Dan Q
SmartData‘s considering this as a new slogan to replace “Enjoy smart business. Make data work for you.” We’ve all been asked to ‘try out’ the proposed new slogan with friends/family/whoever and get some feedback, so I thought I’d put it on my blog. Here we go:
Free time. Work easy. SmartData.
Comments, please.
Sometimes being a geek is funny.
Went to Str8Up at the Students Union on Monday night with Bryn, Claire and Paul. Paul complained a little about people (in general) who go to traffic-light parties (where you wear red, yellow or green to reflect your ‘availability’ and ‘desperation’ – Claire and I wore red, Paul wore yellow, Bryn wore blue), wearing green, and just sit in the corner and don’t actually talk to anybody, then complain that they’re still single. He’s right – relationships can’t be relied upon to “just happen”, particularly in such a setting. I retorted, though, pointing out that while he was perpetually complaining that he was still single, he was just sat here with his friends – a couple, and a heterosexual man – his chances weren’t that good.
Paul explained as he slowly got more and more drunk that he was particularly shy in situations like this – which I can entirely appreciate – so I decided to help. I started by bluejacking a few messages around to the nearby bluetooth-enabled mobile phones (they’re getting surprisingly common these days). I won’t embarrass anybody by sharing the messages that went back and forth on here, but suffice to say I bounced several messages to somebody, and back, before they “disappeared” themselves. They left with a photo of Paul, but missed their chance to leave with him.
Fluxx arrived, and we’ve spent several days playing games of it. It’s a funky, fancy, just-plain-weird card game in which the rules and goals are defined entirely by the cards in play, which in turn dictates what cards can be played and when. It’s also a lot friendlier than our games of Munchkin, with less backstabbing and shouting at each other… not that that’s not fun, too…
Last night we went out to celebrate Liz’s 22nd birthday. This was a lot of fun (although, even by the time we’d gotten to The Bay, I’d come to realise that it was only Liz, Claire and I who knew everybody there… and who they knew and how. We drank, we talked, we danced… then we all sat down exhausted and watched Liz and Kathleen carry on wiggling in that lovely way on the dancefloor for a little while longer. And even Bryn got dancing (I have a video I’ll have to upload at some point…), perhaps only the second time I’ve seen that (after Kit and Fiona’s wedding). Speaking of which, I’ve now finally got around to putting a photo of the bride and groom online.
In other news, I asked AQA: How cool is RockMonkey?. AQA responded: AQA: RockMonkey.org.uk is very very cool indeed as the Wiki-powered site is run by Aberystwyth’s number one dude & mountain-lover Andy Keohane. Predictable, but sweet nonetheless.
Yesterday lunchtime I finished writing a program that suddenly makes our working day that little bit more exciting – SmartRacer.
SmartRacer runs quietly in the system tray of as many users want to run it – currently Matt, Haagen, Gareth and me… but I’m trying to get Alex involved, too.
When you click on the system tray icon, the race begins! A couple of quick UDP broadcast packets are passed around the network, and everybody on the subnet who’s running the program is presented with racing-style “start lights”… 3… 2… 1… GO!
At this point, all participants will race – on their wheely-chairs – around the central ‘island’ of tables, in a clockwise direction, and attempt to be first to return to their own place and click the “Finish” button. Overtaking is rare – but permitted – and usually quite aggressive. As each player returns to their desk a “score” table is presented to everybody, with all participants times appearing in ‘minutes’ (heh), ‘seconds’, and ‘hundredths’.
Of course, players can choose not to participate in any particular race by clicking the “I’m Not Playing” button. The wimps.
You can download SmartRacer here, to play at your own workplace – SmartRacer.exe (64kb). It runs on Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/2003, and requires the Microsoft .NET Framework.
Another happy fun little weekend. Troma Night on Saturday was particularly good: we watched both Kill Bill films back-to-back, along with the usual collection of other crap. Not-gay Gareth couldn’t make it, in the end (his parents are visiting this weekend), so we may have to see him some other weekend.
We’ve proposed a few more traditions for Troma Night. The first of these – and the one most likely to be implemented – is that of the “Honourary New Person”: following in the traditions of “Honourary Kit” and “Honourary Claire”, this tradition would dictate that whenever somebody comes to Troma Night for the first time, another person (a regular) is nominated “Honourary New Person”, and has the rules and traditions explained to them, and is teased mercilessly for the real new person’s lack of knowledge.
Other proposed new traditions were ‘tried out’ at Geek Night, on Sunday, such as an “Honourary JTA And Ruth” – the latter of which punches the former every time anybody insults the real Ruth. Of course, the real Ruth is eligible for nomination to be “Honourary Ruth” or even “Honourary JTA”!
Geek Night itself was fun, but a little drawn-out. We started with a longer-than-usual game of Carcassonne, this time with both the expansion packs that we have. The latter, “Traders And Builders”, really does add an extra something to the game. I won (miraculously, I thought Andy, just one point behind me, was going to!), after a long battle over a few key farms and two large cities.
We went on to play Munchkin. A very long game, with all of us waiting on level 9 for a long time. I spent most of the game as a woman, after an early sex change. Ruth looked most likely to win for a long while, then Andy and I tried to gang up and “win together”, just to get the game over with! Eventually, I won with a lucky draw at just the right time. A little luck had me win twice this Geek Night. Good-o.
We should have played Hacker, but for some reason everybody else seemed to think that Munchkin would be quicker. Ha!
In other news, after my revelation about ACME Computer Games I gave them a bell. They have none of my stuff in stock and it may be several weeks before they do. Five minutes later the called me back and told me that, actually, he had just found a copy of Fluxx and would be posting it to me ASAP.
Oh, and JTA‘s moved his blog over to it’s new home. Go take a look: I’m quite proud of the design I helped him with.
I recently bought three board games (Munchkin 3, Fluxx and Puerto Rico) from ACME Computer Games in Bangor (yes, I know, the same guys who got confused over my order before…). Somehow, I don’t think they get many e-customers: I just grabbed this screenshot from their web site –
Notice that I’m looking at Munchkin 3, and the Customers Who Bought This Also Bought says… yes, my two other purchases. And nothing else. Hmm.
Still no sign of my order, or any word from them (I placed the order over a week ago). Better give them a bell, I think.
This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
This repost was published in hindsight, on 11 March 2019.
Ruth wrote:
Dan: “Let’s play Hacker!”
Andy: “No, let’s play Munchkin. It’ll be shorter.”
General Agreement3 and a half hours later:Dan finally wins. All players have been at level nine almost constantly for about half an hour. Several attempts at winning have been made, but all have been prevented, mostly by Andy. Dan wins by one point, in the face of all the cards Matt and Andy had left to prevent him.
All cheer. Except Andy, who nearly chokes on a pringle at having his plot foiled.And now for something completely different…
…I like to call it sleep.
PS no idea why this is down this side. Pressed something randomly, too tired to try and fix it.
PPS O. Now it isn’t. Odd.
- Mood:Exhaustion… Of Doom!
Contrary to my perpetually changing plans, we’re off to see Bubba Ho-Tep at the Arts Centre tonight – 8pm. If you’re in town and need a slightly more relaxed night out, come along!
Extract from a personal (online) conversation, today:
Rockmonkey: it was very boring well no not boring but i could understand law like u and a simple web site so didn’t pay attention and explained it to others after
AvaPoet: Here, have a packet of full stops, you must have run out: [……………..]
Argh! Nothing’s happeneing on RockMonkey… I’m being forced to waste time by making phallic sculptures out of blu-tack.
What’s everybody doing tommorow (Thursday) night? Wanna go see Bubba Ho-Tep at the Arts Centre cinema? It scores 7.6 on the IMDB, so it’s better than most of the crap we watch. I’m trying to avoid learning too much about it in case I ‘kill’ it, but here’s the plot outline according to the IMDB: “Elvis and JFK, both alive and in nursing homes, fight for the souls of their fellow residents as they battle an ancient Egyptian Mummy.” Sounds like a must-see to me!
Thanks to Not-Gay Gareth, who I saw for the first time in years, yesterday, for this recommendation.
In other news, the U.S. election is looking very tight. Just three states left to call, two votes in it (lead to Bush), and a recount underway in Ohio… which will make the difference, one way or another…
Not-Gay Gareth Is Back In Town!
By sheer coincidence, I bumped into not-gay Gareth, a friend of mine from my second year, who studied Film & TV while working as a projectionist at the Arts Centre cinema. It’s him who introduced me to both Troma and Studio Ghibli, and therefore him who’s (inadvertently) been a huge influence on the appearance of Troma Night – after all; without him, I may never have had that conversation with Paul that led to the decision to have Troma Night One.
So… I invited him along to this Saturday’s Troma Night.
Not-gay Gareth is also the guy “behind the camera” for Team CompSci’s “The Matrix”, the spoof that won Rory, John, Dom, Huw and I the “Best Presentation” award (and a nice cash prize) at the 2001 Student Skills Competition – a spectacular feat still talked about within Aber’s Department of Computer Science. With Claire, Paul and Ruth competing on behalf of Comp. Sci in the 2005 competition, I suddenly feel very old again. =o/
In other news, I’ve developed WikiBridgePuzzle on RockMonkey, a re-interpretation of a classic puzzle.
Catch ye all later!
Update – 12 October 2018: This blog post was also crossposted to the Troma Night website at the time, where I added:
As I’ve just recently mentioned on my blog, not-gay Gareth is back in town. This is relevant because it’s this guy – who I lived with in my second year – that gave me my initial interest in Troma and in Studio Ghibli. In fact; were it not for him, it’s unlikely that I’d ever have had the conversation with Paul that led to the creation of the very first Troma Night.
In any case, I’ve invited him along to an upcoming Troma Night. I’m sure you’ll all give him the welcome he deserves…
Another fantastic Dudley’s Dungeon (comic for Nethack-lovers) today.
I have lots to do.
Inspired by Jon‘s WikiMaze on RockMonkey, the wiki-powered website that I helped Andy to set up, I’ve made WikiPlatformGame. Go have a play! And, if you don’t mind really bad humour, try the EvilWikiPlatformGame afterwards.
