Week 13

Ingoal’s score: 20 pts (400 points total)
Mr. Price’s score: 28 pts (523 points total)

Slowly but steady the season is going down the drain, and Ingoal’s Invincibles don’t look all to invincible :-(

Comment spam plugin

Thanks to Adam‘s suggestion if decided to give Kitten’s Spaminator a try. It’s said to be (one of) the most effective comment span plugins available for WordPress. Very well, let’s see what it can do. In order to see if it’s really working successfully I’ve deactivate the auto-shutoff on comments, so commenting on posts older than 30 days is possible again from now on.

Trackback URI

After seeing that recent trackback URIs were really hitting the right hand menu, it was time to update the style. Now they’re displayed a little smaller but won’t be messing with the design anymore.

Thanks to this tutorial it was done in under 30 seconds :-)

Jeremy’s guess the final price competition

Update: The prices that are up for grabs are starting to pour in hour by hour! The grand prize is now even higher and there are more prices for the runner up places! So, make sure you enter this competition!

Hehe, nice one. As you might have heard Jeremy is putting himself up for auction at ebay (see here). So after he’s posting day to day standings of the current price I suggested he could make it a “competition” (see here): whoever guesses the final price (or is nearest to it) will win something like a T-shirt or something.

Now he really did a great job and put up the Contest:
First price will be

  • 1. A groovy t-shirt
  • 2. 1 year free ROCKET3 hosting with HostRocket
  • 3. Free domain name from DeveloperCube
  • 4. A free guest blog appearance by world renowned blogger Jeremy Wright!

Two thumbs up, and the prices for second and third price aren’t bad either!

  • 2nd place: 1 year free ROCKET2 hosting with HostRocket
  • 3rd place: 1 year free ROCKET1 hosting with HostRocket

So…if you’re interested, get your behind over to ensight and enter your guess ;-)

Qute 3 released

Alright. Arvid Axelsson released the new verision of Qute on November 27th 2004. It carries the version tag 3 and is compatible with all versions of Firefox (up to 1.0) now. Groovy stuff.

If you’ve been waiting for it you can get it here or update it if you’ve already installed the old version (2.1.3): in Firefox: Tools -> Themes select the Qute theme and hit the update button.

Age of Mythology – Game 4

Well, only three players were playing tonight (Nico, Ralf and myself) due to the fact that Kai & Ines had other plans (congrats to your third anniversary ;-) ).

It was a tight game, although I started out with a big run to destroy almost all other armies right in the beginning. Nontheless in the middle of the game I was unable to build important stuff like the depository so it was hard to get to “the wonder” which carried the most winning-points on it.

In the end it really came down to it:

  • most armies: 6 winning points
  • most buildings: 9 winning points
  • the wonder: 12 winning points

I already had 3 winning points from prior battles. After being unable to build “the wonder” I tried to sneak in a surprise action, which in my mind would bring my victory (once again). Ralf started the last move round with an attack on Nico and destroyed two buildings which put me up in this category as I built four buildings with a special card (status: Ingoal 5 buildings, Nico 3). So I thought I had the victory right in my pocket which is right when “desaster” struck on me. Nico played his last card, which should have been the final card of the game, and attacked one of my buildings. He destroyed it. The special ability of the card enabled him to make a fourth move though (normal is three moves per round). He attacked me once again and destroyed another building. In that situation both Nico and me had 3 buildings – there’s no tie-breaker so the winning-points on the most buildings card went down the drain.

As he had the biggest army he claimed the 6 winning points on it and “stole” victory with this brilliant last second move. Thumbs up to an interesting game.

Final Standings:

  • 1. Nico – 6 points, Race played: egypts
  • 2. Ingoal – 3 points, Race played: greeks
  • 3. Ralf – 0 points, Race played: vikings

Overall winning standings:

  • 1. Ingoal – 2 wins (4 games played)
  • 2. Ines – 1 win (3 games played)
  • 2. Nico – 1 win (3 games played)
  • 4. Kai – 0 wins (3 games played)
  • 5. Ralf – 0 wins (4 games played)

So you see I can live with tonight’s “defeat” ;-)

TSV Ludwigsburg II 1-1 FC Marbach II

Oh my :-(

Now that’s a bummer. After go ahead 1-0 in the first half we were unable to score the second goal despite having 2-3 100% chances :-(

Now we need to wait and see how the other teams played, but I guess it’s almost certain that our 4 point lead will be cut to 2…

Update: Or not…my oh my, everything went our way apart from our own game and performance, both Dersim Ludwigsburg and KSV Besigheim lost 3-1 today. So, we could have claimed the top with a win today…

Week 12

Oh man, this really hurts.

Hell froze over this wednesday! Yes you heard me ;-)
Believe it or not, but Mr. Price has really taken over the top of the league. I don’t know what it is this season, but it seems I’ve run out of luck as I can’t seem to get a foot on the ground. :-(

Mr. Price: 1st place, 50 pts – 495 pts total
Ingoal: 14th place, 18 pts – 380 pts total

Time to catch up

While I was really busy this week there was much going on around the “blogosphere”.

  • 1. Ensight’s Jeremy Wright is selling himself on ebay. Unbelievable? No, his idea to sell himself for a period of time as a blogger for a company is really groovy. I’m wondering how much will be the final price. You can checkout the auction here (current price: 112.73$).
  • 2. Jeremy is still looking out for bloggers who would like to join his effort to get 50 bloggers together to start an advertising network. Jeremy will negotiate based on the basis of 50 bloggers as soon as this number is met and, I think, it’ll be beneficial for all participants. More infos can be found here
  • 3. Google’s newest edition to the “beta-family” is Google Scholar which can be used for literature research (scholar.google.com). Found via Technosailor.com

Closure (update)

Update: All went relatively good…now it’s finally over…time to idle a lot ;-)

Almost all done. Now I just need to finish the presentation and then at 2pm it’s showtime :-)

Wish me luck ;-)

Closure

Well, well, well. It has been more than a year now since I started my second uni project (Service Engineering Support System: S.E.S.S.). Now we’re on the “final meters” or the home lap as one might put it. After all this time it’s hard to get yourself together and close out. I’m currently writing the documentation of one of my parts (database) and it’s really annoying. Nontheless it needs to be done as I’ve got more stuff to do (official final meeting and project presentation will be this thursday afternoon) and I need to prepare the following stuff until then:

  • Do own documentation of all stuff I did…done
  • Preprare groovy presentation so that the “outsiders” will understand the essence of our work in progress
  • Get all documents together and print them out…scheduled for November 24th done
  • Write project retrospective…done
  • Get all code and burn it scheduled for November 24th in progress done
  • etc etc

That’s the main reason why I wasn’t posting to much here or on SPF! So I’m really looking forward to this thursday at it’ll finally be over and I’ll have some free room to breath again (although other stuff has already piled up so there’s no real “idle-period” right away :-( ), but hey I don’t complain, after all christmas holidays aren’t all that far away anymore ;-)

Comment Spam Plugin added

Alright. Enough is enough.

I’m really tired of getting comment spam after comment spam. Okay, most of it is already caught due to a good list of spam words, but it’s nontheless annoying having to moderate them. So now I’ve added a plugin which autocloses comments after 30 days (see here) – it’s kind of a bummer as there might be some people who would make decent comments on older posts, but you can’t please anyone I guess :-(

Header

Update: Not perfect yet and something still missing, but enough for today – need to get some uni work done.

As you may have noticed I’m playing around with the header atm. I want to incorporate a pic and add some navigation, so don’t wonder if it’s looking a little awkward atm. “Work in progress” ;-)

Age of Mythology

You might have heard about Age of Mythology (the computer game), but did you know that there’s a board game version of it?

It’s pretty new over here in germany and a mate of mine bought it on the recent south german game convention. More infos about the english version of the game can be found here.

Tonight we played it for the third time and I won for the second time in a row :-)
Last time I had played the “Vikings” and won due to the fact that I had the most buildings. This time it was a little bit different: I was playing with the egypts and was able to win some battles early on. That made it possible for me to built some major army and to advance to the next ages quite quickly. In the end I won because I built “the wonder” in the last round and was able to claim the 12 winning points sitting on it. This gave me a grand total of 18 winning points (out of 30 total).

  • 1. Ingoal – 18pts, race: egypts
  • 2. Nico – 11pts, race: egypts
  • 3. Ines – 1point, race: vikings
  • 4. Ralf – 0 points, race: greeks

What a good evening :-)