The Poorhouse has a penchant for games and gambling, and where better to combine than poker? Actually, so far, online poker doesn't appear to have quite the fun that real live poker does, but it passes the time better than say an extended GMTV session, plus you can make money. In theory. If you're lucky. Unlike certain forms of betting manipulation, there's no guarenteed wins to be had (that the Poorhouse discovered yet anyway), but there is a quick way to profit in the cash value of items if you're into poker at all.

2plus2, publishers of poker books, have an offer where if you sign up to a poker site and complete certain obligations you get to pick 5, count 'em, 5 books.

Scrabulous rhymes with fabulous, and it is. It's an online version of Scrabble, and it's main Poorhouse selling-point is that it is available as a Facebook application. So whilst seeing that "XX is on the toilet" you can also batter them at what is probably the world's most famous word game. In fact, for many, it's basically the reason Facebook is actually worth logging on to.

Unfortunately, the Scrabulous guys are not the same as the Scrabble guys, and a nice (legal) fight has been going on for a while whilst the Scrabble owners try and remove the Scrabulous facebook application as breach of intellectual property rights. Not too sure why the actual Scrabulous.com website is immune here, but unless it's just the reporting it seems that it's the Facebook application that's the main point of contention.

What could be more interesting on a weekend than an article about Microsoft Office? I know...a story about the most common aspects of it that everyone knows about anyway.

Those of you with recentish incarnations such as Office 2003 may be aware that unless you tell it not to, Office monitors (parts of) what you're doing and reports back to big bad Microsoft which collates this information, hopefully to inform their designers and developers rather than another step towards world domination. So guessy guess time: what were the most used commands in Word based on this data (circa 2006 anyway)?

Happy weekend from the Poorhouse. Not much of note has hit the Poorhouse's stream of consciousness in recent times so instead here's a couple of geek-funny vids to watch.

Firstly, who doesn't love the oh-so-realistic techno/terrorism battle that is any given series of 24? Well, little did you know it was first produced in 1994 - and here's the pilot to prove it.

Yay for the Nintendo Wii. Now it has its own version of Mario Party there really isn't any reason not to own one...assuming you don't mind the way it plays it part in many vicious and violent injuries. And now even the health-hazard aspect of the gaming glory is at risk.

The far-flung lump of hard plastic known as a Wiimote now comes with a jacket, both to aid grip and lessen the physical imprint of inadvertent blows. Those of us vaguely-earlyish adopters need not suffer though - Nintendo's handing them out like candy.

Housework; even the name doesn't sound that interesting. A "house", well it's a nice thing to have, but not especially known for adrenalin-filled rock 'n' roll rides in most cases. More a shelter from adrenalin-filled rock 'n' roll rides. "Work"; for this one clearly no further explanation is needed. So we need to find some way of making housework a bit more interesting and hence not ending up dead in a filth pit of infested evil muck one day (or, worse yet, ending up on "Life of Grime").

Enter…Chore Wars. Geekgasm!

Wash your mouth outDagnammit, one of the Poorhouse highlights of 2007 is being delayed again. Yep, another push-back for the Mario Party 8 Wii extravaganza. OK, it'll probably be pretty much the same as the other seven, it is written for 5 year olds, but hey, it's Mario Party; even Mario Party with barrel lassoing!

It was actually released in the UK a few days ago, but swiftly retracted. Whyso? "the wrong version of the game disk being included following an assembly error" according to Nintendo. The truth is funnier. It contained a naughty bad word. Tut tut.

Top Trumps is in itself a funny old game. In the eyes of the Poorhouse however it has never been more funny then when played (combining the dual Poorhouse loves of games and bargains) with the "value" set of cards, one of which is depicted to the right. Literal LOLing.

Full credit to Dr When of the B3TA board for sheer utter genius.

(A few other funny pictures can be seen here).

Yay for Wii. Much as Wii Sports Tennis is the finest thing that electronica currently provides, they do also make other games. Including Rayman Raving Rabbids. It's a bit of a weird one, basically a bunch of mini-games obsessing beating psychotic bunnies one way or another. On the subject of psychotic, the Poorhouse became almost exactly that over one particular game - Bunnies Have Natural Rhythm.

There's "geeky" as in dull articles about needlessly complicated computery thingymajigs you might see around here, and then there's geeky that needs full on worshipping, like that of Mr Banks and his entry into the 1998 International Obfuscated C Code Contest.

Yep, this is a competition where one designs the worst-possibly coded, most-confusingly written, least intelligible - but still functioning - program in the computer language C with severe restrictions on code-length. In 1998 it was 1536 bytes. A byte, iPod kiddies, is 1/1073741824th of the size of a "gig". So Banks wrote a graphical flight simulator.