Saturday, January 24, 2015

The BBC are trying too hard

Having got the rights to FA Cup coverage back this season, all their commentators and website-news-article-writers are clearly under strict orders to say how awesome the FA Cup is at every opportunity. Even a dull game like the 0-0 draw between Cambridge and Man Utd's second-string players last night was enlivened by the commentators remembering every five minutes to say what a cracking game it was!

Thing is, the FA Cup IS awesome! They don't need to go to such extremes to convince people it's great, it does that naturally. Calm down, BBC people, please.

In other news, we're nearing the end of XMT qualification. Here's my best attempt at remembering 80 digits in under a minute:



A bit annoying that I didn't manage to remember all 80 in my next four attempts at doing a faster time, but 29 seconds is a reasonable kind of time to aim for in the competition itself (with my system, it works out to 27 images, whereas a pack of cards is 26, so under 30 seconds is still a great result - people with a basic two-digit, one-card system will use fewer images with numbers than in cards so might do better times here).

The thing about numbers is that you don't rearrange things into the right order in the recall (like you do with cards and images), you have to remember them all perfectly without any prompts. Despite finding my own "qualification" attempt a bit annoying, I think I still come down on the side of this being a good thing, just because it makes it a bit different and forces people to think about the right strategy to go for in head-to-head competition...

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