Gaffer tape disappointed me again today; this time, by being semi-transparent.

This week I've started to have my usual summer sleeping difficulties, caused by it getting light outside my bedroom several hours before I actually need to get up. I'm a light sleeper (ahem) and that tends to wake me up; I already have excellently thick and dark curtains, but plenty of light still comes in round the edges of them.

So, on being awoken at 6:30 this morning by the sun, I lost my temper with it, and decided that since it had caused me to have an hour and a half to spare, I could usefully spend that time dismembering cardboard boxes and gaffer-taping them to my bedroom windows. Some hard work and a nasty paper cut later (thick corrugated cardboard is a lot sharper than it looks!), this was duly done, and I went to bed last night feeling fairly optimistic.

This morning, well, there was an order of magnitude improvement, but quite a lot of light was still coming in round the curtains, and it turned out that almost all that light was shining through the gaffer tape. Bah.

Oh, and I invented a silly game last night in the pub.

rmc28 was describing a card game to me called ‘Nuclear War’, which sounded like a reasonably complex affair involving warhead cards, propaganda cards and all sorts of rules. It crossed my mind that surely nuclear war would be better modelled by a very simple Hofstadterian non-game, along roughly these lines:

The first player to shout ‘BANG!’ is the winner, unless the other player also shouts ‘BANG!’ within four minutes, in which case both players lose.

I didn't think I was serious about this. But later on, it occurred to me that if you cut the four-minute warning time down to about two seconds (after all, in this simulation the players aren't separated by half the world!), it might actually become a halfway plausible game to be played between (for example) small children on a long car journey. They wouldn't be playing it to the exclusion of all else, of course; they'd be conversing, squabbling, staring out of the window, asking ‘are we nearly there yet’ and all the other things small children do on long car journeys; but every so often one of them would shout ‘BANG!’, and if the other one didn't remember and react quite quickly enough, they'd score a point. Experiments in the pub suggest that it's actually quite tricky to realise why someone is shouting ‘BANG!’ at you fast enough to respond in kind within two seconds, especially after a couple of pints.

(It's an important feature of the game that a draw involves both players losing, so that it's undesirable to be the first to attack unless you think you have a reasonable chance of getting away with it. Without this feature, your best strategy would be to attack first, and to do so constantly, on the basis that that way you could never lose and just might win.)

Of course, you'd build up a reflex reaction fairly fast and then the game would get boring due to mutual assured destruction; so it wouldn't stay interesting for too long. But I was rather amused to find that it was actually a more challenging game than I'd initially thought when I jokingly proposed it :-)

This week at work, we have all been migrated to a new mail setup, which means in particular that Linux users (i.e. most of the people in this room) have to read their mail using Ximian's ‘Evolution’ client.

It occurred to us this morning to wonder why there isn't a rival mail client, called ‘Creation’. Notable features would be:

• There is no version number, because there is no process of incremental improvement. Creation was in its final form at the moment of initial release.
• If you think you've noticed any bugs or flaws in the design, you just don't understand it well enough. Every aspect of the program is in accordance with a higher purpose.
• If anything really bad happens, such as Creation losing all your mail, it's because YOU DESERVED IT!
• There is no acknowledgment when you ask Creation to perform an action. Users are expected to have faith.
• It is of course hoped that Creation will become the default mail client for Jesux[1].

Come to think of it, actually, I'm quite surprised that googling for ‘Creation MUA’ hasn't already turned such a thing up :-)

[1] http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Node/4081/