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[more of this post was recovered on Friday 24 November 2017]
[missing picture: chez geek card]
Tag: board games
More Celebrations
[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]
[chez geek card]
Yay. Now I’m in a fab bouncey mood and ready to crack on with the next 10,000 words of my dissertation.
People have kindly been offering to proof-read it for me on Sunday night – this is most welcome: if anybody else wants to, you can too: just drop me a comment or a message or something, and I’ll e-mail you it. I presume you’ll all prefer Acrobat .PDFs than PostScript .PS files, yeh?
On which note; everybody’s being really considerate of my need to get this thing done – leaving me to do it where they’re likely to be a distraction; not suggesting really cool things we could be doing right now (except for the above card, ahem), etc. Thank you all, guys!
In other news…
Lots Of Work To Do; Lots Of Dissertation To Do
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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 Of The Day
[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]
Shower With Bryn
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[missing image: Chez Geek Card]
BTW: does Bryn know about his page on AberWiki?
Free Parking Jackpot
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?
I’m Still In Aber. Yay.
[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]
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 …
Repost #13118
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
This repost was published in hindsight, on 11 March 2019.
Claire wrote:
Well, the clocks have gone forward and the sun has come out. Something tells me there’ll be no more snow for a while. Yesterday, Dan, Paul, Bryn and I went up Pen Dinas (large hill south of aber with monument atop it) and had a picnic. The food was good, the company better and the sunset… well it was just another sunset really. I’ve realised that i can’t remember ever having seen a sunrise. Maybe one of these days I’ll be up early enough, and up a hill, and I’ll see one. Ah well.
After the picnic we went down the hill to Rummers, where we played silly games, first Cluedo(Paul won), then a game called Ntropy where the aim is to place sticks on a stick structure without any sticks falling off. Sounds simple but it got really tactical during the second game. Two random people joined us that time, so we had six players and only a few sticks each. It was tense, but Bryn won (again). We are goin to have to find a copy of that game so that we can finally beat bryn!
Then the last orders bell rang, and we returned to the flat, where we played Lord Of The Rings: the board game. It’s surprisingly good, given that you play cooperatively against the rules to try to get the ring to Mordor. I was Pippin – impetuous.
Now it’s morning and I have a headache from all the beer and a backache from the rolling down hills head over heels. Nevertheless, it was a good day.
Parcel Of Goodies
Woo and indeed hoo. Just when I was about to wander down to Richley’s and take advantage of their sale on jeans (having had a nasty shredding-related accident with one-too-many of my existing pairs of trousers a couple of weeks back), my Auntie Anne sends me a parcel of goodies, including several pairs of trousers (including one with a million pockets, or thereabouts).
I think I’ve put on weight since the last time she sent me any clothes. [measures waist size]. Yup; I’m two inches fatter than this time last year. Well; there’s an incentive to lose it again.
In other news; I’ve almost completed an exciting little project that will provide some amusement to those of you who attend Chez Geek Night (BTW: it’s on Tuesday this week, so we don’t end up in a fight with the Irish Band again). No; it’s not a computer game version (although I’m hoping that the author will allow me to write one, one day)… but I think you’ll like it, anyway. Details tonight or tomorrow.
Yay! No more lectures today!
Bovini: A Week Well-Spent
It’s been a busy week. I’ve spent a lot of my time at the office, trying to get the replication model for Bovini working – causing much stress as it failed time and time again. For those of you without a grounding in computer science theory, replication is the art of making data be identical (and editable) in several places at once without the fundamental problems that this goes on to cause, such as data identity conflicts.
In this particular case, we have two master copies of a database, and five smaller copies of a particular one-fifth of the data each (plus a little shared data), split around seven UK sites, and who’s computers can only be made to talk to one another between the hours of midnight and 4am each weekday. So: not only does the program I’ve been writing (and sweating on, crying over, and shouting at, this week) have to pull all the data back together and spread it out, it also has to detect whether two users at different sites edit the same piece of data during the same day, work out who’s most likely to be ‘right’, and ‘fix’ the data accordingly. Or, if it’s not sure, know who to ask for assistance. It’s a clever program.
And now it seems to be done. And working. Great!
Unfortunately, working like a dog on this little project has only taken time (and energy) away from my preferred software project – Three Rings – a program I’m writing for free for National Nightline. I’m likely to have a busy weekend catching up!
Regardless, tonight… will be a night for relaxing – Bryn, Claire, Paul, Kit and I are going to spend the evening in the Ship & Castle, drinking Real Ale and playing Chez Geek. A perfect way to end a week.
Eventful
Been excessively busy this last week: lots and lots of work. Pulled a 16-and-a-half hour work day on Wednesday, fixing the entire network where my co-workers were unable to. It’s a lot nicer now. In other news, I won an eBay auction for a copy of the 1974 edition of Parker Games “Careers” board game, which is fab, and Claire, Bryn, Paul, Kit and I have been playing it all week.
Three Rings schedule looks tighter and tighter. Having some doubts about getting it to a stable 1.0 release by next weekend, the deadline.
Tonight, sometime after midnight, my awful ex-, Reb (if you ever hear me complain about my ex-, it’s undoubtedly her) dropped me two text messages out of the blue asking if I’m awake and to call her, in capitals (followed by two “X”s, which I take to be kisses). I can’t be arsed. I’ll drop her a text in the morning and find out what she wants.
Right now, I’m going to coax Claire to bed for rumpy-pumpy. ;-)