’s explanation,
which is “using military satellites to find lost Tupperware”. Put simply, participants hide caches (often plastic stay-fresh containers) in interesting places around the globe,
and publish the GPS co-ordinates online on websites like Geocaching.com, then other participants try to find them.
Ruth helps Paul up a particularly steep slope
I suppose one could also describe the activity in the context of the pastimes it is most similar to. It could be described as being a little like rambling (although some caches are in
urban locations and many are reachable by car), orienteering (but generally with less need to be able to triangulate points and read a map and more ability to use a GPS effectively and
understand its limitations), hide & seek (finding things that have been hidden rather than people, of course), and one of any number of hobbies ending with “-spotting” (each geocache
has a unique number, and many participants are trying to visit as many as possible, or to visit particular subsets of them).
A small geocache wrapped in grey tape to help camoflage it, the roll of tape, and a TomTom navigation system (being used as a backup GPS receiver).
I suppose another way of describing it might be in the context of the hot cold game, which you probably played as a kid: where while looking for something hidden, the hider calls out
“warmer, warmer, colder, warmer again, hot!” as an indication to the seeker as to whether or not they’re on the right track. This analogy is particularly apt when one gets within a few
metres of the cache, at which point GPS devices become almost useless at telling you which direction to go in (and of uncertain value at telling you how far away you are – when in a
wooded area or surrounded by tall buildings, GPS can be thrown off by tens or even hundreds of metres).
Ruth watches as Kit gets a reading for the cache that Fiona and Paul are preparing to plant
Since Kit and Fiona’s visit, a number of us have jumped right in to geocaching. Paul, Ruth, Jimmy, Claire and I are all now represented on the site: as pacifist_049 (Paul), fleeblewidget (Ruth), JimEsk (Jimmy & Claire), and avapoet (me).
Kit and Ruth prepare to hide one of Paul's first caches
I can’t speak for all of these people, but there’s something about geocaching that’s really grabbed my interest. Since their visit, I’ve been out and found a number of the caches in
and around Aberystwyth, and I’ve even hidden the first of my own. At the very least, I’ve been glad of the excuse to make better use
of my bike, but more than that: I’ve been pleased to get around and see parts of the town and countryside that I don’t normally visit or look that closely at. Yes, even when I’ve ended
up stuck up on a hill
in the dark (that’ll teach me to go ‘caching after work in the short days of winter!).
Geocaching way up the Rheidol valley
Perhaps strangest, though, is my (so-far limited) experience of the local geocaching community. After you’ve visited a few sites around here you begin to notice patterns in the names of
the people who’ve been there before you, and you start seeing the same aliases appearing again and again. And in a town the size of Aberystwyth, it’s invariably only a matter of time
before you make contact with, well, everybody.
Paul, Kit, Fiona and I wandering back from a cache (sorry about the wonkiness of the picture: this one was taken by Ruth, and she's all wobbly and stuff).
At the weekend I was in Morrisons, buying plastic tubs and other supplies with which to make caches – I suppose that in itself might have made me stand out: who goes to Morrisons to buy
a stack of small Tupperware boxes and notepads small enough to fit inside them? – when a man come over to me. He looked at me, as if trying to work out where he knew me from, and then
looked down at my hands and saw what I was carrying. “Avapoet?” he asked. “Treedoctor2000?” I replied. So there we have it, I’m officially part of the local geocaching
community, and I didn’t even mean to.
Ruth finds a cache!
So there we have it, a glowing review for a fun new activity that if you haven’t tried, you ought to. If you own a GPS or even a modern mobile phone or even just a portable SatNav
system, you’ve probably got all you need to get started, and with almost a million caches around the globe, there are sure to be a few near you. So if you were waiting for my approval
before you went and did so, here it is.
Now get away from the computer and go do something outdoors!
Further Reading
More photos courtesy of my camera and Kit’s camera. I’ve been
careful to use only photos that don’t give away huge clues about where caches are in this blog post, but there may be spoilers in the other photos: you have been warned!
Friday night was Murder… In Space!, our most recent murder mystery party. This is the second of our murder mystery nights that I’ve been the author of (the first one was
Murder In The Reign Of Terror), and I took a lot of what I learned
from the experience of writing and co-hosting of that mystery… and then disregarded about half of it.
Me as the hologram of Ground Control Director Dan Griffin
One of the things that I thought we’d do differently from normal was a more “freeform” roleplaying experience. Instead of communal debates punctuated with pre-scripted dialogues, I
wanted to create an atmosphere that felt more… like a group of people trapped together, where one is a murderer! I wanted distrust and backstabbing, secrets and lies. So instead of
scripting dialogues and drip-feeding clues to the players between courses, I gave a lot more information “up front” and relied on the characters to develop their own social
interactions, with mixed success.
Captain Rusty Schweiper (Adam) issues a mission patch to reporter Robyn Morse (Claire)
As I expected, I disregarded my own suggestion to myself to refrain from committing to a date for the event until I’d written at least half of the materials. Unfortunately, this was
coupled with my incorrect assumption that writing a murder mystery in which I didn’t pre-script the dialogues would be somehow easier or faster than the contrary. Also my
mistake in thinking that writing for ten people would only be 25% harder than writing for eight (in actual fact, complexity grows exponentially, because each person you add to a murder
mystery has a theoretical relationship with everybody added before them).
Little red pieces of paper abound in the early stages of the game
The game proved challenging early on. Without the structure of initial dialogue and with no formal introduction phase, it took some time for the players to get into character and to
understand what it was that they wanted to achieve and how they might go about it. In addition, a lot of the characters held their cards very close to their chest,
metaphorically-speaking, to being with, resulting in a great shortage of “free” information during the first half of the game. However, the “space age” multicoloured cocktails did their
work quickly, and after a sufficiency of liquid lubrication virtually everybody was slotting into their position in the group.
Helen Shaman (Ruth), the biologist
Once the players got into the swing of things, including (for those who’d attended this kind of event before) culturing an understanding that it was encouraged, perhaps even necessary,
to meet up with fellow crewmembers in smaller groups and swap information and plot items – something that was new to this particular adventure – everything went a lot more smoothly. As
I’d hoped, characters would take time to creep away in twos and threes and gossip about the others behind their backs. At least one character attempted to eavesdrop on others’
conversations, which was particularly amazing to see. In addition to the usual goal of “detect the murderer”/”make a clean getaway”, I’d issued each character with a set of secondary
(and tertiary) goals that they’d like to achieve, typically related to learning something, preventing others from learning something, or acquiring or retaining a particular plot item.
Some characters had more complex goals, relating to keeping the blame on or off particular other characters, making good early guesses, or being the first to achieve particular
milestones. I felt that this added a richness to the characters which is otherwise sometimes lacking, and it seemed to work particularly well for helping the players play their roles,
although I should probably have put the goals higher up on each player’s character sheet in order to make it clearer how important they were to the overall plot.
Robyn Morse (Claire), Sir Richard Virgin (Matt P), and Steven Win (JTA) in a private discussion
As usual, it was inspiring to see characters I’d invented brought to life in the interpretation of their players. As with Murder In The Reign Of Terror, I’d quite-deliberately avoided
assigning characters to players, instead letting Ruth do that based on my preliminary character
descriptions, thereby providing me with a number of surprises (and an even greater number of interesting coincidences) when it came to seeing how everybody chose to portray my ideas.
Particular credit must go to Matt R for his stunning performance as the self-aware android, TALOS-III,
and to Adam for the extraordinary amount of effort he put into his costume (including a silver jumpsuit, “moon
boots”, and a cap and t-shirt emblazoned with his name, insignia, and the mission name). That said, everybody did an amazing job of making their character believable and love (or
hate)-able for the characteristics they portrayed: there were moments at which it was easy to forget that this was all make-believe.
Adam’s “moon boots”
As usual, Ruth put an unbelievable amount of work into making the food fit the theme, and she’d tried to have food that represented the nationalities of all of the astronauts present,
in addition to making the food look like “space food”, even where it wasn’t (which resulted in the up-side that the foil containers out of which dinner was served needed no washing up
when the party was finished). She’d also put a lot of thought into “space age” drinks, which mostly consisted of brightly-coloured cocktails prepared from ingredients brought by
individual guests, which worked really well (although I apologise for the disparity that I’ve since discovered in the varied prices of the drinks people were asked to bring).
Pointing at the murderer, pilot James McDivvy.
As seems to have become traditional – although I swear that this is just another one of those coincidences – Paul‘s
character, James McDivvy, turned out to be the murderer: he’d poisoned the victim using carbon monoxide in his space suit’s air supply when he went for a spacewalk. In the photo above
he’s seen holding a data disk containing the program that controls the TALOS-III android: he played upon the fact that nobody could find it to imply that whoever had it must have
somehow used it to reprogram the android to perform the murder, playing upon everybody’s natural suspicion of the creepy robot amongst them, and this worked well for him, distracting
many of the others from the evidence that would have implicated him. You can also clearly see Rory‘s (Akiyama
Toyohiro) fabulous SG-1/Japanese space geek costume, including his digital scrolling Twitter feed hanging around his neck.
Angharad (Svetlana Svetyona), a first-time Murder Night attendee
As usual, there are lessons to be learned. In the hope that I’ll pay some attention to myself next time (yes, there’ll be a “next time”, hopefully before I leave Aber – and I’m hoping to make something even
bigger and cooler out of it), I’d like Future Dan to remember the following lessons:
I know you’ll ignore this anyway, Future Dan, but do not commit to a date for a murder mystery until you’ve got at least half of it written already. There’s lots
of stress, lots of panic, and a higher freqency of typos and other embarassing mistakes when you write the last few thousand words in the last day or two.
Similarly, have more leeway for additional characters: I know it feels like “wasted words” to write for characters who’ll probably never be used, but it’s better to plan for about
10% of your cast to be playing optional characters, so that when they pull out (or more people want to come) you’re already prepared.
Plan for a structured introduction round in which the host more-fully explains “the story so far”, and perhaps pre-script the first conversation(s) that players are likely to engage
in, in order to make breaking into character a little less like diving in at the deep end.
In the unlikely event that I’m not the only person who uses SuperGenPass to manage my passwords and MicroB on Maemo on
my Nokia N900, here’s a few tips that I thought I’d share (they’re also valid on the N800 and N810
and “hacker edition” N770s, too, I expect):
You don’t have a Bookmarks Toolbar (where would you put it on a 3½ inch screen?), so once you’ve customised your SuperGenPass bookmarklet, you’ll need to click-and-hold on the
generated link, and then select “Add bookmark” to save it to your bookmarks).
Use it as normal: either fill your master password into the form and click your Bookmarks menu and select the bookmarklet, or select the bookmarklet and give it your master
password. Don’t forget when using complex forms or changing passwords that Maemo provides a full clipboard so you can copy/paste passwords around where the need arises (thankfully quite
rarely).
If you’re irritated by the “You have requested an encrypted page that contains some unencrypted information” warnings that you see when logging into SSL-secured websites (and the
fact that unlike desktop Firefox, you can’t turn it off from the settings), here’s how you disable it:
Agree to the warning page, if you’re presented with one
Type “security.warn_viewing_mixed” into the search box, or browse the properties list for that option
Select it by clicking on it, and tap the Enter key to toggle it from true to false.
I don’t yet know the reason for the fleeting “Maximum number of characters reached” message, but it doesn’t seem to impact on functionality of SuperGenPass. Does anybody else know
what it’s about or how it can be suppressed?
The wedding was Andy and Siâns, of course, and they got married
yesterday in Cardiff. Unfortunately, Ruth, JTA and I’s plans to go down there were conspired against by the combined forces of all of the worst luck imaginable. Allow me to elaborate.
The plan was simple. As soon as JTA could finish work, we’d suit-up, hop into Miriam (Ruth & JTA’s loveable, quirky litle car), and rocket down to Cardiff to join the party. And it could have gone
so well, as a plan – JTA managed to finish work early, I dug out one of the most awesome ties ever, we’d even packed up a stack of inflatable beds so that anybody else who was planning
to crash on the happy couple’s living room floor could also sleep in comfort.
But the problem was Miriam. Miriam, you little beast! She’d apparently been “sounding funny” during Ruth’s trip over to Aber on Thursday night, and – as a precaution – we decided to
take her for a quick run out along the A44 to check that she was going to be okay for the journey to Cardiff. The plan wouldn’t be foiled even if there was a problem: we already had a
backup plan to rent a car (probably for a whole week, as Ruth and JTA will somehow need to get to and from Oxford over the coming week).
It turns out that Ruth getting a second opinion – mine – was a good idea: yes, Miriam “sounds funny”, if by “sounds funny” you mean “judders and vibrates once you get above about 1000
revs, increasingly violently as you get above third gear, and ocassionally cuts out entirely at higher speeds.” Honestly, I suspect she might have been safe, but she certainly
wasn’t healthy, so, after (correctly, it later turns out) guessing that the problem was that one or more cylinders were periodically (read: virtually always) failing to fire, we ditched
her and went looking for a rental.
We toddled along to Europcar (don’t be fooled by the picture: that’s not what
Aberystwyth Europcar’s offices look like), and asked what they had available for hire for a week. “Nothing,” came the reply. “What about just for today?” we asked. “Nothing,” came the
reply, again, “We always sell out at about this time on a Friday.”
They suggested we try Hertz out in Llanbadarn, so I gave them a bell. “You want it for today,
do you?” came the reply, in a distinctly Welsh accent twinged with only a little incredulity. There was the sound of paperwork being filed in the background. “I’m afraid we’ve got
nothing at all today.”
“Is there anybody else I could try, other than you and Europcar?” I asked, “We’re trying to get to a wedding in Cardiff and our car has broken down.”
“You might try – what are they called? – AV Van Hire, out in Glanyrafon. I think that they used to have a car that they used to rent out, sometimes.” This was our last chance, so I
thanks the lady from Hertz and went about phoning her competitor in the industrial estate.
I explained the situation to the friendly-sounding man who answered the phone.
“Yeah. We’ve got a Ford Galaxy here that you can borrow.”
“Really? That’s great! How much for a day’s rental?”
“Yell you what – you get over here and we’ll talk about that when you get here.” Hmm. Not sure how to take that – leaves the opportunity to haggle, I suppose, but he could be the kind
who wants to size-up his customers first, and the fact that I’m wearing a suit won’t necessarily work financially in our favour. Still, running out of options at this point, so Ruth & I
grabbed JTA and jumped into a taxi out to the industrial estate.
Finding the place was more than a little challenging. The taxi driver didn’t know where they were, so eventually we just had him drop us off at the DHL Parcel Depot and called the
rental place again. He said he’d send round the car to pick us up, and a few minutes later it arrived.
The Galaxy had taken a bump at some point in it's life, so - not wanting to risk being ripped-off for causing damage that already existed - I took this picture
“It’s… big,” said Ruth, as we hopped into the Ford
Galaxy (Mk2). And she was right – you could comfortably seat seven in this beast. Bear in mind that Miriam’s a very small car – she sometimes look as if the two rear passenger doors
were added as an afterthought – and you can see why what is, essentially, only a little smaller than a minibus, might be a little intimidating to her.
The chap at the rental place was as friendly as he’d sounded, and, after talking a little about fuel economy and turning circles, made us a really good offer. “Great,” I said, “We’ll
take it!” We wandered upstairs into the plywood “office” that hung above their maintenance garage.
“Have you got your license?” he asked, and Ruth produced hers. He started tapping details into a computer and filling out forms, and then stopped and looked at it again. “Umm: how long
have you been driving?” he asked.
“18 months,” she said.
“And you?” he said to JTA.
“17?” he guessed, and then checked his license to confirm that this guess was correct. The friendly man turned to me.
“I’m taking my test next month,” I replied.
He pointed at the documents in front of him, where it clearly stated that while the insurance company that they used could insure anybody over the age of 21, they needed to have two
years of driving experience. He flicked backward and forth through the paperwork, looking for an exception clause (they were a reasonably liberal-minded insurer, even willing to take on
drivers with convictions, but had no flexibility on this one clause… unlike, we later learned, Europcar’s insurers), before giving up.
And that was that. Our last hope, sat out in their driveway, ready for us to rent but illegal for us to take off the premises: as good as useless. We’d checked the public transport
options already and determined that the best we could hope to achieve might be to arrive at Andy & Sian’s house right as they happy couple would be retiring to their matrimonial bed
(can you think of a better way to make yourself welcome than that?), and that’s if there weren’t any delays. Dejected, we finally gave up. The friendly man had one of his employees
(possibly his son?) drive us back to Aber.
Act Two – Doing Something Else Instead
So, in true Friday night tradition, we did what we usually do: had Troma Night, our regular weekly film night. Of course, few could make it (just Sam; Paul visited briefly; and Kit and Fiona turned up late on). In accordance with the prophecy, and perhaps a little in order to feel like we were less-badly separated from our
friends on their special day, we themed Troma Night around them.
We stayed in our wedding-wear, watched films about weddings, toasted the happy couple, and wallowed in the fact that we could’t be there with them. Briefly – and with thanks to
Matt R – we got to speak to the bride by phone and wish her well, which was nice, but it’s not quite the
same. We promise that we’ll try to get down there and visit you sometime soon!
Champagne and flowers at Troma Night 290
Folks Dressed-Up At Troma Night 290
Some Of The Films For Troma Night 290
Ruth pops open (yet) another bottle of bubbly at Troma Night 290
Sam arrives at Troma Night 290 - for those of you who haven't met Sam yet, he's the leader of a small nocturnal group of filing-cabinet kickers up on campus, if you know what I mean.
Dan and Ruth at Troma Night 290
JTA and Ruth at Troma Night 290
This is how a one-time pad works. Suppose you and I agree a series of numbers, like this: 64191 25746 89891 93406 33604 89879. You keep a copy, and I keep a copy, and we never
tell anybody else those numbers, or the order in which they appear.
In practice, using a codebook is optional, but very-highly recommended. In the basic codebook I’ve provided with my implementation, the word “condition” goes down from being
“71547 23833 54” to just “99114 7”. A well-designed codebook will contain not only common words in your language, but anticipated words for the things that you expect to talk about in
your messages (like “MISSION”, “CAPTURED”, and – of course – “PANTIES”).
