c4countdown

Matt Bayfield

I've heard the track, and saw it go into the top 40, but didn't realise that Victoria Bergsman was the vocalist. She used to be in (possibly still is in) The Concretes, who released a couple of passable singles 5 or so years back, including one called "You can't Hurry Love" (not a cover ve...

Matt Bayfield

Speed Demon, Pool A

Martin May 73 - 34 Matt Bayfield
Martin May 44 - 52 Matt Bayfield

Matt Bayfield

I'm a bit of an Unlimited specialist, so either in terms of being able to beat a given bot, or in terms of my relative positions when the Duels are in these formats, my list would be: RELATIVELY EASY Junior Goat Junior MODERATE Unlimited Hyper Unlimited Goat Standard Omelette TRICKY Hypergoat Hyper ...

Matt Bayfield

Flight A:

Matt Bayfield 103 - 86 Philip Jarvis
Matt Bayfield 103 - 70 Philip Jarvis

Matt Bayfield

Dinos Sfyris wrote:...head home about 1amish...

This has conjured the wonderful image of Dinos being accompanied home from a glitzy club by a Mennonite gentleman berating him for his hedonistic lifestyle...

Matt Bayfield

Jeff: Carol "Vorderperson"? Is that general parlance round here or a 1990s Lee & Herring reference (I think it was them, with their Tim Henperson sketch, etc.)? If it's the latter, then very nice... As for COLEI2010, Leicester is only an hour away from me, so I shall probably turn up r...

Matt Bayfield

My Speed 9 games for this week:

Matt Bayfield 57 - 34 Tom Rowell
Matt Bayfield 46 - 36 Tom Rowell
Kirk Bevins 67 - 33 Matt Bayfield
Kirk Bevins 72 - 32 Matt Bayfield

Matt Bayfield

Cheers Charlie. I know it wasn't a bug report but I posted it here as it was partially relevant to some of the posts above.

Matt Bayfield

For those of us with standard QWERTY keyboards, is there a quick way to enter Greek characters and accented vowels? Thus far, I can only think of: (a) remembering a stack of the relevant alt-codes for the upper case characters (b) copying and pasting individual upper case letters from, say, a Notepa...

Matt Bayfield

I had the pleasure of playing Julie in both Flight A and the Speed Demon this week. The first three games all went to crucial conundrums before I ran away with the fourth game after spotting SQUINTIER in the second round. Flight A Matt Bayfield 86 - 83 Julie Taylor Matt Bayfield 81 - 72 Julie Taylor...

Matt Bayfield

Speed Demon

Matthew Tassier 51 - 48 Matt Bayfield
Matt Bayfield 40 - 33 Matthew Tassier

Matt Bayfield

I can understand people's resistance! Although I do seem to be pretty much the only person who plays Unlimited and Hyper Unlimited enough to get occasional 16+ letter words, I'd still like to see this fixed. Perhaps it's possible one time when the apterous server is down for other reasons anyway? No...

Matt Bayfield

A new record in the extremely rarely-played format of "Hyper Unlimited Flat 9". Note that because conundrums are worth 5 points in this Flat scoring format, my performance would be equivalent to a score of 94 (the equal 2nd best score ever) in the more frequently played scoring system of &...

Matt Bayfield

No, I didn't mean that all abbreviations written entirely in lower case are regarded as words in Dutch. What I meant is that many common "strings", which are formed from the initial letters of a longer expression, are regarded as Dutch words, in which case they will be written in lower cas...

Matt Bayfield

Yup - I think you've got it now Phil - I was only taking about Dutch, not English. As far as I'm aware, the Dutch Language Union , who set the rules for spellings, etc, tend to spell many abbreviations made from initial letters, e.g. "gsm", in lower case, and without any punctuation. They ...

Matt Bayfield

I don't know much about Dutch, but it appears to have a much richer inflection system than English, which means you get a lot of words "for free" once you know the grammar. The full wordlist is 227,330 words up to nine letters, which is roughly three times the length of Jimdic, but whethe...

Matt Bayfield

Deal - I'll look forward to it! Alec will kick both our asses, mind... Btw, there appears to be a choice of 2 wordlists. If you want a shorter wordlist (250000 words), you could just use Aad's alternative 1 MB list. As my Dutch vocabulary is probably less than 10000 words, I can't really comment muc...

Matt Bayfield

At the risk of calling Charlie's bluff, there appears to be a pretty sound Dutch wordlist on this gentleman's personal website . Aad is clearly a fan of the short-lived Dutch equivalent of Countdown (" Cijfers en Letters ") and is a general words and letters puzzle buff. The files which wo...

Matt Bayfield

hoi Alec! ik wist niet, dat je nederlands kan! helaas spreek ik helemaal niet vloeiend nederlands, want het was bijna 10 jaar geleden dat ik in nederland woonde. maar als je wilt apterous-NL spelen... dan kan wel als je een elektronische woordenboek kan vinden! (ik heb vroeger scrabble in het nederl...

Matt Bayfield

Speed Demon Week 1

Matt Bayfield 66 - 28 Ian Dent
Matt Bayfield 44 - 32 Ian Dent

Finally my first win in an apterous tournament game, at the 7th attempt!

Matt Bayfield

Scott Gillies 84 - 75 Matt Bayfield Scott Gillies 89 - 87 Matt Bayfield Posting this here saves me posting it in thread of scrag! Not that I want to detract from a good performance by Scott, as he played well, but I made some absolute howlers - misclicks when completing numbers games, forgetting to...

Matt Bayfield

"Odorize" and "odorise" are both classed as acceptable British spellings. I can see where confusion may arise, as only "odorize" is acceptable in US English. Lots of "-our" words drop the "u" when sticking suffices like -ise on the end, e.g. vaporise...

Matt Bayfield

I'd like to enter please Ben, especially since I'm in on a freebie! (Part of my prize for winning Ben's Scrabble tourney in Peterborough, in case anyone's wondering.)

Matt Bayfield

Anyone else notice DC-beater SALONEEN* cropping up in one of the later rounds?

RB would have been proud...

Matt Bayfield

Cheers Kai. I quite like the variants, especially Goat/Junior/Unlimited/HyperUnlimited, and play them more than Standard, so it seemed like a sensible challenge for me to have a go at. Having said that, 30-odd games of Goatblind against Prune was probably strictly more than I would normally have pla...

Matt Bayfield

I'm fairly sure that I'm the only person who's been bothered to attempt this aptochallenge... but I can happily report that as of earlier today, I now have the following 12 skills all at level 3: Dog, Tadpole, Millipede, Giraffe, Centipede, Coyote, Wolf, Tanngrisnir, Parrot, Bat, Goat and Mole. Whic...

Matt Bayfield

Yup, don't go for level 5 questions all the time. When I played "A Question Of Strategy" (i.e. the final head-to-head round) at the audition, I was paired against a semi-professional quizzer (who had missed out on a Mastermind heat win by one point, had won £125k on WWTBA Millionaire, etc)...

Matt Bayfield

Ian-- --I was a contestant on the last series of "A Question of Genius". I take it you have passed the phone i/view and have got to the in-person audition stage, where you will probably play a few of the rounds from the show. A few pointers: Don't be timid at the audition. This doesn't jus...

Matt Bayfield

Cheers chaps. I have to say that my opening game, with a young guy called Stephen Hunt, was a cracker. He's an internet player rated 1600-ish on ISC, and with a huge vocabulary, so I was well pleased to pip him, by something like 446 - 419, by consistently scoring at 30 pts a turn, then playing a sm...

Matt Bayfield

Count me in for both tourneys please Andrew.

Matt Bayfield

Conundrums faster than 215ms don't count, because that's human reaction time . For example the one you linked is 156ms which means you buzzed before you even "saw" the shuffle, let alone solving it, or there was a bug in the timing, and in either case it's not really worthy of a fastest t...

Matt Bayfield

The fastest conundrums are a fab addition to Superstats. One question though - do the fastest conundrum stats include all our successfully solved conundrums since the beginning of aptotime, or is it just over the last 30 days ? I ask, because I certainly had a very quick Junior Conundrum a long time...

Matt Bayfield

It's an extremely rarely-played format, but I've just set a new apterous record in Hypergoat 9 . Whilst the record should be reasonably straightforward to beat for anyone so inclined, the game is more notable for a 12-letter word in round 2, which I guess adds me to a relatively small group of folks...

Matt Bayfield

I only wear a hat so that people on this forum might think I have hair...

Underneath the hat I am delightfully stubbly.

Matt Bayfield

Just to clarify, Steve Wood & I are the other way round to Matt's summary above. I'm in the jean jacket and blue hat. Steve is brown hair, red t-shirt, back row, to the left of and behind Jack.

Kai had it the correct way round.

Matt Bayfield

This one's not for me, Richard - not this time, anyway. But I hope it's a good event.

Matt Bayfield

Probably 13th, Karen, but I wouldn't worry about it either way. I didn't even write down my scores, so I'm not the kind to get het up by these sorts of things.

Matt Bayfield

There appears to be a minor glitch with the recording of words longer than 15 letters (which, obviously, can only be valid in Unlimited or HyperUnlimited). Whilst words above 15 letters are accepted and scored correctly within a game, for example [brag] this 19-letter gem [/brag], the offering is tr...

Matt Bayfield

My PBs are as follows. The track PBs were set when I was at school/college, and I've not raced on a track since college. Track ----- 400m: 1:05.2 (set at school) 800m: 2:29 (set at school, on the same day) 1500m: 4:52 (set at college) Roads ----- 5km: 17:47 (2007) 10km: 36:49 (2008) Half: just under...

Matt Bayfield

Thanks to all the hard work of those who typed in the long words in the dictionary, it is now possible to score with some very long words in Unlimited and HyperUnlimited. Suggestion: Could we have an addition to the Stats pages please for longest words offered/missed in these two formats? There woul...

Matt Bayfield

Julie - thanks for posting the recaps. That looks right for our game. Btw - there's s/th wrong with the wiki page. Am fairly sure Karen Pearson can't have finished 15th, as I was beaten in the 15th/16th place play-off by Steve Wood. (That's a different Steve Wood to the one who has appeared on Count...

Matt Bayfield

It does help - thanks for the clarification! ANd sorry for my part in debunking the mystery of the bronze pencil...

Matt Bayfield

Thanks for clarifying, Charlie. So can we look forward to silver and gold pencils, which might follow as more of the remaining unique words get offered in months/years to come...

(Rhetorical question, btw - no need to answer!)

Matt Bayfield

Matt: sure, it's quite possible that I've got the wrong end of the stick and that the bronze pencil is working as designed. However, I was fairly sure I've been awarded bronze pencils for words which have previously been offered, so I was guessing they were awarded for "rare words" (i.e. o...

Matt Bayfield

Two small, low priority, issues which may or may not be bugs: ---- The Summary page on my Superstats doesn't seem to have updated since I started playing apterous again around the end of September. For example, it still says I've played only 312 games. All my other Superstats pages appear to update ...

Matt Bayfield

Nice list. Presumably RADIUSES is good then! I wouldn't have realised that.

And I suspect that LITHIA is lithium oxide, not the plural of LITHIUM, although I don't have a dictionary with me to check.

Matt Bayfield

I think the key to this is using "green" in the sense of "environmentally friendly". So surely the answer is either some kind of environmentally-friendly yellow paint, or it's something/someone famous which is painted yellow, which is known for being environmentally sound. Like a...

Matt Bayfield

Fantastic event... a credit to Jeff and all who helped with the organisation, and also to the c4c/Countdown community at large. See you at the next one... ;-) And to Dinos and Ben, who just missed the final due to inferior points total, I can only apologise for not taking more points off of Kirk and...

Matt Bayfield

I like that two of the experts interviewed for that article went by the names Mingo and Burke.

Matt Bayfield

No apology necessary Derek - hadn't heard that one before so was quite amused! And an aside to all cross-country route organisers who take sadistic pleasure in routing their course over a spiky gate after 5 miles of slog through churned-up saturated clay. There is no fun at all in attempting to comp...

Matt Bayfield

Nice! And not entirely inaccurate, Derek. Although unfortunately the ol' voice is back to normal, thus ending my lucrative career in a Bee Gees tribute act...

Matt Bayfield

I'd be tempted by a 10k, as I've never run one on a track. Have got a decent-ish PB for the same distance on the roads so would hope to be competitive. However, if there's not going to be much competition (i.e. if everyone else is going to be either much faster, or much slower), then I'm less intere...

Matt Bayfield

Mr Vain hadn't occurred to me, though on reflection it appears to be the most accurate answer. I was about to propose the same answer "you", but this time the reasons being "every day giving me more and more", "keeping me satisfied", "doing all the things that I l...

Matt Bayfield

The coin-tossing was said to have taken "over 9 hours", rather than days, so in that case, I have no great reason to disbelieve that that footage was genuine - and even if it were faked, it was simply included to prove a mathematical point. I'm sure that Brown would have known that the exp...

Matt Bayfield

I'm a fan of Derren Brown - I think he's a fantastic entertainer/showman, with an imaginative team behind him. I'm somewhat disappointed if the Lottery trick has used the split screen, as that doesn't seem to be Derren's normal style. However, as a 10-minute trailer and advert for his new series, it...

Matt Bayfield

The referee is already flagging offside for references to Jon and I sharing our Smeg...

Matt Bayfield

After first thinking this was impossible, I think I've worked it out.

Matt Bayfield

Kelly Osbourne appears to have the answer...

Matt Bayfield

[brag] Awesome day in my armchair yesterday. Despite only getting 8 maxes, I spotted YIPPIES, SENTINEL, RECOATED, DIPTEROUS and (after 25 seconds) INSWINGER. Making the dubious assumption that I would have risked YIPPIES, I *whispers* would actually have "armchair-beaten" Chris, 93-90... D...

Matt Bayfield

WE SINFUL ===> SWINE FLU

Try TTOSSERGBUSH...

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