Page 371 – Dan Q

Chasing The Paycheck

What with unavailable accountants and worse, I’ve not been able to get my paycheque until today – a week later than expected. I have £2.50, half a loaf of bread, a tin of beans, and a packet of super noodles to live on until my cheque is cashed. I don’t think that Sainsbury’s Recipe Finder quite understood me when I explained my situation, on account of it suggesting the following:

Cowboy Baked Beans
Prep and cook time: 30 mins to 1 hour
Serves: 6-8
Ingredients: 25g butter, 1 large onion, chopped finely, 1 clove garlic (optional), crushed, 2.5cm piece fresh root ginger, crushed, 1 each green and red pepper, cored, seeded, and chopped, 2 carrots, diced, 30ml vinegar, 60ml clear honey, 5ml Worcestershire sauce, 900g baked beans (hah! I only have a 450g can of baked beans anyway), 125g streaky bacon, sliced.

If you want the full recipe, go visit Sainsbury’s Recipe Finder.

In the end, Kit and I celebrated my paycheck by buying a heap of interesting looking ingredients from Somerfield, and made ourselves some cheesy garlic bread, a smokey-mince and pork tomato sauce with pasta-thingy, and some cheesecake. Then ate most of it. Fab.

It’s amazing what a little money will do for you. Last night we ate corned beef on toast.

Claire Goes To Norfolk

My love, Claire, disappeared to Norfolk today. I won’t see her for a week. My horniness is going to be unmeasurable within days. Hmm… I wonder how much a prostitute costs around here?

A quick search on PunterNet UK (a prostitute review site) doesn’t find any ladies for hire in Aberystwyth. That’s disgraceful. I think I should write to the government and get a ‘job creation scheme’ underway here. Yet again this coast of Wales is left in a rut. Gutted.

Threw my hand on the bed and ***** it, instead.

A Message From Reb

I received an interesting text message from my ex-girlfriend Reb today. It read:

I was thinking, you know how you used to say i could have your diaries when you died. can i still? not that i wish you dead or anything, i was just wondering.

Yeh; sure – it sounds like you love me to pieces, my dear. This, interestingly, is the latest in a short string of text messages, including one that asked if I had any pornographic videos (I asked why she wanted to know, to which she didn’t respond), and one which asked if I ever missed talking to her (I responded to say “Rarely, and briefly.”).

And let’s just get this straight: “not that i wish you dead or anything”. What kind of person says something like that? I’m not sure whether I’m to be scared or amused!

What’s going on in her mind? Suggestions welcome.

April Fools Day

April Fools Day has always been an oppertunity for me to get back at the ineffective dickheads that are the management of Penbryn Hall at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. This year was no exception. Building upon the success of my last big prank, Penbryn-Hall.co.uk, a spoof ‘official’ site which almost got me expelled from the hall, this year I worked with Kit, Bryn and Claire in order to cause yet more chaos.

We had a plan in mind already, but when Penbryn sent out the following message on the internal e-mail system, we couldn’t help but pounce on an oppertunity:

From: Eiryls Evans <eee@aber.ac.uk>
Date: 28/03/2003 13:46
To: hall-penb-4@aber.ac.uk
Subject: Re: Maintenance Checks

Dear Student

On Tuesday 1st and Wednesday 2nd April, Mark and I will be doing a maintenance inspection in student rooms.

This will involve checking for repairs and lights which are not working.
We will be starting in Block 1 at 10.30 am

If you have any problems e.g. desk lamp not working and would like a new bulb, please call at Reception.

Margaret Woodliff
Deputy Manager

A few things immediatley stand out in this e-mail. One is that the name at the bottom is not the same name as the person it appears to come from. A second is that it is not provided in Welsh, and is therefore in contravention of the University’s billingual policy…

…the third, and stupidest of the lot, is that they arranged to do room inspections on the first of April.

So, we thought… all we have to do is spread some more convincing (not difficult, considering) counter-publicity, stating that this e-mail was actually a student prank, and that there will not be any room inspections after all. We could even go so far as to state that we suspect that this e-mail may be the prelude to an attempt to gain unauthorised access to student’s study bedrooms. Mayhem in the making.

We came up with a poster that expressed pretty much this, and stuck copies up all over the hall. And it worked! People were absolutely convinced that our posters were real and the real e-mail was the hoax. In the end, the management had to spend their Sunday walking round from room-to-room knocking on student’s doors and assuring them that the e-mail was the genuine article. Oh; how I laughed.

The poster is available to download as an Adobe Acrobat file, below.

Download The Poster
Adobe Acrobat (PDF); 22KB.
The actual poster which was put up around Penbryn Hall for April Fools Day 2003.

Ship sizes and Pillaging / Flag-o-poly

This is a reply to a post published elsewhere. Its content might be duplicated as a traditional comment at the original source.

Nemo wrote:

Ursela is her own, walking, talking, swashbuckling example of the monopoly flag argument. I see the flag distribution happening along almost the same lines as the current crew situation.

Example:

A new player logs on. We’ll call him Steve. Steve is quickly greeted by a member of the largest, most aggressively expansionist flag/crew. We’ll call her Ursela. Ursela seems nice, her politics look good, and she is certainly persistent, so Steve joins the Dastards. Steve, as a new player, quickly sees the advantages of having such powerful crewmates. Many ships to job on, knowledge to be shared, a snappy in-house trade system.
Steve puzzles away happily with the Dastards.
Steve gets pretty good and wants more power and renown. Steve soon realizes that the sort of fame and riches he can get through the Dastards is only in keeping with the Dastard heirarchy. Much as he likes the Dastards, Steve thinks he can make it on his own, with his own ship, and this time… as Captain!

Fin.

Ta-daa.

Or, Steve stays with the Dastards and they live happily ever after. Or there’s a terrible row and Steve’s new crew and the Dastards become lifelong foes and their rivalry and animosity are legendary. Or Steve never joined because he’s a distrustful paranoid and starts his own Crew of fellow misanthropes and they never amount to much because they’re always afraid of everybody stealing their maps.

People in this game are governed by their personalities just like in the real world. In the real world there are many different groups to be part of. And no one group gets everybody. And don’t forget, there are ooo-run flags too. So, we’ll have some in-game influence of what’s going on too. If the need for some sort of anti-trust activity arises, we’ll confront it, but until then, I think the system is working out pretty well.

-Nemo
(Who will likely have his own renegade flag of anti-imperialists, operating out of a volcano near the Canary Islands. Then all we’ll need is a giant submersible war machine…. mmmm)

Steve? Why didn’t you just call him Ava and be done with it.

Gender Balance

This is a reply to a post published elsewhere. Its content might be duplicated as a traditional comment at the original source.

Rengor wrote:

…

Also an interesting group are the developers, not the ringers, but all the other game developers playing this game, and there’s quite a few of them. Im curious if they can say why they chose this game instead of Sims or Everquest etc?

…

…

I’m a dev. (not a PP dev., of course), and you’ll probably laugh, Rengor, when you hear how I discovered the game…

I’m currently spending way too much of what little free time I have developing a secure online database system, which I’ll be selling at cost price to a network of charities in the UK providing night-time telephone listening and information to students. This system will help these voluntary organisations find and manage volunteers for specific nights of the week, send text messages to them to remind them when they’re due to be ‘on duty’, provide a secure forum, and (eventually) a host of other features.

While the selection of organisations which this system will serve are… somewhat diverse in their policies (much to my horror as the system I develop has to cope with all of them), one thing they all have in common is the amount of time the telephone has to ring before they will answer it: three rings. As a result, my system is called Three Rings.

So; I looked for a domain name for it… threerings.com was already gone. Oh, I thought, I wonder who owns that? So I hopped to the web site and thus found Three Rings Design Inc., and, being a fan of MMORPGs and all things MUD and puzzle games, I signed up for Yohoho!

But what about the rest of you dev’s? I know there’re more tech’s out there than just me, arr!

Scatman’s World

[this page was originally posted to AvAngel.com but is archived here; the links have been adapted to improve usability]

Introduction

After playing around for some time with Corel Photo-Paint and Adobe Premiere, I decided it was time to make a cool music video that quite blatantly took the piss out of Bagpuss, a friend of mine with whom I used to share lodgings at University. I believe that when he saw it, his exact words were “I’m going to kill him.”

Well, not content with having made a fool out of him, my next project was to make a fool out of myself (what do you mean, I do that all the time anyway!)… and so my next video project was…

Scatman’s World

After my nickname among many folks in Aberystwyth, Scatman Dan (a reference, of course, to the late Scatman John), I made this music video, which made it’s big-screen premiere at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre Cinema on Saturday 4th May 2002 (after a two-week delay caused by numerous technical problems). And now, for your viewing pleasure, it’s available to download here (it’s a DixX-encoded file, so you’ll need an appropriate player). Being, as it is, filled from top to bottom with in-jokes, it’s probably not even remotely funny if you don’t know who I am.

Download The Video

Warning : This file is just under 30MB in size, and will take a considerable amount of time to download, even on a fast connection. You have been warned.

Warning : Owing to explicit content, this video is not suitable for viewing by anybody under the age of 18 years, without parental consent and supervision.

Note : It is recommended that you attempt to save this file to your hard disk, rather than attempting to play it directly from the site, as this corrects a lot of potential download problems with this file. In most browsers, this can be achieved by right-clicking on the link and selecting “Save File As…” or “Save Target As…”.

[the download is no longer hosted here, but you can view the video on YouTube]

New Site Preps For Launch

The new version of AvAngel.com is under full developmental swing… and within a week or two it’ll be uploaded. Of course, you know what we’re like for deadlines, so don’t hold your breath – but if you don’t believe us, catch Dan online (e-mail him for his ICQ number) and he’ll show you what he’s working on!

The new site will include a brand new interface and a host of new features… I’m not going to give away too much unless you catch me online or come round to my house, but I’m pretty sure you’ll like it.

Oh, and for the time being, I’ve uploaded my new CV, ‘cos I’m looking for a job…

Scatman’s World

Back in early 2002, right after a shitty break-up, I moved back in with my dad and spent my nights making an alternative music video to Scatman John’s “Scatman’s World” out of photos of me and my friends and snippets of badly-lipsynched webcam footage. It’s full of in-jokes and if you don’t already know me then, well, it’ll mean nothing to you anyway.

This video is also available (with annotations explaining most of the in-jokes removed by YouTube and lost forever) on YouTube.

FEAR

The site hasn’t been updated in a long time so it seems like a good idea to bring something new onto AvAngel.com! Andy has made a sub-site to AvAngel.com for a Starfleet Command 2 fleet that he is in called FEAR. If you play the game, then check it out!

Project AngelPlanet Publicly Announced

The boys behind AvAngel.com have got something new up their sleeves… it’ll be coming soon, and you can expect to see it mentioned here a lot. Their latest project is a web-based, multiplayer, live-action roleplaying game called AngelPlanet. They’re keeping most of the details on a ‘need to know’ basis, at the moment, but you can watch for updates on AngelPlanet.co.uk.

Secret Project

The boys behind AvAngel.com have got something new up their sleeves… it’ll be coming soon, and you can expect to see it mentioned here a lot. For information, e-mail info@angelplanet.co.uk.

More Balloons

Dan decides that it would be a good idea to fill a train carriage with balloons and then stick them to the ceiling of the carriage using static.

Easter In London

I’m back in London again, this Easter. Expect a whole load of people to get told about AvAngel.com, one way or another.

AvAngel.com Censorship Lifted

After a bit of a battle between Information Services at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and I, resulting in the semipermanent blocking of the Unversity’s right to see www.penbryn-hall.co.uk, and the temporary blocking of AvAngel.com (Woohoo! I’m officially censored by the University), access to the site from the University’s network is now re-opened. Thanks to everybody who gave me the support I needed to go and tell them where to shove it…