Paint the Tiger, Carve the Swan

This weekend was the SAPSASA Touch Trials, which are for boys and girls aged 12 and under. Since I have a vested interest in making sure the best group of 12s girls gets selected as possible, being that I get them when they turn 13, I tend to come out and help run/select at these trials.

This year’s bunch of 10, 11 and 12 year-olds was astounding. It really seems like our state development programs are starting to work out. Each year we seem to have a better group of kids than the years before. Even though there were only just over the 14 that each team takes away, this is better than in recent years where we have had to find extra players. And almost without exception, all of the kids trialling know the rules better than the first group of 15s I took away did. Mind you, those girls are now all over 18, and some of them have played State Women’s Open, and Crusaders 20s, so not taking anything away from all of them.

I wound up running the grids on both days, and helping with the selection of the girls team. I really enjoy working with kids that age, but I think I could only handle so much of it before I tired of the young-ness of them. If you know what I mean.

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I received a comment on one of my blog posts about http://australia.sms-txt.co.uk, an apparently free method of sending SMS text messages over the internet.

Don’t use this system, for several extremely important reasons:

• Your recipient does not recieve your message, but instead a placeholder message, to which they must either send a premium priced message to a 19-number - minimum cost of 50c, I don’t know the actual cost, or visit a website, and pay 50c via PayPal to view the message.
• It’s system for sending a message requires you to add a person to your address book first, you can’t, like SMSPup.com.au send a message to someone, and then decide to add them to your Address Book.
• The system is very insecure. You are given a link with a number at the end to visit a website. It is possible to change this number, and then view the message of someone else. Or, at least, I assume it is. I wasn’t going to waste 50c to see if this is the case. If a message can only be viewed once, then it would be possible to hijack someone else’s messages, if you were prepared to pay the money, thus preventing them from viewing them.
• You cannot send a second message until a person has replied/retreived the first. What happens if the person chooses not to? You cannot send them another…

Thus, this system is not free. Whilst it costs nothing to send, it costs at least 50c to retrieve. This is contrary to the normal way SMS charges are applied in Australia, which are sender-based. At least you can choose not to retrieve a message, so if “James” keeps sending me SMSs, I can ignore him. Similar to how Optus keeps sending me advertising MMSs. And I keep ignoring them.

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Whilst most of the stuff in WoW update 1.11 is great, there are a couple of things that have come to my attention as being problematic.

The first and most obvious is the global LookingForGroup chat channel. It has meant that everyone in every zone can see every LFG from the other zones. This alone is bad news, as it makes the traffic level in this chat too high. But it gets worse. People have started using this channel as a trade channel, as they now get access to everyone, everywhere. It means that most of the time, people will now be forced to turn this channel off.

Secondly, and only obvious to Druids, is the subtle change that has been made to flight paths - you can now only fly to Rutheran Village out of Moonglade, wheras before you used to be able to pick a flight path, and chain out of Moonglade.

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The radio was tuned to 91.9FM last night, while I worked away on the computer. By worked, I mean played, but that’s irrelevant. So, I listened to the same songs over and over again, and I’m okay with that. Because, at least one segment was where listeners voted, so they must just be choosing those songs, hey? And, amazingly, the #1 and #2 songs both had 20% of the votes each, and in fact it came down to one vote between the two songs!

So, imagine my surprise when, tonight, as I have a short break from WoW to make Chai, that on comes the stupid Nova bimbo, and there is one vote between songs #1 and #2 again.

Now, this cannot possibly be true. And, what’s worse, is it’s totally meaningless anyway. I mean, both songs get played, right? What’s the point in having all of this fuss over it? If it were a difference between songs #5 and #6, and they were only playing 5 songs, then it would make sense. Or, if the loser were to never be played again.

I don’t get it. Why do Nova feel the need to lie to their audience, just to try to get them to vote for songs in a crappy, meaningless competition?

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Apparently, even some of the WoW boys who are on ADSL had some delays waiting for the update to download, and someone from my guild, who communicate regularly outside of WoW (we do all know one another in Real Life) posted a link to a website: http://www.cforce.org.

This site begins with three puzzles requiring a little bit of knowledge to solve: the first one took me a matter of minutes, although I had to use Google to find who actually said the quote. Reorganising the puzzle pieces was pretty simple, and my first guess (of Einstein, who died in 1955) was incorrect. The second puzzle took a little longer, but only because I didn’t have access to a 1 dollar bill. Again, Google helped out in finding out the latin phrases on the back. I didn’t bother with the date, as there were only a couple of characters used in this simple substitution cipher that were from this section of the key. Then, as there were a finite number of possible answers to the puzzle, I just tried several of them before I lucked on the right answer. I can’t even remember what answer I put in…

The third one took some thinking. Originally, I had tried one method, and for some reason got fixated on this. It wasn’t until I thought a little more about it, and expanded my ideas a little that I solved it. I had at this stage obtained a small audience of students, and they were very impressed with my solving of the puzzle. I can guarantee that in total, the three puzzles took me around 20 minutes to solve. And that was with some breaks as students needed assistance. If I’d been at a machine with a python interpreter installed, I probably would have done it in about 5.
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A pathetic attempt at making a joke: cf. Waiting for Godot; I’m currenlty waiting for the WoW 1.11 update to finish downloading. I thought I had grabbed all the files in advance, but apparently there was another 20Mb or so that hadn’t been distributed yet. So, I wait again.

92%, and counting.

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Boing Boing: China Olympic stadium design entry resembles giant snatch?

This is kind of amusing, but even more so when I think back to a furore that erupted in my early days of University, shortly after the State Bank of South Australia fiasco that resulted in the bank being rebranded as BankSA.

Along with the name change came a new logo:

Some wags from one of the student newspapers - it may have been on dit, the Adelaide Uni newspaper, but I seem to recall it being entropy, the UniSA paper - decided that it looked decidedly snatch-like, and called it CuntSA.

Needless to say, it didn’t go down too well.

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I can’t remember when I first heard of Freud. I think I didn’t really know enough about him while at school to make any decisions, other than the term Freudian Slip. It wasn’t until I was at Uni, and studying some Psychology that I came across him in any context. I read a couple of fairly biting criticisms of his work by people like Stephen Jay Gould, and haven’t really had any respect for him since then. There’s one quote I really enjoy, particularly since it nicely complements the Freud/Fraud similarity:

Everything Freud did that was new was not true,
and everything Freud did that was true was not new.

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Finally, the 1.11 World of Warcraft update is being applied. Which means all of those things I mentioned a fortnight ago are finally happening.

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Well, it hardly seems like a year since the last 15s trials, but it must be. Last weekend was the date, and over the Saturday and Sunday, we had a total of 33 girls trial. What was excellent again this year was the general standard of the girls. Virtually all of them had very good ball skills, and most were quite athletic.

It was, as I always seem to be saying in my letters out to candidates, very hard to select a team from a pool of talent like this. Having said that, we’ve selected what we deemed to be the 21 best girls from the weekend, and in about a month I’ll be holding further trials, over a couple of weekends.

Following that, there will be a selection of 14 girls to be in the final team, and then training begins in earnest. And then, at the end of October, it’s off to Perth for a week.

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