Shall we try a normal blog for a change?

(Look out Mel, its gonna be a long one!)

Wow... that was pretty prosh! I started my day off with, well usual breakfast first, then trotted on down to uni for morning tea. At 10:00 AM I bore the brunt of our team's first challenge for Prosh Week, which was to eat an A4 sheet of paper. Mmm... mmm... did that ever hit the spot. Unfortunately I don't know how many points I won because the paper which told me... is undergoing digestion.

Still... it was better than our team's second challenge, which was to have sex with one or two members of the group within one hour. Which we also accomplished, in a very creative way.

Tomorrow some crazy individuals are going to drive for twenty-four hours straight. <-- :-$ I am not.

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In unrelated news, I registered for a user account on TopCoder.com today, and here's a snippet from their TOS (yes, I do read TOSses!)

In addition, if you are a U.S. person (including U.S resident aliens)...

It seems someone knows something the rest of us do not!

Also, among the more interesting things I had to fill in on the form... Shirt Size! (This is because one of the prizes is shirts, but still...)

So... it seems as though tomorrow or the next day, I'll be participating in a TopCoder programming competition. You get one hour to code a short program as quickly as you can. Hmm... I just had a go at it and its quite hard :/ At least doing it in C++ was because they wanted you to use a "string" class which I've never used before! I'll brush up on my C# skillz and use that!

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Now in even further unrelated news, I have some links for you.
A World of Warcraft World - A slightly humorous yet at the same time pretty frightening view of the future. An interesting read in any event.

And linked from that article:
Chinese online gamer gets life for murder.
OK I know murder isn't the funniest topic, but today we were totally cracking up reading this.
Get this: In China, two guys working together in a MMORPG looted a really awesome sword. Then, one of them (Qui) lent it to the other (Zhu). Zhu then sold the sword for US$870 actual money. Qui got so pissed that he went over to Zhu's house and killed him. Now that's taking online gaming a bit far!

Ironically, Qui had appealed for the law to help him, but the law was powerless because it has no jurisdiction over virtual items. Now I think if you read your TOS for most MMO games (as we've already ascertained, yes I do read TOSses ;)), you should find a clause that states explicitly that all game items and characters are the legal property of (if any) the company itself - not you! So you don't actually own the items. This is why the companies don't let/like you trading game items for real money.

"Bible Games" instead of "Grand Theft Auto".
Now I'm not a huge fan of GTA - and for once, it IS about the violence. I do morally object to such a level of violence and sexual content. But Bible Games? I have just one quote for you:

“I play a lot of Christian video games,” Tolin said. “They don’t have fights. You just have to follow Jesus and pick up little crosses for points.”

Err, good luck breaking into the mainstream, guys!

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Now, as for our usual feature, the much-lauded Word of the Day, I think I'll start to wind it down. It's gone for two weeks now (this is the fortnight anniversary), which is much longer than I expected, and its been quite popular, but you're probably starting to get sick of it by now and it's becoming an effort to come up with them each day. I'll still do them occasionally, just not every single day.