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.)
