Hide & Seek

Claire, Paul, Bryn, Ruth, JTA, Andy and I went to the beach this evening to play frisbee and watch the sunset. We even got Bryn participating, which is somewhat a rarity for any of this fun outings that involve physical activity. Everybody seemed happy to be taking a break from exams. Aber is wonderful this time of year – why must it coincide with exam time?

Paul got some mint-choc-chip ice cream without chocolate chips. Don’t ask.

Afterwards, we all went to the Castle and played hide & seek as it got darker. Paul went first, and I was last to be found – I’d climbed over a wall to a fenced-off area, in which I was very visible, but not in a place anyone would look. I went second, and took ages to find Paul and Ruth. It shouldn’t have taken so long to find Ruth – she was just in the shadows of a tower – but Paul had a brilliant hiding place: inside the ruins of a chimney (how he squeezed in there I’ll never know). For our final game, with Ruth hunting, I hid on top of a tower – with a great view – where I could become completely concealed by lying down. I was found third-from-last, with JTA and Claire remaining hidden for ages (despite many [not particularly helpful] text-messaged clues sent by JTA to Ruth). JTA had wedged himself between two upstanding slabs of rock, and could only be seen from above. Claire, better yet, had lay down and slid herself into what appeared to be an old drainage channel from one of the buildings into the courtyard.

Finally, we all returned to the flat for a game of Chez Geek: Paul won, and deservedly so (despite us all ganging up on him quite brutally at the end).

Time for bed, methinks.

 

My Blog’s Been Kind-Of Quiet Of Late, So Here’s Some Crap

[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]

[more of this post was recovered on 13 October 2018]

You can blame Paul for this, but here we go:

1: Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 18, find line 4. Write down what it says: You enter these seven digits as your password. (See Figure 2.1.) If you have a password

2: Stretch your left arm out as far as you can. What do you touch first?: Two bottle caps.

3: What is the last thing you watched on TV?: I can’t even remember the last time I watched TV.

4: WITHOUT LOOKING, guess what the time is: 11:40?

5: Now look at the clock, what is the actual time?: 11:37

6: With the exception of the computer, what can you hear?: The other computer. A truck backing up. A generator. A woman’s footsteps. A bus. Quiet chattering. A woman coughing.

7: When did you last step outside? Outside? That’s like here, but with lower resolution, isn’t it? I guess it must have been yesterday sometime.

8: Before you came to this website, what did you look at?: An SSH shell.

9: What are you wearing?: Black …

 

Chicken-Heated Atomic Weapons, And Quake [TM] For Those Who Miss Text-Based Adventures

[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…

Plug ‘N’ Pray

Looking to change your religion using an easy, clean interface? Try Plug ‘n’ Pray from Holy Corporation.

A site well-worth reading.

 

Warning: Extreme Geek Humour

Sat in Burger King…

Bryn: So many nice things come in .deb packages…
Dan: Yeh. Except for some nice things which still come in nasty RPM-shaped packages.
Bryn: I’m not even sure I have an RPM package manager installed.
Dan: I’m sure you can ‘apt-get’ one.

Oh; how we laughed.

Pretend You’re A Traffic Police Officer

…and one day, on your beat, you catch a guy driving the wrong way down a residential one-way street. Well; that’s not very good, so you flag him down and investigate. Upon reaching the car, you discover that he is driving the wrong way down the road as a result of a lack of due care and attention – he was using his laptop. Moreover, his pants are round his ankles and he’s using his laptop to look at kiddie porn. As if this isn’t enough, he’d been downloading said illegal porn using an internet connection hijacked using wireless networking gear.

What do you charge him with?

The full story here.

Rage Against The Monkeys

I’ve been thinking about a popular mathematical document easily available on the web, More Monkey Business, which uses the maths behind the otherwise inconceivable “infinite monkey problem” (if a million monkeys at a million keyboardsetc.… also known as Usenet…) as a gateway to argue against molecular biology’s evolutionary theory, which states that life ‘came together’ out of primordial soup as a result of a ‘miraculous’ coincidence.

It states, for example: “From a strictly mathematical perspective, the idea that life arose out of a pre-biotic soup is about as reasonable as the idea that Hamlet could arise out of alphabet noodle soup.”

What the author, and many creationists in general, fail to realise, is that there is nothing fundamentally ‘special’ or ‘miraculous’ about life. Life is nothing more than a series of stable, perpetual (although not eternally-perpetual) chemical reactions, and the fact that we see it as anything more than this is an example of our failings as rational entities to realise the fundamental truth about our existance: that life, intelligence, and humanity are nothing more than basic chemical processes examined at a level of blindingly indefinate abstraction.

Or, at least, that’s what I believe.

Read the article. It’s good.

Which NetHack Monster Are You?

This made my day:

If I were a NetHack monster, I would be a mimic. I can be whatever you need me to be - it might look like I'm here to help you, but really you're here to help me.

If I were a NetHack monster, I would be a mimic. I can be whatever I think you need me to be – it might look like I’m here to help you, but really you’re here to help me.

Which NetHack Monster Are You?

I laughed until I mimicked a boulder.

(if by some strangeness you know me but don’t know what NetHack is, start here)

Growing Up

The older I get, the more I become like those people my parents used to warn me about when I was younger.