Dan Q
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[chez geek cards]
I have heaps of work to do today. Then I’ve got to go home and get heaps of dissertation done.
There’s good news, however: our favourite among the folks who’ve been viewing the cafe under our flat has put a bid in. If everything goes well, he’ll buy it and we’ll still be able…
[chez geek card removed]
I’m about a quarter of the way through my dissertation. I have to have it finished, printed and bound by Monday morning.
[chez geek card removed]
Yay! Victory for I!
Take a look at the LiveJournal interest ‘Troma Night’. And if you’re a Troma Night person who uses LiveJournal, add it to your interests list, too!
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[missing image: Chez Geek Card]
BTW: does Bryn know about his page on AberWiki?
[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]
[further fragments of this post were recovered on 13 October 2018]
Last night’s dream was somewhat weird. Like so many of mine:
I’m travelling by train with Claire. We’re going to meet a guy who’s going to give us (plus some other folks we know) a desirable-sounding job. Upon getting there, we find that the other people starting work for him include Alec, Bryn, Liz, and some other folks. Our boss is a tech-geek-guru in a wheelchair. His computer is powered by the kinetic energy of people moving around the room, which is cool and environmentally friendly, I guess, but what happens if everybody stands still? Does he have UPS?
Anyway, we begin our on-the-job training. This involves rowing a one-man dinghy across the office (one side of which is half-filled with water – why it doesn’t flood into the other half I don’t know) to answer one of about twenty phones which are arranged in a crescent shape on a curved shelf at the other side. These phones are old, Bakelite, traditional phones (a …
Okay, it’s not certain yet, but Wired News reports that it, and Family Guy (also killed by Fox) will make a comeback on Cartoon Network, with new episodes sponsored by the channel.
Yay. And, indeed, hey.
And in other news, to celebrate the change of name from Lindows to Linspire, Lindows.com are giving away copies of Linspire. All you have to do is try to buy a copy of the BitTorrent ISOs from their online store and enter LINDOWS as a coupon code.
[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]
[further content was recovered on 13 October 2018]
If you’ve been on the internet for any length of time at all, you’ll probably have come across the concept of a phishing [wikipedia] attack, or even been the target of one. The idea is that Joe Naughty sends you an e-mail, pretending to be your bank, credit card company, or whatever, and when you click the link in the e-mail it takes you to your bank’s web site. Or that’s what you think, anyway. Actually, you’re at Joe Naughty’s web site, and it just looks like your bank’s web site. And so he tries to trick you into giving him your bank details, so he can rob you blind.
I was recently the target of such an attack (one related to the CitiBank browser-bar scam [bbc news]). In this particular attack, the fake site tries to trick you into thinking it is the real site by making your Internet Explorer address bar ‘disappear’, and then replaces it with a picture of an Internet Explorer browser bar saying that you’re on the real site.
I decided that this was a particularly crude hack, and that I could do better. And …
Anyone with a pair of pliers can install Red Hat on a toaster or a motorcycle… it takes a real (sick) geek to install Linux on a dead badger.
Not the usual kind of story I link from my ‘blog, but this particular case is of interest because the girl in question is both the perpetrator and the victim, so to speak: she posted pictures of herself online, performing sexual acts. From what we can gather, she did this of her own free will and consent.
Read more on The Register. No word from the BBC yet.
[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]
[additional fragments were recovered on 13 October 2018]
Off to Scotland, that is, where I’ll be spending a long weekend cycling and island-hopping. I’ve got a brief stop in Preston for tea with my folks before I catch the train up to Scotland… but for now, I need to do some laundry, get a train ticket, and get out of Aber.
I’ll be back on Tuesday night, if anybody’s interested. My mobile’s not making outgoing calls at the moment (forgot to pay my bill, now can’t afford to – at least until my paycheque comes in), so if you call and you can’t get through (not unlikely: I’ll be hitting some low-signal areas) try my dad’s mobile number (Claire has it) or drop me a text – not an answerphone message.
Odds are very high that I won’t be anywhere near an internet connection, so don’t expect ‘blog updates or participation in the usual forums, either.
It’s a shame I won’t be here to see Kit off as he moves to Scotland (coincidence?) this weekend. But hey, at least I don’t have to help him pack and/or carry boxes around.
Oh; and I think you should all…
[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]
[further fragments were recovered on 13 October 2018]
Two fantastic bits of funny news for you this April Fool’s morning:
1. A seven-ton atomic landmine, designed to prevent Soviet advance through West Germany, would have been kept warm while underground by being filled with live chickens (with enough food to keep them alive for a week). This (not an April Fool’s – really!) report brought to you by the BBC. Weird.
2. Do you remember a couple of years ago when somebody wrote ttyQuake, a front-end for iD‘s groundbreaking game, Quake, which replaced the graphics with live-generated ASCII-art [screenshot]? Well; somebody’s gone one step further: IF Quake. IF Quake is an Inform program that acts an an interface between your Z-Machine Interpreter and the Quake data files. What does this mean? It means that it’s a text-based-adventure version of Quake. So instead of wiggling your mouse and…
Looking to change your religion using an easy, clean interface? Try Plug ‘n’ Pray from Holy Corporation.
A site well-worth reading.
It turns out that there’s been a huge fire in a BT service tunnel, knocking out 130,000 phone lines and numerous data links in the Manchester area.
This, in turn, has caused Microland UK to be unable to process our credit card details and deliver me my new work PC, a swanky-looking Athlon 64 3GHz box.
<sob>
Am I the only purist here?
I am, of course, referring to Monopoly. Pretty much everybody I know doesn’t play Monopoly by the correct rules, as laid down by Waddingtons. And how many arguments does this cause? It’s unbelievable!
What’s even scarier is the number of people that honestly believe that their particular variation of the rules is actually correct – be it “£400 for landing on Go” to “free parking jackpot” to “capital punishment”… I’ve seen so many of them (and studied many more popular variations)…
…but one thing that is particularly common to these variations is that they usually exist to increase the bias of luck to a game which, ultimately, in my opinion, already has too much luck in it! But why? Are people scared of thinking or something?
Leave a comment: how do you play? What variations do you play by? Or are you a fellow purist?
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I’m still in Aberystwyth, which I thought was a good thing even before people who don’t have the same benefit complained [Alec complaining, Ruth complaining, Adam complaining] about it. Aberystwyth is great this time of year – it’s still a little too early for the tourists to arrive, but it’s warm and sunny and feels like springtime.
Sadly, I still have heaps of work to do – Simon, my boss, is breathing down my neck… not to mention the fact that I need to pretty-much finish my dissertation over the Easter break. And an assignment. And start my revision. And train for Malawi.
As Claire reported, we went for a picnic up Pen Dinas at the weekend, followed by an evening of board games in Rummers and back at The Flat. The game we played in Rummers, ‘NTropy’, is really particularly good – you have to build unstable structures with sticks such that other players are …