Articles – Page 59

My April Fools

I’ve always had a thing for big, overcomplicated April Fools’ gags. Traditionally, we’d always play pranks on Penbryn Halls at the University, but it’s not so easy these days to gain access to halls of residence, now that they’ve installed door locks that don’t open by themselves when you so much as breathe hard on them, so I thought it was time to broaden my sights.

I work for a company based in the Aberystwyth Technium on the marina. A few weeks ago, the Technium management had arranged for the installation of a new fence and automatic car park barriers, to allow the building to better control who has access to the offices’ car parking spaces (car parking spaces being a particularly valuable commodity in Aberystwyth). These barriers haven’t come online yet, but apparently they will “soon” (which is regional-government-speak for “someday, maybe”).

Car Parking Gates at the Aberystwyth Technium

Early on the morning of 1st April, I put out an e-mail to all resident companies at the Technium, spoofed so that it appeared to come from Technium management and emulating their writing style and the way that they typically send out bulk messages to the tenants.

Annwyl pawb ,

The key fobs for the new car park barrier system need to be ordered via an online application form . The application needs to be filled in as your key fobs will be uniquely linked to your vehicle.

The application form is only available online at http://www.techniumnetwork.info/aberystwyth/carparking/

Once you have applied, central office will send out the key fobs to us in a week or two. Please fill in the form as soon as possible so that the key fobs all arrive at the same time.

Diolch

Sion

Sion Meredith
Gweithredydd Technium Aberystwyth
Technium Aberystwyth Executive

<snip>

The techniumnetwork.info domain name is one that I’d picked up the day before for the best part of 49p on a special offer with a registrar – the real Technium website is at www.technium.co.uk, but I figured that people wouldn’t pay attention to the domain name: even the tenants here probably don’t spend much time, if any at all, on the Technium website. I stole the stylesheet and layout for the official website and adapted it to my purposes: there’s a mirror up now at http://techniumnetwork.scatmania.org/aberystwyth/carparking/ if you want to see for yourself.

Spoof website for the car parking key fob scam

The site begins by looking like a genuine application form, asking for all of the key details – your personal and company information, basic details of your car – and slowly starts over many, many pages of forms to ask sillier and sillier questions. “What colour is your car?” is a drop-down with “Red” and “Other” as the only options. “What noise does your car make?” is accompanied by options like “Vroom!” and “Brum-brum.” Later questions ask whether or not your car is capable of transforming into a giant robot and challenge you to correctly identify road signs that have been altered in comedic ways.

The trick worked, and many of the tenants were fooled… some of them well-past the point at which they should have thought the form was genuine; and almost all of them believed, even when they realised that the form was a joke, that it had been set up by the Technium themselves. It was only when one tenant decided to pass a copy of the e-mail on to the real Sion Meredith that the building management heard anything about it, and, sadly, put a stop to it by sending out an e-mail to say that it was all a joke, and not one by them.

After he’d worked out it was me that was behind it… I’d taken steps to make it obvious to anybody who bothered to check up on it, so as to maximise the understanding that it was, in the end, just a joke: the last thing I wanted was some humourless bureaucrat to see this gag (which did, of course, involve feigning the identity of a government employee) as a terrorist threat or something …he got his own back, though. He came up to my office at a few minutes to midday to inform me that he’s had to pass on my details to the Technium legal team, and he managed to make my heart skip a beat before I realised that he, too, was just having a joke.

A selection of feedback so far on the gag after I sent out a “gotcha” e-mail to everybody affected:

“Way too much time on your hands………” – Aled, thinkplay.tv
“You have far too much time on your hands but it was very amusing!!” – Kayt, MapAnalysis
“When I realised it was an April Fool I did look at the email address and questioned it but didn’t think [it could be spoofed]! Must be because I’m a technical dumb ass!” – George, MapAnalysis
“Dan, Sion was serious [about the legal team], when he popped his head round the door at 11.45 he had some documents in his hand.” – Nic, Angle Technology
“When did you find time to make this, then?” – Simon, SmartData

I had to leave the room when it first started to catch Simon out: I heard him phoning his wife to ask for a reminder of their cars’ number plates and had to excuse myself so as not to give the game away with my girlish giggling.

So, that was all good, and far more successful than my backup plan which involved passing on missed call messages to co-workers to ask them to return a call to Rory Lyons at Captive Audience on 01244 380280. The number is actually the number for Chester Zoo: I so very nearly made some of the people I work with unwittingly call up Chester Zoo on the morning of April 1st and ask, “Can I speak to Rory Lyons, please?” It’s a good prank, anyway – I’ll save it for another time: or if you want to give it a go (it doesn’t even have to be April Fools’ Day, with a great joke like that), let me know how you get on!

What I’ve Been Up To This Weekend

This post should have appeared on Monday 24th March 2008, but owing to technical difficulties didn’t make it online until Thursday 27th. Sorry!

Like many others, I’ve had both Good Friday and Easter Monday off work, and as I haven’t blogged enough recently, I thought I ought to provide a quick update about the things I’ve been up to:

Aberystwyth Goes Silent

Okay, so that happens about this time every year: the last week has been the usual lull between the disappearance of the majority of the students and the appearance of the Easter weekend tourists. But this year it was particularly quiet, because even many of the people I’d sort-of expected to be around are elsewhere: Matt‘s still in Cornwall, Sarah‘s also absent, and of course Ruth and JTA are away on a skiing holiday with Gareth and Penny. So it’s been even quieter than we’re used to at this time of year.

Bedroom Tidy-Up

It’s been long overdue, but anybody who ever went into Claire and I’s bedroom at The Cottage will know that it contained bags of clothes that we’d never got around to unpacking since we moved in, over a year ago. So, I finally unpacked them: many of them right into other bags which made their way to the nearest charity shop.

Why do I share this with you? Well, because it leads to an interesting guessing game. You know how Claire pretty much never, ever wears a dress or a skirt (and makes a point of mentioning this to people). Well, having unpacked/washed/sorted/re-hung all of her clothes, take a guess at the exact number of skirts and dresses (total) that she owns. I’ll reveal the actual figure (assuming there aren’t any I’m yet to discover in the final bag) a little further down.

Troma Night Lite Ultralite

Pretty much every Saturday for about four years, we’ve held Troma Night, our film night of the best and the worst films ever made, and, over the years, it’s gathered a number of interesting traditions. One such tradition is that it only counts as a Troma Night if there are four people present. That’s fine and dandy, and there have been a number of three-man Troma Nights, which we’ve instead called Troma Lite. But this Saturday was the first ever (that I’m aware of) Troma Night with only two people present.

That’s right: only Claire and I were there. We’ve now dubbed this event Troma Ultralite – a Troma Night with only two people present. So we (re-)watched the RiffTrax‘d version of Raiders of the Lost Ark, followed by Watership Down, which I hadn’t seen since I was a small child (it gave me nightmares, I seem to remember).

(A Very Small) Geek Night

Yesterday brought us a Geek Night, of course, hosted by Rory, but only he, Claire, Paul and I were present, and Paul had to disappear before then end because unlike the rest of us, he’s still working his usual crazy number of hours this Easter weekend. Unlike last week, when I played like a complete moron, I rocked last night and thoroughly trounced everybody, which I shan’t be letting them forget for a while. Well, until next week.

Turning Point: Fall Of Liberty

I got hold of a copy of Turning Point: Fall Of Liberty, a new video game, and played through it this afternoon. In it’s favour, it’s a very clever idea for a game. Apparently, in 1931, Winston Churchill was hit by a taxi cab while in New York, which gave him a characteristic limp for the remainder of his life. In the game’s alternate-history universe, this accident killed him, and he never went on to lead Great Britain during the Second World War. In 1940, Britain surrenders and comes under the occupation of Nazi Germany, who never forge a wartime alliance with Japan against the United States, and do not turn their sights on Russia.

We’ve seen this kind of thing before, of course. The time travel of the Command & Conquer: Red Alert series of games played the idea to death (of course, they instead had a young Adolf Hitler killed, but the principle is similar). But there’s something quite well-executed about this particular alternate history. In 1953, Greater Germany and Japan launch a combined surprise attack against the United States, capture key cities on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, and force the President and Vice-President to step down so that they can replace them with a “puppet President” during the first part of the occupation.

The game plays as a first-person shooter: the player’s character is a New York construction worker who for some reason is highly proficient with a huge variety of firearms and can withstand several simultaneous bullets to the chest time and time again without dying. The game opens as bomber and paratrooper blimps, accompanied by bomber wings, attack New York, and it’s here that you really see how beautiful the game can be. The draw distance is fantastic: you can see the distant planes passing over Liberty Island as they get closer and closer until eventually they’re strafing the buildings you’re above. And so your adventure begins.

Unfortunatley, it is – at heart – a console game, for the Xbox 360, and it shows. The controls are somewhat clunky and ill-described (and why oh-why are you forbidden from using the mouse to navigate the menus?), the aim “assist” that’s so essential on most console shooters feels out-of-place when you’re playing with a nice accurate mouse, and it’s impossible to save the game except when you pass a “checkpoint.” Worse yet, these checkpoints get further and further apart as the game goes on, as if the developers couldn’t think of how to make the game challenging any more so they just made it more frustrating: here’s a clue – doing the same thing over and over isn’t challenging, but it is boring. They’ve tried to make it not feel exactly like Half-Life 2 (even some of the scenes seem to be copied directly from the game, like the Tower Bridge mission) by adding in the “plant a bomb” minigame, but this is about as challenging as picking your nose: all you have to do is press the appropriate coloured buttons in order. There isn’t even a time limit to doing so – at least not one that I ever found.

The middle of the game draws on and somehow skips over the key elements of the story, which could otherwise have been fascinating. Perhaps I’m looking at the “wrong” things, but I’d really like to have seen more of the politics, the formation of the resistance movement, and the German propoganda slowly appearing on the walls of the city. Oh, and the civilians! Where do they all disappear to? When they’re not part of the plot, they disappear after the first chapter never to be seen again.

And then the end brings it all back again – those huge draw distances, those beautiful wide fight scenes, and the (really cool) blimps (including a fucking flying aircraft carrier – how cool is that?). It’s a bit easy at the beginning but it makes up for that by being really quite hard towards the end, except for the very final scene which was a bit peasy (although I don’t think the level designers expected me to have saved myself an anti-tank rocket launcher and a dozen rockets from way earlier in the level, the use of which was my entire strategy for defeating the Third Reich).

So, in summary: it’s a good way to waste an afternoon if you “do” WWII first person shooters, and you’re interested in alternative history, AND you can put up with the fact that this is, in the end, a console shoot-em-up that’s been half-heartedly ported to the PC.

Fire! On The Beach!

Not-gay Gareth’s free tonight for the first time in ages, so he and Paul have organised that we’ll be having a fire on North Beach tonight when Ruth and JTA get back into town (or maybe starting a little before then). There’ll be a barbeque, so if you’ve got anything to grill, bring it along. It’s on Abnib Events, of course, as well (which I fixed last week and is now working properly again – sorry about that!).

So, How Many Skirts And Dresses?

And the answer to the earlier question? 24. Yes, 24 skirts and dresses are now hanging in the wardrobe of a woman who never ever wears any of them. How did this happen? I’ve known Claire for six years, and I’m not sure I can count 24 times I’ve ever seen her in a skirt, never mind some of the things in her wardrobe which I’ve never seen before in my life. How does she manage it?

A Comment From Thailand

Oh yeah, and you’ll remember a while back I blogged about a postcard from Jimmy in Thailand. Well, it turns out that somebody from Thailand (allegedly, at least) found the page and corrected his spelling of the name of the island he was on, in a comment on this blog.

Right; that was longer than it should have been. I’ll try to be less of a sloppy blogger.

I’ve Been Q’ing For A Year Now

Post Offices, eh? But those aside, it’s now been a year since Claire and I changed our surnames to the letter “Q”. Here’s a quick look back:

The Good Things

It still feels like it’s “ours,” and something that’s ours alone – a great sense of identity and togetherness that we probably wouldn’t have gotten in any other way.
It still makes people’s minds boggle, even after they get past the “disbelief” stage. It still baffles me how many people try to “guess what it stands for,” even after being told it doesn’t stand for anything.
The junk mailers still don’t seem to have caught up with my new name, which makes filtering my postal mail very easy – it’s it’s for my old name, it’s junk; if it’s for my new name, it’s not.
It really wasn’t very hard to do!
The game of “comeing up with children’s names for Claire and I” seems to have gone out of fashion at last. I still feel that the winner was “Barbie.”
I’m yet to find anybody with a shorter name than me, although I suspect that at least one exists (there are plenty with same length of name, including Ron Ng, Wu Man, and many other people with romanised Chinese names).

The Bad Things

Some companies (and, in particular, their computer systems) seem to have a great deal of difficulty with my surname. It hasn’t caused any problems as yet; just inconveniences – and I’m on several databases as “Qq”, “Qu”, or “Q[space][space][space].”
We spend longer at customs desks at British airports than we used to. Those guys have no sense of humour.
I spend longer spelling my name to people on the phone than I used to, which feels unusual considering that my old surname had at least two spellings of which mine was the least common.
My mobile phone contract provider still refuse to believe that my first name has changed, too. They have no problem with my last name. Weird.

So, no: I don’t regret it, it’s been fun and fabulous and it’s something special for Claire and I to share, and I fully expect to have this surname for the remainder of my life… although I am sometimes tempted by the idea of a one-letter first name, too… :-)

Edit, 22/03/2008: Fixed a spelling mistake.

Self-Harm Awareness Day

There’s a mailing list I’m on that just got a message that started as follows:

Subject: March 1st – Self-Harm Awareness Day

Just curious…

a) How many of you knew it was self-harm awareness day on March 1st and

b) Are you doing anything to mark it?
<snip>

It’s pretty bad that the first response I thought of was “Yeah, I’ll scratch that date into my arm to make sure I remember it.” Bad, but funny, in a sick and twisted way.

There’s a reason I’m a lurker.

A Postcard From Jimmy

The first postcard has arrived from Jimmy‘s world tour (right now he’s in Thailand).

Postcard front

On the front is a picture of some interestingly-shaped rocks which are apparently right outside the front door of the guesthouse where he’s staying.

He writes:

Hello everyone in Aber!

Fly to Samai in Thailand. Grab a taxi (boat or car) to Lamai beach. I’ll be in the guesthouse next to the rocks like genitalia – you can’t miss them. Bring sun cream!

Seriously, this place is amazing. Going to spend a month or so island hopping – might get used to the heat by then.

Hope everyone is well,

Jimmy

If you get internet access and read this, Jimmy: know that your postcard got here okay (and sooner than you estimated!) and that we’re all thinking of you. And if you send enough postcards, we’ll think about getting some kind of world map and sticking them to it with bits of wool and pins like something out of some crime thriller where the detectives are trying to track the villain’s movements around the globe.

Or like that scene in Heroes. That would have been shorter to type, wouldn’t it.

Best Bug Ever

On behalf of a client of a client of SmartData, I was responsible this weekend for moving a website over from one server to another. It’s a monolithic old custom-written content management system, in Perl, which over the last four or five years has been passed from developer to developer and has begun to look quite disgusting. Needless to say, we’ll be recommending refactoring.

But in the meantime, a server move was needed. No problem, I thought. Install Apache on the new server, CGI::Application, mod_include, mod_rewrite, MySQL, blah blah, all pretty standard. Copy the files over, copy the database over, hook it all up, and test it. And after a day or two of playing with it on the new server and with approval from our client, we move the DNS over to complete the operation.

Yesterday morning I get a phone call from somebody who manages the site.

Romanian Days Of The Week “All of the days of the week are in French!”

I suppose I ought to say something about this particular company. Like many companies in this part of the world, this company runs it’s website bilingually: that is, in English and Welsh. But for some reason, claimed our client’s client, their web site was now putting the days of the week in French instead of Welsh. The months of the year were still in Welsh, and the stuff that was supposed to be in English was still in English, but… well…

Further investigation showed that this report was mistaken. “I’m not sure it’s French, you know,” I replied, typically helpfully, “It’s Romanian.” I was pleased with myself right up until the point that I realised that this wasn’t actually helpful, about a second or two later.

It turns out that the site uses a Perl module called Date::Calc to display days of the week in an appropriate language, and I’d just used CPAN to do a quick-and-easy install of Date::Calc. But something was different about the old server’s copy of this module. It turns out that, not unsurprisingly, Date::Calc doesn’t naively support the Welsh language, but that some time many years ago an enterprising programmer, not wanting to go to all the effort of adding a new language to Date::Calc the proper way, simply patched the module, overwriting one of the languages already in it. He decided to replace a language that he didn’t think anybody would ever have reason to use on the server – Romanian.

The reason that the months were still in Welsh was because they used a far more standard method of translation. So I simply wrote a couple of regular expressions that changed the old, Date::Calc-translator code into a more common approach, and that fixed it. Somebody had even already defined me an array with the Welsh weekdays in (it looks like this change was planned at some point in this huge, horrible codebase, but never actually happened).

Not sure I’ll ever find out who was responsible for the atrocious bit of coding that caused this particular website to turn Romanian for a few hours, but if I do, I’ll be sure to tell them about this, the most amusing bug I’ve seen in a long, long time.

Valentine’s Day

None of the four of us (JTA, Ruth, Claire and I) had planned to make anything special out of Valentine’s Day, which is why I was quite surprised last night to come home from work and find The Cottage kitted out with candles as part of Ruth’s last-minute secret plan to cook a romantic meal for us all. Which was nice, if unexpected (although she’d apparently not planned it herself until earlier in the day, so I’ll let her off).

And so, a good evening of eating, drinking, and chatting was had by all, once JTA had gotten back from work (before then it was mostly a good evening of work – code for Ruth and I, dissertation for Claire), and the evening wore on nicely as Paul came (laden with beer and flowers) to join the party later on.

It occurred to me at the time that it’s now been six months (well, give or take a dozen days or so) since the four of us – the quad, or the Unholy Alliance, as our friends call us – got together in the romantic sense, and, with the exception of my end of year review, it’s been almost three months since I last said anything about it, so I suppose I ought to provide an update.

The four of us are all doing pretty well as a quad, still with plenty of momentum and excitement and without any major hiccups. Perhaps it’s just because my life is so hectic that I’m used to this kind of time management, but it’s my suspicion that I’ve found it the easiest of the four of us to adapt to thinking in not only an “involved in two couples” way rather than an “involved in one couple” way, but also in an “involved in a quad” way, where it’s even more important for the stability of the shape that we communicate how we’re feeling to the others around the square (or kite, or trapezium, or rectangle, or rhombus, or whatever shape we feel like we’re configured in at any given time).

There have, of course, been some challenges in having two girlfriends, each of which has two boyfriends, and I think I’ve down-played these challenges whenever I’ve talked about how things have been going. That’s not to say that they’re particularly troublesome – I’ve had far more complicated relationships than this (like, for example, most of them!) – but I guess I’ve always felt it’s a bit unfair for a guy with two hot-bi-babes on his arm to moan about relationship trouble.

Time management is the big one, obviously: I’ve heard of people with three (or more) long-term partners and I honestly haven’t a clue how they find the time for it. With work, hobbies, charity work, and valuable computer gaming time all vying for space in my already-crowded calendar, something had to give: and it was probably the computer games… =o( That’s not quite true, and it’s a vast oversimplification of the time management problem, but it is true that I seem to have far less free time than I did before (well, duh!) and I’ve had to learn to schedule time “for me” where previously it’d just come naturally. Google Calendar and it’s calendar-sharing and it’s SMS reminders have become my best friend.

Another early challenge came from insularity: the tendency for couples to become “coupley” and just do things together. It turns out that being in a quad makes it even more difficult to say “Hey, I’d quite like to go and spend some time with my other friends now, ok?” It’s taken a while, but we’ve pretty much got the hang of this, now, I think – although it can still be difficult for our friends to see the difference between us being insular and us (me in particular!) simply having very little free time in our lives. Hopefully we can still learn to get better at this.

We’ve all had to learn a lot of new skills in negotiation and communication to help us define our own rules for something that society in general isn’t too helpful about providing. An example that came up during discussion last night was about third-party secrets. When you’re in a couple and somebody tells you something, it’s usually pretty obvious whether or not you’re allowed to share it with your partner. And if it’s not, it’s easy to clarify: “Just between us, right?” And with our various backgrounds, I guess all four of us have learned to be pretty good at keeping secrets. But it can feel a little confusing when you talk to somebody about, for example, the person at the opposite corner of your quad. And what’s the etiquette for supporting those you love when your girlfriend has had an argument with your other girlfriend?

These are the kinds of things we’ve had to learn to solve, and I think we’re doing pretty damn well. We’ve had to learn to be more explicit about how we feel and what we want (“I’m feeling grumpy because I haven’t seen you in awhile – all the times I’ve been free you’ve been with $otherperson. Can we have this Saturday to ourselves?”), because that’s the best way to get what you want – to ask for what you’d like, not what you think you can get away with. We’ve had to learn about other people’s needs and about compromise – something that every relationship has, but that multiplies when you add extra people. We’ve had to learn how to talk frankly as we go through the motions of defining our own rules and our own etiquette – it’s obvious that when you go to the cinema with your lover you should be sitting next to them, but when you go with both your lovers and their other lover, who goes where?

Here in the UK, like most of the world, people are geared-up to understanding “couples” – from forms which have a spot for “partner’s name” (but… which one?) to party invitations that cover you and your sweetie (singular) only. It’s not our place to change those norms, and nor would we want to: we’re not some kind of crusaders for non-monogamous rights. We don’t want left-handed scissors made for us, and we’ve already got the right to vote (although, interestingly, not to all marry one another, not that I’d want to).

So yeah, what I planned to say was “our relationships – they’re all going really well,” and I ended up talking about some of the things that have made it challenging, instead. Ho hum. If I get the impression that people can cope with my smugness, I’ll write about what makes the whole thing great, next time, instead.

For now, though, I’d just like to share something quite profound that Claire said a while back. She said, “I expected polyamoury – for us – to be like a lending library, but it turns out it’s more like a book club.”

And on that note – have a happy Valentine’s Day (for yesterday) – however and with whoever you chose to spend it.

And The Rest Of Bulgaria

Oh yeah, suppose I ought to finish writing about Bulgaria now that we’ve been back a couple of days.

MORE SKIING: Aced The Wall in the end, and damn it’s a good run – long and fast and challenging, even when you think you know it. Coming back up on the chairlift I met a couple of Irish blokes (the Irish seemed to be the most-represented nationality on the ski slopes; not sure why), who – as the fog of the final day began to white-out the mountain top – pointed down at The Wall and said that you’d have to be a nutcase to go down it right now. So I pointed out that I’d just come off it, and was on my way back to it again.

SKIDOOS: Damn, these things are fun. Imagine a motorcycle but on skis, ripping along hard-packed ice in the middle of the night at 70km/h, guided only by a drunk Bulgarian. On or off road, Skidoos are brilliant. When the next ice age comes, I’m getting one to do my shopping in.

KARAOKE: On our final night, we went out and (alongside some Irish blokes we met) made complete idiots of ourselves at the local karaoke night.

I’ll upload pictures from the holiday at some point. For now, here’s a video of my dad singing Dancing Queen at the Karaoke night.

So yeah; Bulgaria was fun.

News From The Slopes

Fresh from the slopes, over GPRS (at charging rates starting at “two limbs”), comes this report from the Bulgarian Holiday Team (Claire and I, along with my dad and my sisters).

JOURNEY: Uneventful, but tedious – three and a bit hours on a plane followed by a five hour bus journey is pretty mind-numbing, although we did get a break at a Bulgarian McDonalds (complete with hilarious Cyrillic lettering on the sign – picture to follow [I don’t have enough arms and legs to pay to upload it]).

ACCOMODATION: Remarkably nice hotel: infinitely superior to our usual stay at Aviemore Youth Hostel for Cairngorm skiing, but with a predictably scary price tag to go with it.

FOOD: Every meal seems to contain egg and/or pork. Are these the national foodstuffs? Scrambled egg with bacon in is an obvious breakfast combination. Eggy bread laced with ham was less expected, and quite a suprise to bite into. Stuffed peppers very nice. Cured sausages not bad either.

SKIING: Generally good conditions – some partially broken runs (by Bulgarian standards – in Scotland we’d call them “perfectly usable”) this morning because the weather report predicted snow for two days so they haven’t turned on the snow-blowers, but no snow’s been forthcoming. Here in Pamporovo there’s a lot for beginners (one entirely green run is almost 4km long!) and some nice challenges for advanced skiers (I’m particularly enjoying some of the red and black runs on the West face of the mountain), but fewer options for intermediate-level skiers. Not as large a resort as Mt. Tremblant in Canada, where I was a few years ago, but still far more than Cairngorm or The Lecht offer us on our traditional trips to Scotland. Of particular note is The Wall, a black run that’s so-called because it’s quite steep. Here’s an example for those of you at home: stand up – pretend you’re on a ski slope that stretches down to your right and up to your left (so you’re “sideways” on it). Now stretch out your left arm to your side. If you were on The Wall, your hand would be touching snow. Well, a wall of ice, really. It’s a beast, and I love it.

ACCIDENTS: This is what you were really reading for, isn’t it – to find out who’s had a horrible accident so far. Well, here’s some of the best:

1. On my first attempt at The Wall, I took a turn a little sharply and flipped over. And began to slide. On my belly. Head first. Now I’ve been in this position before – it’s a natural state for a skier who’s just pushed themselves a little too far. So a started working on stopping myself all the ways I knew how, but after about 10 seconds of accelerating I came to the realisation that there was genuinely nothing I could do to stop this slide, and instead positioned myself in the best way possible to minimise the risk of damage. Eventually I ran onto the next ski run (still belly-sliding at about 40mph) and was able to regain my balance and right myself. No injuries except my pride and some friction burns, but this hundred-metre ride – well, FALL – is easily the most fun I’ve had here so far.

2. A few seconds later, I was hit by a runaway ski. My sister, Sarah, had a similar slip but had been able to keep her balance at the sacrifice of half her equipment, and had to sledge the remainder of The Wall on her other ski.

3. Claire panics when she sees a cliff some 10 feet away and swerves into a tree, with no serious injuries. Photos to follow. Everybody starts making jokes about Claire loving trees, which become even funnier when…

4. Owing to out-of-date maps and a bit of bad guesswork on my part, Claire found herself on a short run somewhat above her capabilities. And, realising that snowploughing wasn’t enough to bring her to a halt, sped up (because THAT’s a sensible alternative)… right into a tree. She caused herself a mild concussion (earning herself a day in bed) and a series of nasty-looking cuts and grazes across her neck.

BOOZE: It’s been hard to find drinking establishments that don’t charge excessive touristy rates, but now we’ve found a few I’ve been trying out the local beers. Zagorka is great, and Kamenitza is pretty good too. Vodka’s cheap, and a “small” vodka is 50ml (what we in the UK would call a “double”). It makes me wonder what a medium or even a large is – a quadruple or sextuple, presumably. It’s also hard to persuade bar staff to provide mixers – the pervading attitude seems to be that vodka should be drunk neat.

RINGOS: While Claire was bed-bound, the rest of us went ringo-ing. We’d done it before in Canada – sitting in a rubber ring and sliding down a ski slope – but it’s still good fun and a fabulous violation of health and safety law. By the end, my sisters and I were strapping our ringos together and spinning our way into the walls that marked the edge of the slope.

COMING SOON: Later this week – Skidoos? Snowboarding? Pub crawl around Pamporovo? As usual, you’ll read it here first (if I can be bothered).

So That Was 2007

2007’s drawing to a close, so I thought I’d better say a few words to mark it’s passing, and what’s it’s meant to me. In convenient bullet-point form, here’s what I’ve been up to this year:

January

I was a headline act at Gorilla Monsoon, Aber’s now-dead alternative comedy "scene" event. I got a bit scared about it, but it went reasonably well in the end, although I disappointed myself a little.
I got my hair cut for the first time in almost a decade, and – for the first time almost-ever – this suddenly meant I that had shorter hair than the person I was going out with. Just because I’ve got a sense of humour, I got up early, had it cut, then returned to bed to frighten the crap out of Claire when she put her arms around me and thought I’d left somebody else in our bed.
We tried a few times to get our online games of Diplomacy re-started, but it all fell apart technically. Despite it being a very back-stabby board game, we all managed to stay friends pretty well this second time around.
My sister Becky came to visit me in Aber, which was nice.

February

I read The Ethical Slut, which turned out to be very useful later in the year by giving me lots of tips for the renegotiation of the terms of open relationships.
I developed and deployed the new version of Abnib, which to this date is still the coolest (even if not the most practical) way to keep up with your favourite Aberystwyth-based weblogs.
I helped Claire sue her bank (having done the same to mine in 2006) to reclaim penalty charges unlawfully levied against her.
We got Geek Night – our weekly alternative board games night – kicked off again, with a little help from sister event Poker Night (which since died a death after Claire took everybody’s money).
I celebrated my birthday a month late, because my family had posted cards and presents (and advised others to do the same) to an address that wasn’t actually where I lived, and it took me this long to gain access to them.
We went skiing in Scotland, but bad wind conditions we didn’t get so much done as we’d have liked. Claire took lessons which helped her confidence and her technique no end, and she got "bitten by the skiing bug" in a way that I’d worried she’d never get. So we’re going again in 2008, although not in Scotland.

March

Biggest bit of news for March, of course, was that Claire and I changed our surnames by deed pollto Q (and I shortened my first name to Dan). I’m now Dan Q, and she’s Claire Elizabeth Q. This attracted many comments (most of them positive, some of them negative) from our friends, and contributed to quite a lot of stress as we had to write to every company we deal with in order to update their records. But it was worth it. Even when… no – especially when – I got a snotty note from the Passport Office about it.
I had a go at explaining why I’m an atheist on my blog, and kicked off a series of meme-like responses on my friends’ blogs.
With the help (kindly volunteered) of my friend Paul, I helped out backstage at the Aberystwyth Student Skills Competition for the fifth and final time. With the loss of Lynda Rollason from the Aberystwyth Careers Department, the competition has been cancelled. It’ll always have a special place in my heart.
Oh, and loads of people come over the border to visit us in Aber. Thanks!

April

The smoking ban came into force in Wales, so my Aber friends and I went on a pub crawl of what were previously the smokiest pubs in town, to show our support for the ban by spending all our money on booze. Hic.
My friend Bryn left town, leaving behind copious quantities of alcohol.
I finally got myself a Facebook account, which I barely use, but here it is if you want to see.
As the weather had begun to improve, we started our traditional barbeques on the beach again, and Rory made the best burgers ever.
I decided that I really like being the age that I am. Don’t worry, I’ll like being 27, too, I expect.
Because I love playing devil’s advocate, I made an argument for political apathy.
We organised an Aberite reunion at Oakwood theme park, including a trip to the single remaining "Crystal Maze Cyberdrome," which a lot of us had wanted to do ever since they first started opening (personally, I’d been to the one in The Sandcastle, Blackpool, about a decade or more earlier). It was fantastic fun.
We released 99 red balloons (yes, like the song) from the top of a hill near Aberystwyth.

May

I got myself a new phone, and it (a Nokia N95) remains one of the sexiest bits of technology I’ve ever had the pleasure to use.
I launched an extra part of Abnib – Abnib Events – to help us Aberites schedule our various social calendars.
I went to see Meatloaf without Claire after she had exams scheduled on both sides of the concert date. Worse yet, when she went to see him later in the year he cancelled the show and he’ll probably never perform live again, meaning that Claire may have missed her last chance to see his show. Which isn’t good.
I won a competition run by Fanta where you text in a code from the back of the bottle. I wouldn’t normally enter such a competition, but I was bored on a train (back from Meatloaf) and my new mobile phone contract gave me millions of free text messages, so I gave it a go. I won a Nintendo Wii (which, as I already have one, I gave to my mum), a wide-screen TV (which is running as a much-needed replacement for our old one, which was falling to bits) and a fridge full of Fanta (the latter of which I drunk, and the former of which I donated to a charity raffle). I am hereby declared A Lucky Bugger.
I released Google Reader For LiveJournal Users, a tool to help people who use LiveJournal friends-only feeds to get those "secret" posts into their Google Reader accounts, because I needed a tool that did that. It now has over 200 regular users, and, because I released the source code, it’s also being run elsewhere on private servers by other users.
Claire and I found and agreed on a venue for QParty!

June

A quiet month. I went otter-spotting, Claire planned for her birthday, I read and reviewed a couple of books, and we finally started doing some proper planning for QParty, and I got paid to put a few temporary ads on my weblog.

July

I identified 10 computer games that stole my life.
Rory started hosting Geek Night, because his new flat has lots of floor space for playing board games on, and he generally keeps it tidier than Claire and I keep our house – The Cottage.
Paul and I re-wrote the Troma Night Drinking Rules, to better reflect the kinds of awful films we watch these days, and how pissed we plan to get in order to make suffering them bearable.
And I got hold of a leaked copy of the final Harry Potter book and proceeded to try to ruin it for everybody else.

August

Claire and I went to the UK National Bisexual Conference, and had a magical time.
Then we went to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with our friends Ruth and JTA. For various reasons, we didn’t see as much comedy as we’d planned to.
However, the four of us did reconfigure our relationships somewhat. Claire and JTA started seeing one another, while I started going out with Ruth. All without significant change to our established relationships. It started out secretive, but now it’s much more overt, and after five months, it still makes me very happy to have two fabulous girlfriends who I adore, and for them to both share their love with another man. It’s pretty brilliant.
I made and deleted a blog post which managed to offend pretty much the entirety of the surviving part of my mum’s side of the family. Oops.

September

QParty – Claire and I’s celebration of love and commitment – happened, and we had a fantastic time. This party – and our name change – is something we’d talked about for years, and it was great to finally see it happen… and to get together with all of our closest friends and relatives and commemorate the last five and a half years of Claire and I’s relationship. There are loads of photos online. There was a minor crisis when we discovered that the venue was being rennovated when it should have been ready for us to use, but a handful of the guests pulled together into a makeshift team and helped us clean up and prepare the hall so that it was once again suitable for use (thanks guys!). All in all, the event was wonderful, and I was delighted to read that lots of our friends blogged about it. Eventually, I got round to writing about preparing for the party and about the party itself, too.
We also went on QMoon, a "honeymoon" following QParty: my dad sent the pair of us on a mystery holiday to Italy (mystery in that we didn’t know even to which country we were going before we got to the airport; we didn’t know whereabouts we’d be going in the country until each day when we’d open up a surprise parcel with a guidebook of where we’d be the following day, and so on). I wrote four blog posts from the holiday itself, just to show how sad and internet-addicted I am.
As if September wasn’t a big enough month for Claire and I, we also used it as an opportunity to explain to many people about our unusual relationship with Ruth and JTA, because we thought it might be important to explain to people what it meant to, for example, QParty (the short answer: nothing – QParty was still about what it was always about: Claire and I celebrating our relationship, our love for one another, and our commitment to one another). I suppose in hindsight that the timing of our new relationships (so close to QParty) may have been confusing for some people, but it’s just a coincidence.

October

Ruth returned to Aberystwyth, and we celebrated by paddling in the sea in the middle of the night. Unsurprisingly, we got rather damp and my phone got damaged and required repair. Surprisingly, I didn’t have to claim on the insurance, because Vodafone repaired it under warranty. Presumably "inability to withstand being dropped in the sea" is now considered to be a manufacturing defect. That’s pretty much all that’s worth saying about October.

November

The unofficial UK premiere of Poultrygeist: Night Of The Chicken Dead, Troma‘s new film, came to Aberystwyth. Better yet, Paul, Claire, Ruth, JTA and I got to sit in Lord Beechings for beer and nachos with director Lloyd Kaufman. I almost wet myself with excitement. I wrote a lot about it (and everything else that happened in the first weekend of November, too) in a blog post. Claire mentioned that weekend, too.
I also enjoyed the opportunity to visit Preston for the book launch party of my friend Faye‘s first published novel, Cover The Mirrors. It’s really quite a good read, and I’ve promised to review it at some point or another, but for now just buy a copy and enjoy it. While I was up in Preston my sisters and I took my dad out for his birthday and had a remarkably good night out.
Fellow Aberite Matt got taken into hospital, and so we spent a lot of time visiting him there and wishing him a speedy recovery while simultaneously teasing him (only a little) for his medical misfortunes.
Claire and I went to the Computer Science Department away weekend at Gregynog.
Ruth, JTA, Claire and I took our usual November holiday on the Llanwrtyd Wells Real Ale Ramble, a weekend-long trek through the damp hills of mid-Wales, drinking all the way. Despite getting so wet that my trousers chafed so badly that I bled quite a lot, we had a fabulous time and I’m looking forward, again, to taking part in the event next year.

December

To kick off December rallied folks to comment on and complain about the Aberystwyth Masterplan, which aims to turn Aberystwyth from a tiny town in the middle of nowhere into a slightly bigger town in the middle of nowhere by making the town centre shinier, putting up a multistorey car park, and making all of the public transport inaccessible to anybody without a car.
Despite being even-more-than-typically busy at work, I found time in a weekend to visit Katie at her university accomodation in Derby. I originally met Katie at BiCon earlier in the year.
Because I’ve never really understood Christmas cards, I made a charitable donation in the name of the people for whom I couldn’t think of a more personal present, rather than sending a card, kicking off some debate on the principles of card-sending and gift-giving, and inspiring some others to do the same.
Claire and I spent Christmas in Aberystwyth (as has become the norm) with Paul and, for the first time, Ruth and JTA. We roasted a goose too large to fit in the oven we’d originally planned to cook it in, exchanged gifts, and generally had a wonderful time: it was particularly nice to spend a large part of the holiday period in the company of my friends and lovers.
Finally, to end the year, Claire and I have been travelling around Norfolk (to meet up with her dad and his wife, and to attend an A-Level Reunion organised by some of her old friends) and Lancashire (to visit my family), and we’ll eventually be returning to Aberystwyth on the first day of 2008, with Ruth in tow (we’ll be picking her up from her dad’s house tomorrow morning).

So that, in short, is my year. It’s been a pretty hectic one, full of new names and new relationships and new experiences, and it’s been very busy with work and various volunteer and social activities, as well as with a more-than-normal number of holidays and weekends away.

How’s your year been?

Out And About

Just to keep people posted aboutour whereabouts, here’s Claire and I’s travel plans for the next few days:

Friday (Today) evening: travel from Aberystwyth to Norfolk.
Saturday: Norfolk (well, Lincolnshire) with Claire’s dad and his wife.
Sunday: travel from Norfolk to Preson.
Monday: Preston with Dan’s family.
Tuesday (New Year’s Day): travel from Preston to Maulds Meaburn to meet with Ruth and her dad, then travel with Ruth back down to Aberystwyth again.

If you’re in any of these places and want to meet up for a sly half-pint (it’s a tight schedule, but we can probably manage that) leave a comment: I’ll be checking my main personal e-mail addresses while on the move, as usual.

Further Disturbances From Dan’s Sleepy Head

Two more particularly strange dreams last night, probably owing at least slightly by the amount I drank at the SmartData Christmas meal, beforehand… and perhaps owing more to the phase I’ve been going though of consistently remembering what are usually quite trippy dreams. I’ve not been blogging them all (I had a dream the night before last, or thereabouts, in which both my grandfathers [actually already dead] died in quick succession, which was a bit odd) because I’ve not had much spare time in which to blog at all, but I can’t really not share the unusual stories my brain was telling me last night.

The Company Picnic Dream

The first of these dreams I remember because I woke up parched at about 3am, having not had quite enough water between stopping drinking alcohol and going to bed. It’s very obviously inspired quite heavily by the SmartData Christmas meal:

Simon, Alex, Gareth and I – everybody present at the Christmas dinner earlier in the evening – were having a picnic on the Aber promenade. We’d laid out a picnic rug right at the edge of the prom, where the drop-off to the beach begins, and we were eating soup from bowls. The tide was in and it was getting dark, and occasional waves would crash against the prom and splash us, so we all got off the picnic rug and dragged it further away from the sea. We were still getting sprayed and our soup was getting cold, so I suggested that we go to Paul‘s flat, nearby, where we could re-heat it.

When we got to Paul’s flat he wasn’t there, but Ruth was. She said that Paul wouldn’t mind us using his oven [!] to re-heat our soup, so we put our bowls in the oven and turned it on. Paul’s living room had distinct elements of The Flat and The Cottage to it, but the staircase downstairs was the one from my dad’s house. After a while, people started to arrive for Geek Night – just the usual people one would expect, but also two women I didn’t recognise. I went down the stairs to collect a box full of board games, and the stairs looked a lot like those at my dad’s house, but with the carpet we had when I was young.

I picked up the blue plastic box of board games [the same one that, in real life, has been used for months to transport games to and from Rory‘s place], but it was overfilled and hard to control, so I asked JTA to carry some of the games, which he did. Later, I persuaded Claire to carry some, too, although she objected to having to help. The box for the Friends & Foes expansion pack to Lord Of The Rings fell open, and I had to pick up all the pieces.

The Animated Cat Dream

The second dream of last night is far more weird and convoluted. It’s all-too-easy to find meaning in it relating to my life and the people in it, but I can assure you that if that appears to be the case, it’s coincidental – large segments of it are from a recurring dream I’ve had several times in the last seven or eight years. This doesn’t help my case for not being a fruitcake, though, I suppose. In any case:

The dream is told from a perspective in which I am an observer – like watching a film – rather than something of which I am part of with which I can interact. During the dream, I was aware that the story I was following was something I had seen before (previous occurrences of dreaming this, which is one of the far-less-frequent recurring stories I find in my dreams). Like previous times, however, I’ve had a sensation of "seeing more" in it this time around than any previous time [another common theme in several of my recurring dreams is a feeling that I’m being told a story in fragments, seeing a bigger picture every time]: a clearer picture, a more-understandable plot, and a longer and better-planned tale.

The dream is also always told through the medium of animation, and the animation style in itself is worthy of mention. It has a particularly hand-drawn feel to it, uses very strong blocks of colour, a slightly-too-small frame rate, and it is animated entirely without outlines around the characters and their features. It’s very slightly glossy, like poster paint. Those "common" bits aside, here’s the dream:

An anthropomorphic black tom cat walks up a stairwell, as seen from a "floating camera" ascending the stairs ahead of him, in a grubby, run-down old house. He has a cheeky grin on his face as he reaches the top of the stairs and enters what appears to be his bedroom, and makes the bed, while we hear his voice as a voice-over monologue. He’s trying to impress a woman he lives with in order to sleep with her. He gets into the bed.

Later, the woman comes home. She’s tall with long unkempt blonde hair, and she’s wearing a black dress, and she’s animated in the same style as the cat (although she’s the most human-looking character in the entire story). She goes to the bedroom, and it becomes apparent [from the voiceover? I don’t remember] that it’s her room, not the cat’s. She appears to be angry that the cat has crept in to her bed, and she sternly demands that he returns to his own room. He slinks out, and she follows him, watching him skulk back to his own room, where she insists that she must punish him for his impertinence. A series of kinky games ensue, and it’s obvious that what I’m now seeing is the true nature of the relationship between the cat and this woman: one based on cheeky misbehaviour, control, sex, and sadomasochism. She threatens him, and slaps him, and makes him sit bare-bottomed on a hot radiator, and as the camera pulls away from the scene we see some text appear that for some reason tell us their "safe word" (well, a "safe phrase", really): it begins "I wish I knew the name of…" and finishes with a monicker by which we know the woman. [but since waking, I don’t remember what it is]

The dream shows another two inhabitants of the house [only one of which I can recall well enough to describe] – one of these has distinctly pig-like features. He’s excitable and slightly nervous and talks with a stutter, but he’s likable and gets on well with the other people he lives with, including the other one in this scene. The two talk [but I don’t recall about what] as the opening credits begin to appear (large, serifed white letters) and the view explores the house, seeing a great deal of filth and squalor and a generally disturbing level of decay. At one point, we see an ill and dying rat bite off and eat the eye (and surrounding face) of a dead and decomposing rat.

Some time later [there’s a huge plot hole here, and I’m convinced my brain simply hasn’t seen fit to fill it in yet], a black bakelite telephone rings at the house, and the woman answers it. We hear the voice on the other end of the phone threaten [perhaps blackmailing] her, and she appears genuinely scared. She tries to respond, boldly, to hide her fear, but the voice on the phone is being played from an old-fashioned record turntable in a car parked over the street, connected to a car-phone. The cat, the woman, the pig-man, and the fourth housemate gather to discus what to do about this threat.

New aspects in this dream since the last time I had it include: a great deal more clarity on the animation style of the cat (and the woman, to a lesser extent), the discovery that the woman and the cat have a "safe word," the dead rat (the other rat has always featured, but it’s new to see it being cannibalistic), and the woman’s face while she is being threatened (previously, I’ve "been looking at" the record player at the time).

So, that’s another episode in one of my more-unusual recurring dreams (and not a common one; I’ve only had that particular dream about four times so far, as far as I can tell). Interpretations, as always, welcome, but if you’d prefer to just sit quietly and think, "wow, that guy’s fucked up," that’s cool too.

Another Strange Dream

Well, I’m in Derby (after a hideously long and complicated journey involving long train delays, diversions, and a taxi ride – lost – around the middle of Derby city centre) visiting my friend Katie.

And another strange dream for my collection. But this one isn’t suitable for print (no, not in that way), so you’ll have to wait and ask about it.

Back in Aber tomorrow afternoon. Have a great Troma Night 200!

Christmas Cards

[thanks to several people for the suggestion behind this post]

I’ve never really "got" the sending of Christmas cards, or, really, got "into" it. It feels like a waste of overpriced paper to line the pockets of big printing companies just to save you the bother of actually picking up the phone and talking to the people you care about over the holiday season. So I won’t be sending any. But read on.

If you would have liked a Christmas card from me (and I know you!), leave your name and e-mail address using the comments form for this post. In exchange, I’ll donate £1 to Samaritans of Aberystwyth and Mid-Wales (my local Samaritans branch) in your name. Plus a £25 ‘kitty’ in the names of you all.

Samaritans volunteers will be working round the clock on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve, and New Year’s Day – just like every other day in the year – to provide emotional support to those who are suffering from feelings of distress or despair, including those which may lead to suicide. Christmas can be a difficult time for many people, and this vital service – provided by telephone, post, and e-mail, as well as by face-to-face contacts – can, for some, make all the difference.

Technical note: You’ll probably end up classified as blogspam if you leave an empty comment, so say something, even if it’s just "Merry Christmas!"

We’re Going Down

Another strange dream last night:

I was in a small aircraft (one aisle, two seats either side, about 80 seats in total, two jet engines, for those who feel the need to identify the aircraft in my dreams), sat by a window on the left hand-side, when the right-hand engine caught fire. The plane was forced to make an emergency water landing somewhere off the coast of India. The other passengers and I were all instructed to put on our life-jackets, fasten our seat belts, and brace for impact, but as the plane went down, I suddenly came to an understanding that we were all going to be okay. I took off my seatbelt and stood up moments before the plane hit the water, and (despite a little juddering) I was perfectly okay. Around me people were panicking, but I was completely calm.

Read into that whatever you like.

Suppose I’d better start my Christmas shopping, today.