Where? [moves to wall]

[DrQ] (i) Spent pretty much the whole afternoon trying to work out if it's possible to embed an MPEG in a pdf using pdflatex. Some comments on mailing lists suggest "yes", but stop short of telling you actually how. (ii) I would suggest somewhere between Goldmember and Father Jack.

[MF] Is that a new Boardo variant you're playing there?

I like the introduction of a bit of Call My Bluff into the Hangman game.

Aaigh! It's down! What are we going to do?

Wonder who did it and how? Just go to bed early!

Their news page (before that disappeared into the ether) said that some people were randomly losing cash, apparently because someone deleted, rather than delisted, Tony Benn...

[GIII] Was it not Nigel Benn?

[Bool] You should have seen the cover I did with Mark E Smith!

As if from nowhere, the shopkeeper appeared.

[Britney] Yarbles, I did it againNAH.

Interesting. It's up now, but all of my shares have dropped like a brick. Have they back-dated all of them?

[Boolbar] <homer>Gravy!</homer>

I thought it was "as if by magic, the shopkeeper appeared"?

I joined in with all this celebdaq business rather late (about two weeks ago) - how do I join in the MC league ? (If you'll have me !)

My username is Blobble and I have a paltry £47k - but as I say I've only been playing 2 weeks. (made 262% last week, thought that was quite good, didn't realise that people had millions)

If you look at our league, I think you can tell who had Phil Tufnell. :)

Blob]post your id number here and you can take your place within hours.
Dr]Tuffnell did do well pushing me to +1364.93%,seven day profit of £2,845,856, this have gone into Keanu Reeves that is 1,662,711 shares. Only question now is how many millions will I have before I'm kneecapped and you take the No1 spot in the league.
My other me had a £350,000 div on Prince William, a perfect celebrity, no 7 day gain but huge divi(+399.76%), extra coverage in tabloid and broadsheet, coming up in the next few weeks as his 21st birthday is on the 21 June. Buy early!

BLOBBLE (User ID: 3183175)
Yes I had Phil (and Anthony & Linda) - but didn't have the kind of funds you have to invest. I've also got Prince Billy who's been doing nicely for me. My long term banker is J.K.Rowling who's going to go ballisting mid June methinks.

Or even ballistic.

Well, I'm doing better than I was, though I think it'll only be this week that we see any real improvement - I don't really have time to do it very often, but it's a useful break from revision, so I am going there on a reasonably regular basis. Keanu Reaves is doing me very nicely thankyou... I picked up 10000 shares for not very much, and hopefully we'll have a nice dividend this week.

I'm not sure she will tbh... Harry Potter will get lots of coverage, but will that all count to her?

What I want to know is how on earth the guy who's number 1 today got an increase of 30156090.00%

[G III] I don't know how they work that out . . . if there was a huge article all about how Harry Potter turns young minds to jelly, and at the end it says "Harry Potter is written by J.K.Rowling", does the whole article count towards her, or just the last sentence ?

[G III] There are going to be some anomolies - like the fact I got NO dividends despite owning Phil Tuffy for almost the whole week.

Never heard of it. Just logged in and by the time I had selected half a dozen "celebs" I was down a hundred quid. Eighty percent of these "celebs" I had never heard of - probably because they don't have "blankety blank" or "celebrity squares" here in Italy.

[IS,P!] That'll be because they charge a fee for transactions...

[IS,P] But hang on. If you play your cards right, you'll make back the cost of the commission. A good place to look for tips is on www.thesun.co.uk showbiz pages...
BTW, What is happening to Phil Tuffnell? Who's selling all their shares and causing him to crash? The 'Get Me Out Of Here!' celebrities only flew back into Heathrow last night, and he got a full page in The Sun today, so I suspect there are some anomalous market figures going round. And how the hell do you make 30 million per cent profit, as today's chart-topper has?

Blobble enters the league at a stunning No 5.

One way to get a huge % would be to invest in a celeb who is plastered all over the papers (so you know you will get a large div) and just before the divs are dished out, do a load of trading (ie. endlessly buy and sell) to reduce your worth to next to zero by the end of the day. 7 days later you will have whatever your divs were plus a weeks trading and your % increase will be huge. It might be possible to get (divide by zero)% :o)

(divide by zero error)%

Umm, do I exist any more? I can't log in and the system claims not to know who snorgle is! Am I still in the league?

snorgle]your still there in the league with your id 2818390, I hope your password lets you log on soon.
I Say, Porter!]for a bit of extra fun post your id No and join the MC league. Can you stay ahead of Wol and blamelewis?

You reply to the auto reply thing but there is still "nothing known about ISayPorter". Bah. Worth starting again?

Nope. Generates the really useful error message: "Error". What genius came up with that, give him or her a raise.

[snorgle] Just to note that Celebdaq logins are case sensitive. I had trouble when I first joined due to that.

OK ID number 3244310 and currently about 190,179 in the chart (up 15 quid or .15 pecent)

I can get in again! It wasn't caps lock, I checked that last night. Probably just a glitch on the system.. I think Keanu Reeves must be a good buy with the Matrix Reloaded opening soon..

Does anyone know how to change your password on celebdaq? I've been searching for a way how, but can't find anything!

Try here...

dunno whether that'll cause problems, but basically you have to go to the portfolio, go to 'register for cash prize or update details' and it's in there.

[GIII]thanks!

I made a million - yay! *cackle*

evil_edna]get on your broomstick and I'll race you to the top!

Thanks or attaching me to the MC league, whoever did it.
What a plonker I am. I had Phil Tufnell, Linda Barker & Anthony W-T which were doing nicely. I knew they'd slide in value after the show finished, but thought the divi was worked out on a daily basis - so sold Phil & Anthony the day before the divi was announced. So of course I got no (huge) divi. Ho hum - learn from mistakes.
Slightly amazed to find myself in 3rd posn. in the MC league @ moment. Can't see that lasting !

Was making a few cunning trades at the weekend, calculated to be in David Beckham at divi time, and one of the trades must have got stuck in the door. I came in this morning to find I had nearly 170,000 in cash and virtually no shares, so no divi this weekend. Groan.

Presumably when you get to a million you dump back down to 10,000 but get that little wad of green notes by your name - is that right ? How then do you get the sports car and yacht that I see some people sporting for pity's sake ?

[Blob] It says here.

I've not had much time to concentrate on it for a while now but I think I'm no good cos I went at first for celebs who interested me rather than ones who might grab headlines, so I'm saddled with a lot of loss makers... I bought lots of JK Rowling and Keanu Reeves when they were cheap though so those strategies are finally paying off!

[DrQ] Thx. Tell me, looking at the Bill Gates Icon for £1bn - is he doing a multicoloured fart, or am I just imagining things ?

Bit quiet the noo... Any particular reason? Working hard? Found something in our lives more fulfilling than MC? Me? I've got a talk to write... grrr...

I've been away, and busy both sides of that; I don't post much here but often keep an eye on things. I managed to skillfully avoid checking 52 pairs of glasses today, and did an exensive literature search instead. Didn't find much interesting. Ho hum.

Time for dinner - tempted by pizza and DVD, really.

(DVD provides fibre, you see)
Boggled slightly the other day by the sight of a CD shredder. My, I live a sheltered life. Or something.

Incidentally I think the celebdaq people should be warned that Big Brother is starting again at the end of the week. Presumably they add 'celebreties' to the list as time goes on; in the meantime, maybe Davina might be worth investing in?

[rab] I've been working and doing housy stuff, mainly, when I haven't been uploading broken fixes to OMC. I'm currently considering turning on my work machine so I can get on with my day working at home. Although I may wait another hour so I can start nearer a normal time.

Was thinking of starting a new fund and doing two big brother trackers - one for people still in there, and one for people who've been voted out. Don't know why, but thought there might be some value in the exercise. Thinks: revision is getting to my head. I need to get out more.

GIII] For what are you revising?

A paper that I spent most of February writing has been described by the editor of the receiving journal as 'truly superb'. That's an accolade that deserves a beer I think...

[Rab] Excellent news. Well done. Just a half for me, thanks. :o)

[rab] congrats!
[Btd] Doing my finals in music at Fenland Polytechnic, starting Monday (joy!!!) :)

Dear Professor rab:
Thank you for submitting your paper to the Journal of ____________. I have now received the comments of two highly qualified reviewers, and I regret to inform you that while both reviewers and myself agree that the paper is truly superb, we none the less feel that it addresses a rather narrow technical topic of limited interest and therefore does not make sufficient contribution to warrant publication in our journal.

Thank you for submitting your truly superb work, and I am sorry that the outcome was not more favourable.

Yours sincerely, The Editor.

Hmmm. Sixteen thousand words to write by next Wednesday (Master's Dissertation). Good job the girlfriend is away for the weekend - no nagging me about staying awake 24 hours a day. I plan to be "resisting a rest" a lot. Anybody know anything about how to stay awake whilst reading Data Warehousing sh1te?

Dear Professor rab:
Thank you for submitting your paper to the Journal of ____________. I have now received the comments of two highly qualified reviewers, and I am delighted to inform you that both reviewers and myself agree that the paper is truly superb. Accordingly, we should like to proceed with publication as soon as possible. In view of the quality of your work, we are prepared to have it prepared for publication at the reduced fee of £1520, a reduction of £20 on the usual tariff of £1540. Please enclose a further sum of £2340 for your 1000 half-price concessionary copies of the Journal, to distribute to your friends and colleagues. We shall proceed, therefore, as soon as we have your cheque or banker's draft for £3959.99 (including £79.99 postage and packing).

Yours sincerely, The Editor.

[gil] Don't joke. There's one very well known and wealtby US journal of physics that sends out a bill for publication of your work. In extremely tiny print you can find the word "voluntary"... but it is hidden...

[GIII] All the best!

[ISP] Try and think of how all the theory you're reading about might be used. For instance, imagine a database of all the MC games online, all the players, all the IP addresses they were played from, all the timestamps, replicated from the servers in real time while people play. You could come up with fascinating information like how particular players vary their posting times over, er, time, or what each player's favourite move is, or some query which you would actually need a data warehouse for!

That's the way I made some of my AI papers more relevant to me, anyway. At the time it was examples from roleplaying, but the point is the same.

Thanks, Dunx, it beats my plan to write "I am a fish" three thousand times, do a full double Rimmer and then faint.