Stephen Lang

Top Trumps

Monday September 4, 2006

I used to love Top Trumps when I was a child. I had aeroplanes and tanks and superheroes, all that kind of stuff. My daughter has now discovered the game. She has Top Trumps for The Simpsons. The Simpsons work very well for the game, with categories including huggability, IQ, personal hygiene and prone to mayhem. Homer scores badly for IQ, Maggie highly for huggability. Most of the characters in The Simpsons score highly for prone to mayhem.

I’m working on some new Top Trumps games. Here’s number one:

Read on, and see new Top Trumps! [1]

True Encounters

Tuesday July 25, 2006

True Encounters

Yes I do have a lot of these strange encounters, and all of them are true.

I get to go to quite a few presentations as part of my paid work, usually demos for various bits and pieces of new software. Half of the time nothing works in these demonstrations and our poor network usually gets the blame. The other half of the time, ‘other factors’ cause the demo to be squeezed into a fraction of its planned running time. These factors range between the heatwave and our lack of air conditioning, rescheduling on our part, lateness and general confusion of our visiting demonstrators, and our poor network.

When we are treated to something that resembles a demonstration, we invariably don’t learn as much as we could. It’s usually the case that our carefully prepared questions are carefully noted because they cannot be answered. These are the queries that cannot be attributed to ‘network concerns’, but they are easy questions nevertheless.

I’ve found myself pre-empting the reactions to these bog-standard queries. I recently followed the question “will it work on different browsers?” with “please don’t say IE only!” when it was met with a blank stare. I worry that I’m becoming a Touretter of web standards and accessibility, uncontrollably shouting “Mozilla Firefox!” when anyone says “browser”. Whenever Windows is mentioned I am often heard to bellow “Mac user, Safari!” and most of the time I am perched on the edge of my seat, ready to utter “text-only equivalent!” whenever dubious looking graphics are introduced.

All a bit worrying, really. “Hand-held devices!” Blimey, I really can’t stop it now.

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