Some more flash goodies, this time with the flash game Line Rider but beware this is ADDICTIVE. What you've got to do is to create a race track to guide the tobaggonist down a path. There's no hope I can explain how funny it can get. Just to give you a clue there are currently over 11,000 videos on google of Line Rider tracks.

Via The ten most addictive online flash games ever made

I'm under rugby world cup fever. While I'm waiting for my new laptop to arrive (had a wait time of 4-6 weeks), I found a BBC online rugby game. Considering it's just a flash game it's quite sophisticated. You get to pass, kick and win scrums and there's even a tutorial which at was way more difficult than beating Italy. The game was designed for the 6 nations rather than the world cup, but it's good fun anyways.

I'm not a rugby guru but I still can say that Ireland were a total disaster last Sunday. They played Namibia, a bunch of white African farmers, and even risked losing the match. They’re reminding me of when Italy failed to qualify in the European cup. I'm seriously considering forsaking the green team for the black team. After all I identify more with black than with green.

I'm starting a new game. This may be a bit more intellectually demanding than the boyfriend or the 'where I'm from' games, but hopefully more rewarding. Actually I might start a new section in the blog called silly games.

The game is this: Ask 10 questions regarding any profession. The questions must be directly related to the profession not generic questions.

My first set of questions is for an unconventional job in the software industry. The documentation writer.

1. What type of documentation do you usually write (user manuals, API documentation, or other documentation)?
2. With the event of the web many programs are publishing their documentation on the web. What medium do you prefer for publishing documentation, web or HTML, PDF files or printed documentation?
3. With whom do you interact most in the development team to write the documentation?
4. What part of the documentation do you prefer writing?
5. Have you got any tricks of the trade of making your documentation more accessible to be understood by the non-technical person?
6. What do you think about the quality software documentation in general?
7. Do you feel that your role in the production of software is appreciated enough?
8. Would you write documentation for an open source project?
9. Did you ever contribute to improve the usability of a product while you were documenting it?
10. What do you think is the major shortcoming software developers have when they write the documentation themselves?

If you're a documentation writer and would like to reply, please feel free to comment.

You're also free to play along and write your own 10 questions to a profession of your choice. What I might try to do is find some people with blogs in the mentioned profession and ask them to answer the questions.

Remember that experiment with the colour, animal, body of water, and room? Well here's the reason for it. In Diary, Chuck Palahniuk says that Carl Jung used these questions to represent these things :-

• The Colour and description of the colour you gave are representative of how you think about yourself.
• The Animal is other people.
• The body of water is your sex life.
• And, the all white room is your thoughts on death.

This tip isn't to save your time but to waste it. These are some flash games/animations I found on the web through Stumbleupon!

Tilt - Balance a stand on your finger. Simple and addictive

Icon war - Icons fighting each other

Interactive art - Get immersed in the picture

The Angry nintendo nerd (youtube) - Finds fault with crappy games and rants about them. hilarious. Parental Advisory.

Come on I need some replies on this. I'll tell you why later.

• Name your favourite color and 3 words to describe why?
• Name your favourite animal and 3 words to describe why?
• Name a body of water and 3 words to describe why?
• Describe how you would feel if you were locked in a white room with nothing in it but a simple wooden bench on which you were sitting naked, waiting?

1. Your internal clock triggers every 15 minutes in time for the next idea drop.
2. Billions of dollars are still not enough.
3. You set your start page to the ideas market.
4. You cannot work with a calculator without comma separating the thousands.
5. Neglect your blog in favour of blogshares.
6. Start paying attention to the number of outgoing links you add to your blog.

How are you addicted to Blogshares?

Tomorrow I'm back to work since last Tuesday, even though I'm still not in tip top condition after this tedious flu. At least I've managed to work on the holiday video editing in the morning which is much easier after 11pm. When working on larger sequences of video at the once give the end result a much better flow and identity. Additionally this left my nights free to get gobbled up by blogshares maniawhich has replaced the very brief chess phase I've been through in the last weeks.

Blogshares is getting me paranoid to the extent that I decided to buy a premium membership. After hesitating for about a week I was completely determined to buy the membership until I saw the damn paypal graphic. Our country is still not supported so all my plans burnt up in flames leaving a very nasty e-mail residue to paypal.

The best thing about blogshares is that apart from being a bomb to play making millions of virtual blog cash, it is a huge manual blog directory with more than 2200 categories. You get to categorize any blog in the system to earn chips depending on the detail and accuracy of your categorisation. In fact something rather funny happened when Kitty from Traces of time categorized mindspill in the love life category which I found rather amusing and quite strange. It turned out that my references to my girlfriend led to this intuition.

As expected a number of blogs are featuring posts about our new pope, Benedict XVI. As I'm not one to formulate predictions based on total ignorance I thought it would be more worthwhile to point to a couple of articles that seem to be more familiar with the new boss.

• Pope Benedict XVI: The History Behind His Name
• A new pope

My New Year retreat at our mate's farmhouse was a great way to start the New Year. The best part of it was that I managed to teach Mahjong to my village pals. I've been meaning to learn and teach the game from when we arrived from Malaysia but it's only till now that I've sorted out the rules and learned it well enough to be able to teach it.

At first I tried to learn Mahjong through the internet and although there are several resources it seems that each document is different from the rest. The reason for this is that the game has got a lot of variants which can sometimes lead to completely different games. Working on the premise that the best way to learn a game is to play it I searched for a game to play.

My first attempt was to play Yahoo's version but the documentation of the game was akin to Jboss's documentation i.e. close to zero. The next software I found though provided the solution to all my problems. The software is Four Winds Mahjong and apart from being a great game it goes out of its way to explain the game. The game comes with a flash tutorial that introduces you to the basics of the game and the extensive documentation lists and describes most of the known variants of the game. What's more the site keeps a knowledge base with all the versions known which is much more than anyone interested in the game can desire.

If you're interested in learning and playing Mahjong my advice is to go and download an evaluation version of Four Seasons and learn the European Version which is the best versions for familiarising oneself with the game. I've create a brief summarised cheat sheet that I used to teach the game with that might turn hand especially in the beginning to provide easy reference for keeping points.

I'm at the office on this Saturday afternoon dead tired after a morning of intense Christmas shopping. I'm writing this post in IntelliJ just in case our manager passes around and stares at the monitor as usual. This post will look like one big large comment. I even included it in comment tags for the atmosphere.

This week we started seriously coding the leave application system and considering that my mate hasn't programmed for the last two years we're on a good pace. This program has become like the end of the world because everybody is pestering and asking about it, with our manager almost forcing us to work overtime in order to finish it. I really don't believe this is the real reason but anyway we're doing our best.

Anyway, enough of coding blabber and on with the events of the week. Last Thursday I managed to find the board game Taboo at a very expensive price of almost $60. The game is played by trying to explain a word to your team without using related words. For example you must describe the word "OPEN" without using the words "DOOR", "CLOSE", "DRAWER", "ENDED". It's a good way to keep juggling your mind after a day's work.

With all this Christmas wrapping paper I started doing some origami again with my current favourite model being the classic Japanese crane. The initial origami rekindled interest started by trying to make some models to tag Christmas presents, but the more I think about it the more futile the idea seems.

Since I was pretty busy this week I didn't have much time to read but the few columns I selected were very interesting:-
Improving Usability
Rands in Repose - How to lose a job Part 1
Red Herring - The business of technology

I'm currently experimenting with Desktop Search software. Apparently these are programs developed by the major search engines that work like complex windows find files. They index all documents like word, excel, web pages etc. on your PC and allow you to search for them though a web interface. I downloaded google's desktop search hoping that it's better than the competion from MSN's desktop search and the newly released Ask Jeeves Desktop Search

Yesterday the Champions League fixtures were drawn. We're spoilt for choice on which game to watch with particularly hot matches like Milan to Manchester, Real Madrid to Juventus and Barcelona to Chelsea.

Read the Sergio Muniz feature HERE

All ended well at the reality show of the year - Isola dei Famosi 2, the Italian verson of Celebrity Survivor. Sergio Muniz a Spanish model triumphed over Kabir Bedi and Toto Scillaci in the final round after spending 46 days in complete isolation. It was a great relief when the finalists were declared because from the 12 participants the three most sincere, truthful and correct people made it to the final. It's no coincidence that amongst the finalists there were no women given their extreme and in most cases exaggerated sense of rivalry, backstabbing and aggression. The winner was my favourite competitor showing an unprecedented sense of resourcefulness, courage, stamina and ability to live in solitude for a month and a half. Congratulations Sergio you're bold and beautiful.

Today I heard two interesting puzzles. Try to add the following numbers mentally in this order:- 1000, 40, 1000, 30, 1000, 20, 1000, 10. What answer did you get? If it was 5000 recount again.

Another one was: say "silk, silk, silk", now what does a cow drink? If you said milk try going to a farm and get your agricultural knowledge up to par.

This week I dedicated less time to the blog than usual because I decided to work at work, and play at home. My better half attended the Microsoft course for the whole week so instead of getting lonely I sunk my head in about five different project simultaneously and getting nowhere in all of them. At last the red headed newcomer, who possessed my old office, offered some words and it turned out that he's much better than the management tried to give the impression. He's a friendly down to earth guy who seems to have a considerable amount of experience in both the airline and computer business. On Friday we had a meeting regarding the Revenue Management system proposal and the COO trashed the proposal document. As expected I ended up having to write the thing myself, with a 30 page draft required next Tuesday morning.

The rest of my free time was spent nurturing one of my favourite vices, installing games and playing their intros. In a week I installed;-

Doom 3 – Great graphics but the 1.3Ghz PC was far too little for the game's heavy requirements. The game is set in a futuristic Mars so it didn't appeal much. I uninstalled the game today.

MVP Baseball 2003 – This game was installed just after I returned from the holiday and it's the only one that I've been playing constantly. At last I learned enough baseball basics to be able to play the game. Just before the beginning of the real World Series I started a tournament with the Red Sox and I like to think that it brought them the luck they've been missing for the last 86 years.

Total Club Manger 2005 – Barley moved through the first few screens before trying out something else. It looks like a good game although it's definitely not in the league of championship manager. I haven't uninstalled it yet so it might stand a chance.

Far Cry – This game is not working well because the entire playing area is blue. I hope I manage to find what's wrong because I've got high hopes for this one.

Worms 3D – This is my girlfriends current sensation. We've play 3, 45 minute games since yesterday and from the 6 rounds played I only managed to win one. The 3D environment takes some time to get used to especially for fans of the older version, but its appeal is undeniable. Since she is almost winning every time this game is here to stay.

Midnight Club 2 – Just installed it and will try a game just after this post.

Counterstrike Source – My brother was brainwashed about this version of the most popular internet multiplayer game and I got carried away with the current. My first few games as complete newbie were very frustrating, but in my latest appearances online I managed to get 5 frags.

War is not over yet. Last Wednesday that blood hungry president won again and the world will have to suffer his decisions for the next four years.

Unless somebody convinces me on the contrary I've decided to forsake the travel blog in full format. Too much time has passed since we returned and work is pilling up so fast that by the time I finish writing the blog I'd be returning from another holiday. Instead I will attempt to write my travel experience in the format of a travel article.

I found the following paper airplane sites to help me win future plane throwing competitions:-

Paperplane.org

From the longest paper air flight Guinness holder Ken Blackburn

Alex paper airplanes

Some nice plane designes

Joseph's Palmer Paper Airplanes

Four good ones

Amazing Paper Airplanes

Some model designs that actually fly

MindSpill is helping me to realise how fast I gain and lose interest in things. My last pursuit is poker. Actually this is more a rekindled interest rather than a new one, considering I was once going to write a thesis about poker AI. This interest will generally last between a week and three weeks, so this is the time for my poker books and yahoo games profile to see some light.

Today was a very quite day at work so I dabbled with some probability theory analysing different poker hands vis-à-vis different card deck configurations. Locally we tend to play draw poker using a 20 or 32 card deck when 3/4 people are playing which as expected offset the probability balance of the different hands. The following table illustrates the number of possible combinations and the odds for each hand in the respective deck configurations. Since I am no math guru I must give credit to wikipedia – Poker Probability

Configuration	20-cards		32-cards		52-cards
Total Combinations	15,540		201,376		2,598,960
Straight Flush	4	3876.0	16	12,586.0	40	64,974.0
Four of a kind	80	193.8	224	899.0	624	4,165.0
Full House	480	32.3	1,344	149.8	3,744	694.2
Flush	0	0.0	208	968.2	5,108	508.8
Straight	1,020	15.2	4,080	49.4	10,200	254.8
Three of a kind	1,920	8.1	10,752	18.7	54,912	47.3
Two Pair	4,320	3.6	24,192	8.3	123,552	21.0
One Pair	7,680	2.0	107,520	1.9	1,098,240	2.4
No Pairs	0	0.0	53,040	3.8	1,302,540	2.0

Since the amount of draw poker games I can play is pretty limited I'm reading and playing Hold'em Up on yahoo games. For starters I am going to follow the pair standards advice on Poker for Dummies for initial betting.

Pairs in early position
Pairs	7+
Suited	A - 10
	K,Q - 10
	J,10 - 9
Unsuited	A - 10
	K - J
Pairs in middle position (positions 5 - 7)
Pairs	5+
Suited	A - 6
	K - 9
	Q,J,10,9 - 8
Unsuited	K,Q,J - 10
Pairs in late position (postions 8 - 9 dealer)
Pairs	All
Suited	A - All
	K - All
	J,10 - 7
	Connectors
Unsuited	K,Q,J - 9
	8 - 7

At work our inter-planetary friend spent a whole morning retrying these IQ tests to get a score of 130. Test your IQ on the International High IQ Society

As part of my aim to lower my carbohydrate intake today I improvised a pretty good Chinese like meal. Here is the recipe:-

Ingredients:

1 Carrot
1 Green Pepper
1 Onion
3 Whole Garlic Cloves
Sweet corn
Dark Soy Sauce
Sunflower / Seaseme oil
Pinch of dried chilli
Pinch of black pepper
1 small packet of Cashew Nuts
2 Chicken breasts
Blue Dragon Peking Lemon Sauce

1. I finely chopped the green pepper and carrot using the thick side of the cheese grater and cut the whole onion in concentric rings. I then stirred fried the vegetables in a dash of oil and dark soy sauce, adding the cashew nuts and sweet corn when it was almost done (i.e. when the vegetables start to soften).
   

   Note a: The soy sauce is very important and a dark one works better than a light soy sauce because it gives a better taste and colour in stir fry vegetables. For the amount of chicken I could have added a little bit more vegetables especially onions which tend to disappear. The cashew nuts gave a great taste to the final plate however I think it would have been a better idea to add them in the beginning of the vegetable stir fry.

2. Then I cut the chicken breast in rather thick squares and fried them separately in oil, dried chilli, black pepper and soy sauce along with the whole garlic cloves. The lemon sauce was added later until the chicken was completely cooked.
   

   Note b: The chicken was cut to large. It is best to first slice the chicken thinly then cut it in smaller squares. The garlic cloves did not taste too strongly even though they were present.

3. Finally I mixed the vegetables with the chicken and stir fried once again.