Geopursuit - the worldwide con

As I was walking down to one of my lectures, I saw an advert - "The most adventours game on earth", a grand prize of £10,000? A prize for the top ten fastest players every week? Why would I not have a go, being techincally able, quick with a PC I thought I stood a good chance!

How wrong I was, the moment approachs when the competition was about to begin and I was sitting ready at my computer, within moments of starting the challenge the location markers on google earth, where we are supposed to find the secret codes to put in the website and win....disappear.... amateur? Yes.

Shell very much frustrated me at this point as I battled with the fact that the geopursuit server had gone down. About an hour and a half later I recieve a text saying that the server is down, "Great!", I thought, at least they are admitting their mistakes and working on the problem. I was told that I would be notified of when the server is back online, yet being an avid competitor I thought it was sensible to continue trying, of course, with no avail.

Well, the time is now 21:28, almost exactly 3 hours after the competition opened, still no notification that the server is back online. But guess what, the leaderboard has filled up! Clearly SOME people have been able to access the game, and others not. A fair chance? No. A reliable company? No. An indication as to the competence of the firm, I sincerley hope not. Since this game is aimed at studnets particularly, and the first clue (of which I was able to see!), was more or less a propaganda video for Shell, I am assuming that they are looking to inspire future young proffesionals to work for Shell. Well, Shell, here is one that will not.

This competition was unfair, and with questionable legality considering the limited access to the acutual competition.

Bad form Shell, bad form.

Google Calendar

Okay so this is not anything particularly new I know. But if you have never heard of Google calendar, prepare to be amazed.
I don't claim to be an expert by any means in online applications and facilities, but this is by far the best I have seen.

Gcal is a simple and effective device for managing your time. It basic terms, you input the dates and times of your events, and it displays them on a calendar so you know what is going on an when. The really impressive stuff starts when you looks deeper, Gcal can text you to remind you of any event, simply register your phone, (which is free and instant), then whenever you set a reminder, select SMS as the option and you will receive a text with the date, time, location and any description of the event - what more could you need for an organised life!?


Believe it or not, there is more. Gcal supports multiple calendars as well, so you can have (as I do), a calendar for personal events, University timetable, exercise schedule, or even a bills calendar so you know what is coming out when! Events can also be set to reccuring so there is no need to set the same lecture every week, just the once.

Whats more, Gcal offers an option to embed your calendar into your website, or just send a link to someone else to view your calendar. And my most recent discovery is that the description section of Gcal will accept HTML code, so you can hyperlink, or even embed things into the description!

Gcal is extremley easy to use as well, to extend the time of an event, just click and drag the end time. If you type (for example), Dinner at Uni in the event title box, it will set the event title as dinner, and the location as Uni.

See below for my calendar, if you want you own you need to go to www.google.com/calendar. While your there, why not sign up for a Gmail account as well? In my opinion, google are offering excellent services at no cost to us as a consumer, these will get better with the number of people that sign up, more advertising exposure, more revenue for google! So sign up now!