Ring Tones

Here's something to amuse yourself (or keep you up way too late). Yahoo! has a site available where you can listen to various pop songs turned into cell phone ring tones. Now, this is not compatible with my cell phone, but my interest in this is tied to a morbid fascination with which songs sound awful. Also, with which artists have sold out to the ring tones. I suppose it's possible that the ring tone people don't have permission, and are just paying royalties to the song's writers. But then how do they use the artists' names?

The Clash's Rock The Casbah sounds suprisingly awful for such a great song. It turns out you're much better off with Should I Stay Or Should I Go. REM's The One I Love -- not so recognizable, but Stand is unmistakable.

And who could resist The Dreidel Song?

Random Robo Rally

Last Sunday, Ben, George and I played six games of Robo Rally in a time where we would usually only be able to play one or two. How did we do this?

In a large part, due to a random setup. We ordinarily devise a fairly complicated placement of flags to ensure a good game. This time, we just determined the starting positions randomly. It produced a greater variety of types of games. For example, knowing that the only flag is one or two turns away from the starting position results in a mad scramble.

With that in mind, I've written up Random Robo Rally Setup Guidelines to codify what we came up with. I'm hoping to circulate them for comments.