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December 7th, 2002
02:25 am - Useless Information
Today was the last recommended posting day for air-mail from the UK to outside Europe to arrive in time for Christmas. I am pleased with the uselessness of this information: if you're in the UK, it comes too late; if you're outside the UK, it's of no practical use. All the same, I have dispatched a considerable number of Christmas greetings around the world. There is a meme thing going around the Harry Potter side of my Friends list which reads "If you want a Christmas card, send me your postal address". I understand it better now. What it really means is: "You're on my Christmas card list, but I may not have your address. If you want to receive the card I wish to send you, let me know your postal address." It's a good scheme. If any of you feel so inclined, "42 TS5 7RE UK" uniquely identifies this house and a card so marked should arrive here. Should.
A possibly slightly less useless piece of information is how easy it is to get the postal addresses of inhabitants of the USA from Google. Just search for a name and an address and, unless your main number is unlisted, about 60% of the time up will pop an address and a phone number. Sometimes you might have to try a few variations of the name, just a first initial, the name of someone else in the house or something like that. Even scarier, if you search for a phone number, quite frequently it will give you a reverse look-up and produce a name and address from that phone number. (This may explain some of the cards I was able to send even when you don't think I know your address.) It's stalkertastic - quite scary, really. (Of course, it doesn't work if you take proper precautions. However, some who have otherwise taken said precautions leave postal addresses elsewhere - say, in the preface of their NaNoWriMo novel - thus filling in a few more blanks. What a treasure hunt!
Apart from sending cards, I have been reinstalling software packages on this machine - lots of Windows Critical Patches, MSIE 6, MSIE 6 SP 1, more Critical Patches and so on. (Tomorrow I reinstall Mozilla.) This 13 GB hard disk drive is now nearly half-full. Crikey. I made a list of 32 applications that I need to have to feel completely at home on a PC; so far, I think I'm at about eight or nine.
Will try to get around to a report on last weekend at some point. In short, it was very entertaining largely due to excellent company of both Friends and friends. Tomorrow, the Middlesbrough Gamers Club are running their second all-day Saturday games session. I will be running Haggle, the late Sid Sackson's classic negotiation/trading/puzzle game. Hopefully I will get a full complement of 15 players. I plan on 15 minutes for briefing - for none of them have ever played anything like this before - an hour for trading and solving and another 15 minutes for debriefing. If it goes well then I have a dear desire to run a Harry Potter themed Haggle, just so I can call it Muggle. Another spin-off idea that sprung to mind is whether anybody has ever tried to run a Haggle game in which the players can change the rules by which the hands are scored; some sort of Haggle-o-Nomic, perhaps?
 brakusjs has updated his Bemani 3-65 online radio station playlist. I've only listened to about 40 minutes of it so far, but I fully approve of the changes I've identified to date. There was a passing mention of Dance Dance Revolution on British sitcom I'm Alan Partridge on, er, Monday 11 days ago; our anti-hero, Alan, is rejected from a number of parties and ends up visiting an arcade. As he later puts it, "I tried to outdance a computer - impossible - and shot more zombies than a ten-year-old. In care." Good to see the field get some sort of public attention (we see two clips of him, each about a second and a half long, playing obviously extremely basic DDR in a very stompy fashion) but not necessarily the ideal sort. Has anyone ever played DDR and Bop-It at the same time, so they have to try to cope with duelling simultaneous computer-given directions for both hands and feet?
(Was this long enough to require an <lj-cut>? I shall let the market decide.)
Current Mood: back
Current Music: a very large fan for a very small computer processor
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Address: thinking about it further, you probably would be well advised to put "U.K." rather than "UK", to avoid possible confusion with the Ukraine - though presumably they don't share our postcode system. Friends: no suggestion that Friends cannot also be friends is intended. Gah! I was intending to write all the cards on monday and get them posted either monday or tuesday. Ah well. Cards will just have to be late, then. When's the last date for cards within the UK?
And I am a really bizarre person who likes long posts not hidden behind LJ cuts. I don't know - I think it makes the page actually look full up with interesting entries, and I prefer reading things in the font of my lj style as opposed to the larger one behind the cut. Strange, eh? strange? quite possibly.
but i agree with you. ![[User Picture]](https://l-userpic.livejournal.com/38690500/588494) | | | If you want the last dates for mail to BFPO addresses, you can look them up yourself :-) | (Link) |
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Inland
Special delivery: 23rd Dec.
1st class: 21st Dec.
2nd class: 18th Dec.
Air mail
Western Europe: 14th Dec.
Eastern Europe: 10th Dec.
Outside Europe: 6th Dec, but I reckon Monday should probably be OK in practice.
Surface mail
About half past August. ![[User Picture]](https://l-userpic.livejournal.com/50185001/653367) | | | Re: If you want the last dates for mail to BFPO addresses, you can look them up yourself :-) | (Link) |
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I've had to deal with surface mail, and I know you forgot something.
Surface mail
About half past August.
August, 1947, that is. |
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