21/12/2002 @22:32:07 ^01:05:49

Christmas shopping and crowd density

So yesterday I wandered into town to try and get my family some crap for Christmas, and to try to spend as little as possible and still be able to claim I had made some sort of effort.

I failed, miserably.

If you go into town when it is empty, you're fine. There's loads of room, you're never worried that you're getting in people's way or vice versa.

On the other hand if it's really, really, astonishingly crowded everywhere, you can push and "excuse me please" your way around with impunity, simply due to the crowd density being so high that people are going to be expecting it.

The problem arises in the window between these two extremes. When there are enough people to get in the way, but not enough that excusing yourself around and constantly bothering people isn't going to get you lots of dirty looks and set off all your paranoid self-consciousness phobia neuroses. When there's still plenty of room to walk around, except for where you want to be.

  |***============***    | window at shop front    \ shop front door
  |   PS S S S S S S*    = the one rack of christmas cards
  |  QQQQQQQQQQQ    -    - various racks of birthday cards   * other crap
  \ C-------------  -    C the till
  |  -------------  -    Q queue of people waiting to pay for stuff
  |                 -    S people looking at Christmas cards
  |      @          *    P some woman's bloody huge pram
  |***------------***    @ me

#aaw

So today I suggested renaming aaw's IRC channel from #warwick to #aaw (As usual you'll have to wait a few hours before the first link starts working... Not my fault I'm way ahead of Google)

Logical enough? It is if you call #warwick "aaw's IRC channel", but that is stretching the truth. #warwick has existed in one form or another for a lot longer than aaw. It's just turned out that its users are mostly graduates, alumni, etc. For this reason and also the recent emergence of the rogue #warwick on QuakeNet, I reasoned that the name change was a good idea.

I cannot deny that there are good arguments for tradition and keeping the name everyone knows. I think the success of the idea comes down to whether or not enough of the regulars, in particular those who administer the channel bots, can be convinced to make the switch.

...at least, this is what I'd like everyone to believe...

The truth

The real reason is completely, totally and utterly selfish! I don't like it when there's two channels on different servers with the same name. Heh, how am I supposed to go troll the rogue #warwick with accusations of fraudulenticity and counterfeitness while remaining connected to the real one? Two connections writing to the same log file! "Ray, whatever you do, don't cross the streams!"...

"phunf, fucking say something" and other humourous quotage

While we're on the subject of IRC retardedness there's this guy phunf from Filmsoc who has this habit of joining #warwick and then leaving within 2 seconds before anyone else can react. We think it's because he's looking for other people from Filmsoc and when he sees there's none there he just leaves again because he doesn't know the rest of us very well, if at all. We got fed up of this and so we (well, really just Amy, although the rest of us helped) rigged ChanServ so that he'd get a shock!

17/12 23:25 - 17/12 23:28
        --> phunf (~phunf@dsl-xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx.zen.co.uk) has joined #warwick
        --- ChanServ gives voice to phunf
 <ChanServ> .:{phunf}:. phunf, fucking say something!
      <RjY> hahahahahahahaha
     <Matt> What?  That's er... surreal.
      <RjY> we have waited for this day
          * phunf blinks and takes a step back.
   <graham> wot?
      <RjY> we got sick of phunf joining the channel then quitting 2 
            seconds later so we rigged chanserv
      <RjY> because none of us could react fast enough and type something 
            before he quit
          * phunf smirks
  <Matthew> I thought he had to be authenticated for it to work.
          * Matthew shrugs
      <RjY> Matthew: yes
      <RjY> but we put his hostmask into the auto-authentication list
  <Matthew> Ah.
     <Pete> !kick Pete
     <Pete> Hmmmm
          * Pete raises an eyebrow
     <Pete> I can't kick myself

Sorry I couldn't resist leaving in another Peteism on the end there. We would put Pete on the access list but the last time I gave him ops he banned bisc which you can't do because it is a program and so won't see the funny side, i.e. be able to recover. We had to crash it and wait for its crontab entry to restart it. After a more recent loss of service (the one that took out webnewsstats)

22/12 00:00 - 22/12 00:00
  <RjY> bisc your downtime has made you even more retarded than usual
 <bisc> RjY: what?
  <RjY> hahaha

Well I thought it was funny. Anyway #warwick's other bot, itsrbot, is simply a relay between the old #warwick on efnet and the new one on astrolink. One day a long time ago I sat down and thought about how itsrbot would always make certain responses under certain circumstances, and given how you could tell bisc to do the same I wondered "Could you get them to feed off each other..."

     <RjY> bisc: unknown command !heh is <reply>!heh
     <RjY> bisc: unknown command !heh
    <bisc> !heh
 <itsrbot> bisc: unknown command !heh
    <bisc> !heh
 <itsrbot> bisc: unknown command !heh
    <bisc> !heh
 <itsrbot> bisc: unknown command !heh
    <bisc> !heh
 <itsrbot> bisc: unknown command !heh
    <bisc> !heh
 <itsrbot> bisc: unknown command !heh
           ......