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Richy's Random Ramblings

Techy: New Directory Enquiry numbers

December 12, 2002
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[A Phonebook with two phones]As you may have heard on Tuesday, the new replacement UK directory enquiries telephone numbers are now live (since I’m on OFTEL‘s mailing list, I get advanced notice 🙂 ). Basically the 192 and 153 DQ (directory enquiries) numbers are going to be phased out by the end of next year (August 2003 to be precise) to be replaced with numbers starting with “118” provided by third parties and the “incumbents” (such as BT, NTL:, Orange – basically all those provides who currently provide the 192 DQ number service only on their own lines).

One of the interesting things to note, is that according to OFTEL if you have any complaints you “contact ICSTIS, the premium rate services regulator.” Why is that interesting? Well, OFTEL’s saying the new DQ services are premium rate and ICSTIS state: “All UK-based premium rate services must be advertised on ‘090’ dialling codes” (their emphasis). Hmm – me thinks that the two regulators need to communicate a bit better between each other….

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Blog: MT-RefSearch v0.7

December 12, 2002
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[MT-RefSearch]Woo! After several days of work, I’m proud to announce the release of MT-RefSearch v0.7. Inspired and based on the original version by Eliot Landrum, this new version not only recognises Google but also over 240 other search engines. (The “official” homepage of MT-RefSearch is still on Eliot’s site by the way). You can also see Eliot’s announcement of the release.

Basically, MT-RefSearch is a PHP script and Javascript which you can include MovableType powered site, and when people come to your site from one the 243 listed search engines, they will be presented with the most appropriate search results from your site.

Any comments, criticisms, problems, ideas etc – please feel free to comment here and I’ll do my best to assist. I will be adding even more search engines to the ‘scan list’ (I did mention to Eliot I was aiming to get it over the 500 mark, but ‘upgrades’ to the main bulk of the code stopped me getting that far) – so keep checking either my blog or Eliot’s “official” MT-RefSearch site for future updates….

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Fun: Speed Stacking

December 12, 2002
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[Emily Fox]Wow is all I could say when I saw this video. Basically Emily Fox is a 15/16 year old student who can “speed stack” and unstack cups in the format 3-6-3 (3 cups on either side a 6 cup pyramid) in 2.72 seconds and can do a “cycle stack” (of 3-6-3 followed by a 1-10-1 pyramid followed by a 3-6-3 “down stack”) in 7.43 seconds (that’s a world record).

Just look at her hands go! I’ve watched the video and worked out that she touched each of the 12 cups 6 times – that means she was placing a cup every tenth of a second. Ok, she used both hands – but that still means changing cups every one fifth of a second.

Games: The Kill Everyone Project

December 11, 2002
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[The Kill Everyone Project]Continuing the ‘button’ theme from yesterday and Monday let me present the Flash The Kill Everyone Project. Basically, you’ve just got to use your mouse to click a moving red button and each time you do, it kills a ‘virtual person’. The “total population” count, however, is linked to the world population – therefore you (and other participants) have only got to “kill” 6,248,918,996 people (only 1,801,950,011 people have been killed so far).

It’s quite ‘ironic’ timing that I post this, as TKEP is currently ‘killing’ the UK population (14.29% done, only 52,735,058 people left to go). Yep – it goes in population order (smallest country first). Did you know the UK was the 20th most populated country?

I’ve managed to kill 818,886 people so far (giving me a ‘rank’ of 313 out of 27,783)… Here’s a thought for you – if this game was “real” and every-time you clicked the ‘Click here!’ button you really did kill someone (in real life) – would you press it? How about if someone paid you a million pounds and guaranteed that you could not be traced? On the one hand you could be killing a serial murderer/paedophile/spammer or you could be making several children orphans… How much is a human life worth?

Game: Hold The Button

December 10, 2002
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[Push Button]Continuing the button theme from yesterday, here a little basic Flash game you can play. It’s called simply “Hold The Button“, and you aren’t going to be able to guess what you have to do.

Ok – I’ll tell you: You’ve just got to Hold The Button (don’t faint – it wasn’t that difficult to guess)!. Yep, how long can you keep your finger on the mouse pressing a poor defenceless little button? I managed 2hr 45mins before I needed the computer for something else – and even than I only “held the button longer than 50.2% of visitors”. No, I didn’t rest anything of the mouse to cheat like that: I can certainly say that the only thing to touch the mouse or my keyboard during that time was myself. But, then again, I did have better things to do with my time then just sit there pressing a button… I’ll leave you to guess how I managed it 🙂