quiz – Rory Parle

January 7, 2010January 2, 2010

Seven Years On

While we’re still celebrating milestones, I have one of my own. I started this blog seven years ago, on January 7, 2003. Back then it was made of hand-coded HTML that lived on the servers of my university’s Internet Society.

I soon moved it to a self-made blogging platform on those same servers. From there it moved to a professional web host, on yet another custom blogging platform, and with its own domain. Most recently it moved to a new domain, and I finally gave up on maintaining my own software and migrated all the content to WordPress.

I’m quite happy that through all those software changes and server moves I still have every post I’ve ever written for this blog, right back to the very first one.

That first post was about the result of a little Web quiz that took details of my physical fitness, intelligence, education, and lifestyle and, through the twin magics of mathematics and making shit up, informed me that I was worth exactly $2,320,314. I would have hoped my organs alone could fetch that much or more, but I’m not the expert here.

Looking back on my first post I decided to see if that quiz was still online and, more importantly, if my value had changed at all. You’ll be delighted to hear that not only is the quiz still happily digesting humanity into currency, but I’ve gone up in value to an amazing $3,061,316. That’s an increase of nearly 32%. Maybe that’s not the biggest possible return over seven years, but at least it’s going up.

August 15, 2008

Take That, Blindness!

Quizzes are like buses. For one thing, it always takes me two tries to figure out how to spell the plural. Also they smell a bit funny; and it’s rare that they’re organised quite as well as you’d like; and you always try to sit at the back, even though that turns out to be much less convenient than sitting up close to the person in charge.

Oh, and you can wait ages for one and then a few arrive at once.

So it is that I was at another quiz yesterday so soon after the last one. This one was in aid of Fighting Blindness ‘Round the World with Russell Crowe (“We couldn’t find Blindness, so we’re going to fight some blind people. Take that, Blindness!”)

It was the most fun I can remember having while doing so badly at something. I mean, I’ve seen quiz teams suck before, but we were the suckiest bunch of sucks that ever sucked. We just plain sucked. It was like a re-run of the exam I once had in college when I’d forgotten to attend a course for the entire year. Only with less terror and more beer.

Still, I redeemed myself towards the end with a double whammy of full-points rounds. One of them was a six degrees–style movie association game, in which I managed to answer two of the questions before they were even asked (no bonus points for knowing the quizmaster that well, sadly).

The next was all about Irish history and geography, which is about as far from being my specialist subject as shoe care and maintenance, but with me as the only Irish person on the team we still got seven out of the ten answers right before we resorted to cheating thinking outside the box.

Maybe if quizzes come in threes like buses do then I’ll be able to drag myself back up to a more competitive place next time. Either that or I’ll just fully invest in the strategy of writing ‘Samuel L. Jackson’ as the answer to every single question.

July 30, 2008July 30, 2008

News Team, Assemble!

Taking part in table quizzes is one of my favourite activities. It allows me to display my two great virtues: always wanting to show off how much I know, and being a really sore loser. Sadly I was only able to really demonstrate one of those virtues yesterday, as the Channel 6 News Team scored a massive victory and humiliated the opposition. They got served! (did I mention I’m also a sore winner?)

We took our team name from Anchorman, and in the spirit of acting like idiots for the sake of entertainment each of us took on the persona of one of the original Channel 6 team. As I was the team member with the strongest fondness for lamp I became Brick Tamland, weather. This suited me well as I have an IQ of 48 and am what some people call “mentally retarded”. Still, in between putting spoonfuls of mayonnaise in the toaster I think I managed to get some answers right. Fantastic!