I don’t think El Cid Viscoso was criticizing your activities at work, as much as he was the insensitivity of your timing. By referencing this activity as part of your workday, while others are desperately seeking employment, even willing to washing walls or other activity just to meet their responsibilities, could be seen as being callous to the feelings of the “others”. Another example would be pitting a restaurant for serving your 16 oz. steak dinner with a cold potato. It may be a valid pitting, but not appropriate for the keynote speech at a “Feed the Starving Children” fundraiser.
“The fact that your superiors approve of your relaxing between torrents of pressure vindicates you of any moral issues though. I understand what you mean by On/Off in respect to work load.
(This being my opinion, it is within the rule providing that my opinions are relevant to 50% of the population, 50% of the time, with a 50% chance of 50% accuracy. Plus or minus 50%)
Otherwise, I totally agree, and I would offer that Minesweeper has been misspelled from day one. It should be Mindsweeper.
I also have to point out that there exists a plugin for Mozilla that includes both normal and hexagonal minesweeper. It works well on MacOS, too, and presumably the Linux versions, previously unscarred by Minesweeper.
This means that it’s possible to SDMB and minesweep at the same time. Fear it.
Damn, you just beat me…I am 9, 46 and something (haven’t tried the expert on my new comp, but think i was in the 120s)…though i finish expert very rarely because i don’t have too much patience
92 seconds on expert. Don’t be too impressed; someone will be along shortly to blow this out of the water.
I’ve found that my best times come when I’m almost completely unconscious of the game itself – like, say, when listening to a fast-paced song and paying attention to the lyrics. Of course, that only works if you’ve been playing so much recently that you know intuitively where the mines are just by looking at a given section of the board. You know you’ve hit that point when you find yourself playing games of it in your head while dreaming or spacing out.
I can’t find it* right now, but I remember a cheat where you would enter a certain code (xyzzx or something), then move the mouse around as usual. The very very upper-left pixel on your screen would change colors depending on whether the mouse was currently over a mine or not. This is slow and difficult, so I recommend using it only when logic fails.
Alright, I’ve posted this before my times are as follows:
Beginner 6
Intermediate 26
Expert 84
I play expert almost exclusively and at work when people see me play they often stand in amazement while there is always one person in the group who labels me a cheater for marking the bombs, because apparently some people aren’t aware of the right mouse button. At one point I wrote the guiness book of world records but they turned me down, so sad.
(Seriously, that game is to computer gaming what the SDMB is to the Internet. Caramel-covered crack in spades, cobber.)
Funny, I always render it as “Man’s retch must exceed his gasp, or what’s a heaving for?”
Small note: Freeware has a rather specific definition among us computer otaku. It means software that’s available free of charge but not open-source. Kinda like, oh, most things on Simtel that aren’t shareware.* NetHack is open-source, which means it’s available free of charge (though not all open-source software is free of charge) and its source code is available. Kinda like all software released by the GNU Project.
This is why open-source people are quick to distinguish between free-as-in-beer (or gratis) and free-as-in-speech (or libre): Not all open-source software is gratis, and not all gratis software is libre.
*(Shareware is software released in a free version (again, sans source code) but in a crippled form, to encourage you to buy a more capable version. Kinda like DOOM.)
ooh, the memories … Minesweeper got me through undergrad, it was the perfect game for essay-writing because it has a built-in time limit. It takes up about five quite pleasant minutes, and then it does something stupid like what Sauron describes, or you accidentally left-click when you meant to right-click, and you get too pissed off to play any more and have to go back to the essay. And then, once you’re stumped for a word, Minesweeper lures you back again, and you (stupidly) forgive it …
Freecell, there’s no stopping point. The essays got forgotten.
And at one notable call centre I worked at, we played either Ballistic or Dopewars while talking to customers (which made for fun moments like when your co-worker yells “Dammit! I gotta unload this crack!” when you are in the midst of explaining someone’s bill to them)
