Dan died a few days ago.

Here’s to him :-

You never heard of him?

Search for “Dark Star” or “Alien”.

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As created by Henry, using Gimp.

Picture the scene :- you are watching heat after heat of racing, you are bored, but you need to stay awake. Guessing who will be the winner of each heat is too obvious, how about guessing who is going to come last?

Note that this works best when there are loads of short heats, with a few competitors in each heat, as is typical with track sprinting, swimming galas, etc.

Here are the rules :-

Each person spectating picks a loser as the competitors approach the start – you are not allowed to review any performance stats, only judge on what you see. Perhaps lane 4 looks more nervous than the rest?, perhaps lane 2 looks too professional with proper kit?, judge what you see, make your choice. The race starts, you follow the action with as much interest as all the other spectators, but for slightly different reasons. But no one will know!

Points are awarded as follows :-

Your choice loses the heat – you get 1 point.
If none of your group chooses the loser, the slowest one wins a point.
If your choice is disqualified, you get 2 points.
If your choice fails to finish i.e. a real loser, you get 3 points.

This is more fun than it sounds, as long as you don’t tell those around you (who may be related to those taking part!)

If you feel brave, put some money on it.

Your next competition meet will pass a lot quicker.

Please note I didn’t invent this game, their identity will remain secret for the moment.

Some companies are still spending :-

http://www.rolla.co.uk/PictureGallery-April2009.html

Perhaps the deal was a good one.

Got a netbook recently (not for me to use though). HP 2133. Seen in Comet, but £10 less from Dixons online, delivered. (How stupid are they?).

Runs SLED10. Got the updates to work, then promptly lost all wireless. A week later it is fixed taking advice from the online forum of openSuSE. HP were useless – rang them a few times but they kept asking me what happens when you run IE. Very nice people but obviously lived a long way away and did not have a clue what I was talking about. It’s their own OS!!! Told me to ring Novell. Which I did, but politely pointed back to HP.  The fix I found is now in the forums.

Here are the links (partly for my ref.):-

Wireless now working, dodgy hub permitting.

Wow. Just got a new phone, google g1, currently exclusive in the uk to t-mobile. Just because I can, I did a wi-fi scan last night on the way home. In less than 2 miles, through a small rural town, I found 92 wireless routers. 11 of them were open. The saved kml file brings them all up on google earth in seconds. What fun you could have!

p.s. posted from the phone.