I’ve recently undergone an ordeal with Easily, with whom a number of my domain names are registered, that involved a process so
painful and convoluted that I couldn’t help but share it with you. All I wanted to do was to change the WHOIS data on some of my domains, because they were horribly out of date. Here’s
the process that seems to be standard at Easily:
I log in to the Easily web site to change my WHOIS information. If this were any of the other domain name registrars I deal with, this would be the only step in the process, but
Easily don’t seem to think that their customers want this functionality, and so they don’t provide it.
I use the contact form to send requests that they change the WHOIS information, providing all of the information necessary to facilitate the change.
Easily e-mail me, informing me that requests have to be made by fax or postal mail. Muttering under my breath about this being a little like the dark ages, I send them a letter
spelling out my request. The letter also includes three characters from my password, which apparently is all it takes to impress upon them that I am who I claim to be.
Easily e-mail me, thanking me for my fax (it was a letter), and informing me that a change of ownership of a domain requires that a £15 fee is paid. I reply to point out that no
change of ownership has occurred; although my name and my address have changed, and I can supply proof of both if required.
Proof of these things isn’t required: my word as a gentleman is good enough, it seems. Easily change the WHOIS information, but mis-spell the name of my street.
I e-mail Easily to inform them of their mistake. Several days later, they e-mail me back to say that they’ve corrected the typo, along with a terse apology.
It turns out that they’ve corrected the typo, but somehow managed to introduce an even more significant one: now the house number is incorrect. I double-check my letter and all of
my e-mails so far to ensure that this mistake couldn’t possibly be my fault, and it’s not. I e-mail Easily back and request that they have another go at typing my address correctly).
A week passes. With no response, I wonder if I shall have to write another letter. Don’t forget that this is an Internet-based company selling Internet services. I send another
e-mail, asking whether the previous e-mail is going to be handled any time soon.
Easily reply, with no apology this time, stating that the typo has been corrected. I check the WHOIS records: it turns out that they’ve only corrected their (second) typo on one of
my domain names, and not on all of them. I write back to ask when they’re planning to correct the others, and list them.
We’re coming up on one month since this ordeal started. For reference, when I used GoDaddy to do the same operation, I had it done
within five minutes, and I could do it all online.
Easily have really, really gone down in my estimation.
It may come as a surprise to you that the stuff I write about on my blog – whether about technology, dreams, food, film, games, relationships, or my life in general – isn’t actually
always written off-the-cuff. To the contrary, sometimes a post is edited and re-edited over the course of weeks or months before it finally makes it onto the web. When I wrote late last
year about some of my controversial ideas about the ethics (or lack thereof) associated with telling children about Santa Claus, I’m sure that it looked like it had been inspired by the run-up to Christmas. In actual fact, I’d begun writing it six
months earlier, as summer began, and had routinely visited and revisited it from time to time until I was happy with it, which luckily coincided with the Christmas season.
As an inevitable result of this process, it’s sometimes the case that a blog post is written or partially-written and then waits forever to be finished. These forever-unready,
never-published articles are destined to sit forever in my drafts folder, gathering virtual dust. These aren’t the posts which were completed but left unpublished – the ones where it’s
only upon finishing writing that it became self-evident that this was not for general consumption – no, the posts I’m talking about are those which honestly had a chance but just didn’t
quite make it to completion.
Well, today is their day! I’ve decided to call an amnesty on my incomplete blog posts, at long last giving them a chance to see the light of day. If you’ve heard mention of declaring
inbox bankruptcy, this is a similar concept: I’m
sick of seeing some of these blog articles which will never be ready cluttering up my drafts folder: it’s time to make some space! Let the spring cleaning begin:
Title: Typically Busy Unpublished since: March 2004
Unpublished because: Better-expressed by another post, abandoned
In this post, I talk about how busy my life is feeling, and how this is pretty much par for the course. It’s understandable that I was feeling so pressured: at the time we were having
one of our particularly frenetic periods at SmartData, I was fighting to finish my dissertation, and I was trying to find time to train for my upcoming cycle tour of Malawi.
The ideas I was trying to express later appeared in a post entitled I’m Still In Aber. Yay, in a much more-optimistic form.
Title: Idloes, Where Art Thou? Unpublished since: June 2004
Unpublished because: Got distracted by rebuilding the web server on which my blog is hosted, after a technical fault
In anticipation of my trip to Malawi, I was prescribed an anti-malarial drug, Lariam, which – in accordance with the directions – I began taking daily doses of several weeks before travelling.
It seemed silly in the long run; I never even saw a single mosquito while I was over there, but better safe than sorry I suppose. In any case, common side-effects of Lariam include
delusions, paranoia, strange dreams, hallucinations, and other psychological
effects. I had them in spades, and especiallytheweirdtrippydreams.
This blog post described what could have been one of those dreams… or, I suppose, could have just been the regular variety of somewhat-strange dream that isn’t uncommon for me. In the
dream I was living back in Idloes, a tall Aberystwyth townhouse where I’d rented a room during 2002/2003. In the dream, the house caught fire one night, and my landlady, Anne, was
killed. Apparently the fire was started by her electric blanket.
Title: Are We Alone In The Universe? Unpublished since: March 2006
Unpublished because: Never finished, beaten to the punchline
Here’s an example of an article that I went back to, refining and improving time and time again over a period of years, but still never finished. I was quite pleased with the
direction it was going, but I just wasn’t able to give it as much time as it needed to reach completion.
The Drake Equation
In the article, I examine the infamous Drake Equation, which estimates the likelihood of
there being intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy (more specifically, it attempts to estimate the number of intelligent civilizations “out there”). Which is all well and good, but
the only way to put the formula into practice is to effectively pull unknowable numbers out of the air and stuff them into the equation to get, in the end, whatever answer you like. The
only objective factors in the entire equation are those relating to the number of stars in the galaxy, and everything else is pure conjecture: who honestly thinks that they can estimate
the probability of any given species reaching sentience?
The post never got finished, and I’ve since seen other articles, journals, and even stand-up comedians take apart the Drake Equation in a similar way to that which I intended, so I
guess I’ve missed the boat, now. If you want to see the kind of thing I was working on, here it is
but better-written. I wonder what the probability is that a blog post will never end up being published to the world?
Title: Why Old People Should Be Grumpy Unpublished since: October 2006
Unpublished because: Never finished, possibly bullshit
In this post, I put forward a theory that grumpy old people are a positive sign that a nation is making just enough change to not be stagnant: something about the value of
keeping older people around crossed with the importance of taking what they say with a pinch of salt, because it’s not them that has to live in the world of tomorrow. I can’t even
remember what the point was that I was trying to make, and my notes are scanty, but I’m sure it was a little bit of a one-sided argument for social change with an underdeveloped
counter-argument for social stability.
In any case, I left it for years and eventually gave up on it.
Title: The Games That Didn’t Make The List Unpublished since: July 2007
Unpublished because: I could have kept refining it forever and still never finish it
After my immensely popular list of 10 Computer Games That
Stole My Life, I received a great deal of feedback – either as direct feedback in the form of comments or indirectly in other people’s blogs. Reading through this feedback got me
thinking about computer games that had stolen my life which I hadn’t mentioned. Not wanting to leave them out, I put together a list of “games that didn’t make the list”: i.e.
games which could also have been said to steal my life, but which I didn’t think of when I wrote my original top ten. They included:
Castles and Castles 2
The original Castles was one of the first non-free PC computer games I ever
owned (after Alley Cat, that golf game, and the space
command/exploration game whose name I’ve been perpetually unable to recall). It was a lot of fun; a well-designed game of strategy and conquest. Later, I got a copy of Castles 2 – an early CD-ROM title, back before developers knew quite what to
do with all that space – which was even better: the same castle-building awesomeness but with great new diplomacy and resource-management exercises, as well as siege engines and the
ability to launch your own offensives. In the end, getting Civilization later in the same year meant that it stole more of my time, but I still sometimes dig out Castles 2 and
have a quick game, from time to time.
Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates!
Early during the development of Three Rings, I came across an existing company with the name Three Rings Design, based in the
US. Their major product is a game called Yohoho! Puzzle
Pirates, an MMOG in which players –
as pirates – play puzzle games in order to compete at various tasks (you know, piratey tasks: like sailing, drinking, and swordfighting). Claire and I both got quite deeply involved during the beta, and played extensively, even forming our own crew, The Dastardly Dragons, at one point,
and met some fascinating folks from around the world. When the beta came to an end we both took advantage of a “tester’s bonus” chance to buy lifetime subscriptions, which we both
barely used. Despite the fact that I’ve almost never played the game since then, it still “stole my life” in a quite remarkable way for some time, and my experience with this (as well
as with the Ultima Online beta, which I participated in many years earlier) has
shown me that I should never get too deeply involved with MMORPGs again, lest they take over my life.
Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri
As a Civilization fan, I leapt on the chance to get myself a copy of Alpha
Centauri, and it was awesome. I actually pirated my first copy of the game, copying it from a friend who I studied with, and loved it so much that I wrapped up the cash value of
the game in an envelope and sent it directly to the development team, asking them to use it as a “beer fund” and have a round on me. Later, when I lost my pirated copy, I bought a
legitimate copy, and, later still, when I damaged the disk, bought another copy, including the (spectacular) add-on pack. Alpha Centauri is the only game I’ve ever loved so
much that I’ve paid for it three times over, despite having stolen it, and it was worth every penny. Despite its age, I still sometimes dig it out and have a game.
Wii Sports Tennis – Target Training
Perhaps the most recent game in the list, this particular part of the Wii
Sports package stole my life for weeks on end while I worked up to achieving a coveted platinum medal at it, over the course of several weeks. I still play it once in a while:
it’s good to put on some dance music and leap around the living room swinging a Wiimote to the beat.
Rollercoaster Tycoon and Rollercoaster Tycoon 2
In the comments to my original post, Rory reminded me of these games which stole my life during my
first couple of years at University (and his, too!). RCT2, in
particular, ate my time for years and still gets an occassional play out of me – but was pipped to the post by OpenTTD, of course.
X-COM series
Another series of games which hooked me while I was young and stayed with me as I grew, the X-COM series (by which – of course – I mean Enemy Unknown, Terror From The Deep, and Apocolypse; not Interceptor and certainly not that
modern travesty, Aftermath). Extremely difficult, each of them took me months or years before I completed them, and I’ve still never finished Apocalypse on anything higher that the
lowest-two difficulty settings.
I wanted to write more and include more games, but by the time I’d made as much progress as I had, above, the moment felt like it had passed, so I quietly dropped the post. I suppose
I’ve now shared what I was thinking, anyway.
Title: Rational Human Interaction Unpublished since: September 2007
Unpublished because: Too pretentious, even for me; never completed
I had some ideas about how humans behave and how their rationality and their emotions can conflict, and what this can mean. And then I tried to write it down and I couldn’t find a happy
medium between being profound and insightful and being obvious and condescending. Later, I realised that I was tending towards the latter and, besides, much of what I was writing was
too self-evident to justify a blog post, so I dropped it.
Title: Long Weekend Unpublished since: April 2008
Unpublished because: Too long, too wordy, and by the time it was nearing completion it was completely out of date
This post was supposed to be just an update about what was going on in my life and in and around Aber at the time. But as anybody who’s neglected their blog for more than a little while
before may know, it can be far too easy to write about everything that’s happened in the interim, and as a result end up writing a blog post that’s so long that it’ll never be
finished. Or maybe that’s just me.
In any case, the highlights of the post – which is all that it should have consisted of, ultimately – were as follows:
It was the Easter weekend on 2008, and town had gone (predictably) quiet, as many of my friends took the opportunity to visit family elsewhere, and there was a particular absence of
tourists this year. Between Matt being in Cornwall, Sarah being out-of-town, and Ruth, JTA, Gareth and Penny off skiing (none of them wrote anything about it, so no
post links there), it felt a little empty at our Easter Troma Night, which was rebranded a Troma Ultralite as it had only two of the requisite four people present: not even the three
needed for a Troma Lite! Similarly, our Geek Night only had four attendees (but that did include Paul, unusually).
Claire and I took a dig through her wardrobe about found that of the skirts and dresses that she famously never
wears, she owns over two dozen of them. Seriously.
I played and reviewed Turning Point: Fall Of Liberty, which turned out to be a second-rate
first-person shooter with a reasonably clever alternate history slant. I’m a fan of alternate histories in video games, so this did a good job of keeping me amused over the long bank
holiday weekend.
Paul and I were arranging for a beach-fire-barbeque with Ruth and JTA when they got back, to which we even anticipated attendence from the often-absent not-gay-Gareth.
And finally, I had something to say about Jimmy‘s recent experiences in Thailand, but that’s as far as my draft went and I don’t
remember what I had planned to say…
Title: Confused And Disoriented Unpublished since: April 2008
Unpublished because: Never finished; abandoned
Having received mixed feedback about my more-unusual dreams over the years, I’ve taken to blogging about a great number
of them in order to spread the insanity and let others comment on quite how strange my subconscious really is. This was to be one of those posts, and it catalogued two such unusual
dreams.
In the first, I was at my grandma’s funeral (my grandma had died
about two years earlier). A eulogy was given by both my mum and – confusingly – by Andy R. Afterwards,
the crowd present booed them.
In the second, I revisited a place that I’ve dreamed of many times before, and which I think is a reference to some place that I found as a young child, but have never been
able to determine the location of since. In this recurring theme I crawl through a tunnel (possibly of rock, as in a ruined castle) to reach a plateau (again, ruined castle-like), from
which I am able to shuffle around to a hidden ledge. I have such vivid and strong memories of this place, but my faith in my own memory is shaken by the very “dreamlike” aspects of the
event: the tunnel, the “secret place”, as well as the fact that it has appeared in my dreams time and time again for over 15 years. Perhaps it never existed at all: memory is a fragile
and malleable thing, and it’s possible that I made it up entirely.
Some parts of it are less dream-like. For example, I’m aware that I’ve visited this place a number of times at different ages, and that I found it harder to fit through the tunnel to
re-visit my secret childhood hiding place when I was older and larger.
A few years ago, I spoke to my mum about this dream, and described the location in great detail and asked where it might be, and she couldn’t think of anywhere. It’s strange to have
such a strong and profound memory that I can’t justify through the experience of anybody else, and which consistently acts as if it were always just a dream. Maybe it’s real, and maybe
it isn’t… but it’s beginning to sound like I’ll never know for sure.
Title: The Code In The School Unpublished since:May 2008
Unpublished because: Never finished; abandoned
Another dream, right after Troma Night 219, where it seems that the combination of the beer and the trippy nature of the films we watched inspired my brain to run off on a tangent of
it’s own:
In the dream, I was visiting a school as an industrialist (similarly to how I had previously visited Gregynog on behalf of the Computer Science department at Aberystwyth University in 2005,
2006 and 2007). While
there, I was given a challenge by one of the other industrialists to decipher a code represented by a number of coloured squares. A basic frequency analysis proved of no value because
the data set was too small, but I was given a hint that the squares might represent words (sort of like early maritime signal flags). During mock interviews with the students, I used the challenge as a test, to see if I
could get one of them to do it for me, without success. Later in the dream I cracked the message, but I’m afraid I didn’t make a record of how I did so or what the result was.
A particularly famous message represented in maritime signal flags (click for bigger version)
Title: Absence
Unpublished since: May 2008
Unpublished because: Forgotten about; abandoned
At the beginning of the long, hot summer of 2008, I wrote about the immenent exodus of former students (and other hangers-on) from Aberystwyth, paying particular attention to Matt P and to Ele, who left for good at
about this time. And then I forgot that I was writing about it. But Matt
wrote about leaving and Ele wrote about being away, anyway, so I guess my post rapidly became redundant, anyway.
Title: =o( Unpublished since: June 2008
Unpublished because: Too negative; unfinished
I don’t even know what I was complaining about, but essentially this post was making an excuse to mope for a little while before I pull myself together and get things fixed. And that’s
all that remains. It’s possible that it had something to do with this blog post,
but without context I’ve no idea what that one was about, too. Sounds like it was about an argument, and so I’m happier just letting it go, whatever it was, anyway.
Title: Spicy Yellow Split Pea Soup Unpublished since: November 2008 Unpublished because: Got lazy; unfinished
I came up with a recipe for a delicious spicy yellow split pea soup, and wanted to share it with you, so I made myself the stub of a blog entry to remind myself to do so. And then I
didn’t do so. Now I don’t even remember the recipe. Whoops!
In any case, the moral is that pulses make great soup, as well as being cheap and really good for you, and are especially tasty as the days get shorter and winter tightens it’s icy
grip. Also that you shouldn’t leave just a title for a blog post for yourself and expect to fill it in afterwards, because you won’t.
Title: (untitled) Unpublished since: December 2008
Unpublished because: Too busy building, configuring, and working on my new PC, ironically
December is, according to Rory, the season for hardware failures, and given that alongside his troubles, Ruth’s laptop died and Paul’s computer started overheating, all at the same time, perhaps he’s
right. So that’s when my long-serving desktop computer, Dualitoo, decided to kick the bucket as well. This was a particularly awkward time, as I was due to spend a weekend
working my arse off towards a Three Rings deadline. Thankfully, with the help of friends
and family, I was able to pull forward my plans to upgrade anyway and build myself a new box, Nena (which I continue to use to this day).
I began to write a blog post about my experience of building a computer using only local shops (I was too busy to be able to spare the time to do mail order, as I usually would), but I
was unfortunately too busy building and then using – in an attempt, ultimately successful, to meet my deadline – my new computer to be able to spare time to blogging.
But I did learn some valuable things about buying components and building a mid-to-high spec computer, in Aberystwyth, all in one afternoon:
Daton Computers are pretty much useless. Actual exchange:
“Hi, I need to buy [name of component], or another [type of component] with [specification of component].”
“Well, you’ll need to bring your computer in for us to have a look at.”
“Umm; no – I’m building a computer right now: I have [other components], but I really need a [name of component] or something compatible – can you help?”
“Well, not without looking at the PC first.”
“WTF??? Why do you need to look at my PC before you can sell me a [type of component]?”
“So we can tell what’s wrong.”
“But I know what’s wrong! I only took the shrink-wrap off the [other components] this morning: all I need is a [type of component], because I don’t have one! Now can
you sell one to me or not?”
“Well, not without -”
/Dan exits/
Crosswood Computers are pretty much awesome. Actual exchange:
“Hi, remember me? I was in here this morning.”
“Yeah: how’s the rebuild going?”
“Not bad, but I’ve realised that I’m short by a [type of cable]: do you sell them?”
“We’re out of stock right now, but I’ve got some left-over ones in the back; you can have one for free.”
/Dan wins/
It’s possible to do this, but not recommended. The local stores, and in particular Crosswood, are great, but when time allows it’s still preferable to do your component-shopping
online.
I later went on to write more about Nena, when I had the time.
Title: Child Porn Unpublished since: April 2009
Unpublished because: Never finished; too much work in writing this article
I had planned to write an article about the history of child pornography, starting well before Operation Ore and leading up to the present day, and to talk about the vilification of paedophiles (they’re the new terrorists!) – to
the point where evidence is no longer as important as the severity of the alleged crime (for particularly awful examples of this kind of thinking, I recommend this article). I’m all in favour of the
criminalisation of child abuse, of course, but I think it’s important that people understand the difference between the producers and the consumers of child porn, as far as a
demonstrable intent to cause harm is concerned.
Anyway, the more I read around the subject, the more I realised that nothing I could write would do justice to the topic, and that others were already saying better what I was thinking,
so I abandoned the post.
Title: 50 Days On An EeePC 1000 Unpublished since: May 2009
Unpublished because: By the time I was making progress, it had been more like 150 days
Earlier in the year, I’d promised that I’d write a review of
my new notebook, an Asus EeePC 1000. I thought that a fun and engaging way
to do that would be to write about the experience of my first 50 days using it (starting, of course, with reformatting it and installing a better operating system than the one provided
with it).
Of course, by the time I’d made any real progress on the article, it was already well-past
50 days (in fact, I’d already changed the title of the post twice, from “30 Days…” to “40 Days…” and then again to “50 Days…”). It’s still a great laptop, although I’ve used it less
than I expected over the last nine months or so (part of my original thinking was to allow me to allow Claire to feel like she’d reclaimed the living room, which was being taken over by
Three Rings) and in some ways it’s been very-recently superceded by my awesome mobile phone.
Title: El De-arr Unpublished since: September 2009
Unpublished because: Too waffley; couldn’t be bothered to finish it; somewhat thrown by breaking up with Claire
Over the years I’ve tried a handful of long-distance romantic relationships, and a reasonable number of short-distance ones, and, in general, I’ve been awful at the former and far
better at the latter. In this blog post I wrote about my experience so far of having a long-distance relationship with Ruth and what was making it work (and what was challenging).
I’m not sure where I was going with it in the first place, but by the time Claire and I broke
up I didn’t have the heart to go back into it and correct all of the references to her and I, so I dropped it.
Title: Knowing What I’m Talking About Unpublished since: October 2009
Unpublished because: Never finished; got distracted by breaking up with Claire
On the tenth anniversary since I started doing volunteer work for emotional support helplines (starting with a Nightline, and most recently for Samaritans), I wrote about a talk I gave at BiCon 2009 on the subject of “Listening Skills for Supporting Others”. It was a little under-attended but
it went well, and there was some great feedback at the end of it. I’d helped out with a workshop entitled “Different Approaches to Polyamory” alongside fire_kitten, but strangely it was this, the workshop whose topic should be that which I have the greater
amount of experience in, that made me nervous.
This blog post was supposed to be an exploration of my personal development over the previous decade and an examination of what was different about giving this talk to giving
countless presentations at helpline training sessions for years that made me apprehensive. I think it could have been pretty good, actually. Unfortunately a lot of blog posts started
around this time never ended up finished as I had other concerns on my plate, but I might come back to this topic if I give a similar presentation at a future conference.
So there we have it: a big cleanse on my perpetually unfinished blog posts. I’ve still got about eight drafts open, so there’s a reasonable chance that I might finish some of them, some
day: but failing that, I’ll wait until another decade or so of blogging is up and I’ll “purge” them all again, then.
And if you had the patience to read all of these – these “17 blog posts in one” – well, thanks! This was more about me than about you, so I don’t mind that plenty of you will have just
scrolled down to the bottom and read this one sentence, too.
Maybe this is just a pet hate that is exclusively mine, but there’s something that really gets on my nerves and it’s happened under one of the two scenarios below at least three times
within the last month. It’s as if the very second you let people loose on social-networking site Facebook they immediately lose
all common sense.
Here’s the scenario: you lose or break your mobile phone – I’m sure it’s happened to us all at some point or another – and as if that wasn’t bad enough, you’re stupid enough to not keep
a backup of your contacts (virtually every phone can do this now, so there’s no excuse for the vast majority of people). Well, fair enough: like I said, this could happen to anybody,
although you’re already due a talking-to by me about keeping your information backed up, and if it’s been stolen I’d quite like to know what information you had about me on
there at the time. But in the most part you have my sympathy… so far.
How’re you going to get all those carefully-collected numbers back in your phone? Well, here are two wrong ways to do it. I’ll explain why later:
Send a bulk Facebook message out to everybody you know.
Create a Facebook group.
So why are they wrong?
Bulk Facebook Messages
The first and biggest reason that either of these methods are wrong is pretty fundamental, though: you’ve lost my mobile number, that’s your problem, so why don’t
you make some of the effort to fix it. My mobile number is on my Facebook profile. I put it there so that you wouldn’t ever have to e-mail me if you wanted it.
It’s there because improving connectivity between and sharing personal information with friends is entirely what Facebook is for. So next time you misplace
your address book – which you failed to back up – why don’t you do some of the leg work and actually go to my profile and look it up for yourself.
If you can’t see it on my profile, it’s invariably because I’ve used Facebook’s (now-quite complex and powerfu) privacy tools to hide it from you because I don’t want you to have my
mobile number. So there you are. If you’re on my Facebook friends list you should never, ever need to send me a Facebook message to get my mobile number.
Secondly, sending a bulk-Facebook message is wrong because it almost always leads to retards “following suit” like this:
I don’t mind getting James’ new mobile number over a Facebook message. That’s fine. I shan’t be responding, because he ought to be bright enough to get my mobile number for himself,
considering it’s only one-click away. But by bulk-sending it to everybody he knows, he’s underestimated the stupidity of his other friends. About 50% of the people he sent it to
sent their mobile numbers back to the list by using “Reply All.”
Reply All is the only option available, and so a new Facebook user could conceivably make this mistake. But then a handful of James’ other friends make the same mistake, having seen one
of them do it already. Wait, did I miss something? Are these people all patients at some mental hospital that James used to volunteer at, or something?
I don’t know who any of these people are, aside from the fact that they’re James’ other friends. I’m only permitted to read the profile of one of them, and he isn’t sharing his mobile
number with me there, so I can only assume that they don’t want me to have their number. But then they’ve just turned around on that idea and given it to me. What?
I’m half-tempted to set up a handful of fake Facebook accounts just so that I can send a message back to each of the idiots like this:
I Need All Your Mobile Numbers
Between You, An
Identity Thief, A Stalker, Somebody You’ve Never Met, Their Ex-,Every Man, and His
Dog.
I’ve lost my mobile (again!) and can’t be bothered to look up your numbers on your profiles or contact you individually. Please use the “Reply All” form below and tell me and all the
other people in the list above exactly how to contact you and harass you whenever we get bored.
Facebook Groups
The other, even more irritating way that people handle this self-inflicted (let’s face it, paper and pen is a backup if there’s no other way) tragedy is by creating a Facebook group
exclusively for the purpose of re-harvesting their friend’s numbers. I’m sure you’ve all seen this happen at least once.
And it happens a lot: log in to Facebook and search for “lost mobile” in the Groups list. You won’t ever find out how many idiots do this, because Facebook only lists the first few
hundred results. But there are lots. Lots and lots.
The first thing that’s wrong with this approach is an issue which I’m sure I’ll be one of very few people to care about, but it’s not the biggest problem: Facebook “Groups” are, by
definition, according to Facebook’s own documentation, collections of “people with similar interests” and “places for discussion.”
I’ve never joined one of these “I’ve lost my mobile!” groups, because:
I’ve never lost my mobile.
Even if I had, I wouldn’t realy say I have an interest in lost mobiles. I have no intention to discuss what having lost a mobile is like, or even what my friend
having lost their mobile is like. And I’m pretty sure that isn’t what they want, either.
Not only is creating a Facebook group a mis-use of the service – this isn’t what groups are for! – but they suffer from all the same problems as Facebook bulk-mailing
all your friends (i.e. if they reply, they all see each others’ numbers) but even worse. Most people create these groups but don’t make them “secret,” so anybody can
join. Want a few hundred numbers to sell to an SMS-spammer? Just browse Facebook for awhile. Worse still, these groups don’t disappear until (after) every single member
has left. So your phone number, which you stupidly put in the group description (if you’re the idiot who lost your phone) or on the wall of the group (if you’re one of their
even-bigger-idiot friends), will be visible to pretty much any Facebook user, indefinately. Give yourself a pat on the back. I suggest using an ice pick.
What Little Timmy Should Have Done
Never let it be said that I’m overly negative when I criticise morons. I’m more than happy to educate them and I won’t even demand the right to use a heavy, blunt object to help the
knowledge sink in.
Here’s what you should be doing in order to show off your uncommon sense. You can start today!
Back Up Your Mobile Phone
Just stop and think for a moment what your mobile phone is worth. I don’t mean the cost the insurance company will pay when you drop it in a pint of cider a week on Friday, I
mean the value of the data inside it. How long would it take you to put all those numbers back in? If you’re a heavier user of the geekier features of modern phones: what about
all the photos, e-mails, text messages, music, and the carefully-tweaked settings that make the icons have a purple background and that Crazy Frog video ringtone?
Most modern mobiles can be connected to a PC by a cable (which sometimes comes free with the phone) or by Bluetooth, and free software (often from the phone manufacturer’s website)
will let you make a backup copy of everything on your device. It’ll take seconds, and doing it as infrequently as four or five times a year will save you a universe of hassle. Just look
for a feature that will enable you to read all the data from the screen of your PC if you need to – for example, if your replacement phone isn’t compatible with the data from your
broken old handset.
Pretty much every mid- or high- end Nokia, Motorola, and Sony Ericsson handset and some LG and Siemens handsets support a technology called SyncML (there are links to lists of compatible phones at the bottom of that page). Using this technology and a free on-line provider
like many of these ones, you can back up your entire address
book to a safe online repository over the Internet. Sure, if you’re on Pay-As-You-Go you’ll pay a few pence to do an Internet upload, but isn’t it worth it even if you just consider
that the price of insuring your data?
Even if you’re using an ancient handset, consider keeping a paper backup (little black books are very affordable) or a typed-up list in a spreadsheet (Google Docs provides a free online spreadsheet). Or, if virtually all of your friends are on Facebook or another social networking site that allows the
exchange of contact details, encourage them to keep their mobile numbers on their profile; suitably locked down to “friends only” (or even just to specific friends), of course.
What To Do When It All Goes Wrong
Everything goes tits-up from time to time. Suppose you lost your phone in a house fire that destroyed the PC the backups were on, too. Or maybe your phone got stolen and the new “owner”
was so malicious he used your SyncML connection (if you’d saved your password on the phone) to overwrite all of your online backups with pictures of Lolcats. Or perhaps you didn’t keep backups at all (so long as you promise to keep backups next time, it’s not so bad – we all have to learn
the hard way once, I’m sure, how important backups are). What should you do?
First: take responsibility. There is always something you could have done to keep a better backup. Therefore, it’s your job to do as much of the legwork of
getting your numbers back as you can. Don’t make it your friends’ problem. Go through your friends’ Facebook profiles and retreieve as many phone numbers as you can before you start
bothering them.
Second: get numbers in a sensible way. If you have a few close circles of friends, it’s pretty trivial nowadays to Bluetooth/MMS/Infared hundreds of contacts from
phone-to-phone, and this can be a great way to get yourself re-connected. Call up Barney, and say “Hey, Barney; let me buy you a pint tonight and take a copy of everybody in your
address book – I’ve been an idiot and I didn’t keep a backup before I lost my phone the other week.” Barney’ll drink his pint and press some buttons on his phone while saying things
like, “Do you know Robin? Marshall? Lily? Have you met Ted?” and these people will magically appear in your address book.
There’s almost certainly be people you can’t re-get the numbers for in this way, but you can stillbe sensible about it. Send messages
individually to those few people and ask for their numbers, but not before double-checking that you actually need them. If you can’t think of a reason you’ll ever call
them within the next year, why are you carrying around their number anyway? Unless they’re somebody you’d call “in an emergency” you can always look them up when you need them.
That way, you won’t spend you entire time with a number in your phone that could go out of date (people change numbers all the time) and you’d never know until you came to phone them,
six years down the line, and you’d have to look them up anyway. Save yourself (and them) the bother and keep them out of your book. It’s a liberating experience to tidy up your contacts
list.
And finally: if you get a new mobile number with your new phone, drop a text message to everybody who might want to know it, but make sure you say who you are because you won’t be
in their address book with your new number, yet. The number of text messages I’ve got in my life from a number unknown to me that read “Hey there! This is my new number! Bye!” is
staggering.
Some people are just too stupid to be allowed mobile phones.
In case you hadn’t heard/didn’t care, ICANN have
authorised the creation of arbitrary privately-controlled top-level domains. So what does this mean?
Well, the happy hippy theory fun about it all is that suddenly there’s the capacity for pretty much anybody (well, anybody with a particularly deep wallet, and – for now – a
demonstrable business plan) to set up their own top-level domain. A top-level domain is the bit at the end of a domain name, like .com, .net, or .org. The
idea is that this will increase the number of providers from whom you, as a consumer, can choose to purchase your domain from, as well as giving you more choice – someday, I’ll probably
get the opportunity to buy dan.q, for example, or scatman.dan.
Of course, it’ll take a long, long time before people start understanding that these things really are domain names. There’s still a certain stigma attached to not being a
.com, because many web users will guess the dot-com domain names first. The success of the “no
www.” campaign has been hampered mostly because people do think, in general, that web site addresses have to start with www. and have to end with
.com, .co.uk, or another one of a handful of extensions they’re familiar with. If Jo Public sees e.mail written on an advertisement without (or perhaps even
with) a http://, www., or both, in front of it, they won’t have a clue that what they’re looking at is a domain name. And how often do you actually use a .biz
or a .mobi, and they’ve been around for a while now?
A bigger problem, though, is the capacity for phishing attacks. Apart from their ability to sue my arse off, what’s to stop me becoming the registrar for .microsoft,
.paypal, or .natwest. If I sent a large spam attack out suggesting that people get a critical update from https://www.windowsupdate.microsoft/, I’ll bet that
at least 50% of the people who click the link will go on to download whatever malware I want them to and become part of my zombie network.
It’ll only take one such event – and perhaps less – for ICANN to start being very, very careful about who it gives top-level domains to. And with all of the applications they could
potentially get, they’ll quickly get bogged down in administering the top-level domain system. There’ll be backlogs of months or even years on new top-level domains, a lack of trust of
them, and people will still continue to play with .coms for decades to come.
It’ll all work out in the end, I’m sure (although I anticipate a punch-up between ICANN and New.net
– which ICANN will win, of course – in the near future). But I’m just not sure we should be letting the unwashed masses loose on their own TLDs quite yet.
Downloaded your copy of Mozilla Firefox 3 yet to help them make the world record? I’ve been using Firefox 3 since the early betas and I’ve got no qualms about recommending it wholeheartedly. The
awsomebar is simply that: awesome, the speed and memory usage have become far better than the previous version, and the care and attention that have gone into the little things – like
the fact that it now asks you if you want to save passwords after you’ve seen if they were correct, not before – really do make this the best web browser I’ve ever used.
I’ve always had a thing for big, overcomplicated April Fools’ gags. Traditionally, we’d always play pranks on Penbryn Halls at the University, but it’s not so easy these days to gain access to halls of residence, now that they’ve installed door locks that
don’t open by themselves when you so much as breathe hard on them, so I thought it was time to broaden my sights.
I work for a company based in the Aberystwyth Technium on
the marina. A few weeks ago, the Technium management had arranged for the installation of a new fence and automatic car park barriers, to allow the building to better control who has
access to the offices’ car parking spaces (car parking spaces being a particularly valuable commodity in Aberystwyth). These barriers haven’t come online yet, but apparently they will
“soon” (which is regional-government-speak for “someday, maybe”).
Early on the morning of 1st April, I put out an e-mail to all resident companies at the Technium, spoofed so that it appeared to come from Technium management and emulating their
writing style and the way that they typically send out bulk messages to the tenants.
Annwyl pawb ,
The key fobs for the new car park barrier system need to be ordered via an online application form . The application needs to be filled in as your key
fobs will be uniquely linked to your vehicle.
Once you have applied, central office will send out the key fobs to us in a week or two. Please fill in the form as soon as possible so that the key fobs
all arrive at the same time.
The techniumnetwork.info domain name is one that I’d picked up the day before for the best part of 49p on a special offer with a registrar – the real Technium website is at www.technium.co.uk, but I figured that people wouldn’t pay attention to the domain name: even the tenants here probably don’t spend much time, if any at
all, on the Technium website. I stole the stylesheet and layout for the official website and adapted it to my purposes: there’s a mirror up now at http://techniumnetwork.scatmania.org/aberystwyth/carparking/ if you want to see for yourself.
The site begins by looking like a genuine application form, asking for all of the key details – your personal and company information, basic details of your car – and slowly starts over
many, many pages of forms to ask sillier and sillier questions. “What colour is your car?” is a drop-down with “Red” and “Other” as the only options. “What noise does your car make?” is
accompanied by options like “Vroom!” and “Brum-brum.” Later questions ask whether or not your car is capable of transforming into a giant robot and challenge you to correctly identify
road signs that have been altered in comedic ways.
The trick worked, and many of the tenants were fooled… some of them well-past the point at which they should have thought the form was genuine; and almost all of them believed, even
when they realised that the form was a joke, that it had been set up by the Technium themselves. It was only when one tenant decided to pass a copy of the e-mail on to the real
Sion Meredith that the building management heard anything about it, and, sadly, put a stop to it by sending out an e-mail to say that it was all a joke, and not one by them.
After he’d worked out it was me that was behind it… I’d taken steps to make it obvious to anybody who bothered to check up on it, so as to maximise the understanding that it was, in the
end, just a joke: the last thing I wanted was some humourless bureaucrat to see this gag (which did, of course, involve feigning the identity of a government employee) as a terrorist
threat or something …he got his own back, though. He came up to my office at a few minutes to midday to inform me that he’s had to pass on my details to the Technium legal team, and he
managed to make my heart skip a beat before I realised that he, too, was just having a joke.
A selection of feedback so far on the gag after I sent out a “gotcha” e-mail to everybody affected:
“Way too much time on your hands………” – Aled, thinkplay.tv
“You have far too much time on your hands but it was very amusing!!” – Kayt, MapAnalysis
“When I realised it was an April Fool I did look at the email address and questioned it but didn’t think [it could be spoofed]! Must be because I’m a technical dumb
ass!” – George, MapAnalysis
“Dan, Sion was serious [about the legal team], when he popped his head round the door at 11.45 he had some documents in his hand.” – Nic, Angle Technology
“When did you find time to make this, then?” – Simon, SmartData
I had to leave the room when it first started to catch Simon out: I heard him phoning his wife to ask for a reminder of their cars’ number plates and had to excuse myself so as not to
give the game away with my girlish giggling.
So, that was all good, and far more successful than my backup plan which involved passing on missed call messages to co-workers to ask them to return a call to Rory Lyons at Captive
Audience on 01244 380280. The number is actually the number for Chester Zoo: I so very nearly made some of the people I work with unwittingly call up Chester Zoo on the morning of April
1st and ask, “Can I speak to Rory Lyons, please?” It’s a good prank, anyway – I’ll save it for another time: or if you want to give it a go (it doesn’t even have to be April Fools’ Day,
with a great joke like that), let me know how you get on!
On behalf of a client of a client of SmartData, I was responsible this weekend for moving a website over from one server to another. It’s a
monolithic old custom-written content management system, in Perl, which over the last four or five years has been passed from developer to developer and has begun to look quite
disgusting. Needless to say, we’ll be recommending refactoring.
But in the meantime, a server move was needed. No problem, I thought. Install Apache on the new server, CGI::Application, mod_include, mod_rewrite, MySQL, blah blah, all pretty
standard. Copy the files over, copy the database over, hook it all up, and test it. And after a day or two of playing with it on the new server and with approval from our client, we
move the DNS over to complete the operation.
Yesterday morning I get a phone call from somebody who manages the site.
“All of the
days of the week are in French!”
I suppose I ought to say something about this particular company. Like many companies in this part of the world, this company runs it’s website bilingually: that is, in English and
Welsh. But for some reason, claimed our client’s client, their web site was now putting the days of the week in French instead of Welsh. The months of the year were still in Welsh, and
the stuff that was supposed to be in English was still in English, but… well…
Further investigation showed that this report was mistaken. “I’m not sure it’s French, you know,” I replied, typically helpfully, “It’s Romanian.” I was pleased with myself right up
until the point that I realised that this wasn’t actually helpful, about a second or two later.
It turns out that the site uses a Perl module called Date::Calc to display days of the week in an appropriate language, and I’d just used CPAN to do a quick-and-easy install of
Date::Calc. But something was different about the old server’s copy of this module. It turns out that, not unsurprisingly, Date::Calc doesn’t naively support the Welsh
language, but that some time many years ago an enterprising programmer, not wanting to go to all the effort of adding a new language to Date::Calc the proper way, simply patched the module, overwriting one of the languages already
in it. He decided to replace a language that he didn’t think anybody would ever have reason to use on the server – Romanian.
The reason that the months were still in Welsh was because they used a far more standard method of translation. So I simply wrote a couple of regular expressions that changed the old,
Date::Calc-translator code into a more common approach, and that fixed it. Somebody had even already defined me an array with the Welsh weekdays in (it looks like this change was
planned at some point in this huge, horrible codebase, but never actually happened).
Not sure I’ll ever find out who was responsible for the atrocious bit of coding that caused this particular website to turn Romanian for a few hours, but if I do, I’ll be sure to tell
them about this, the most amusing bug I’ve seen in a long, long time.
I’ve been playing with HTML 5 a little this morning. It’s really quite fabulous: a lot
of smart design decisions have been made and it looks like – given a good few years to get things up to scratch even after the specification has been finalised – it’ll really provide a
lot of useful tools to help the web developers of tomorrow reach their goals more easily and in a more structured way.
I knocked up a quick test page to see how the code comes together, and, in particular, to play with the new sectioning elements that can be
used to state what parts of the page have what purpose and what their relationship is to the rest of the document. So far, so good. Then I tried to style them.
Internet Explorer 7 didn’t really stand a chance, I suppose. Microsoft don’t have any plans to
support either HTML 5 or XHTML 2 – an alternative language for the future web – and that probably won’t change until they think they’re losing browser market share over it. That’ll
happen, perhaps, but much slower than they lost market share to Firefox over issues of speed and security: the media make a far bigger deal of computer security these days than they
ever will about standards-compliance, because standards-compliance doesn’t sell newspapers.
So yeah; IE7 got all the content, at least, thanks to the fact that HTML 5 is backwards-compatible (in a way that XHTML 2 simply isn’t), and the page is just about understandable. But
it wouldn’t allow CSS styles to be applied to any of the "new" tags it didn’t understand, so the page is quite a bit more simplistic that it should have been.
I’d expected more from the latest beta version of Mozilla Firefox – Mozilla are, along with Apple, perhaps the biggest supporters of HTML 5 as the future of the web. Unfortunately, I
was mistaken.
Perhaps the majority of the HTML 5 support will come in a later release of Firefox – although it’d be nice it they supported at least the core, well-understood features in the final
release of Firefox 3. Yeah, yeah, I know they’ve started to implement support for things like <canvas> and stuff, but it’s hard to get excited about things that,
while cool, I’m just not likely to use.
Firefox understood that there was something to do with floating something in the <aside> element, but didn’t do a very good job of actually floating it, instead just
drawing a box where it might have put it if it understood it better. This is actually just slightly worse behavior than IE, which failed to understand but didn’t half-heartedly try to
interpret what it didn’t "get." Nonetheless, Firefox still rendered a readable, understandable page – good old backwards-compatibility, there.
Opera, as I’d have expected, excelled here. Opera’s support for emerging standards has always been impressive, and this was no exception, as it rendered the page almost exactly as I
would have expected. It genuinely seems to understand the new sectioning elements provided by HTML 5 (although a later experiment has shown that this is possibly just because it will
happily interpret CSS directives for unrecognised elements: however, this is a good future-proofing strategy for any browser – had Mozilla
taken this approach, the majority of the page would have looked perfect in Firefox, too).
In short, we’re a long way from being able to use HTML 5 in any real way, and all the exciting things it’s bringing will have to wait for now. But I expect we’ll be seeing better and
better compliance with the standard as the standard becomes more finalised next year and the geeks at the major browser manufacturers compete to have the coolest features first. My
prediction? Lead by Opera, Safari, and Firefox (as well as Konquerer, which I gather is also likely to support HTML 5 early), we’ll start seeing usable snippets of some of the
fun things the future of the web will bring us as early as next year, and Microsoft will – eventually – give in and implement them in Internet Explorer too.
In the meantime, it’s been fun to read through the current working draft specification for what I think is likely to be
the more popular language of the next generation of the web. But that’s perhaps just because I’m the kind of person who enjoys reading specifications for fun.
Update: Two more browser snapshots (thanks Katie).
Camino, as you might expect, looks pretty much identical to Firefox.
Safari fares well, rendering the page in the same way as Opera did, seemingly understanding all of the elements perfectly.
Thanks to the hundreds of users that use the service, and in particular to Mike, Aaron, Thom, and Nat, who filed particularly valuable bug reports, this post announces the new version
of the tool – version 1.3. If there were a tagline for it, it’d be “at long last, it’s stable!” The source code for this version is also available for download.
Here’s the “for dummies” guide to getting it working:
Using Google Reader To Get “Friends Only” LiveJournal Posts
There are lots of good reasons to use a newsreader (like, for example, Google Reader) to subscribe to your friends’ LiveJournals. The big and obvious one for me is that it’s possible to
subscribe to your other friends’ non-LiveJournal weblogs, too, and to other comics and news sources and all kinds of things all from one place, so you don’t get stuck in a cycle of
“check the LiveJournal friends page, now check this blog, now check that one,” and so on. But if you’ve used Google Reader already, you won’t need to be told about how great it is.
The problem is that if you just use Google Reader to subscribe to LiveJournal weblogs, it doesn’t pick up your “friends only” posts. That’s kind-of irritating, and could be a
showstopper, unless somebody wrote a tool to get around the problem. Hey look, somebody did!
You’ll need a Google Reader account. If you already have a Google Mail or similar account, you can use that, or you can make up a new one to make it hard for the all-seeing Google
to link together all of your online activities into their massive databases. If somehow you don’t have one already, create a Google
account here.
Next, you’ll need a LiveJournal account. Unless you’re one of these fancy folks who uses OpenID to authenticate and read your friends’ “friends only” posts, you probably already
have one of these. If not, create one here and then get everybody you know to add it to their friends list!
Finally, you’ll need to log in to LiveJournal For Google Reader Users. This bit’s really easy, because you just log in using your LiveJournal
username and password. If you don’t like the idea of your LiveJournal credentials being stored on some site somewhere that isn’t LiveJournal, you’ll want to download the codebase and
run it on your own server.
Then you’re ready to go! Just click the “add to Google Reader” links (or use the “atom feed” links to get links you can use in other reader tools, if Google Reader isn’t your thing).
And Here’s The FAQ
What’s new in this version?
It works properly, for one. Previous versions have had bugs when picking up feeds of users whose usernames contained dashes or underscores, or when your username had uppercase letters
in it. These irritating little bugs took a while to be found, and are the result of strange behaviour on the part of LiveJournal’s server. They’ve now all been fixed, and all feeds
should work perfectly.
What about… OpenID…? Communities…? DeadJournal…?
If you’re looking for extra features; here’s the round-up:
Support for OpenID probably won’t ever happen, and certainly won’t happen soon, because it’s horribly complicated compared to the simplicity of the rest of the
program. I love OpenID, I really do, but LiveJournal For Google Reader Users will probably never support it (unless you feel like writing that bit of it). Sorry!
Communities probably will end up supported in the next version, so you can pick up friends-only posts in them, too. Stop asking.
Related journalling systems like DeadJournal can probably be really easily supported by this or a similar system. I’ll implement it as soon as somebody asks me to.
Another feature that’s in the pipeline is an indication of friends-only posts. Right now, in Google Reader, there’s no little “padlock” icon to let you know that
what you’re looking at is a friends-only post: they all look the same. This’ll probably be fixed in a later version.
Got other suggestions? Leave a comment to let me know!
I’m already using Google Reader to subscribe to LiveJournal. What should I do?
You should unsubscribe (sorry!) from every single LiveJournal you’re subscribed to, then re-subscribe to the addresses given to you by LiveJournal For Google Reader. It’s a
painstakingly long process, and I wish I could think of a way to make it easier, but I can’t. If you want to do it a few blogs at a time, that’s fine – and I suggest you start with the
blogs which most-frequently make friends-only posts.
Why do I have to give you my LiveJournal username and password?
To get access to friends-only posts in your friends’ feeds, LiveJournal must be supplied with your username and password. LiveJournal For Google Reader stores these for you and provides
you with a complex URL that doesn’t contain your username and password (so people can’t work out your password just by looking at the list of feeds you subscribe to).
To help you feel more secure, the entire application is open source (you can read the code and see that it’s not doing anything malicious) and you can even run a copy on your own
server, if you don’t trust me at all.
Alternatively, if security is a concern for you, open a second LiveJournal account and have your friends add that one to their friends’ lists, and use this new account with
LiveJournal For Google Reader. This way, your own personal LiveJournal account remains completely protected. Can’t say fairer than that, I guess.
If you change your LiveJournal password or close your LiveJournal account, LiveJournal For Google Reader will stop working until you supply your new credentials.
Why do you get all mysterious towards the end of FAQs?
I was playing the Chess game in Clubhouse Games on the Nintendo DS last
night, and I’ve discovered a bug that can occur in a very unusual situation. Normally, the game quite rightly allows you to only make legal moves. For example, when in check, the only
legal moves are those moves which get you out of check, either by (a) capturing the attacking piece, (b) blocking the attack or (c) moving the king in such a way that he is no longer in
check.
However, it looks like the programmers of Clubhouse Games, when writing support for the en passant rule, gave en
passant moves more importance than they should have, making them always valid moves (even when they shouldn’t be). Consider the scenario below:
Black moves his pawn two squares forward, putting white’s king in check through his bishop. At this point, the only valid moves for white should involve moving the king out of check.
However, Clubhouse Games will also accept the white pawn capturing the black pawn en passant as valid.
Of course, being a bit of a geek, I felt compelled to do this (illegal) move, just to see how the game engine handled it. The result was that I was told that I had lost, and then the
whole game crashed and locked up.
Sloppy coding there, guys, which could easily have been avoided by putting the valid move check after the special moves. I wonder if similar problems affect castling…
I don’t actually play many computer games: I’m quite selective. Sure, I try out each and every “next big thing,” but in general, I’m left unimpressed. Sometimes, however, a computer
game is released that actually steals my life for months or years – something I come back to time and time again. Something that actually makes me into an addict, if just for a while.
Here’s my roundup of the top 10 computer games that stole my life:
10. The (Even More) Incredible Machine
I suppose I brought it
upon myself. I’ve always been a fan of machines. When I was very young, kids TV programme Playschool used to
have what they called the marble machine. It was dropped later, much to my disappointment. The marble machine resembled an upright pinball table, into which – at the end of
every show – a bucket of marbles was deposited. The marbles would roll down through a series of see-saws and tunnels and tubes and rails and tracks, striking buzzers and bells and
little things that would light up. It was spectacular. I tried to build something comparable with my marble run, but without success.
Two of my cousins used their expansive Lego sets to build a similarly complicated “Rube Goldberg machine,” once, and I
was insanely jealous, mostly – I think – because I hadn’t thought of it first. The idea of these millions of moving parts, complex and un-necessary motion, and things that clicked and
whirred… really appealed to me for the entirety of my childhood.
When The Incredible Machine was released in 1992, I persuaded my parents to buy it for me. No longer did I have to
spend hours finding exactly the right-sized paperclip to slide down a string I’d set up in my room – I could do it all on my computer! In The Incredible Machine, players aim to solve
puzzles by building and extending ludicrous machines. I eventually owned every release in the series. I’d use the freeform mode to build perpetual motion machines and to design
mind-bending puzzles that I’d generally fail to persuade my friends to attempt. I’d play through the puzzles time and time again, trying to find marginally more efficient ways to
solve them.
The Incredible Machine was probably the first computer game to genuinely “steal my life.” I dust off a copy of it or one of it’s sequels now and then and have a go, and I still adore
it.
You can probably download a copy from some kind of abandonware site, but if you’re looking for a similar fix right now, I can recommend Armadillo Run.
9. NetHack
Since before I was
born, people having been playing Rogue, the original top-down dungeon-crawling hack ‘n’ slash game. Rogue begat
Hack, and Hack begat NetHack, which – miraculously – while I’d heard about, I didn’t end up playing for the first time until about
2002.
NetHack is free and open source. You could go download a copy right now and be playing it within a few minutes. But before you do
that, read my warning: it will consume you. The first dozen times you play it, or thereabouts, you won’t have a clue what’s going on: you’ll have pressed a few buttons and
gotten eaten by a grid bug or something. But then, usually after you’ve taken the time to read at least some of the manual, it’ll begin to click. You’ll have gotten the hang of it.
And it’s only then you’ll realise quite how huge the scope of the game is. Every time you play, the dungeon map is different. Potions, rings, wands and spellbooks – all carefully
identified in your last games – will change their purpose. The only thing you’ll find in common is your own corpse, littering the dungeon, from your previous incursion.
And it’s clever, too. There’s a saying in NetHack player circles – the dev. team think of everything. I remember once, my character was trapped in a dangerous situation and
surrounded by monsters. I was likely to die if I stayed put, so I scrambled through my inventory to try to find a clever combination of objects that might get me out of the mess I was
in. Suddenly it hit me: I had a potion of levitation and a wand of digging: I could drink the potion, float up to the ceiling, and then aim the wand upwards to tunnel my way to the
floor above and to safety! The plan worked, but sadly my newly-created hole appeared right underneath an altar on the floor above. The last thing I saw in that game was my gravestone,
which read: “Here lies Scatman Dan the Samauri, killed by a falling altar.” Yes, that means that someone on the development team anticipated that one day somebody might dig underneath
an alter, and ensured that the text was in there to accommodate. It’s insane.
NetHack stole months and months from my life, and – now and then – I still go back to play it. I’ve never won (“ascended”). Statistically speaking, based on the amount I play it, I
never will. But sometimes I get a little bit closer. Perhaps it’s that that makes it so addictive.
8. Super Mario Kart
I wasn’t always such a Nintendo fanboy as
I am now. In fact, before I really embraced Nintendo-fandom, I had to get hold of a second-hand SNES with Super Mario World and Yoshi’s Island and… Super Mario Kart.
Ah, the original Mario Kart. Zipping round pixelated tracks in stupid little buggies with frustrating computer opponents who cheated – cheated, damn it – by firing power-ups they
hadn’t actually picked up. And the multi-player! Two players, head to head, taking on the pack and competing for the cup, or “bursting each other’s bubbles” in a one-on-one.
The rest of the franchise rocked, too – Mario Kart 64 for the N64 and Double Dash for theGameCube, as well as the Nintendo DS version – but it was the original Mario Kart that stole my
heart (and countless hours of my teenage years). Perhaps it was the cutseyness, or the not-quite-a-game-of-skill (but close enough that I could, after a while, royally whip everybody
I knew at it) quirkyness, or the instant “sit down and play”-ability of it… I don’t know… but Nintendo really hit this one on the head. Sneaky tricks such as saving your “feather”
power-ups for the secret routes through the tracks and bunny-hopping to “snake” your way around rough ground really added an extra something to it, too, and the music gave each track
an atmosphere all of it’s own, albeit one in bleepy 8-bit sound.
While I don’t play the original these days, I still enjoy an occasional blast on the sequels.
7. Ultima VII
Nowadays, if you want to play a
huge, open, expansive, deep roleplaying game, you install Morrowind or Oblivion. Oblivion comes on a DVD-ROM and it’s huge. But back in the early-mid nineties, when we wanted that kind of
experience, we installed Ultima VII. Ultima VII came on only seven floppy disks (assuming that, like me, you bought the 3.5″ copy
rather than the 5.25″one) but packed a ludicrous amount of compression onto them – so much so that I vividly recall spending almost an hour watching the installer and swapping disks
when I first installed it on my 33MHz 386 with no maths co-processor.
It was all worth it, though. Ultima VII’s game world dwarfed anything that came before it. Sure, you could rush through the game, sticking to the well-trodden paths, and not taking
any side quests and (if you were good enough to survive such an ordeal) complete the game within about 50 hours of playtime. Not including the expansion packs, of course. But that’s
not what the game was about – it was about taking your party along, being distracted by something moving in the woods, following it, losing it, finding something else interesting,
taking side quests, trying things out (there are a million and one easter eggs)… I particularly enjoyed injuring a monster I was previously unable to beat by having the strongest
member of my party drop all his weapons so that he could carry a cannon all the way from Lord British‘s castle (with other
members of the party carrying balls and powder) to the monster’s lair, firing it at the beast, handing him back his weapons, and getting on with the fight!
It’s deep and it’s clever and it’s spectacularly well-made. It was the first game to introduce the idea of “losing” things in your own backpack (chuck too much stuff in there, heaped
on top of itself, and it’s very easy to misplace your lockpicks… and why were you carrying all these spellbooks, anyway?).
It was over a year between me first getting this game and first finishing it. And even now, thanks to a great community and emulators like Exult, it’s possible for me to play it again, and, 13 years on, I still see new things in it. It’s a masterpiece.
6. Dune 2
This list really couldn’t be complete without tipping
my hat to Dune 2. Dune 2 is pretty much single-handedly responsible for inventing the modern real-time strategy genre (no, Stonkers doesn’t count).
I got Dune 2 in 1993, and found it infinitely more playable than Doom (which was still good fun, at least in multiplayer: my friends
and I had endless games across null modem cables and via direct dial-up), which was released in that year. It was a strategy game with a heavy emphasis on war and scenarios, like
Battle Isle, which I’d already fallen in love with, but it was run in real-time. Real-damnit! If you weren’t quick or smart enough, the enemy could quite rightly sneak up on
you and trash your base (or, more annoyingly, your harvesters).
All the key elements that became the backbone of modern RTS games were there: a set of missions each with a video (well, animated to save space and processor cycles, of course)
introduction, each introducing more and more technology, the capacity to build and upgrade buildings, harvest resources, and buy troops, and fast and furious combat in between short
periods of “turtling” behind your walls and turrets. And it rocked: the three sides (Atredies, Ordos, and Harkonnen) were sufficiently different to make the game challenging whichever
way you played it, the scenarios were different depending on which side you played (for example, the Sardaukar – the Emporer’s crack troops – always sided with one of the other two
houses!), the missions were varied, the sandworms were vicious… and it had speech: speech in a computer game!
I played Dune 2 long before I read the Dune books, saw the film,
or played the original Dune computer game (which shares a lot more in common with the stories than Dune 2 – which is
just an abstract RTS game set in the “Dune” universe – but which I also adore), and I loved every minute of it. Eventually, my friends and I did battle through every one of the 13
levels as each of the three sides, and then we did it all over again with different strategies.
The only thing we could fault it on was the lack of a multiplayer mode. At that time, modern multiplayer games were just starting to appear (Doom’s multiplayer features, for example,
were added as an afterthought; it was thought that only a few people would ever bother to use and enjoy them – but it was this action that eventually made it essential that all first
person shooter games had a multiplayer mode), and I’d never seen or heard of a multiplayer real-time strategy game before. We played a lot of Dune 2, but our wishes for multiplayer
were only realised in 1995, with the next item on this list.
5. Command & Conquer
Now here was a game that you could get into. Command & Conquer, released by Westwood Studios – who’d already stunned us with Dune 2 – in 1995 made real-time
strategy into a real art form. While on it’s surface just a re-write of Dune 2 (Arrakis is replaced by Earth, the Atreides and Harkonnen are replaced by the GDI and the Brotherhood of
Nod, Melange is replaced by Tiberium, and so on) it added so much more.
For a start, it added real live action videos with hammy acting, blended right into the game. It also added a real sense of attitude: everybody who played through the GDI campaign
remembers the first mission where you have to play “Commando,” the ass-kicking sniper with a stack of C4 (the level itself isn’t terribly challenging, and mostly consists of
remembering to do all the actions in the right order, a-la Rick Dangerous, but it’s the attitude that made it stand
out). The music has attitude. The FMV actors have attitude. The military hardware has attitude. The whole game reeked of it. You genuinely felt like some kind of general, sending his
troops to the front line.
Even the installer had attitude: animations, speech, and a stereotypical movie “military supercomputer” user interface. The installer was simplified for the later Windows 95
Compatible (basically the game with a few patches on it) release of the game, and I resented them for it: that installer was still one of the coolest I’ve ever used.
It added lots of clever new features to the genre, too: transports that could have troops loaded into them, well-balanced superweapons, and the “right-click default action” idea that
because so popular for so many games for so long to come.
What really made it stand out to my friends and I, though, was the multiplayer features. By this point, we’d gotten the hang of setting up LAN parties at short notice. We had stacks
of null modem cables and even a few old network cards, scavenged from parts bins, and we knew IPX/SPX inside out (skills that would come in very useful when Duke Nukem 3D, one of the best multiplayer shoot-em-ups ever, would come out the following year).
So we played two player battles (by modem and null modem). And we played four-player battles (over networks of various kinds). And we modded the game (we made levels, we made new
weapons). And we got better at it. The potential for the game was limitless. Every weekend for several months the attic at my dad’s house became our warzone: battle after battle with
different strategies every time. I favoured engineer swamping and fast strikes at ill-defended construction yards. One friend preferred to tank rush. Another friend liked to turtle. A
further friend enjoyed the frowned-upon habit of harvester-baiting. We all had our own strategies, our own alliances, and our own favourite maps. And we played it to death.
4. (Open) Transport Tycoon (Deluxe)
I’d played Railroad Tycoon, of course, because everybody who was anybody had played that. And I’d played
A-Train, which was a lot more obscure and with good reason – it wasn’t really very good. But I’d never really been bitten by the
transport simulation game until my dad – a transport consultant – bought me Transport Tycoon as an (unexpected) Christmas
present.
I was sceptical. How much fun could it really be? Laying roads and rails, sponsoring schemes in towns, and building a network of trains, buses, lorries, planes and ships sounded –
thanks to my understanding of “what daddy did” – a lot like work, rather than fun!
I played it non-stop. Despite it’s faults (stupid computer players, shaky pathfinding, etc.) it was a marvel: a clever, easy-to-learn, fun transport sim that you could play on many
different levels. At it’s simplest, you can lay point-to-point track and run trains around, making “choo choo” noises all the way. At it’s most complex, you can set up clever track
combinations to make efficient use of stations, provide passing points on single-track, flood valleys to use as canals, chain together stations to move cargo in a “leapfrog” method
with greatest efficiency, and choose the best combination of locomotives to prioritise your passengers over your freight.
Then came Transport Tycoon Deluxe, an “enhanced” re-release. At a glance it just provides some silly theming, but looking a little deeper you soon discover how much bigger the game
world just became: one-way signals – such a simple concept – enable the construction of far more advanced track configurations. The extra themes aren’t just themes; they provide whole
different experiences (such as having to deliver fresh water to towns in deserts in the “tropical” theme to allow them to grow).
I was still playing the occasional game of Transport Tycoon Deluxe in the early 2000s, when OpenTTD started to appear on the scene.
OpenTTD is an open-source remake of Transport Tycoon Deluxe, but, over the last few years, it’s exploded in size and now offers a lot more than official releases ever did: enter/exit
signal “blocks” allow for complex station approach/exit designs, a (brilliant) improved pathfinding algorithm makes it possible to design very advanced track/road layouts and still
have vehicles reach their destinations, electrified track is improved, stations can be “chained” together into larger stations, vehicles can “share” orders (like a symlink!), there’s
a load of new kinds of airport and heliport, and, perhaps most exciting of all – it’s possible to extend the game even further with “NewGRF” add-on packs. In particular, I like the
one which provides “realistic” British rail stock, including trucks with speed limits, believable diesel acceleration, and more.
And it’s still being developed: now and then I compile the bleeding-edge version from the repository, and it blows my mind. Trams are on the cards for a near future version, by the
look of things, as is the ability to customise the colours on individual subclasses of vehicle. Very new is the ability to build “on-road” bus stations, which is nice, and to have the
game automatically pause itself when it first starts (a popular option amongst micromanagers like myself!).
It’s thirteen years since the original Transport Tycoon was released, and I still regularly play the games derived from it. This is truly a “computer game that stole my life.”
3. Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth Of Worlds
Most of the games in this list stole my life simply because I kept coming back to them time and time again, even years after I’d finished them or thought I’d seen everything
there was to see in them. A couple of the games in this list stole my life because it took me so long to explore them fully – to do everything there was to do in them, to complete
them on the hardest difficulty level, etc.
Ultima Underworld II stole my life on both counts, but especially on the latter. It’s a real-time first-person
roleplaying game; something that – before Ultima Underworld – hadn’t been fully realised before (okay, okay, there was Dungeon Master…). In any case – what it provides is an immersive 3D dungeon experience with dynamic lighting,
bridges, moving floors and walls, secret doors, switches and triggered interactivity, the ability to “look” up and down, and other fantastic graphical and gameplay engine improvements
that wouldn’t be seen in the first-person-shooter genre until two years later, with the release of Rise of the Triad (and
then, it could be argued, not quite so beautifully).
It’s a non-linear, slightly combat-heavy RPG with lots and lots of character… and lots and lots of characters, too. It’s got a complex magic system, a surprisingly deep combat system,
bartering, the need to eat and drink and sleep, swimming… and lots of “the dev team thought of everything” moments when you, for example, weigh up your options in any particular
subquest: “There’s a Despoiler Demon guarding that key I need… I could fight him; wonder if I’ve got any potions that could help with that? Maybe I could steal the key and try to run
away? How good is a Despoiler’s eyesight? And can he swim?”
Better than that, it’s surprisingly big. About 8 hours into your first attempt at the game… and that’s a very variable amount of time, because there’s a lot to do and try if you want
to, being a non-linear game… just when you’ll be starting to think that you’ve gotten the hang of everything, you’ll come across a portal and you’ll find that the game is nine times
larger than you’d been lead to believe. The fun will be only just beginning.
The plot is complex and coherent, and you can genuinely feel like you’re “getting somewhere” if you need to. There’ll be monsters you can’t face but that you can come back later and
attack, puzzles that you can’t solve until you’ve found clues elsewhere, and a storyline that’ll make you laugh, and cry, and think.
It’s also the first game I ever played that made me physically jump with fright (it was the first time I found a highly-poisonous, dog-sized monster called a Dread Spider… little did
I know I’d blundered into a lair full of them…).
Ultima IV and Ultima VII (the later of which is also on this list) will always been my favourite Ultima games, but Ultima Underworld II did a better job of stealing my life. About two
years passed between first playing it and first finishing it (although I’d had a few “breaks” from playing it), and I still sometimes go back and play as an unusual character class,
or with a more or less heavy-handed approach. And it still pleases me.
2. Quake
I bought Quake on the day of it’s release: June 22nd, 1996. It didn’t matter to me that I was on holiday at the time and wouldn’t be anywhere near my
computer for another four days: I had to have it then and there, just so I could enjoy the smell of the manual or something.
I’d been involved with the beta test for almost six months, and it’s chugginess had been instrumental in my insistence that I be allowed to upgrade my PC. I got it home and played it
non-stop until I’d finished all four campaigns on hard difficulty, and started on nightmare.
If this were any other game, that’s where the story would end. But Quake was special. After seeing how people had received Doom all those years ago, iD Games had put a lot of careful
thought into how Quake should work. Within weeks, I was playing multiplayer deathmatches and co-operative monster hunts with my friends. The following year, still playing it, my
college buddies and I would take control of the computer labs in order to have huge blast-fests with mods like Team Fortress
installed.
I made maps. I’d done this before in Doom and in Duke Nukem 3D, but Quake – with it’s actual 3D-ness – made
the whole process exciting again. I learnt enough C to write mods, and distributed them on the internet (one of my weapons, the Orgeslayer, a rotating-barrelled shotgun, still
occasionally appears in mod packs, and it surprises me to see my handle still floating around with it, complete with obsolete e-mail address).
And every week we’d get together and play the maps I’d created. Times changed, and new mods appeared, and we played them too. Quake Soccer was a classic, kicking each other’s
disembodied heads around a pitch. Rocket Area was a plain old blast-em-up distraction. Superheroes was a very cleverly-made adaptation. We played them all, and we played them to
death.
I played through Quake 2 and Quake 3, and quite a bit of multiplayer of
both, when I was at University, but the appeal was never quite the same – by this time, the Unreal Tournament series had
stolen my interest. Now and then I still play a quick game of Quake, though.
1. Civilization
And so we come
to the number one life-stealing game for me, perhaps forever: Civilization (and it’s many sequels).
Let’s start by looking how I got into Civ (as it’s known to us veterans), though, because I’m in the unusual position of having a perfect memory of the first ever time I played it.
Back in 1991, my mum was subscribed to some kind of software club – you know, like those book clubs – that would send us a catalogue every month. In this particular month, they were
raving about Civilization, a new strategy/wargame (yes, that’s how they chose to describe it). Sounds interesting, so she bought it. This was the original, v1.0.0.0, proper boxes set
of Civilization. It came with a many-hundred page manual that just about squeezed into it’s big box, and four 5.25″ floppy (yes, actually “floppy”) disks. It could be run from the
disks, and we didn’t have a hard drive at the time (just a CGA [four colour] old 286) with 480K of RAM, so that’s how I’d have to play it – switching disks to watch the introduction
or to load up the help (Civilopedia).
The first time I ever played, it took me awhile to “get it.” I played as the Americans, and I had three cities that were doing okay when the Zulu first invaded my territory, bringing
with them three or four units phalanx. I managed to fight them off, and continued to develop my technology and economy, eventually building myself an army of three knights! They set
out, and immediately ran into the new Zulu army and their shiny new tanks.
And so, they kicked my arse. But I’m not so easily put down, and within a few weeks I’d gotten the hang of kicking arses and getting the occasional space race victory too. Not bad for
a 10-year-old.
I played Civilization consistently for several years, and, when Civilization II came out in 1996, pounced on a copy of that
too. Civilization II made a huge difference to the game: more technologies, more units, larger maps, more complex diplomacy, more wonders, stronger espionage, and, thanks to the extra
storage space offered by compact discs, FMV clips of advisers, wonders, and other special content. This game was spectacular, and I played it at every opportunity for years to come.
That it was released between my mock and final GCSE exams might have something to do with my grade drop between the two.
Civilization II didn’t support multiplayer gaming (at least, not in it’s initial release – the later Multiplayer Gold Edition did, which I also bought) so I bought a copy of CivNet.
CivNet is a Windows-based remake of the original Civilization with multiplayer options, including an innovative “simultaneous moves” option which drastically changes the way the game
is played. Along with Quake, CivNet became a staple of my college gaming group.
Civilization III, which was a bit of a disappointment to many long-term Civ fans, impressed me more than most when it was
released in 2001, but it wasn’t until Civilization IV‘s release in 2005 that I found the game series truly stealing my life
once again. Civilization IV’s development saw active contribution from Sid Meier, and it shows in just how well-designed the game is, and how well-balanced it is. I continue
to play several hours in a typical week, and every time that begins to wane, a new add-on pack is released, giving me more things to explore and to get addicted to all over again.
Civilization games are deep, complex strategy games with a huge focus on resource management and empire building, and a not insignificant amount of war and diplomacy. The AI is
typically brutal enough to make single-player games almost as fun as (and quite a lot faster than) multiplayer ones, and the game is designed well enough to cater for casual players
(who will happily turn on the Governor options, automate production, etc.) and for micromanagers like me (who can tweak every little aspect of the way their cities operate, view
reports on spending, and customise to their heart’s content). Civ 2 and (particularly) Civ 4 are easy to mod, too, and I’ve played a variety of custom scenarios, alternative rulesets,
and other modifications to the core game over the years.
So Civilization, and it’s children, sits right at the top of the list of “computer games that stole my life.” For sixteen years I’ve been playing it, and I still haven’t beaten any of
them on the highest difficulty levels or achieved every victory type with every race in any of them except the first. Here’s to you, Civilization. You stole my life.
My previous post reminded me that I’d never gotten around to writing something I’d promised a few of you already: that is, a guide to using Google
Reader and LiveJournal together effectively (Google Reader doesn’t support digest authentication, which means that it’s not possible to use
Google Reader to pick up, for example, “friends only” posts, so I’ve written a bit of software that bridges the gap).
I’ve used a number of bits of newsreading software over the years before realising that what I really needed was a web-based reader that I could use from “wherever.” I implemented my
own, Dog, which worked adequately, but Google Reader has since matured into a wonderful program, and it seemed a waste not to use it.
In case there’s anybody else out there in Abnibland who wants to be able to use Google Reader to centralise all their blog reading into one place
and who has LiveJournal friends who make “friends only” posts (it’s nice to have all the comics I read, all the news I’m interested in, and all of the blogs I follow – including those
on LiveJournal – integrated into one place with reminders when new stuff appears, searching, etc.), here’s my guide:
Google Reader For LiveJournal Users
You’ll need a Google Reader account – if you’ve got some other kind of Google account (e.g. GMail), just
log in, otherwise, sign up for one.
You’ll also need one or more LiveJournal accounts through which you can read the “friends only” posts you’re interested in. Another
advantage of this system is that if you have multiple LiveJournal identities you can read the blogs of the friends of both in one place. If you don’t have a LiveJournal account, why are
you bothering with this guide? Just go use Google Reader itself like a normal person.
Log in to LiveJournal Feed Fetcher using your LiveJournal username and password. Then, just click on each of the “Add To Google” buttons in turn
for each of the friends whose blogs you’d like to syndicate.
Remember to add other people’s (non LiveJournal) blogs to your Google Reader account, too!
Now, whenever you log in to Google Reader, you’ll be presented with the latest blog entries from all of the blogs you read, including “friends only” posts, if available, from your
LiveJournal buddies.
Advanced Tips
Install the Google Reader Notifier plugin (mirror)
for Firefox. This sits in the bottom-right corner of your browser window and lets you know how many new posts you’ve got to read, and provides a
convenient shortcut to your Google Reader account.
In Google Reader, click Settings, then Goodies. Under “Put Reader in a bookmark” you’ll find a bookmarklet that you can drag to your Firefox Bookmarks Toolbar (or a similar place on
the user interface). This will appear by default as a “Next” link that you can click to immediately go to the web page of the next item in your reading list.
I hope this short guide will reduce the demand for further maintenance of abnib help people to get a handle on Google Reader and on
reading syndicated LiveJournal blogs. The LiveJournal Feed Fetcher can very be easily extended to cope with similar systems (DeadJournal, etc.), so just let me know if there’s anything
it’s “missing.”
I promised Jimmy I’d try not to distract him with computer games that would appeal to him while he’s revising. It turns out I lied.
I’ve just discovered Plasma Pong. It’s like Pong – you know, two paddles, a ball, that whole lark – except it mixes the genre up with some of
the fastest computer models of two-dimensional fluid dynamics to put a completely new twist on things. The paddles and the ball are in a tank of coloured fluids, in which ripples can be
created (by, for example, the movements of the paddles and the ball). Better yet, by holding one or the other mouse button, the player can "inject" fluid into the arena, suck it out
into a vacuum, or blast a shockwave out. It starts pretty tame, with players trying to "push" the ball past one another, but as ripples and currents begin to appear, players have to
work fast to manipulate the ball to get it past their opponent.
Looking me up on Facebook or any of the other services I mention my mobile number on, if you have an account on any of
these services.
Following the instructions on any Q Card issued before today.
Asking me for it, or asking somebody who already has it. I’ve tried to send a text message to pretty much everybody who I think might care, as well as a few people who probably
don’t.
Nokia N95
My new phone is Nokia‘s stunning new smartphone, the N95. I just wanted to share with you what
a sexy piece of hardware this is. Really.
Aside from the usual stuff a mobile phone isn’t complete without today, the N95 carries a fantastic 5MP digital camera (with a flash), a sophisticated media player, TV-out, 802.11b/g
WiFi, an FM radio, hot-swappable MicroSD memory cards of up to 2Gb each, both Bluetooth and IRdA… and GPS. Yes, GPS. Whip out the phone and within a few seconds it’ll draw a
map of your immediate locality, plan routes for you, and more.
It took me by surprise after I first booted it up and it used the GPS to work out where I was, established a GPRS internet connection, and then used the two together to get me a list of
local radio station frequencies which it cached in the FM radio. The interoperability of the compenents (plus the API that allows them to be accessed by developers) makes this
particular phone a beast and a half. And a bit more.
It’s a very, very powerful piece of kit. Aside from all of that lot, it’s the usual Nokia mid-high end offering: large, bright screen, Symbian OS 9.2, USB connectivity, a nice web
browser, media controls, and a fab user interface. In fact, I’d do better to write about the things that I don’t like about it, as they’re fewer. I don’t like the
flimsy-feeling sliding panel, which I feel like I might break if I’m not careful. I’m not very impressed with the resolution of the GPS (about 8-13 metres, in my trials) or the
assumptions made by the integrated mapping application (will have to install Mobile Google Maps). I don’t like the fact that sliding the phone shut
doesn’t – and can’t be configured to, by the look of things – end a call. I’m slightly displeased that the volume control does nothing when not on a call or using a media player (feels
like a waste of a perfectly good button to me).
Other than those few little niggles, it’s an amazing phone that’s made me really glad I came back to Nokia after my hiatus in Windows Smartphone 2003-land. Recommended.
In order to reduce the amount of time my
blog spends being used to organise events like Black Red Dwarf Adder Nights and whatnot, I’ve launched Abnib Events, which aims to centralise
the organisation of such get-togethers. You’ll also find that the next upcoming event appears on the Abnib front page, in the upper-right – like the
upcoming Eurovision Night.
Obviously I’ll still end up mentioning these events here sometimes, but this still feels like a step forwards.
You’ll find that you’re able to subscribe to the XML or ICal feeds for the list of upcoming events, so if you use Google Calendar or similar
software, you’ll be able to have Abnib Events appear right alongside your existing appointments. I’ll sort out RSS/Atom feeds for you newsreader fans at some point soon.
Right now, Paul and I are administrators of Abnib Events. If there are events you think are worth publicising to the Abnib community at
large – Troma Night or other related film or TV series nights, barbeques and bonfires, house parties, nights out, board game or poker nights, for instance – get in touch with one of us
two.
“All of the
days of the week are in French!”
I suppose I brought it
upon myself. I’ve always been a fan of machines. When I was very young, kids TV programme 
I wasn’t always such a Nintendo fanboy as
I am now. In fact, before I really embraced Nintendo-fandom, I had to get hold of a second-hand SNES with Super Mario World and Yoshi’s Island and… 
Nowadays, if you want to play a
huge, open, expansive, deep roleplaying game, you install 
This list really couldn’t be complete without tipping
my hat to 
Now here was a game that you could get into. 
I’d played 
Most of the games in this list stole my life simply because I kept coming back to them time and time again, even years after I’d finished them or thought I’d seen everything
there was to see in them. A couple of the games in this list stole my life because it took me so long to explore them fully – to do everything there was to do in them, to complete
them on the hardest difficulty level, etc.
I bought 
And so we come
to the number one life-stealing game for me, perhaps forever: 
In order to reduce the amount of time my
blog spends being used to organise events like Black Red Dwarf Adder Nights and whatnot, I’ve launched