Tag: fun

It’s back! Dan’s Dingbat Challenge III!

If you’ve not played Dan’s Dingbat Challenge before, you’d better go back and look at the first and second ones, and Andy’s one. Or just go look at the answers to my first and second ones. Or just give it a go.

I’ve made a few changes since last time:

• There’s a nifty little JavaScript to automatically put your cursor into the box you have to type into, to save you having to click in it. You should now be able to play the whole game without touching the mouse.
• I’m using incremental graphics, so even if you’re on a slow connection you should be able to make out (mostly) what the picture is, even before it’s loaded.
• The penalty for wrong answers and skipped questions has been increased to 50 seconds, so it’s really worth your while to look at every one for a few seconds before giving up. As usual, there’ll be “half-marks” available for very close-but-not-quite-right answers.

Is is just me who sees Abbey National‘s new logo – the result, inevitabley, of thousands of pounds worth of rebranding as part of their “new appeal”, as looking like some kind of symbolic steaming turd?

Perhaps it’s just me, but when I first saw it in Aber high street the other day, that’s the first thing I thought of.

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Oh, some of our clients are funny. A client of ours, who hosts her web site and e-mail with us, calls me up because she has difficulty getting access to her webmail:

Her: “My e-mail doesn’t work.”
Me: (not knowing much about her configuration) “Are you using a web browser to check your e-mail, over the web? Or are you using some other program, like Outlook or Outlook Express?”
Her: “What?”
Me: “Are you using Internet Explorer?”
Her: “Yeah. [my co-worker] sent me a link and I went to the page and it worked. So to make it easier in future I saved it to my desktop. But now when I click on it I get the user name and password thing and then it doesn’t work.”
Me: “So… you’re clicking a shortcut on the desktop, and you see the user name and password boxes. You put in your user name and password… what do you get?”
Her: “Page Not Found.”
Me: “Could you tell me the address your web browser says it’s at?”
Her: “The what?”
Me: “The thing written in the white bar at the top of the screen.”
Her: “Okay, it’s C:\Documents and Settings\Meriel\Desktop\login.html.”
Me: “Umm. When you made this link on your desktop, how did you do that?”
Her: “I clicked File, then Save. Why?”
Me: “Right. What you’ve done is you’ve saved a copy of the login page onto your computer, isn’t it? But your webmail is online, so that’s not working.”
Her: “But I wanted to be able to read my webmail offline, because I’m only on dial-up and it’s a lot faster to open things from my desktop.”
Me: (bangs head on desk)

Don’t you hate those tried-and-tested “quiz” memes and things. Well, here’s a variation on the theme.

1. Post this meme to your weblog or journal.

2. Stick a nail bomb in a rucksack.

3. Blow yourself up on a London bus two weeks after I do.

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“These aren’t suicide bombers – they’re just cry-for-help bombers!”

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