A noise is annoying me + Orange**

Phones ring insistently, door bells shrilly, horns honk annoyingly - have you noticed that the things which make us do something are always associated with a negative adjective? The ringtone may be most soothing, the door bell chime sweet as a cuckoo, the horn merely the minimal polite 'please could you move?' Yet, because these sounds are the advance guard of a change in our tempo we ourselves didn't initiate, we view them as intrusive, irritating. Unless of course, you have been waiting for that call from the office informing you of your raise, waiting for your child to be brought home from the hospital, all healed, waiting for your lover to turn up in his new car... :)

Today featuring Michael's second site - the fun page of the communication company Orange. Orange has a site made up specially to illustrate its tagline - Good things should never end!



It is a flash animation, so it will take a while to load up - but the bees ferrying honey from hive to jar are pretty cute to watch in the interim :) Once it is loaded, it is quite literally, an endless page, repeating whimsical animations, some with a shareable code, some without. (See below for three examples - you can click and play in them!) It is fun to explore initially, scrolling down to see what else is there...



You do have to be careful about scrolling - better use the keyboard arrows else you will find yourself sliding down more rapidly than planned! Not that it matters, because after a while you begin to see repetitions, or slight variations thereof, and don't really bother to visit the end of the page at all. So you could just as easily start off in the middle and not lose out anything :)



Each animation generally has its own sounds which remain as long as it is visible. Some are interactive, others just show repetitive movement (not included in these examples here). It is a dream page for the little someone who will insist on using the computer "all on my own, mamma" - endless scrolling and clicking! But kids also are quite likely to get totally bored by the absence of new things to see after a few tries.



There are a few games which involve guessing which word - relating to, say a place, or a transport, is in the 'mind' of a character. Some more in which you hold nonsensical conversations with an 'artificial intelligence'. Both kinds are good for tweens who are able to appreciate this kind of humour. And then there is an ice-cream game, which is different enough from others of its ilk for me to tell you about it. There are three components to the ice-cream, of which you can hold two at a time, ie they will not change when you click the ice-cream man. If you don't 'hold', they will all change, randomly, much in the nature of those lottery machines. So the trick is to hold two, and keep changing the third till you like it, and then repeat the process with the others. Kind of cumbersome, but not really once you get the hang of it.



The url - http://unlimited.orange.co.uk/flash/go

P.S. Yes, I have been pretty much annoyed by the phone today which just is not stopping its ringing - you can make out, can't you?

P.P.S. Which sounds are the most irritating for you? Just curious!