Sunday, 09/22/02

Every six months or so I spend half an hour playing a game of Bejeweled at MSN Games. It's in the Tetris school, with more complex relationships and harder to predict cascade effects. I notice that since the last time, they've considerably stepped up the advertising ringing the board game, often including one of those incredibly irritating flashing-three-time-a-second ads mocked up to trick the gullible into thinking that Windows is telling them something.

This time, the blinking blipvert appeared directly under some text I initially mistook for part of the ad, until I realized it was counterproductive: "Photosensitive seizure warning", linked to this page. I skimmed it, incredulous that MSN would accept advertising that they admit might cause seizures. But then it turned out they're actually disclaiming the potentially lethal power of the game itself.

There isn't that much difference to my way of thinking. The game was unplayable as long as the ad was on the screen. 07:22PM «

I broke my spam database with a careless bit of SQL yesterday, so the sample tokens seen to the right will look a bit odd until late Sunday afternoon. An early version of the Perl module I wrote to manage my spam analysis, Mail::Audit::DemiBayesian, will be hitting CPAN soon.

On Wednesday, among other things, I learned that Brent Simmons is not a giant blond man. Based on zero evidence, I had always envisioned him as sort of a Nordic Paul Bunyan. It's always jarring to meet someone in person and give up my whimsical mental pictures. However, he does have very precise diction, which was another of my unsubstantiated assumptions. 11:24AM «

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