Ceci n'est pas une blog.

It's been quite a long time since I last got excited about an internet site or game... but this one sounds like it could be fun!

Monopoly City Streets

It's going to be a massively-multiplayer online version of Monopoly, with streets taken from Google Maps. You can buy, sell, rent etc. any street in their system and then build stuff, destroy stuff, etc. etc. - all playing against each other.

It's going live later today, and I thought it would be nice if some of my MyOpera friends joined in. I'll certainly be giving it a go...


Oh yeah; and just for P*Nut: "elephant"

My smiley has no nose...

How does it smell?

Terrible!


But theriouthly folkth... why is it that all the "cool stuff" on the web has to break standards?

First of all, they replaced perfectly good text smileys with little drawings... this means:

- suddenly your text looks crap if you mix well-known and unusual smileys (some are pictures, some stay as text)

- suddenly your text looks crap if it picks out innocent combinations of characters as "smileys" (your serious business mail contains a complicated explanation unexpectedly interrupted by a smiley throwing up!)

- they actually halted the creative art of smiley-design (I had an Elvis character, my wife uses a space where the nose would be - neither of these "work" any more)

- newbies don't know that the things are actually text in the first place (they have to search through lists of buttons instead of just typing the damn' things)

- one thing will render some smileys that another thing won't

- one thing will render a smiley differently from another thing (I have seen this cause confusion and misunderstandings)

And if that wasn't bad enough, they are now CHANGING THE STANDARD SMILEYS!!!

Yes, to get a smile on this and other forums, it is now obligatory to skip the nose! WTF?!? For goodness' sake, the smiley that started the whole thing decades ago was colon, hyphen, bracket - not colon, bracket:

:-) not

I may be an Internet "old fart", but I don't see why they must mess with something that's been known and recognised for years and years...

Bah! Or Should I say right angle-bracket, colon, hyphen, left bracket... >:-( ... Oh no, now it's called : m a d : (*), silly me!


(*) notice how I have to add spaces to stop the damn picture coming up instead of text...? See what I mean...? See...? See...? Grrr....

Is it me, or is there no obvious way to start a new blog from "my page"? So far I had to go to the "Opera Community" -> "Blogs" and only there do I find a button "new blog".

I (we) experienced similar things regarding new posts and new images yesterday.

This site is weird...

Hello.

Well, I've resisted becoming a "blogger" because I think it's an ugly, trendy term for something a lot of us were doing already for over a decade. (Yes, I am one of those old farts who remembers the net "back then".)

However, since I discovered my sister's rather shameless blogs (yes, multiple) and showed them to my wife, and since my wife moved here (France) from Singapore last year and hasn't had much to do recently, and since she's wanted to let friends and family know how things are going, and since she couldn't get "into" making her own website... a blog seemed like a nice idea.

But this isn't it!

No, this blog is here because the Opera Community website has a bug! When I directed my wife to the Opera Community to have a go, a cookie buried deep in her browser still identified her as MossMan... She clicked to make a new blog, the cookie said she was me - et voila! My non-blog was born.

So, don't expect rapid updates and daily discourse. And don't expect pictures or links or files or whatever, I already have a website for that.


Maybe this will expand into a real blog some day, but in the meantime I will probably just use it as a dumping ground for random crap I didn't want to post on my site.


(On the subject of cookie problems - last night we had a LOT of trouble editing my wife's new blog and trying to view it as MossMan at the same time...)