Recent Activity

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  Facebook Games

  "Don't kick your own teeth out with excitement or anything, but I've been playing Scrabble. Virtual Scrabble. or "Scrabulous" as it's known. It's a plug-in for Facebook: you challenge a friend, then play turn-by-turn casually, languidly, via email, which means games often last a week or more -like test match cricket, but faintly more interseting.

  "And it's brightened my life considerably - except that there is a glaring flaw, which is that because a) you're not playing in the same room and b) you have as much as necessary to take your turn, it's subsequently far too easy - and tempting - to cheat.

  "Soft cheating involves looking stuff up in the dictionary before placing your tiles on the board. Hard to get away with in real life, but not on Scrabulous, where it is actively encouraged:an interactive dictionary lurks beside the board.

  "I became a habitual soft cheater: trying out all my letters in various combinations, tile by tile, deperately hoping I could "wish" a word into existence preferably on ethat would let me use up both the 'X' and the 'J'and still hit that treble-word-score square. How about JOGHEXY? Does that mean anything? Something medical? Please?

  "Soft cheating might not be full blown hard cheating, but still it leaves you rather cheap. Who knew GIVED was a valid word? Not me, until I looked it up.As I slid the final 'D' into position, Ifely hollow inside. Numb.

  "Inevitably, I soon began hard cheating. It started slowly, with an online anagram generator. Then I discovered http://www.scrabblesolver.co.uk , a site where you simply input the entire layout of the board, and leave it to work out the best possible options.But then my opponants started catching up. Then it hit me: They were using Scrabble Solver, too. we'd rendered ourselves obsolete.

  "I couldn't enjoy the dull thrill of a pathetic, ill-gotten, vicarious win anymore, because with cheats prospering on every side, the outcome was entirely arbitrary. Eventually I rebelled, stopped cheating and started losing honestly.Not because of some kind of ethical awakening, but because I'd discovered the ultimate truth about cheating: it's boring. Grindingly boring.

  "Anyway, I'm still hopeless at Scrabble. But now at least I'm honest. Or shuold that be SCRUPULOUS (4H across, 72 points)"

  Charlie Brooker

   

  Posted 25 Sep 07

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  Facebook opens up to public search

  Well I'm setting my Facebook account to private, removing as much info as I can and then abandoning it for the most part.

  Posted 08 Sep 07

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  Who owns FaceBook?

  According to ConnectU It isn't Peter Thiel and Accel or Mark Zuckerberg himself.

  Posted 12 Aug 07

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  Is FaceBook easy to use?

  I keep getting new friends whom I just don't know. I allow them and say hello, then they disappear.

  Maybe it's just me?

  Posted 10 Aug 07

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  Facebook vs MySpace

  I have had a MySpace account for sometime now. At first it was a fun way to keep up with friends, but now it's millions of "friends" and find that now it's all a bit "look at me" and how drunk I got last weekend. Or just a way of saying "hello", "I'll be getting drunk next weekend". It's also the dronings of wannabe writers and slow witted teenagers who think that every love sick, heart rent piece of 10th grade prose is somehow original and interesting to us all.

  And now It feels like it's more of a media thing now because those folks who seem to know least about what's going on -the "Yooof meeja"-  have caught on to it just as everyone is bored with it. As usual. It's not really as if it was a solely "yoof" thing anyway, but hey a couple of kids commit suicide and guess what? Something is to blame so it's "EMOs", "Goths" the imagined 'evil' of the internet and of course "MySpace".  God give me strength! If The media actually got up off their plush bar stools and had a look at the world they would find it's way more complicated than that.

  As it fades away I'll bet Rupert is kicking himself for buying into some passing ephemeral fad.

  I Recently set up a FaceBook Account and by the time I figure out how to use it effectively (being the old fart I am) it'll be the same  media fodder and I'll have to move on to the next one.

  Posted 30 Jul 07

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  Facebook/MySpace vs Social networking down t'pub.

  It just better cos it's just real. With real folks who are not made up avatars like this

  or this or worse, real shots of yourself "photoshopped".

  But I'll take any arguments against.

  Posted 30 Jul 07

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  Fav Facebook apps

  There are FAVOURITE apps?

  Posted 30 Jul 07

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  Delay on news feeds

  @Mick when you say news feeds, what do you mean exactly? If it's on line news whilst you are at the keyboard, I like to use the BBC because they are usually good otherwise I use MSNBC and if you have Vista there is a gadget built in for MSNBC headlines leading to short precis of the stories.. They do both try to keep on top of it. You can then link to other services, that they readily provide.

  CNN are poor, but Fox is surprisingly good for strictly AMERICAN OVERSEAS news (read war stories).

  Posted 30 Jul 07