1 issue of Miniature Wagames, @ £3.95

Total: £7.95

I visited three branches on W H Smiths, at three different railway stations, on one day and bought three different magazines (the first was SFX).

Mike emails to tell me that Jack Weil and Arthur Andrews are deceased and that he is in joint first place in the Deadpool game.

I seem to have fallen off the NaBloPoMo wagon by failing to post over the weeked. Every day in November is hence out but I will try to make 30 posts in the month. This one makes it 19 in 17 days.

On Saturday pink_weasel (on a post-Cliff high) and I met up with some folks in Guildford and had lunch in a restaurant on top of a multi-storey car park. It sounds odd and a bit grim but the Thai Terrace is fantastic and I really want to go back in the summer and sit outside.

I also got given a copy of Grand Theft Auto, not the latest one, the last one. I like mayhem.

There’s BoardGameGeek but (a) the interface sucks and (b) its remit is so much wider than wargames. TMP and Frothers are fine places to come together and talk about games but that’s all. Where’s the site where I can catalogue the games I play and the miniatures I own and connect with other players?

A lot of the functionality that the knitters have on Ravelry would be great – a flexible but standardised way of listing “projects” – which minis, which paints, which TOE, WIP photos, etc.

Considering how geeky and techie a lot of wargamers are, why has no one created the site? Is it simply because the idea of social networking isn’t really our thing?

Someone will now pop up in the comments and tell me about a site that I should have known about all along.

I’ve been using Opera as my primary browser for a long time, since version 3 in early 1998. Back then it was like a breathe of fresh air compared to Netscape and Internet Explorer – so much faster, so more more secure, so many customisations possible. Subsequent releases added features that have gone on to be adopted by almost every other browser.

But in the last year or so, something has gone a bit wrong. I now find myself using Firefox to read Gmail at home (but, oddly, not at work) because neither of the two ajax powered interfaces work reliably in Opera. Likewise I post to this blog using Firefox because the plugin I use for crossposting to Live Journal breaks the ‘write post’ page interface in Opera. If I’m trying to geocode a batch of photos in Flickr then Opera will often hang or refuse to display the maps.

The problems are not consistent (as I said, I can use Gmail at work but not at home) and can’t really be pinned down to a fault with either the browser itself, the coding on the sites or my set up. It’s just a combination of all three which is making Opera increasingly unreliable when it comes to Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).

Look at the release notes for recent versions of every major and you’ll see that performance, especially RIA performance, is a major goal at the moment. Opera is rightly famed for its overall performance and speed on normal web pages but it seems to me that the performance with ajax requests is lagging behind other browsers.

Will I switch to Firefox anytime soon? I doubt it. I have ten years worth of experience with Opera – I know its quirks and secrets and it has so much that I need available straight out of the box – how many Firefox addons would I need to do the same? Is there even an addon that replicates something as simple as Opera’s “paste and go” function?

The fat lady isn’t singing yet; but she is warming up, just in case.

Very True Mood:  frustrated

Though mostly I was just too knackered from a frustrating week at work and a lack of sleep. So I stayed at home and cleared out a cupboard, played some computer games (the final cut scene in Unreal Tournament 3 reminds me of the end of Blake’s 7) and chilled out.

The farmers’ market in West Norwood seems to be struggling. Only six stalls this week – two meat, one veg, one bread, two pointless.

My computer runs a lot better with the case open. This probably isn’t a good sign. Still, soon I’ll have a Wii to play with so the damn PC will be relegated to email checking only.

A puzzle: I got a £50 cheque from YouGov. I thought I only had half that amount on my account there and as I haven’t been able to log in for a few months (I’ve requested password resets but the email never arrives) I really don’t know what’s going on.

Hmph.

Very True Mood:  melancholy

Minor change to the AI
to reduce the occurrence of Really Stupid Moves.

If only we could make minor changes to NIs to reduce the occurence of RSMs.

Very True Mood:  chipper

Spent most of the day working on a project for our kids’ site (www.kidslovelondon.com). Nothing terribly exciting – a bit of CSS, bit of XSLT, bit of JavaScript (enforcing my own recently written coding standards to avoid document.write and use appendChild() etc.). Minor panic regarding the half term edition of the kids’ newsletter but it got sent out on time and everyone seems very happy with the new style.

Went to lunch with Lettice – she’s working at VL for a few weeks. And after that it was time for today’s round of meetings about the redesign project. Time and money versus ambition. Same as every project I’ve ever worked on. We actually have a very good team (and soon to be a much bigger team, an ad will be appear in this week’s New Media Age for six positions within the web team at VL) and doing most of the work in house will cut down on some of the headaches.

Ended up working until 18:30 which makes up for the late start, though a fair chunk of the last hour was spent playing Bang! Howdy (www.banghowdy.com) whilst waiting for other people to go through the designs of the Christmas pages with me. We need to have some pages up very soon in order to cover the switching on of the Christmas Lights.

London Bridge was busy and I just missed the 18:39. I bought this week’s New Scientist (suckered in by the ‘what would happen to Earth if humans vanished cover story) and this month’s .net (a couple of articles that I can quote mine for a brainstorm in one of Friday’s endless meetings). Ran into Séverine and we caught the 18:51 to Tulse Hill and then walked up to West Norwood together.

Home, sausages for dinner, then watched CSI: Miami with Lettice before sitting down to write this.

Very True Mood:  thoughtful

Last night Frankenstein’s Fumblers lost an exhibition match against the lizardmen of the Turbo Freaks. That’s played three, lost three.

Oh well, those were the pre-season warm-ups and with the cup nearly over we have the league to look forward to.

Despite losing the Fumblers continued to provide entertainment and raked in a sizable purse, which along with it being a casualty free match means that we have the cash to spend on new team members.

Say hello to our new Flesh Golem, Bride of Frankie, (pictured on the right in characteristically stoic mood at a press conference to announce her signing) bringing that much needed feminine touch to the squad. Any notion that this is nepotism on the part of team captain, Big Frankie, is strongly denied.

Very True Mood:  optimistic

Fine then, go break yer toilet by putting an elephant in it, see if I care! :p

Very True Mood:  cheerful