I installed the new version of Opera the other day, 7.5. It comes with a Flash Player bundle, an annoying piece of crap that I uninstalled last year. Now I decided to give it another chance, because I need it to use the Urchin web site statistics provided by my new host. And I didn’t want to load Internet Explorer a.k.a. Worm Magnet every time I wanted to have a look at the stats.

But today, when I was surfing Cali es Cali for pictures of half nekkid women, I was greeted by the most annoying web add I’d seen in a long time. Actually, I haven’t seen any really annoying web adds since I uninstalled the Flash Player back in May last year. Coincidence? I think not. The software is now removed. Again. What Opera could really need is an option to start Flash on request, like when I want to play Flash games for no reason. I think I was once told that Mozilla has this or a similar feature.

If you’re using Opera yourself and want to get rid of the Flash annoyance, simply close the browser if it’s open, browse to the directory where you installed it, go to the subdirectory called Program, then the Plugins subdirectory and delete the file NPSWF32.dll. This is the Flash Player plugin. Alternatively, you can rename it to something like NPSWF32.dll.old in case you want to re-install it at some point.

Yesterday evening I played the RISK board game with Gunnar and a couple of friends of his. Gunnar has been the project manager on most of the projects I’ve been assigned to at the NRK, and he’s basically a great guy. I’m leaving the NRK in four days, this is actually the last week I’ll be working there before I become a full time Rubberduck. And one of the bad things about leaving the NRK is that I can’t work with people like the Gunnar. Well, I certainly hope there will be more RISK playing in his apartment even if we’re not working in the same company.

A few days ago I felt a little nostalgic and suddenly got an urgent need for playing Fragile Allegiance, I game I bought a few years ago. It’s a classic, almost beating other kick ass games in the genre, like Utopia - I played that a lot back in the good old Amiga days. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find my original copy of the Fragile Allegiance CD anywhere. So it’s a good thing we’ve got quality sites like The Underdogs. In just a matter of seconds, I had located the game, and it was even available for download. Awesome!

Miraculously, the game started on my Windows XP computer, but it turned out it was unable to find the sound card, which meant a pretty silent experience. It’s no fun without the sound, so now I’m about to install a DOS emulator; DOSBox. Let’s hope it works. If so, you probably won’t see me here for a couple of days. Or maybe you will. I don’t know.

I was once told to keep my blog entries short. Screw that.