Roman room

This is my 493rd post on this blog. That means that in a week's time, give or take, I'll reach the fabled five hundred! Unless I have more problems with mathematics than I'm aware of, of course. So what should I do for the big occasion? I don't believe in celebrating minor anniversaries and landmarks, but 500 posts is a pretty big deal. Perhaps I should devote the whole day to writing the blog, and see just how many words I can churn out? Perhaps I should write some nonsense story, because it's a couple of months since I last did that. Perhaps I should subvert people's expectations and write one word (I'm leaning towards "potato")? Any more suggestions will be gratefully received, mentally filed away and forgotten about next Wednesday when I devote the historic post to insulting commentary about a minor television personality who's annoyed me.

I also need to learn how to do websites. Having decided to organise another Cambridge memory championship in May, I would really like there to be a nice-looking website I can point people to, featuring example memorisation and recall papers, rules phrased in a way that is comprehensible to beginners, basic how-to-memorise-numbers-and-cards information, pictures that give the impression that memory competitions are fun, all that kind of thing. Because (and I mean this in the nicest possible way) you can't really rely on the WMSC website to publish this kind of thing in a half-decent way.

Once I've got this wonderful website up and running, I intend to try to infiltrate Cambridge University and the surrounding area with the information that this competition is taking place, and attempt to persuade impressionable young students to give it a try. And also pester local businesses to see if we can arrange any kind of sponsorship to pay for the thing. Hopefully there'll be someone wanting to film it for a prospective documentary again, and I'll be able to hype this fact up for the advertising-hungry entrepreneurs of Cambridge. Of course, while I'm great at vaguely planning this kind of thing, I'm really terrible at putting it into practice, so we'll just have to see what, if anything, happens.