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From: spinaa@rpi.edu (Matt Garretson)
Maybe this has been mentioned before, but:
Have you ever been watching TV & reading news at the same time, and hit
the spacebar to change to the next TV channel? Brrr.... scary!
From: faught@convex.com (Danny R. Faught)
Yesterday my wife and I were semi-conscious and snuggling in bed. My hand
wandered to a sensitive area and I wondered, "Do I have read permission?"
No? Darn! Can I su root? Doubtful. :-(
Don't even think about execute permission :-)
From: eigenstr@cs.rose-hulman.edu (Todd R. Eigenschink)
It's bad when you've been hacking one thing too long, and when you
switch to hacking something else, your brain keeps doing the same
thing.
Last week I just about burned myself out working on Texinfo
documentation for a Scheme library (those of you who read
comp.lang.scheme know what I'm talking about). It came time to work
on some C stuff yesterday, the stuff I started writing looked
something like:
@example
@include "foo.h"
@defvar BAR 1
@defun func x y
@end defun
@{
;
@}
@end example
Even after I consciously switched my brain from texinfo-mode to
c-mode, I was still getting weird compiler errors due to stray '@'
characters floating around.
I didn't do much besides read news today.
From: s_titz@ira.uka.de (Olaf Titz)
In article <1993Mar22.233905.23095@bitrot.in-berlin.de> thomas@bitrot.in-berlin.de (Thomas Driemeyer) writes:
> Did you know that you can take control of a dream? First, you have to practice
> realizing that you are dreaming. This can be done by checking whether you are
> dreaming or not whenever you notice anything even slightly unusual, and make an
> honest attempt of waking up (visualize yourself in bed etc). After a while, these
> checks become automatic, and will appear in your dreams. Only now, the check will
> return TRUE. You have to catch the wake-up in limbo - don't open your eyes, which
^^^^^^^^^^^
> would kill -9 the dream, but stay detached enough to debug parameters you are
^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^
> unhappy with. Then, resume the process by letting go. You can do the most amazing
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> things that way, including context-switching to a totally different dream.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
Thank you for convinving me that there are still people with a more
technically-bent mind than me. :-))
(I assume you're just about to practice for an exam in Operating
Systems, or am I wrong?)
From: Kenneth.E.Harker@Dartmouth.Edu (Kenneth E. Harker)
...when you're explaining the final stages of a five-week project to
your hallmate, and you say, "Now all we have to do is get it deal with
the real world - the other programs on the screen."
From: zongker@cps.msu.edu (Douglas E Zongker)
...when your writing a letter to your grandmother by hand and putting
semicolons at the end of each line.
From: aj923@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (P. J. Remner)
In a previous article, jbridson@kean.ucs.mun.ca () says:
>...when in art class, you make a mistake in a drawing and look
>frantically for the undo button on the paper.
>
>Or when you begin pronouncing 'by the way' as 'bee-tee-dubbul-yoo'. =)
Or, when you say "burb" when you mean to say "be right back". (BRB)
From: sdoran@chester.ksu.ksu.edu (Steven D Marcotte)
At 2:30 in the morning when the fire alarm goes off, your are still
reading news. (most fire alarms are just jokes any way) Then, when
they pound on your door yelling "everyone out!" you calmly finish the
article you are on and go over to a public lab to continue reading news.
From: simon@otago.ac.nz
You sit down at the dinner table and knock over a glass of water by reaching
out for the power-on switch.
From: bmh@terminus.ericsson.se (Bernard Hatt)
You know you've been programming with Xlib too long, when you leave the
building at night and say "XGoodNight" to the security guard!
From: mark-r@spec0.ee.man.ac.uk (Mark Robinson)
The other day I was replying by hand to a letter, when I suddenly
realised I'd written out huge chunks of the original letter, with
a greater than symbol at the start of each line.
Even worse, instead of realising my mistake, I thought I'd best
edit this a bit or I'll get flamed for including too much of the
original post!!
From: chambles@whale.st.usm.edu (John William Chambless)
YKYBH in unix too long when:
before you call someone on the phone, you think:
'finger joe@his.house'
when, after exiting a program on a DOS machine,
you automatically try to check mail.
your first reaction to the above is that mail is down
you try to ^Z out of Quattro
you decide to stay in school...just to keep your Internet account!
From: mah@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Martin Hay)
Yesterday morning when my _analogue_ alarm went off, I woke up (just), tried
to work out exactly what the hell was going on, fumbled about and finally
grabbed the thing (alarm clock, you sick shit :-) ), and then spent about 20
dazed seconds trying to remember exactly how to turn it off. I then spent
about another five finding the little lever, and about another ten trying to
manouver my thumb onto it before I could have peace until my Hi-Fi started
up (digital alarm).
Sorry to disappoint anyone, but I am totally incapable of thought (coherent
or otherwise) when I wake up.
From: dave@gilly.UUCP
chambles@whale.st.usm.edu (John William Chambless) writes:
>ObYKYBHTL: this AM when the alarm went off, my first thought was
>"hit 'i' to return to the elm menu..."
My last alarm-clock delusion was trying to figure out what username
it was running under, so I could look at its crontab file to see when
it was going to ring...
Usually I just look at all its glowing LEDs, mistake it for my modem,
and wonder what the *HELL* its doing!?!? :-)
From: eigenstr@cs.rose-hulman.edu (Todd R. Eigenschink)
I saw a friend who works in the computing center from whom I had
borrowed an ethernet tee. I said something like, "Oh, shoot, I have
to give that back to you." Without even thinking, he responded,
"Just email it to me." I was about to ask if I should compress it,
but thought better of it. :-)
From: u912078@daimi.aau.dk (S|ren Erland Vest|)
The classical one (no flames please) :
YKYBHTL... when you get a headache from looking at 3-dimensional objects.. :)
From: peter@NeoSoft.com (Peter da Silva)
Let's see. I once dreamed I couldn't get into the bathroom because I'd
broken the device driver for the door. I once dreamed I couldn't open
my eyes because I'd broken the device driver for my eyelids. That was
particularly irritating, because I couldn't fix the code because I couldn't
open my eyes!
From: nmehl@ccat.sas.upenn.edu (Nathan J. Mehl)
You know you've been hacking too long when, while taking notes in a class,
you begin to /*COMMENT OUT*/ the sections where the professor is going on
a silly digression.
(The really scary thing is that, in my case, "too long" means about two
months of trying to teach myself C. Says something for either my high
impressability, or just my general lack of sleep lately.)
From: ttg242@newton.sps.mot.com (David Thornewill von Essen)
In article nmehl@ccat.sas.upenn.edu, nmehl@ccat.sas.upenn.edu (Nathan J. Mehl) writes:
>You know you've been hacking too long when, while taking notes in a class,
>you begin to /*COMMENT OUT*/ the sections where the professor is going on
>a silly digression.
Another indication of hacking too long is frantically trying to hit the
non-existent ENTER key on the alarm clock in the hope that it will scroll
the numbers off the screen so that you can enter the command to kill the
noise. Giving up, going back to sleep regardless of the now blaring radio,
to be asked later by a non-hacking flatmate "What the hell was going on?"
True, and happened more than once. I am now married, the alarm clock
is on her side!
From: bernie@metapro.DIALix.oz.au (Bernd Felsche)
In <1ul2r1$4tk@uniwa.uwa.edu.au>
chester@tartarus.uwa.edu.au (Craig Abbott) writes:
>>the numbers off the screen so that you can enter the command to kill the
>>noise. Giving up, going back to sleep regardless of the now blaring radio,
>>to be asked later by a non-hacking flatmate "What the hell was going on?"
How about waking up before the alarm clock and the first thing
that you do is return a FILE pointer.
This is highly disturbing, and almost enough to make you head
for the drinks cabinet. The must be some way of clearing the
stack before you sleep(). On the weekends, I usually alarm(0)
but this morning's return() from my sleep() almost caused
a SIGHUP.
From: andreww@uniwa.uwa.edu.au (Andrew Williams)
chester@tartarus.uwa.edu.au (Craig Abbott) writes:
>ttg242@newton.sps.mot.com (David Thornewill von Essen) writes:
>>Another indication of hacking too long is frantically trying to hit the
>>non-existent ENTER key on the alarm clock in the hope that it will scroll
>>the numbers off the screen so that you can enter the command to kill the
>>noise. Giving up, going back to sleep regardless of the now blaring radio,
>>to be asked later by a non-hacking flatmate "What the hell was going on?"
>I had this happen recently too, projects were due. My alarm clock has a
>9 minute "snooze", so, every 9 minutes I would stare at the clock, realise
>that the beeping meant ERROR and wonder what the output meant. Then I
>would fumble around with it till it stopped and lie back down to try and
>figure out what was wrong. Problem: Even though I hadn't yet changed
>the code - the output was different every time it beeped an error....
>Try solving *that* bug!
I remember one day, as the alarm was blaring, spending 5 or 10 minutes
thinking about how to make the clock radio run backwards. The
frightening thing was the fact that while I was awake enough to ponder
the innards of my clock, I wasn't quite up to realising that MY clock
running backwards wouldn't be enough to let me stay in bed...
And then theres the morning I [thinking about an upcoming house move],
decided that a simple solution was to borrow an exabyte drive from uni
and tar and compress the house contents, and restore it at the new
address. I even remember worrying about whether tar would create the
destination rooms properly if I specified absolute pathnames...
From: v37262d@kaira.hut.fi (Mancko H|glund)
In article <1993Jun3.062039.24102@newsgate.sps.mot.com> ttg242@newton.sps.mot.com writes:
>In article nmehl@ccat.sas.upenn.edu, nmehl@ccat.sas.upenn.edu (Nathan J. Mehl) writes:
>>You know you've been hacking too long when, while taking notes in a class,
>>
>Another indication of hacking too long is frantically trying to hit the
>non-existent ENTER key on the alarm clock in the hope that it will scroll
Or picking up the phone and answering with the the program statement
you're about to enter into your code. You can almost hear the ????'s coming
over the lines (unless, of course, the caller is another programmer, and
a quick-witted one at that).
From: u912078@daimi.aau.dk (S|ren Erland Vest|)
[alarmclock delusions del'ed]
Hi,
I recently had a project due, and had been working in X-windows on a Sun3 all
night. About 6 o'clock in the morning I was debugging, and wanted to take some
notes on a piece of paper beside the computer. I spent about 3 minutes trying
to figure out, why that d*mn mousecursor wouldn't go to the paper, so I could
write on it..... Then I realized...:)
From: m91nen@tdb.uu.se (Nils Engstrom)
Reminds me of a very strange dream I had just the other day:
I don't remember the beginning, but I found myself waiting
for a bus with two packets of breakfast cereal in one hand.
(I have no idea why.) Somehow it was very difficult to catch
a bus, but eventually one stopped. Oddly enough, it was the
same bus and driver that just drove past, and I could still see
it leaving... I got on the bus, and the driver asked me a
a question, whether I was in a hurry or somesuch. I was then
beginning to realize, that things were not quite in order...
*Poof*
Suddenly, I'm in Emacs, editing the Makefile for my dream!
I even edited a few lines before waking up, but I can no
longer recall its contents.
This was the second time I had a dream in a dream. Does
this happen to any one else?
n "Be careful not to screw up the terminating
condition when you dream recursively!"
From: delusion@casbah.acns.nwu.edu (Albert Schmezer)
... when you get your high school Senior Class yearbook photo taken with your
favorite IBM-PC keyboard...
Couldn't get the yearbook photo people to include the whole CPU, had
to settle for a picture with the keyboard in my hands, kinda guitar style...
From: majcher@acsu.buffalo.edu (Murali)
m91nen@tdb.uu.se (Nils Engstrom) writes:
>This was the second time I had a dream in a dream. Does
>this happen to any one else?
Constantly. I seem to keep having these dreams where I'm
dreaming and I wake up and so on and etc...but even _better_ are the
computer/internet dreams. The ones where, for an hour or so before I
wake up, I'm somehow logged into EtherNet :), reading all my mail and
news, and replying to things...and then I wake up. (Then I have to
come to work and _really_ do all those things...) I wonder if anybody
ever gets those messages...?
Of course, then there was the time when I was out dancing till
six or seven in the morning, went to bed, and woke up around two in
the afternoon...later that night, my then-SO said something about me
being logged on earlier that morning...apparently, around 10AM, I had
gotten out of bed, made myself breakfast, and logged on! I
immediately went to check, and yep, I had been on for about an hour
that morning, _while_I_was_still_asleep_! So, fearing the worst, I
checked my .history file, and sure enough, I _had_ sent mail to
people...eek. Couldn't tell who, though, so I had to send out some
more preemptive (or would that be postemptive?) letters, explaining
that I had been sleepwalking the 'net, and any email that they had
gotten from me that was lewd, obnoxious, or otherwise unrestrained,
was a result of my somnetulation...
Murali
(and boy was _she_ surprised to hear that...)
From: andyh@syma.sussex.ac.uk (Andy Holyer)
... when you discover something that's happened in you own office
*after* you've read about it on Usenet. My Co-worker just had his hair
cut this afternoon. He then got involved in a ramble about the length
of his hair. I hadn't looked round!!! I found out about it from the
net!! Help!!!
From: faught@convex.com (Danny R. Faught)
As an addendum to the "have you ever sent email to someone at the next
terminal" idea - It has been difficult lately to get the attention of
my officemate because he listens to a walkman most of the day. He
suggested that I send him email. I suggested that I could just
throw my Koosh(tm) at him until I get his attention. It's so much
more personal :-)
From: jwbirdsa@picarefy.picarefy.com (James W. Birdsall)
In article <1993Jun4.134014.14129@nntp.hut.fi> ebbe@shsibm.shh.fi writes:
>Or picking up the phone and answering with the the program statement
>you're about to enter into your code. You can almost hear the ????'s coming
>over the lines (unless, of course, the caller is another programmer, and
>a quick-witted one at that).
Well, I once had a situation where I was carrying so much state in my
head that when a friend called to ask if I wanted to do dinner, I couldn't
clear enough space to check my schedule. After about thirty seconds, I gave
up:
ME: "I don't know. Do I?"
HIM: "Yes."
ME: "OK, when and where?"
HIM: "We're all meeting at my room at six."
ME: "Fine. See you then."
From: sonix@schunix.uucp (Duane Morin)
After one particular night of thrashing about in my sleep, I rolled over and
looked at my digital alarm clock to see that it was now "01 E" oclock.
Heavens, my eyes were working in hexadecimal. I shook my head a few times,
then reached out and turned the poor devil rightside up. 3:10. Much
better.
From: alien@acheron.amigans.gen.nz (Ross Smith)
In article <1993Jun10.032813.16347@picarefy.picarefy.com> jwbirdsa@picarefy.picarefy.com (James W. Birdsall) writes:
> HIM: "We're all meeting at my room at six."
> ME: "Fine. See you then."
Yeah, I've had conversations like that, too. At least, I think I have ...
the trouble is that the information content never reaches my long-term
memory; if you asked me five minutes later, I'd be prepared to swear on a
copy of Kernighan & Ritchie that nobody had said anything to me about
dinner...
From: jsandler@encore.com (Jeff Sandler)
I was driving to the store last night, thinking about bank accounts..
I have my checking account in Tallahassee, where I go to school, and
my savings account in Ft. Lauderdale, where I'm working for the summer.
Neither have branches in the other location.
I was thinking about how to transfer money from my savings to my checkings
quickly - I thought I might buy something that I couldn't cover from the
one account. I quickly decided that I didn't want to wire money to myself..
Then I realized that it was probably just a matter of setting up my
.rhosts file properly, and the transfer would be transparent!
From: Jeremy_Reimer@mindlink.bc.ca (Jeremy Reimer)
Got this one while 'multitasking', IE reading an old copy of Byte while
fiddling around with my desktop settings. :) I was reading the famed
article "Is UNIX dead?" in the Sep 92 issue (it only took them until the
fourth paragraph to admit that it was not, but I see an alarming increase in
these kinds of 'bait' headlines... IE the recent 'DOS 6 - the ultimate
upgrade?' articles) There were some screenshots of various GUIs including
NeXTstep, SVR4.2 (didn't this become UnixWare?) and the oh-so-exciting Win
NT)
Anyway, that's veering off the topic. The topic is this: beige. Beige is an
absolutely horrible colour for hardware in my opinion, maybe because I have
seen too much of it. Everything is beige; beige monitors, beige keyboards,
mice, printer cables... Let's face it, it's the colour of cowards. Beige
should be permanently banned for hardware, but of course then we'd get sick
and tired of what is now the K00L!!!1111 colour, namely black.
Black is cool. Little black lights on a black blackground lighting up black
and so forth. I was even considering wasting^H^H^H^H^H^H^H spending some $
on having the stupid case painted, when I was hit with an absolutely
brilliant idea: open up the System folder, click on Setup, and edit the
System icon to show a cool black monitor instead of a boring beige one!
Wouldn't that save some money!
Actually, the idea of software that is able to alter the physical appearance
of your hardware is a great one, and I think systems like this should be
designed immediately.
From: iisakkil@vipunen.hut.fi (Mika Iisakkila)
Jeremy_Reimer@mindlink.bc.ca (Jeremy Reimer) writes:
>Actually, the idea of software that is able to alter the physical appearance
>of your hardware is a great one, and I think systems like this should be
>designed immediately.
One night I had a dream that all the windows in my house (wish I had
one, that was when I knew I was dreaming) had been converted to huge
transparent LCD displays. All of them were running Windows NT. That
was alarming, especially as I have never even seen NT running. Many
people would have probably hung themselves first thing in the morning,
but I though it would be way cool to have 2 x 1.5 m naturally
backlit LCD screens, with a vivid animated desktop... (apologies to afw).
From: dam@st-andrews.ac.uk (Douglas Andrew McIntosh)
Seeing all of this stuff about computer dreams. I was just having a normal
type dream last night when there was a noise or something outside.The image
in my mind just blacked out and my DOS prompt came up ( GOTHIC H:\ ) I saw
logout come up on the screen and then woke up properly feeling very confu-
sed...typing this I just had a feeling of deja vu...I hope I wasn't dreaming
of writing this post :)
From: cq377@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (David C. Williss)
I saw a billboard for a new radio station in Lincoln, Nebraska, called
KMEM (1480 AM). I found myself wondering if you had to be logged in
as "root" to listen to it or if it would be enough to have a radio
oned by root with the SUID bit set.
From: bwh@beach.cis.ufl.edu (Brian W. Hook)
you know you've been programming too long when everything in your life
turns into code...witness this:
main()
{
while ( sleeping ) {
sleeping = !Rested();
if ( AlarmIsOn() )
sleeping = 0;
}
BrushTeeth( self );
Shower( self );
Dress( self );
Enter( car, self );
while ( !Started( car ) ) {
if ( Inserted( key ) )
Turn( key );
else
Insert( key );
}
}
You get the idea...better yet, when you're sleeping and someone is trying
to wake you up, and you're wondering if you can CLI. :-)
From: sonix@schunix.dmc.com (Duane Morin)
Watching television and reading news at the same time. Right hand on
the keyboard, left hand had the remote control. Tried to change the television
channel by pressing "n". Tried to move to the next article by clicking
the remote. Argh. I hate that.
And another one (not rn related, however)...had a dream a while back that
my SO and I were (god help us) icons in a GUI and I couldn't get closer
to her than I was because the window manager demanded minimum space between
icons and kept knocking me back into place whenever I tried to overlap
her location. Rats.
I'm going to finish my game, and then go away from these things for a
long, long time. Something about no unit of time shorter than a season.
(I know the correct quote, don't anybody give it to me. :))
Well, no I'm not.
Duane
From: sonix@schunix.dmc.com (Duane Morin)
Oh, man...
Last night, I'm in a conversation on a VERY non-computer related topic, when
my friend makes the statement that, let's just say, given adequate access to
the entire female body, one would certainly spend more time in certain areas
than others. (There, I did that so as to offend as few people as I could.)
Anyway. It happened that my girlfriend was also part of this conversation.
At this statement, my brain did something of the following: I created
a topographical data structure representing the surface area of her body,
broke it up into roughly equivalent area, and sorted them according to
priority.
Someone should take my computer away. And, with stuff like THAT happening,
it'll probably be her!
Duane
From: ins559n@aurora.cc.monash.edu.au (Andrew Bulhak)
Today I went to McDonalds for lunch; since it was a pleasantly warm
day, the restaurant was full of customers, and there were several long
queues and not enough attendants.
The first thing that came to my mind was whether this McD, being a
multiprocessor situation, implements the bakery algorighm for scheduling.
After some minutes in the queue, I observed that the load averages
must be astronomical.....
From: mcovingt@aisun3.ai.uga.edu (Michael Covington)
From my 8-year-old daughter, today:
"What would it be like if pets had pets? That would be so... _recursive_!"
From: amb@mundil.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Aaron Marcus BURNHAM)
Hacking at a friend's place on the weekend, I was offered the dregs of the
chips he was having for tea. They were in a cardboard box inside a paper bag,
and after eating what was left in the box, I screwed up the bag and put it
aside. But my friend said I hadn't finished them, so I had a look in the bag
under the box and saw the fries that had fallen in between. "Ahhh", I said,
"Chip cache", and then said something about false-bottomed boxes before I
realised what he was lauging at.
Aaron "stop the spead of quoted middle names from AFU" Burnham.
From: rkroll%cmptech.uucp@csn.org (Russell Kroll)
... your dog is named "Kludge", in this case pronounced (klooj)
From: kulesa@acsu.buffalo.edu (Royal Nuisance)
...for some reason you never *did* get around to reading yesterday's
newspaper, and when you place *today's* newspaper on top of it on
the kitchen table, you think: "X-Supersedes:"...
...you see numerous references to the campus medical building, Michael
Hall, in campus publications, and the first thing that pops into
your head is rec.gambling net.personality Michael R. Hall...
...you're the only one in the room who gets a kick out of the fact that
the #2 and #3 spots on the 1993 Forbes 400 list of wealthiest
individuals are, respectively, Bill Gates and entertainment mogul
John Kluge...
--The Royal Nuisance, of the State University of New York at Buffalo.
From: "Paul E. King"
You may be interested in the following:
When sending X-mas cards you try to put your greeting into a dynamic
link library.
When debugging code, you figure the project isn't
getting enough attention and needs a little more self-esteem.
When listening to your answering machine, you try to pass the messages
to a calling subroutine.
From: jwbirdsa@picarefy.picarefy.com (James W. Birdsall)
I was flipping through the TV listings the other day and the title of an
old Lucy episode caught my eye: "Lucy Is a Process Server."
It took me about fifteen seconds to make that one resolve sensibly.
From: auj@aber.ac.uk (Alun Jones)
Last week I was trying to get PC-NFS upgraded on the PC I use (for my
sins...) Due to the non-standard driver I have to use it took about
3 attempts to get it up & running.
Anyway, last night I walked into a public terminal room and on the
whiteboard there were notes for some class. The first thing that hit my eyes
was the phrase:
net profit
It took a while for me to parse that one right!
From: cpu@chac.win.net (Kip Crosby)
Yesterday I was making arrangements to pick up a new laptop and,
since this was a new vendor too, I needed the address. The
salesrep told me it was 2048 Fourth Street, I laughed, she asked
me why, and I said "Well, it's 2K 2-squared street." She paused
and asked me, much too gently, "Do you think like that a lot?"
From: tsw@cypher.apple.com (Tom Watson)
In article , drs@netcom.com (Data Rentals and
Sales) wrote:
>
> While working in pre-hexadecimal days, I once added up an expense
> report in octal (because there were no 8'2 or 9's in it), quite by
> mistake. The next day I got a call from a young lady in accounting.
> "Uh, Mr. Quitt? Your expense report has all the right signatures on
> it, but I can't get it to add up to the same number you did". "What
> do you get?" (She responded with the correct total, which fortunately
> had a nine in it). "Uh, go ahead and use that number - I see what I
> did wrong". Yeah, right - try and explain it?
>
>
>
Your error was caught in time. I had a friend who, while programming a
PDP-8
(it was a while ago) added (or subtracted) her checkbook in octal. Things
were interesting, but soon hit the fan (a check bounced, or something). In
those days thinking in octal was done on an 8+ hour basis. She had a hard
time explaining it to her husband (who was in Material Science at the
time).
From: ScottM@cup.portal.com (Scott - Maxwell)
I was adding up my phone bill today (just checking AT&T's math) and when I
was done I realized I had added the thing in hex.
From: acb@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au (Andrew Bulhak)
You Know You've Been Raytracing Too Long when.....
Today, when I was commuting home on the bus (50 minutes each
way), when I finished reading the newspaper, I had some ~25 minutes to
spend just sitting there (this was somewhere near the former Motorola
plant whose street number is 666, but I digress), and my glance fell
on the earrings of the woman seated directly in front of me. I caught
myself thinking about how the gold texture of the earrings looks
_so_ _much_ like the gold texture done by Persistence of Vision.
-- Andrew "The earrings must have taken long to define too, as they
were toroidal" Bulhak
From: gavin@sdl.ug.eds.com (Gavin Matthews)
Andrew Bulhak (acb@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au) wrote:
> You Know You've Been Raytracing Too Long when.....
You know you've been playing with a Newton too long when you're
reading a cartoon and you look back to see if any of the hand-printed
words have changed into different type-written words.
From: R_WINES@TRZCL1 (Rodney Wines)
I'll sometimes be watching the credits for a movie or TV show scroll by,
and I'll want to read something, and I'll start to look for the "scroll
lock" key, or for my mouse so I can scroll backwards ...
From: davidw@fulcrum.co.uk (David Wilkinson)
YKYBHTL when as you go to sleep at night your dreams take the form of
IP packets bouncing around your head, and then you suddenly realise
that the reason they are bouncing around is because you forget to set
up the address of the name server, so they don't know where to go...
From: mhamiltn@herman.cs.uoguelph.ca (Andrew M Hamilton-wright)
Travis Corcoran (corcoran@dewey.icd.teradyne.com) was shortened to saying:
pre-processor before a standard C compiler), and I haven't had any
compiler courses, haven't used lex or yacc, etc.
The result is that I spend a lot of time reading manuals and
experimenting.
The other morning the phone rang pretty early. In my sleep I tried to
remember if yacc had enough look ahead to parse:
life: sleep ring answer_phone sleep { continue_sleeping(); }
or wether I'd have to use a rule like:
life: sleep ring answer_phone { wake_up(); }
From: huge.wgc1@rx.xerox.com (Hugh Davies)
When it strikes you that the name of the manufacturer of th coffee machine in your
office - Tchibo - is a pretty obscure way to spell the The Name of He Who Greps in
order that he won't find it....
From: sjpaavol@plootu.Helsinki.FI (Santeri Paavolainen)
I was hacking in the front of a X-terminal, and listening to a radio
show, in which I hear a rather funny joke, and thought "now, quickly, I
just move this mouse pointer to my voice memory before the memory of the
joke fades away and cut the joke and paste it to another window (with
the intention to post it to some local humor newsgroup)".
I was just about to move the mouse before the truth hit me. Ummmm.
From: searlea@cs.aston.ac.uk (A SEARLE)
...when someone is sitting next to you and you don't have
the energy or the motivation to talk.
You just write to them....it's sad, but that's me
Ash
From: Bartosz Blacha
Heh, heh, heh, last night I woke up my roommate screaming in my sleep,
because my code ran into an endless loop and I couldn't get out of it...
From: jim@chiba.tadpole.com (Jim Thompson)
You're fighting with your (now ex) wife, and something deep in
the back of your mind wants to fire up 'adb' on her head.
Jim
From: and1000@hermes.cam.ac.uk (Austin Donnelly)
You Know Youve Been Hacking Too Long When...
" " " " FTPing " " "
...after a heavy FTP session you type ls -l at the DOS prompt and are
surprised to see an error.
Austin
From: pgut1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann)
From a phone conversation with a friend:
"blah blah blah, blah blah blah, blah blah
blah blah, blah blah blah. Blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah...
....ummmm....
.....damn page faults!".
Peter.
From: eeibht@eeiud.ericsson.se (Brendan Hassett)
You Know You've Been Hacking Too Long When...
...you think "I've never seen that assembler mnemonic before..."
and you realise that you're looking at a licence plate.
From: chambles@whale.st.usm.edu (John William Chambless)
In article <1993Dec9.223826.3285@cs.aukuni.ac.nz>,
Peter Gutmann wrote:
>
>I once put a Reply-To: line on an envelope without even thinking about it...
I've noticed a similar symptom in myself and others: the tendency to refer
to people in speech by their login names:
"I left mail for dfw, but never heard from him..."
Hmmm...now that I think about it, I don't KNOW the full names of
some of my friends!
From: mason@cis.umassd.edu (Mason Bliss)
In <2eckpf$2bpe@whale.st.usm.edu> chambles@whale.st.usm.edu (John William Chambless) writes:
>I've noticed a similar symptom in myself and others: the tendency to refer
>to people in speech by their login names:
Even more annoying: once of the people that runs our school mud with me
occasionally refers to me by my mud name. Call me humorless, but whenever
he does it, I stare at him uncomprehendingly until he uses my real name,
which is also my login name. :)
From: pgut1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann)
In <1993Dec8.013346.19356@infodev.cam.ac.uk> M.J.Jennings@amtp.cam.ac.uk (Michael Jennings) writes:
> Today, I wished to transfer some money from my cheque account
>to my savings account at a different bank. The easiest way to do this
>is to write a cheque to yourself. Therefore I got out my chequebook and
>wrote out a cheque, making it out to 'mjj12@amtp.cam.ac.uk'.
> I am really a long way gone.
I once put a Reply-To: line on an envelope without even thinking about it...
Peter.
From: Ernst 'pooh' Mulder
Or when you urgently want to talk(1) to someone, and can't find him logged
in anywhere on any system and you go desperate. And then someone tells you
to use a phone... never thought of that.
(Even worse if you then think "phone? I haven't got a VMS account!")
pooh
From: bj@inmos.co.uk (John Honniball)
I got into the shower the other day and found that the head was
badly blocked with lime scale -- hard water round here. I thought:
Hmm... Time to de-gauss the shower head again...
BJ. (John Honniball)
From: juanm@clark.net (Juan Molinari)
Today I read a sentence that made me do a double-take and
shake my head in confusion until it sunk in...
"Freud suggested that people are born with two drives [...]"
(meaning Eros & Thanatos, not A: and C:)
From: enf1@ellis.uchicago.edu (Eric Fischer)
In article <1993Dec13.161902.6412@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu> zevans@nyx10.cs.du.edu (Zack Evans) writes:
>In article <199312121624.DAA01511@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au>,
>Andrew Bulhak wrote:
>
>>On one machine, I believe I even aliased vi to "EDIT.COM".....
>
>And thereafter every file on that machine contained at least one occurrence of
>ZZ.
a pseudo-related problem: I've been using emacs for years, but over
the summer was finally forced to become a vi user, due to the
inavailability of anything else other than ed. Now I can switch
between the two environments relatively easily, but often I find that
whenever I want to move the cursor in emacs after inserting text, I'll
press Escape first. Which, of course, means that when I use a VT100
arrow key, I get the "You have typed ESC ESC... do you really want to
do this?"
argh.
Eric
From: slavins@hera.psy.man.ac.uk (Simon Slavin)
YKYBH Lisp TLW:
You wake up while finishing a particularly vivid dream and think
"How many brackets do I have to close to get out of this thing."
Me. Wednesday. Arghhhhhhhhhhh !
Simon.
From: enf1@athens.uchicago.edu (Eric Fischer)
Well, it finally happened to me last night:
You know when you've been hacking too long when you're lying in bed
trying to figure out why your dream thread has to explicitly yield to
handle the alarm clock interrupt when obviously the interrupt handler
should just be able to fork off a new pre-emptive awake process, and
eventually decide that being awake must make non-reentrant system
calls and have to run as a co-operative thread.
This being the result of staying up until 2:00 re-reading the text for
an 8:00 Operating Systems final...
Eric
From: frank@twg.com (Frank McConnell)
when you read (the writings of ):
> "He's not wired up to code."
...and you think about { caffeine | mindset } and hacking....
From: ab401@freenet.carleton.ca (Paul Tomblin)
frank@twg.com (Frank McConnell) writes:
>when you read (the writings of ):
>> "He's not wired up to code."
>...and you think about { caffeine | mindset } and hacking....
Short Shameful Confession: I didn't realize there was another interpretation
other than Frank's until I read this about 4 times. It was only then that I
realized that the original poster probably meant something to do with house
wiring and electrical codes.
It took a while.
From: elascurn@daimi.aau.dk (Lars R{der Clausen)
Thus spake mason@cis.umassd.edu (Mason Bliss):
>In <2eckpf$2bpe@whale.st.usm.edu> chambles@whale.st.usm.edu (John William Chambless) writes:
>>I've noticed a similar symptom in myself and others: the tendency to refer
>>to people in speech by their login names:
A conversation from a couple months ago:
Me: Gnort!
Gnort: Why can't you call me 'Lars'?
Me: Because your name is 'Gnort' everywhere but in reality!
-Lars 'No, not that Lars. The other one.' Clausen
From: arensb@cfar.umd.edu (Andrew Arensburger)
I just got a bottle of window cleaner and cleaned the screen
on my machine. Then I reached for the virtual desktop manager so I
could clean the other five virtual screens.
From: msb@sq.sq.com (Mark Brader)
Raymond* Chretien has just been appointed as Canada's new envoy to the US.
The (Toronto) Globe and Mail reported this this morning with this headline:
PM's nephew to get top posting
Only when I saw it, I first read it as
PM's nephew to stop posting
I didn't know he was on Usenet...
*I may have the first name slightly wrong; I don't have a paper with me.
From: woodman@bnr.ca (Dave Woodman)
... you fire up an xterm, invoke the on-line phone directory, double click on
the number you want and just can't paste it onto the phone's LCD display!
From: mikej@access.digex.net (Mike Jacobs)
Ernst 'pooh' Mulder (pooh@brokendrum.stack.urc.tue.nl) wrote:
: Or when you want to point at something happening somewhere else in your
: room, and grab your mouse to do so...
just as bad...
I was showing a coworker a new windows card game I dl'ed and how to play it.
to show that a cards get stacked on a pile, I moved the mouse to the
pile then LIFTED it to get that 3-D effect!
From: ab401@freenet.carleton.ca (Paul Tomblin)
tramm@bourbon.ee.tulane.edu (Tramm "Birdbath" Hudson) writes:
> Of course, YKYBHTLW you mention kermit, and absolutley
>no one in the room thinks of the Frog.
What frog?
:-)
From: faught@convex.com (Danny R. Faught)
You know you're in hopeless computer nostalgia mode when you see a
package at Drug Emporium called "Run Stop" and you wonder why they'd
be selling keys for the C64 keyboard there.
Danny "but computers are so much more interesting than pantyhose" Faught
From: jlowrey@skat.usc.edu (John 'Fritz' Lowrey)
... when you hear an advertisment for FTD Florists on the radio
and the say their phone number is 1-800-FTD-XXXX, and you think, "Wow,
dial-up FTP... an 800 number too!". I need a break!
Fritz
From: Jim Durrell
YKYBHTLW....
I just spent the last week hacking the final project for my distributed OS
class, a file system with 3 disks, multiple clients, etc... .
Monday my fiancee woke me up with this big passionate kiss and I found myself
wondering how she was possibly running with only one disk booted. :)
I realized what I was doing and tried to shake it off....
Then all of a sudden I realized I was only kissing one of her and my
algorithms for distributing the workload across the three of them wasn't
working. That led me back to the problem of why I couldn't find the
other two running....
Thank god the semester is done... :)
-- Jim
From: jgeorge@nbi.com (Joe George)
Okay. It finally happened to me. I was driving down the road today, and I
saw a billboard for a car I want to buy (a Saturn, I have one, this is the
second one I was thinking about) and I thought for a moment of getting a
personalized license plate for it, but then I gave up when I remembered that
the State of Georgia doesn't allow special characters in a license plate.
/dev/car just wouldn't be the same without the slashes.
Joe "wants a coffee mug that says /dev/coffee" George
From: nick@garion.it.com.au (Nick Bannon)
You know you've been hacking too long when...
On the bottom of a New Year's champagne bottle's cork, (ignoring for
the moment the fact that I was logged on then) you see the printed
letters 'ASA', and the frst thing that springs to mind is a well-known
encryption algorithm...
Nick.
From: kodak@mentor.cc.purdue.edu (Jason 'KodaK' Balicki)
I'm cleaning off me desk, making a trash pile. With every item I put
on the pile I'm thinking:
delete. . . delete . . .
From: pgut1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann)
In kim@lewis.vislab.su.edu.au (Kim Lester) writes:
>>
>>Joe "wants a coffee mug that says /dev/coffee" George
>There are mugs I believe that have "/dev/mug" on them,
>this is perhaps more appropriate as unix does not assume
>anything about a "file"'s contents... :-)
The large box full of rubbish next to me is marked "/dev/bin".
From: maddison@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au (David Maddison)
1) You're speaking to someone on the phone and they mention something
like a book and you ask can you FTP a copy across.
2) You're walking through the city at a busy time and when you're
trying to navigate an easy route through the crowd you think of
yourself as a TCP/IP network packet.
3) You speak to a non-Internut person and think they're familiar
with the Nutwork and have an email address and know about the
newsgroups you've been reading.
4) You can't understand that it is possible that some people
don't have email.
5) You go to the supermarket and wonder what the TCP/IP address
of the scanner is and whether it can be "fingered".
6) You categorize people into those with 'Net addresses and those without.
David Maddison
Based in Melbourne, Australia
From: pgut1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann)
In <2g3vi4$93e@sunb.ocs.mq.edu.au> maddison@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au (David Maddison) writes:
>How long do you think you could go without 'Net access.
>When you go on vacation do you make special arrangements like
>taking a laptop and modem with you?
I spent a few days in hospital some time ago... after about the second day I
had to check my mail and news, so I hobbled out to the bus stop, caught a
bus home, spent a few hours catching up on everything, hobbled back to the
bus stop, and got back to the hospital in time for the evening patient ping.
I managed to borrow a laptop from a friend to see me through the next few
days (at the rate of a book every two hours I'd exhausted my reading
material).
When I finally kick the bucket I'll probably crawl out of my grave every few
days just to check my mail.....
Peter.
From: dave@gilly.cca.org
You notice an unbelievably stupid and obnoxious and unreasonably-
posted commercial post from some total moron who you've already
attacked for this sort of thing, and you're just bopping into vi
to flame the shit out of him, when..... the alarm goes off and
you wake up. ARG!!!!!
From: root@umibox.hanse.de (Bernd Meyer)
elascurn@daimi.aau.dk (Lars R{der Clausen) writes:
>Two years ago, I found a pair of sunglasses with a small sticker saying
>'ANSI compliant'. I immediately bought them, only to loose them in Germany
>a week later. I haven't been able to find any like them since. *sniff*
Not to mention the cooking gear that said "Super email" on the cover and
took me about ten seconds of heavy thinking to get right....
Bernie
From: kim@lewis.vislab.su.edu.au (Kim Lester)
One evening after a heavy week of network configuration I needed to call
a technical colleague, sooo I picked up the phone and dialled his IP address
(I used "*" for dot) and I only twigged halfway thru dialling cause the
"dot" didn't feel quite right...
-Kim
From: jeremy.reimer@iflex.wimsey.com (Jeremy Reimer)
JB> From: kodak@mentor.cc.purdue.edu (Jason 'KodaK' Balicki)
JB> Organization: Purdue University
JB> Message-ID:
JB>
JB> I'm cleaning off me desk, making a trash pile. With every item I
JB> put on the pile I'm thinking:
JB>
JB> delete. . . delete . . .
I had a similar thing happen to me recently. I saw one of my manilla
file folders on the floor (such is my highly organized paper filing
system) and I suddenly realized that I was just standing there, looking
at it...
Then I realized that I was trying to mentally "double-click" on it to
reveal the contents!
To me this is prime proof that the idea that GUIs have to look like
"real-world equivalents" is bunk, because nobody (or very few people)
use the real world equivalents enough any more to be more familiar with
them than they are with files, directories, etc.
Nevertheless, I still like OS/2's WPS, even if it does cause me to
look at real file folders strangely.
Jeremy Reimer
From: abcc@DIALix.oz.au (Adrian Booth Computing Consultants)
In <010294124717Rnf0.77b7@kzdoos.hacktic.nl> koos@kzdoos.hacktic.nl (Koos van den Hout) writes:
>jgeorge@nbi.com (Joe George) writes:
>>second one I was thinking about) and I thought for a moment of getting a
>>personalized license plate for it, but then I gave up when I remembered that
>>the State of Georgia doesn't allow special characters in a license plate.
>Is it possible to get a personalized license plate without living in the
>given state or without even owning a car (the last one seems a bit impossible
>to me...).
>I'd **LOVE** to have a plate with 'RFC822' on it.
Yesterday I was driving behind a car that had "RWX-726" as its plate
number: I caught myself trying to guess if 726 was the inode number or
the file's size in bytes...
This implies that there already *is* an RFC-822 plate, at least Down Under!
From: bereza@elm.csis.gvsu.edu (Bill Bereza)
When you see a bag of snack chips calles CC Ricers and your first
thought is that Ricers is getting a carbon copy of the chips.
From: mhamiltn@herman.cs.uoguelph.ca (Andrew M Hamilton-wright)
. . . you want to find the full definition of a word found in
"spell" -- and it takes a minute to figure out why "man "
didn't work . . .
From: jolomo@netcom.com (Joe Morris)
....you pour Mountain Dew into a clear glass and it looks tasty.
....you hear an old song with extranious "Yeah"s and "Allright"s and
think of the compiler defines to stick around those output statements,
#ifdef OBNOXIOUS, and actually get to the point where you're thinking
about yet another rcs of the Makefile, and then realize:
"My friends are right, these computers have done hypnotized me"
From: kodak@mentor.cc.purdue.edu (Jason 'KodaK' Balicki)
bereza@elm.csis.gvsu.edu (Bill Bereza) writes:
>When you see a bag of snack chips calles CC Ricers and your first
>thought is that Ricers is getting a carbon copy of the chips.
My first thought was that it would complain about either not finding the
file "Ricers" or spouting "bad magic number".
From: falcor@netcom.com (Howard J. Poe)
mason@cis.umassd.edu (Mason Bliss) writes:
>In falcor@netcom.com (Howard J. Poe) writes:
>>Plumbing multi-tasks the same way MS-Windoze does... non-preemptively.
>Heh... That reminds me: Last week, my toilet started to back up. The first
>thing through my mind was "Argh! The toilet crashed!".
>Odd...
I sometimes feel that my house is so messy because I have a poorly
implemented garbage collection algorithm. Hmm... maybe I should work
on debugging it.
-Howard J. Poe
From: ScottM@cup.portal.com (Scott - Maxwell)
I was staying at my friends house one night and his Golden Retriever
was hanging out in his room. We were getting ready to sack out after
a long hacking session (MATRIX [C-64 Unix] hacking). Ivan (the dog)
was sitting next to my bed and I said "Give me your paw" Ivan laid
down on the floor instead. My friend said "The shake hands feature
on the dog has a bug in it." It took about 15 seconds for the 2 of
us to realize what he had just said. We ended up laughing hysterically
about it for about an hour.
From: elascurn@daimi.aau.dk (Lars R{der Clausen)
...the connection out of the house finally is repaired, and you exclaim:
'Ah! The world is up again!'
-Lars
From: matstyer@acs.eku.edu
A couple stories of my own:
About three weeks ago, I woke up in the middle of the night, look at the
clock and saw "3:14", and immediately thought "Pi!"
This week I caught myself trying to cut and paste one of my dreams
("let's just take part of this dream and put it over there")
A year or so I was teaching a class on computer architecture, and we
were doing cache. I had the students working on an in-class assignment
simulating a cache, they were going along
"hit"..."hit"..."miss"..."miss"... when I hear one of students say, "You
just sunk my battleship!".
From: michael@hal6000.thp.Uni-Duisburg.DE (Michael Staats)
YKYHBHTL when you are listening to a talk about computer speech
reconition and think that this talk should be "speech recognized" and
filtered with
| uniq | sed s/quasi//g
because the speaker often repeats some word three times or more at the
end of a sentence (or in the middle...). The sed line should be clear :-)
Michael
From: gothick@dcs.warwick.ac.uk (Gothick)
...when you turn the cold tap up, and the shower gets hotter, and you
immediately think "God, this shower's badly written".
Matt
From: fanf@inmos.co.uk (Anthony Finch (PFUE))
You know you've been emailing too much when...
I was in the middle of composing an email to someone in the same building
when he came up behind me to look at a book I have. This completely threw
me since my brain thought he was in two places at once.
Anthony "Gung'f jung jr pnyy n urnqshpx" Finch
From: lance@avalon.demon.co.uk ("Lance S. Buckley")
YKYBHTLW:
You pop a disk out of the floppy drive when you've finished
taping Ren & Stimpy on TV. It was in the middle of a backup and
it won't recover. Shoot me, make it clean and quick.
From: enf1@ellis.uchicago.edu (Eric Fischer)
In biology class a few minutes ago, the professor was talking about
various characteristics of DNA, and brought up dinucleotide repeats,
sections of DNA which contain the same two nucleotides over and over
again.
And what was going through my mind? "Hmmm... it's probably a way of
trying to catch segmentation faults... you'd think we'd have evolved a
better form of memory protection by now. Or maybe there used to be
code there and somebody patched the binary and wrote over it with no-ops..."
0xDEADBEEF,
Eric
From: hucke@sumter.cso.uiuc.edu (Matt Hucke)
enf1@ellis.uchicago.edu (Eric Fischer) writes:
>And what was going through my mind? "Hmmm... it's probably a way of
>trying to catch segmentation faults... you'd think we'd have evolved a
Yet another YKYBHTLW...
I bought a compact disk (music, rather than data). While reading the
booklet, I noticed that for _each_ of the ~20 songs, the name of the writer
and the producers were listed, as well as "stereo". Only a single item
was "mono" rather than stereo, and only one had a different writer.
And then the thought struck me, "they must have wasted at least 600-700
bytes by repeating all of this; pointers to a single instance would have
been sufficient." It was a few seconds before I realized that "bytes"
was meaningless, as the cost of printing the booklet was proportional to
the page count rather than how many characters are present...
From: isc26532@leonis.nus.sg (Chan Nicodemus)
When you: Listen to a faulty cassette tape on your stereo and think
to yourself that you have to disinfect it for viruses and
hope your other tapes haven't been infected yet.
Nico.
From: pagan@meiko.co.uk (Stephen Payne)
YKYBHTLW you wake up to find your emacs buffer full of spaces and beeping
at you.
From: Perry.Rovers@kub.nl (Perry Rovers)
When you: read a snailmail message and wonder why there are no dots in
the address.
Also, when you're trying to cook something and suddenly the ftp sites
for recipes appear in your mind.
From: faught@convex.com (Danny R. Faught)
YKYBHTLW you pick up your trusty office water cup that hasn't been
properly washed in weeks and think, "Man, I'd better check out a
newer copy from revision control."
From: benco@soda.berkeley.edu (Ben Cottrell)
Yesterday I was in a hurry to do something, and I had to eat dinner first.
The thought that ran through my head was:
cat /dev/plate > /dev/mouth &
Strange...
From: mbridson@morgan.ucs.mun.ca (Mary Bridson)
I had oen of 'those' experiences today, taking notes in class. I've been
working on designing a language and writing a compiler for it recently.
I was taking notes in class when I suddenly had the thought, "Wait, that
sentence is ambiguous... won't parse. Have to put braces around the two
clauses..." Suddenly I realized I was planning to redesign English. =)
I don't know what to make of dreams involving BNF notation...
From: cskerr@hellcat.ecn.uoknor.edu (Charles S Kerr)
You know you've been hacking too long when...
I saw the following sign: "road const." on the interstate while I was driving
home late from a long night at the computer lab. My reaction was: "thank Grok
the road has a const type-qualifier; wouldn't want anyone fooling around
with the value of the road while _I'm_ driving on it."
OTOH, if the number of years that interstate's been torn up is any indication,
I might have had it right after all.
From: Morten.Sickel@si.sintef.no (Morten Sickel)
A friend of mine told me about some problems with his car. I had heard of a
lot of other cars of the same kind that had somethisng that seemed as the same
thing so I answered:
"That is probably a known bug"
Until I realized that the ohter cases I had heard about was with older cars:
"But it maybe is corrected in that version"
From: sommers@gatwick.sgp.slb.com (Roger Sommers)
In article lo5@agate.berkeley.edu, benco@soda.berkeley.edu (Ben Cottrell) writes:
>
>Yesterday I was in a hurry to do something, and I had to eat dinner first.
>The thought that ran through my head was:
>cat /dev/plate > /dev/mouth &
Like it. How about:
$ egrep -v '(celery|broccoli|spinach)' /dev/plate | cat - /dev/beer_can \
| chew | swallow 2>/dev/burp | digest 2>/dev/fart > /dev/toilet &
All without leaving your seat ;o)
And yes, I'm a fussy eater. So what?
% egrep '(celery|broccoli|spinach)' /dev/plate > ~fido/foodbowl &
Nothing wasted.
-Rog.
From: John W. Sinteur
You Know You Have Been Hacking Color Too Long when...
you drive home in the early evening - which is special enough to make
you note the blue-to-red colors of the sky, caused by the setting sun,
and you wonder if it would look any better in 24 bits color...
How many dpi is the sky, anyway?
-John
From: elascurn@daimi.aau.dk (Lars R{der Clausen)
I am reading a book of psycology at the moment. In the section about
language, there was an example of a context-dependent sentence:
'There's a bug in the living-room.'
The first meaning I thought of was neither of those the book had.
But I can't help wondering what a bug in a living-room would be like -
slanting walls, no windows (Yeah!) or what?
-Lars
From: ccusbdm@brunel.ac.uk
>hemr@hulaw1.harvard.edu (Kurt Wm. Hemr, Harvard Law School) writes:
>>In article <2k25a3$ep9@belfort.daimi.aau.dk>,
>>elascurn@daimi.aau.dk (Lars R{der Clausen) writes:
>>>[YKYBHTLW...]
>[etc...]
Well, I answered the phone this morning, and started to log into it by
spelling out my login_ID and password. Luckily I didn't get as far as my
password before I realised what I was doing.
Then this afternoon, I wondered what time it was, and looked at my screen for
the clock - *that reflex seems to be better ingrained than glancing at my
watch*!
From: jwbirdsa@picarefy.picarefy.com (James W. Birdsall)
In article John W. Sinteur writes:
>How many dpi is the sky, anyway?
Rather a lot. I recall once looking up at some wispy clouds against a
background of blue sky and thinking that the resolution had to be extremely
high to get such good detail on the clouds...
Oops.
From: klukens@halcyon.com (Kay Lukens)
Yesterday morning when I turned on the Interplak toothbrush, it emitted a
series of faint chimes, and the brush did not move. I said to my husband,
"Look at this! The toothbrush is doing Sad Mac!"
Kay Lukens
From: pgut1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann)
In ccusbdm@brunel.ac.uk writes:
>Well, I answered the phone this morning, and started to log into it by
>spelling out my login_ID and password. Luckily I didn't get as far as my
>password before I realised what I was doing.
I was arranging to meet a friend of mine at 10am at a computer disposal sale,
and he mentioned that he had a champagne breakfast at a place called Pt.
Chevalier on that day. I arranged a time to meet on the basis that he could
get to the sale at about 10, spend maybe an hour there, and then still have
plenty of time to get out to Pt.Chev in time for the champagne. He mumbled
something about the event starting at 8:30. "Why on earth would anyone want to
have breakfast at 8.... oh". It wasn't until then that I realised that
most of the world doesn't live in night mode.
Peter.
From: im14u2c@cegt201.bradley.edu (Joe Zbiciak)
YKYHBHTL when you say to yourself "I pinged reality and determined our
connection to the host was down..." (Said this morning, as I sent
wakeup packets to myself every 20 minutes or so, but was unable to
get a stable boot (even yet.) (Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwn)
--Joe "Will sleep for food... ;-)" Zbiciaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
From: ily@bronze.lcs.mit.edu (Rob Freundlich)
YKYBHTLW your alarm clock goes off and you think "great! we have
connectivity! Put away the OhmMeter!" (happened to a friend who's
been trying to solve a network problem for _far_ too long)
From: pgut1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann)
A few days ago for some reason I woke up during the morning with a very bad
case of shivering (which had nothing to do with the actual temperature, it's
as hot as anything here even at night - I still don't know what caused it).
Anyway, after about 15 minutes of shaking I thought "I suppose I should run
some diagnostics on my arms and legs to find out what's wrong". Then I
found the flaw: "If I do find a problem, what do I do about it? I don't
think you can get spare limbs" (at least that proves I was still capable of
rational thought). Eventually I managed to get back to sleep again...
Peter.
From: lance@avalon.demon.co.uk ("Lance S. Buckley")
...
you read a letter in a magazine, from a total _moron_, and you
spend a good 30 seconds wondering which key to hit so you can
follow up with that brilliant flame which just popped into your
head.
From: kirrilyr@union3.su.swin.edu.au (Kirrily Robert - SINN Editor)
I've had two horrilbe YKYBHTL experiences lately, which I thought I
would relate...
The first happened to my flatmate, who was listening to a song on
the radio by John Farnham (Australian singer, classic rock stations,
peoples mothers like him). My flatmate stared at the radio
perplexed for a while and then asked "Are these lyrics 'lifted up
by INTEL' or have I been spending too much time at the computer??"
He had been spending too long at the computer - the lyrics are
'Lifted Up By ANGELS'.
The second incident happened to me, when I was thinking about an
ex-bf. I'm still a little ashamed to admit it.... but my thought
was "nice hardware.... pity about the interface"
*cringe*
From: becker@rowlf.cc.wwu.edu (Cloud Dancer)
... you start assigning interrupt priority levels to things in your life.
I realized this when I was programming, and my girlfriend asked me how I was
doing. It took about a minute for me to rely, and she teased me about paying
more attention to my computer than her. I automatically replied that my brain
had IRQ0, and my eyes IRQ1, and ears IRQ2. Only when she looked at me
quizically did I realize what I had said. :-)
Cloud Dancer
From: Thomas Ward Hanselman
Here's another one:
I was walking in the nearby mall one day, when I heard someone say 'seashell'.
The first thing that popped into my mind was UNIX's C Shell!.
TH.
From: dave@CS.Arizona.EDU (Dave Schaumann)
Last night, I was listening to the radio, and someone used the phrase
"there's only 3 of them in the world". It struck me as odd that
there were 3; after a moment I realized that the reson it seemed
odd is that 3 is not a power of 2...
From: at425@yfn.ysu.edu (Tom Salyers)
Prime example:
Driving home the other night, I heard this really detestable cover version
of an old Nilsson song and thought, "Wow, I really hate the way they ported
this song."
From: bcombee@nyx10.cs.du.edu (Ben Combee)
I was driving down Piedmont Drive here in Atlanta when I saw a
billboard for The Container Store. It had in big letters
"Destination: Organization". I immediately thought "No, no, no!
RFC-822 doesn't specify a Destination field, although it would
be correct if it went 'Organization: Destination'".
From: walth@netcom.com (Walter Howard)
You're having a great brainstorm with someone and then someone else stupid
walks into the room and you think, "Uh oh, 300 baud".
From: jiml@up.edu (Jim Little)
I'm one of those people who has a great difficulty getting up in the
morning. Well, this morning, I woke up about an hour early. I glanced
at my clock in surprise, then thought to myself, "Wow, somebody must have
upgraded the firmware to v1.1."
I prompty went back to sleep.
-Jim "I need a vacation" Little
From: bh@access3.digex.net (Bill Harrison)
I was watching the television, and a boring scene was on the program. I
wondered why the screen blanker hadn't kicked in.
I misspelled something with a pen today and my first thought was to hit
delete..
From: oldsma@mary (Manny Olds)
YKYBHTLW ... You are reading an article about comas (no, not
punctuation), and the article talks about "does not respond
to outside stimuli", and you think, "I guess they have to
do a hard reset."
From: oldsma@mary (Manny Olds)
YKYBHTLW ... You start having dreams with a text-based interface.
From: djohnson@seuss.ucsd.edu (Darin Johnson)
My Aunt and Uncle raised sheep for awhile, and she used to do a bit
of part-time vet work occasionally as well. So when I told her I
was working at an AI center, she gave me a strange look :-)
She thought I meant Artificial Insemination.
From: lrucker@parcplace.com (Lee Ann Rucker)
I overheard someone saying "I'm getting antsy" (slang for nervous) and
thought "getting ANSI what?"
From: at425@yfn.ysu.edu (Tom Salyers)
So I'm watching _Schindler's List_ the other night and notice the sign on
Schindler's factory: "Deutsche Emailwarenfabrik" (apologies to German speakers
if I mangled that =) ) .
The first thought in my head: "Email? In the forties? Nahhh...." Someone
please kill me.....=)
From: wollman@ginger.lcs.mit.edu (Garrett Wollman)
About a week ago, one of the elevators in our building got stuck with
the doors halfway closed on the first floor. I informed a security
guard, he squeezed into the empty car, and sure enough, the doors were
stuck. He then went over to the control panel and proceeded to flick
switches: no luck. He finally turned off the elevator power and
turned it back on again.
My first comment was, ``Rebooting the elevator...''
(Scary thing is, there might actually be a PeeCee hiding somewhere
that I can't see that actually really was controlling the thing...)
-GAWollman
From: umennis0@cc.umanitoba.ca (Sean Douglas Ennis)
You read the
Motor
Harley Davison
Cycles
Logo on the back of someone's jacket and think it said Motorola (sp?).
Sean
From: M.D.Crowther@bradford.ac.uk (Mark Crowther)
.... you think "I wonder if my letter (snail mail) has reached its
destination yet?" "Yes, it must have otherwise it would have bounced..."
[I really found myself momentarily thinking this this morning!]
From: bittle@antares.canisius.edu (Jason Bittle)
here's me YKWYBHTL...
I was driving with my friend, and he was talking how he took some books out of
a local public library. I asked him if he could check out some lacrosse books
when he asked "how come you can't do it". Before I even realized it, I
blurted out "I don't have an account there." (meaning I don't have a
library card) Then I thought (but didn't say) I wonder if I could use archie
and ftp it..
Gotta get out more..
From: lrucker@parcplace.com (Lee Ann Rucker)
You panic when someone says "The Sun's just gone down"
From: pete@minster.york.ac.uk (Pete Fenelon)
In article <2ntivm$eb8@news.dmpe.CSIRO.AU> Stephen Oakes wrote:
; ...you go wine tasting, and tip the left-overs into the "bit-bucket".
...you type ``telnet localhost 13'' to get the date and time after you've
been drinking too much!
pete
From: ksh@charybdis.128.227.224.10 (Kevin S Ho)
> You panic when someone says "The Sun's just gone down"
YKYBHTLW: you don't get that for a minute, teh realize
that there sometimes is a large object in teh sky that
rises whe I go to bed.
From: s934186@minyos.xx.rmit.EDU.AU (David John Chapman)
... when you put some chocolates on the coffe table, and someone asks if
they can have some, and you say "yeah, they're for global distribution"
From: hucke@sumter.cso.uiuc.edu (Matt Hucke)
s934186@minyos.xx.rmit.EDU.AU (David John Chapman) writes:
>... when you put some chocolates on the coffe table, and someone asks if
>they can have some, and you say "yeah, they're for global distribution"
Similarly, when buying food, it was private by default, but if I wanted my
roommates to know they could eat a certain item, I would inform them that
"I've declared this as public".
(this was around the time I was learning C++...)
From: n1ist@netcom.com (Michael L. Ardai)
This morning, I looked next to my bed and found three sneakers. My first
thought was 'oops - parity error'...
Then again, the reason that you often lose one sock in the washer is
someone leaving the washing machine set on odd parity :-)
/mike
From: cpu@chac.win.net (Kip Crosby)
This morning, after staying up till four the night before with my
balky Laserjet, I hastily put two pieces of bread in the toaster,
pushed down the slider, and thought foggily "Why didn't the drive
light go on?"
From: cpu@chac.win.net (Kip Crosby)
This morning, after staying up till four the night before with my
balky Laserjet, I hastily put two pieces of bread in the toaster,
pushed down the slider, and thought foggily "Why didn't the drive
light go on?"
From: smoke@cs.pitt.edu (Sheldon Smoker)
Here's a good one: I was dreaming about a Makefile one night after working
late, and as I was in the quasi-sleep-awake mode around 11:00 the next day
my throat was really dry. I thought, "cat something | throat" would help
relieve my thrist. Then I woke up and thought hhhmm, "throat < something"
would be more efficient... ack!
Sheldon.
Click here for part 2.