* This is it : The canonical list of 'You Know When You've Been Hacking Too Long When'
(Short : List of Hacking too Long)
This list will be crossposted bimonthly to both rec.humor and alt.folklore.computers.
rec.humor because it's where these lists get posted and alt.folklore.computers because there
most posts are made about the behaviour mentioned in the list.
(Note: I'm not sure who, if anybody, is in charge of this document, but the posting of
this list to the newsgroups seemed to have fallen into abeyance...)
I have left the names of the persons who made the entries intact.
* Surgeon General Warning : Reading This List Can Play Funny Tricks With
Your Mind Resulting In The Behaviour Mentioned Below.
At this moment the list contains 0x15C entries.
Share and Enjoy :
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: ftit@sussex.engin.umich.edu (Sergej Roytman)
This just happened to me: I wanted to take an elevator down to the
second floor and I hit the '1' key. Ground floor is 0 so the floor
above it is 1, right? I need a vacation. Now. When does spring
break start?
From: pereckas@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Michael Pereckas)
I once wanted to go to the basement and spent some time looking for
the 0 button before I realized that the floor below 1 is not 0 but B.
From: mllreu01@uctvax.uct.ac.za
In article <djd.716719694@reading>, djd@csg.cs.reading.ac.uk (David Dawkins) writes:
> robm@void.ncsa.uiuc.edu (Rob McCool) writes:
>
>>My alarm went off this morning, I hit the snooze bar, and when it went off
>> again, I hit it again, and made a mental note that I could not do this much
>> longer because my subroutine was mallocing memory (in the clock)
>> each time it went off and printing the free memory on the front, and soon
>> I would run out.
>> ...
>>Rob McCool, NCSA STG System Administrator
>
> I had a similar experience while writing up my third year project. I was
> looking through my sports bag for my toothbrush one evening after a heavy day,
> when I found myself momentarily confused - some part of me was trying to
> do '/toothbrush' ! (search in vi text editor)
>
> I guess loads of people (huh, make that 'Unix' people) want to use grep
> while looking something up in a book...
>
> Dave
> --
Any-one here ever programme in a language called Scheme.
Typical prog looks like this:
(define Shit_lang
(lambda (crap)
(if (eq? crap ())
(display "the shit is over")
(begin
(if (eq? crap never-ending)
(delete! all)
(shit_lang (- crap 1))))))
Now consider a 38 page program like the one above.
Now consider me at 6:00 in the morning, after having coded the fucking
program in 28 almost straight hours.
gee, I wonder why (dir), (cd temp), (nc), etc don't work?
Either my computer is going to explode or I will
Bang.
From: APPMS@CUNYVM.BITNET (Alexandre Pechtchanski)
You know.... when you are trying to recall something and hear in your
head: "parity error at address..."
From: eigenstr@cs.rose-hulman.edu (Todd R. Eigenschink)
...you're writing a homework assignment, and get the end of the line
in the middle of a sentence, tack on a '\', and continue writing on
the next line.
From: ericf@npic.Corp.Sun.COM (Eric Francis)
When you pick up a rootbeer and read the label as "High Res"
not Hires...
From: ftit@ob.engin.umich.edu (Sergej Roytman)
I spent the last couple of days working on several computer-related
projects. Naturally, I was pretty tired, also pretty zonked. You
just can't hack Minix all night and not be. So as I'm putting my head
on the table for a couple hours of sleep, I think,
"telnet sleep.morpheus.com". Woke me right up. You suppose we could
make a Jargon File entry of it? It seems like the stuff Jargon is
made of. Or maybe I should just go back to sleep.
From: pt@geovision.gvc.com (Paul Tomblin)
I was just scanning the "Barnes and Noble" book catalog, and at one point
there was a picture of two books, and I couldn't quite see the one at the
back. "No problem", I thought, "I'll just click on its title bar to raise
it to the front".
From: 9125113g@lux.latrobe.edu.au (Mitch Davis)
In article <1992Sep16.145437.871@tpki.toppoint.de> kris@tpki.toppoint.de (Kristian Koehntopp)
writes:
>In <BuLt8B.DCJ@unix.amherst.edu> twpierce@unix.amherst.edu (Tim Pierce) writes:
>>I've been lobbying for a "reboot" button for humans for awhile now.
>
>At the U of Kiel there is a CS professor, who pauses a while
>and then recapitulates the last two to five minutes of lecture
>if asked _any_ question during his lectures.
>
>Our theory is that any question will crash his lecture interpreter.
Excellent dude! Although I think the term "lecture engine" works better.
Here at La Trobe, we have a CS lecturer who's internals must be in LISP.
Every five minutes, he freezes solid for about thirty seconds then
continues on as if nothing ever happened.
We hypothesize that he's garbage collecting....
Mitch.
From: stirling@ozrout.uucp (Stirling Westrup)
You know, I always wondered if I wasn't a real hacker, since none of the
hacking-too-long incidences had ever happened to me. Well, now one has.
Last evening, while cleaning up my desk, waiting for one stage of a large
make to finish, I managed to stab myself under my thumbnail on a sharp
piece of sheet metal. The sheet metal is an integral part of my desk, and
was most likely put there to serve exactly the purpose it was serviing, ie.
maiming me. Anyway, in intense pain, and with blood spurting out of my
thumb, I started to make a dash for the bathroom, to find something to bind
my wounds with. After a few steps I stopped, went back and hit RETURN on
my terminal, so that the next stage of the make could progress while I was
bleeding to death in the bathroom. Its a bad sign folks, even when in
pain, I do my best to multitask...
From: Joel Sumner <js17@cornell.edu>
When you think of the lyrics of "Jump! Jump!" by Kris Kross and wonder if
they
can be assembled.....
From: anton@cv.ruu.nl (Anton H.J. Koning)
You know you've been hacking to long when you start typing semi-colons
at the end of sentences instead of full stops;
From: twpierce@unix.amherst.edu (Tim Pierce)
On the blackboard in the terminal room of our computer center, a
couple of days ago, there was a pretty lively theological discussion
going on -- you'd go in after a few hours and someone would have
written a little counterpoint to the last message. When describing
this scene to my lover later that day, I tried to recall the exact
words of the quote that sparked it all and found myself thinking, "Why
don't I just log on and download it?"
From: nj@magnolia.Berkeley.EDU (Narciso Jaramillo)
You know when you're hacking too long when you realize that all his flesh
has long since disintegrated into small bubble-like gelatinous lumps of
meat and fat and you might as well put down the axe because it's about
as tender as it's going to get anyway.
From: infidel@gl.pitt.edu (todd j. derr)
... when you can't wake up in the morning because you forgot to push a
return address on the stack the night before.
(never believed that this YNYBHTL stuff was true until that happened.)
From: tzs@stein.u.washington.edu (Tim Smith)
I'm not going to say who this is about so don't ask. He does read the net
sometimes, and has forgotten that I know about this.
Anyway, he was participating in a one-night stand with a woman. The next
morning when he woke up, he thought that she was a PDP-11 and was trying to
figure out how to boot her. Now that's someone who hacks too much.
Even better, the next time this happened to him (!), he thought the other
person was a VAX, and couldn't figure out where to put the floppy.
From: tlukka@vipunen.hut.fi (Tuomas Lukka)
.. been hacking too long when under immense stress, the following sequence
of thought occurs
'My load averages seem to be higher than ever before, the scheduler might
die any moment, and I'm running out of swap space... better kill off
some low-priority unimportant user processes'
From: tlukka@vipunen.hut.fi (Tuomas Lukka)
... when, when reading a book in front of the computer, so, that
the book is under the screen, pointing at me and I'm doing some
odd jobs on the computer every once in a while, so the keyboard
is on my lap, when I got to the end of a page, I pressed <space>!
This really happened to me about a minute ago! I'm still in the
same place, glad I had my computer ready to take note.
From: tendico@hubcap.clemson.edu (Todd Endicott)
Okay, this isn't a great one, but it did happen...
Yesterday, after leaving work, I got in the elevator and accidentally
hit a floor button between my location and my desired destination.
(D'oh!) Not only did I look for the "undo" button, I was also scornful
for a few moments about our building having such primitive elevators.
From: bernie@metapro.DIALix.oz.au (Bernd Felsche)
>I have a Sparc 2 and an HP X-terminal on my desk. Both screens at the
>same height, both colour, both about the same size. I frequently get
>confused as to why attempting to move the mouse off one screen doesn't
>move it onto the other. After all, they're both running X....
Happened to me with a sun and an ascii terminal.
It's tough when your keyboard focus moves as you drag the
mouse to the edge, and then you notice the flashing cursor
on the ascii terminal, so you start typing on the Sun
keyboard and (if you're lucky) nothing happens.
From: daz@hal.gnu.ai.mit.edu (David A. Z.)
)Happened to me with a sun and an ascii terminal.
I hate to say this (really) but I used to work at a desk with
3 PC's (doing serial network developement) and often confused keyboard
moniter correspondance.
The confusion ussually didn't last long though. After a little
bagging away at a keyboard with no result appearing on the moniter, I'd
hit CTRL-ALT-DEL and the location of the resulting disk-drive reseek noises
would soon after clue me in. :)
From: mcastro@iris-dcp.es
After been working with an hypertext system we are developing,
I sat down at home -at last!- to watch tv. After 2 min. or so
I began to wonder what I was seeing, inmediatly looking for
the INFO key in the remote control!. ( No teletext in my tv ).
BTW: I sometimes wanted grep to work with videotapes, and of
course, books; is a pity you can't grep dead trees.
From: Josef Moellers <mollers.pad@sni.de>
More than once during the last couple of weeks, the following happened
to me:
I have three children. All three show the same behaviour:
They do something they shouldn't do, we tell them to stop, the do it
just once more.
My reaction: "Well, they prefetched the instruction and are executing it
in the delay slot..."
From: zebee@sirius.ucs.adelaide.edu.au (Zebee Johnstone)
jch+@cs.cmu.edu (Jonathan Hardwick) writes:
>I've been out-scared. I only realized that I'd misspelled "comprise"
>when idling in the shower this morning, 12 hours after reading Tod's
>post. I'm not sure if I'm more worried about the time delay, or the
>very fact that my brain had been processing it in the background...
My brain always processes in the background. I obtain facts, and
then the batch processor takes over, producing the answer a while later.
Isn't it funny how the output queue always seems to be located in
the shower?
From: dave@eram.esi.COM.AU (Dave Horsfall)
After fooling around all day with routers etc, you pick up the phone
and start dialling an IP number...
From: c3q@vax5.cit.cornell.edu
I had a cs lab practicum assigment due this Thursday (12 NOV 92). I didn't
seriously get down to work until Monday. I had been using OpenWindow's
TextEditor on a Sun, and switched to Emacs (FSF's manual in hand).
After Monday 14 hr.s
Tues 12 hr.s
Wed/Thurs 21 hr.s
------
47 hr.s
of using emacs w 9 hr.s of sleep interspersed, I was in hard core EMACS mode.
Thursday night I said something in haste, and wanted to retract it.
All I could think of was C-a C-@ C-e C-w
Call me a nerd...
From: wollman@sadye (Garrett Wollman)
My boss is away for two weeks, so I have been working on his
workstation. It's a double-headed SGI Indigo with IndigoVideo, so I
have one screen that I'm actually working on, and another one for the
Video Control Panel and live video input. The way this system works,
you can move the mouse off one screen and onto the other (they are
connected at the inside borders). Today I wanted to change the
channel on the TV receiver, so I tried to move the mouse pointer off
the left side of the left-hand window to click on the `channel down'
button.
Hey, this ``Hacking too long'' stuff isn't half bad... I WANT one of
these workstations!
From: auj@aber.ac.uk (Alun Jones)
You know when you've been hacking too long when the message
New mail in /usr/spool/mail/auj
becomes an NMI
From: michaelr@spider.co.uk (Michael S. A. Robb)
... when that home project you thought would only take a single weekend has
now passed its first decade of development.
It started off as a contribution to a school project using an apple ][. Then
a new version was rewritten for an old Atari 800. Development moved to UNIX
at university, then back to MS-DOS after graduation. Wandering through my old
archives was a surprise when I saw the timestamps (Using timestamps has become
second nature to me).
It scares me to think what will happen in the future ...
{wavy dream cloud - two generations later in a futuristic house} ...
..."Children, when your great-grandfather reached your age, he started a great
project which was to last many generations. It is now your turn to join with
us in this great task which has been given to us so many generations ago
by our ancestors...."
{end of wavy dream cloud}
Does anyone know what software has the earliest recorded timestamp?
From: thayne@unislc.uucp (Thayne Forbes)
I don't know if anyone mentioned this last time but...
You know you've been hacking too long when you can remember your
ethernet (not ip) address. I was tweaking a config file this
morning, and I was rather distressed when I was able to remember
that mine is 00 AA 00 02 98 50. I think I will go home now and
take an asprin.
From: eigenstr@cs.rose-hulman.edu (Todd R. Eigenschink)
The bell rings ending class while the prof is in the middle of a
sentence, and you think, "How in the world is he going to carry that
continuation back to his office?"
From: wollman@trantor.emba.uvm.edu (Garrett Wollman)
In article <1kodicINNm79@ceres.kingston.ac.uk> cc_s525@ceres.kingston.ac.uk (Francis Bell)
writes:
>In article <1kj23vINNi38@uk-news.uk.sun.com> alecm@coyote.uk.sun.com writes:
>The office opposite has a sign on the door "please make sure this door is
>locked before you leave"; the other week I found myself wondering if lock-d
>knew about the door...
Would you really want the door calling its owner up on the phone every
few minutes to find out if she has crashed yet?
(Or do I have that backwards? Sun's fault, anyway.)
On a completely different subject: It's been very cold here this past
week. One day I was walking past one of those bank time/temperature
signs, and it proudly proclaimed that the outisde temperature was -0.
For a while, I caught myself wondering if it was sign-magnitude or
one's-complement...
(That's -0 Fahrenheit, by the way, or -18 for people in civilized
lands.)
From: daniel@mertwig.uucp (Daniel Drucker)
Yesterday afternoon the following came into my head:
grep homework /dev/backpack
I got a device failure back; I had forgotten my backpack in the last
class.
From: Hamish_Hubbard@kcbbs.gen.nz (Hamish Hubbard)
...you're chatting to someone on a BBS, they phone you voice and ask
you a question, and you write the answer down on some code printout...
...you go to the movies and it takes 5 minutes to get used to the
flicker (damn low refresh rate...).
From: Jeremy_Reimer@mindlink.bc.ca (Jeremy Reimer)
> ...you go to the movies and it takes 5 minutes to get used to the
> flicker (damn low refresh rate...).
ACK... I've NOTICED this! I never used to even think about the # of frames
per second in films, these days, well....
Once I even caught myself wondering what the colour depth was...
From: peter@NeoSoft.com (Peter da Silva)
When I see a flock of birds, these days, I sit there and try to figure out the
algorithms that determine their movement.
From: msb@sq.com (Mark Brader)
:You know you've been hacking too long when...: The set-up line
for a genre of one-liners told by hackers about themselves. These
include the following:
* not only do you check your email more often than your paper
mail, but you remember your {network address} faster than your
postal one.
* your {SO} kisses you on the neck and the first thing you
think is "Uh, oh, {priority interrupt}."
* you go to balance your checkbook and discover that you're
doing it in octal.
* your computers have a higher street value than your car.
* in your universe, `round numbers' are powers of 2, not 10.
* more than once, you have woken up recalling a dream in
some programming language.
* you realize you have never seen half of your best friends.
[An early version of this entry said "All but one of these
have been reliably reported as hacker traits (some of them quite
often). Even hackers may have trouble spotting the ringer." The
ringer was balancing one's checkbook in octal, which I made up out
of whole cloth. Although more respondents picked that one
out as fiction than any of the others, I also received multiple
independent reports of its actually happening. --- ESR]
But I have something to add to the above, which I've also passed on
to Eric for inclusion in a later version. It turns out that *Grace
Murray Hopper* had trouble balancing her checkbook at one time, and
the reason turned out to be that she was doing it partly in octal!
From: daz@hal.gnu.ai.mit.edu (David A. Z.)
In article <1mih7pINNd29@werple.apana.org.au> acb@zikzak.apana.org.au
(Andrew Bulhak) writes:
)
)In article <1993Feb11.111834.18576@cs.hw.ac.uk> neilg@cs.hw.ac.uk (Neil MG Gall) writes:
)
)>Also on the thread of "You know you've been using a computer too long when..."
)>Er... "taking precautions" whilst staying over at my girlfriend's last night,
)>it crossed my mind that I could just comment out the code that causes her
)>to get pregnant. This kind of thing happens to me all the time, but this
)>one shocked me - I must have a one-track mind...
)
)Of course you can't comment that code out. Firstly, (unless I am very much
)mistaken) you do not have the source to your girlfriend, and even if you
)do, how are you going to recompile her? (I don't think that human beings
)are written in ANSI C, and the source would probably be many megabytes
)in length. :-) )
Humans are mostly written in DNA encoding, which can be modified.
The only real problem is that most states have a law stating that
humans must go through about 168 to 261 months of developement before you
"use them" in this fasion.
From: ssrfagg@susssys1.reading.ac.uk (Graham Fagg)
rogerj@marcus.its.rpi.edu (Diversion (Jeff Rogers)) writes:
>AAArgh!!! One of the silly ones just happened to me...
>I've been playing around with fork bombs and similar stuff lately.
>Yesterday (day before yesterday, if you must know) when my alarm clock went
>off, I thought it was spawning new alarm clock processes and I had to kill
>it quickly so it wouldn't fill up the process table and prevent me from
>doing _anything_ about it. The only problem was, there was a monitor process
>that I didn't kill, and every time I killed off one of the ring_alarm(x)
>processes, it would wait 9 minutes then spawn another one.
>(When I first read a similar one to this, I thought it was just someone
>being theoritical about things that could happen. Now I know better.)
>Diversion "If only I could 'sleep 24000 &'"
>--
>"I can see 'em | "Want me to create a diversion?"
> I can see 'em | Diversion
> Someone wake me when it's over" | rogerj@rpi.edu
Ek!
....try hitting the kill button instead of the sleep button on the clock
next time.
(Have you ever done a kill -9 -1 in your dreams... I did, and then I did it
again on the NFS server as root the following day.....)
From: rel@mtu.edu (Robert Landsparger)
...you try to bring a window to the front of something, then you realize
that "something" is a post-it (tm) on your screen...
From: jbridson@kean.ucs.mun.ca
...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'. =)
From: koos@kzdoos.hacktic.nl (Yup, that's me)
...When you've been low-level debugging ethernets for a week and when you
see two people at a table trying to pick up the same jar of butter and
you directly wonder if they are using the correct CSMA/CD algorithm to
avoid a re-collision...
(Yes, I need a vacation.)
...When you're watching television, a phone number is shown. After it's removed
from the screen, you want to have a second look and directly try to push the
backscroll key...
From: rharlan@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (Rick Harlan)
... you start to disassemble a phone number.
From: gregn@coombs.anu.edu.au (Gregory Newton)
Last year in a period where i had just done a series of
hideous assignments in C and C++ (set by a couple of less than reasonable
lecturers) I had one night where I dreamed I was parsing C code.
I would go through a piece of C code and was taking in what it all meant
and it's structure. The piece of code in question had a lot of #includes
in funny places and I had to retreive the relevant file and parse it
before i went back to the original ...
... well it so happened that I reached a #include for which the
corresponding file was missing - there was nothing to do but abort
compilation - I woke up.
I got the dream another five times that night waking up for each
of them.
I was quite worried about it at the time. Dreams like that just
are not good signs
Greg 'Cloud' Newton
From: Peter Berlich <berlich@hpopf1.cern.ch>
I was discussing some programs with a colleague in front of my
workstation, when outside it grew darker, and I noticed it would
be better to switch on the light. The first thing I did was move
the mouse in direction of the wall switch to click on it.
When making a phone call the other day I lifted the receiver and
dialed the number into the numeric keypad of my keyboard.
From: Pickaxe <jdg41088@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu>
I had just gotten back to my dorm room after yet another programming
all-nighter. There was a written message sitting on the table and my
first thought after reading was to hit r and send a reply. The sad
part is that I was really mad that I couldn't.
*** Collected by Ben Fulton <fulton@nickel.ucs.indiana.edu>
(Tnx 1e6 !)
You know you've been in hack mode too long when...
...you count things on your fingers in binary.
Actually I do this last thing quite often, when counting things on TV
or in a game or something. I find it's easier than counting under my
breath. Anyone else do the same?
- Nick Haines
Indeed - the only way to count - digitally. The real problem isn't the
counting, it's working out what you counted. I cheat by converting to
octal first.
- Greg Lehey
On at least one occasion, I've opened a window to find a phone
number in a file, then tried to cut & paste it to the phone...
- Andrew Arensburger
... you start dreaming code
- Man Wei Tam
You dream that you are a FPU, doing floating-point adds and multiplies
and stressing out because you can't keep up with the CPU. This happened
to me while I was taking a systems design class. Spooky, to say the least.
- johnkal@microsoft.com
this morn, when my SO tried to wake me up, my first groggy thought was..
'you cant open me as a static window, Im an EVENT!' god.. my brain
is mush..
- edman
When your alarm clock goes off, and in your dream you try vainly to figure
out what keyboard command to use to turn it off. (It's happened twice).
- Kraig Eno, kraig@biostr.washington.edu
Or someone sticks a postit-note to your screen and you try to lower it
behind some other windows...
- Chris Keane
When you're dreaming about something completely non-computer related,
and all of a sudden you hit an RTE and wake up.
I don't want to _think_ about what the fact that my sleeping is
apparently an interrupt implies about my lifestyle.
- Christopher Just
While having sex, wondering where her source code is so you can
tweak it to get better.. uh.. performance [ahem].. and recompile. *sigh*.
"maybe give her bigger buffers". :-)
Yes, I admit, this did happen after a long programming project.
Oh well, after I broke up with my girlfriend I thought "Oh, no, now I'm
forced to work in single-user mode." :-/
- Dave Barr
One night (well, morning, actually) after a particularly grueling
coding session, I had a dream in which I was stuck in vi and I just
couldn't get out for the life of me...
You see, I wasn't *using* vi, I was *in* vi. Me. Stuck.
Shudder.
One day I showed a friend how to alias rm so that it would just tuck
files away in a ~/.trash directory for easy un-deletion. That night he
had a dream in which he was debating getting a haircut, and he
rationalized that if he didn't like the new style, he'd just undelete
the hair...
- Rob Hutten
Happens to me all the time. Last month I had a photo of my SO taped to
the corner of the screen and I got lots of comments from passers-by
about "hey, neat GIF", and "_how_ many colours?".
Had to move it. Needed the pixels.
- Nick Haines
When you wake up, and desperatly try to start a compiler so you
can use the 15 minuts wait period to sleep some more.
- Jesper Lauridsen
I "woke up" this morning and thought, "I'll checkpoint here, snooze a
bit more and then revert to checkpoint." A while later I went up
another consciousness notch and realized that I hadn't checkpointed
successfully -- "Oh, of course. I didn't have the keyboard."
- Eli Brandt
* You stare blankly at the screen and your fingers type "rwho" without any
help from your brain.
* You get tired of screensfull of worthless information scroling so
you alias rwho.
* You subconsciously start typing "/usr/ucb/rwho" to bypass your alias
* You alias /usr/ucb/rwho, but bypass that alias simply by inserting
extra "/"s
- Frank Stuart
o You ask someone if they'd like to go get some "TeX-MeX" food.
o The funniest joke you come up with over dinner has the punch line:
"But what if it was in hex"
o The people you are with also thought it was funny.
o You ask archie where to find your keys.
o You enclose comments in your class notes with "/* */"
o You order some parts from a catolog, and start to give the
operator your email address.
- Jeff Weisberg
You decide to video the early morning film whilst you continue and
look to see if the tape is set to safe...
Alternatively, you know you have been reading news too long when
you type: cd usr.homes.markl
- Mark Liversedge
When you got to put a happy face on a piece of paper, and do it sideways.
- Brian Greenberg
When you start thinking that you can store ANYTHING on a floppy! I
once noticed I was running out of blank recording tape and thought,
but I've got all those blank floppies downstairs!
- Brett G. Person
You know what all of your colleague's names do when typed into
TECO as commands.
- pdt@mundil.cs.mu.OZ.AU
...you put a "Reply-To" line on the back of an envelope before you mail the
letter (I just did about 5 minutes ago - gack!).
- Peter Gutmann
This morning I was wakened at 5am by my eight month-old daughter, who
deperately wanted company. While not quite yet awake, I decided that
the best thing to do would be to rm her and then restore her from a
backup in a couple of hours.
Over the past few weeks I've read about several of you experiencing
similar slips of the mind, but this has never happened to me before.
It has to be this damned 'You know you have been hacking to long
when...' thread that is screwing with my mind.
Once I got fully awake, of course, I realized that the only sensible
way to act would be to signal(SIGCHLD, SIG_IGN); kill(wifepid, SIGURG);
But then it was to late, as I was already wide awake.
- Bjorn
when you dream someone taps you on the shoulder and you think
"I'll have to search through this array of interrupt vectors to decide
what to do next."
... AND I'M NOT EVEN A HACKER, just a network admin!!!!
- Sam
I looked in the Specialized catalog (I just bought a moutain bike), and
see that they have a street tire called the 'Turbo C'. No thanks, I'll
wait for the 'Turbo C++' version...
- Paul Tomblin
You have to convert to hex to divide 50 by 8. (This has happened to me)
- John West
... when you worry if someone will notice the extra spaces after some
of your lines in a text that you are going to print out.
- Jesper Lauridsen
I once received several large pieces of email without explanation.
Upon closer examination, I recognized uuencoding (I was a newbie
at that time), so I pasted them together and uudecoded appropriately.
This procedure resulted in a file whose format was alien to me. A
bit of deduction led me to load it onto a Macintosh, where is was
finally revealed as.....a scanned image of a postcard of Stockholm.
My friend later remarked, "But I *did* send you a postcard!".....
- Wes Morgan
My alarm went off this morning, I hit the snooze bar, and when it went off
again, I hit it again, and made a mental note that I could not do this much
longer because my subroutine was mallocing memory (in the clock)
each time it went off and printing the free memory on the front, and soon
I would run out.
I need a vacation.
- Rob McCool
From: russell@alpha3.ersys.edmonton.ab.ca (Russell Schulz)
you get in the elevator and double-press the button for the floor you want.
(happened to me last week)
From: gothick@dcs.warwick.ac.uk (Gothick)
While heading for my car last week, my *very* first thought was:
"grep keys /dev/pockets"
** Collected by alanf@eng.tridom.com (Alan Fleming)
Tnx another 1e6
From: snippe@prl.philips.nl (Snippe DM)
aki@cruzio.santa-cruz.ca.us writes:
|BTW Have you been using Latex too long when your (handwritten) letters
|include things like \begin{verbatim} ? I recently did that when writing
|a letter that included a newspaper article.
Also, when I write algorithms for other people (like the algorithm to bake a cake,
or how to find my house), I don't write first do this and than do that, but:
do_this();
do_that();
It used to be even worse after I had written some Occam programs, lots of nested
SEQ's and PAR's.
Make Pizza:
SEQ
mix flour and salt
add water, oil and yeast
mold this into an elastic dough.
PAR
slice tomatoes
slice pepperoni
slice mushrooms
slice onions
make tomato sauce
convert dough into pizza
put tomato sauce on pizza
PAR
put tomatoes on pizza
put pepperoni on pizza
put mushrooms on pizza
put onions on pizza
ALT
put olives on pizza
put anchovis on pizza
put blue cheese on pizza
put mozzarella on pizza
put pizza in oven
From: aldavi01@starbase.spd.louisville.edu (Arlie Davis)
Subject: You know you've been using X too long...
I dreamed two nights ago that I had found the man pages on the world, and
in them was a list of the widget hierarchy of everything I could see.
I though, "Wow! Now I don't have to live with the developer's *terrible*
taste in colors anymore!", and prompty decided to make the rivers a deep red,
and the skies shades of grey, by thinking "*River*background: #FF0000" and
"*Sky*background: #808080".
From: mcastro@iris-dcp.es
you know you've been hacking too long when you go to bed, start to sleep,
and suddenly the little voices inside your head said:
you have running jobs
$
From: robm@void.ncsa.uiuc.edu (Rob McCool)
My alarm went off this morning, I hit the snooze bar, and when it went off
again, I hit it again, and made a mental note that I could not do this much
longer because my subroutine was mallocing memory (in the clock)
each time it went off and printing the free memory on the front, and soon
I would run out.
From: espensk@stud.cs.uit.no (Espen Skoglund)
..... you're doing your math and suddenly finds yourself writing:
add.b #1,n
From: lowen@lorc.UUCP (Lamar Owen)
When my alarm goes off in the morning (5:15AM!!!), I keep wanting to press
the Decrement Program Counter switch on the frontpanel.
From: pv@gagme.chi.il.us (Paul Vader)
Subject: You know you've been reading news too long when...
....you see a jar of Motts Applesauce and wonder what the third sex is.
From: okes@essex.ac.uk (Oke S)
This morning I was wondering if some friends of mine were in and I thought
'finger @3, Hamilton Road'...
From: dave@eram.esi.COM.AU (Dave Horsfall)
After fooling around all day with routers etc, you pick up the phone
and start dialling an IP number...
From: l137939@cc.tut.fi (Jani Lahti)
Then, I decided to call someone because of a group purchase of laser units
I'm currently handling. I had tried to call him earlier but he wasn't at home
that time, so his number in my phone's last-number-called memory, so I only
needed to press one button. Without thinking anymore about it, I pushed the
button and waited for the answer.
When a voice answered I started talking about lasers for a moment before
noticing that the person in the other end didn't understand anything I was
talking. Only then I realized, I had pushed a button for a preprogrammed
number to a friend family of mine. His father had a big laugh when I
explained what had happened..
From: tma4@Lehigh.EDU (Terry M. Auspitz)
...When you take a course in Lotus find that your notes are written in Pascal
@if(condiition,true_action,false_action) := If Condition
Then TrueAction
Else FalseAction;
When you get into an elevator and say "Computer, Lever 4." (Ok, that's more
Star Trek than Hacking, but it's the same idea.
From: root@umibox.hanse.de (Bernd Meyer)
mark-r@spec0.ee.man.ac.uk (Mark Robinson (JO PhD)) writes:
>Well I didn't believe these stories about being affected by hacking
>until today. Someone just gave me an email address on a piece of paper,
>and I tried to Cut'n'Paste it into my mailtool.
Isn't it funny? Recently I tried to find something in the supermarket and
thought of "cd /; find | grep sausages" to do it. And then I thought that
real life supermarkets have at least one disatvantage - no root-directory.
Bernie
From: gk@dcs.ed.ac.uk (The Gav)
......you convert numbers to hex to do addition because you cant remember how
decimal works.
From: rainer@ruble.fml.tuwien.ac.at (Rainer Staringer)
> until today. Someone just gave me an email address on a piece of paper,
> and I tried to Cut'n'Paste it into my mailtool.
That's nothing. Have you ever tried to copy a phone number from an email
message and paste it into your phone? I did. (I stopped only when I
noticed that the phone lacked a Command-key.)
The other day, I was just copying a CD to cassette tape when I wanted to
listen to a different CD -- no problem, I said to myself, simply hit
Command-n to open a new window on the CD player and... Ah, well.
From: bolton@rx.xerox.com ( Andy Bolton)
I remember when I was at University (Essex) waking up several times in the
middle of dreams about code. C was the worse to dream about. The funniest
experience of this depth of involvement in projects was a hardware task we were
set once.
After spending many weeks in the lab designing gating circuits on CAD machines
I was woken one night by my girlfriend, apparantly shouting about EPROM's, and
that the "bits were falling out of the legs".
From: masc0374@ucsnews.sdsu.edu (Avoid normal situations.)
You know you've been hacking too long when you have a nightmare in which
you have an endless printout in which you are frantically searching for the
errors in the program. (Yes, this actually happened to me. *blush*)
From: dgempey@ucscb.UCSC.EDU (David Gordon Empey)
In <1993Mar12.133024.17997@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu> gbarnes@nyx.cs.du.edu (Gary Barnes)
writes:
>You know you've been hacking too long, when you look at an internal telephone
>extension number 2444 and immediately try to work out what permissions
>that represents! (and then wonder why it's sgid!)
Gee, I dunno; wouldn't a _real_ hacker _know_ what permissions 2444 represents
without even thinking about it?
-Dave (the non-hacker. more of a Suzy COBOL. I hate programming anyway.)
From: david.emmerson@almac.co.uk (David Emmerson)
`grave' Dave Gymer said to All about Re: ykybhtl when... on 03-18-93 09:01 :
`DG> In article <1993Mar10.214429.1956@samba.oit.unc.edu>
`DG> Tony.Duell@launchpad.unc.edu (Tony Duell) writes: >You are lettering
`DG> (rather than numbering) the sections of a document, and >you start
`DG> with @ (as the letter 0 that comes before A).
`DG> Or someone asks you to count to 10 and you start at 0.
... A colleague of mine just looked in his (paper) diary
to find out when he was working weekend shifts, and said
'Oh, I haven't typed it in yet'.
From: jliukkon@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Juha-Matti Liukkonen)
I've spent the last three or four days more or less completely
installing, getting to know, and test driving the OS/2 2.1 beta. I've
had very little sleep. Now last night I set the Alarm applet to alarm at
10 am (just in case that i would be up still.) Well, I got a trap 0002
at around five and went to sleep.
An image formed before my eyes. Grey panel. A radio button. "Hey... This
is the Alarm control panel!" I realized, and opened my eyes. I looked at
my watch: 10 am, sharp. Then my analog alarm bell rang.
Pretty efficient Alarm in OS/2, huh?
Now I know I've been hacking too long...
From: gray@ml.csiro.au (Randall Gray)
Not as much fun as cards, but one day (in the distant past) I was out hanging
laudry. In particular I was hanging up socks and I like to pair them as I hang
them 'cause I fervently believe that it "saves time". I caught myself thinking
"There's no match in the list, allocate a new node...."
How do I search the list? I *think* I use associative (um, damn I forgot the
word...)
From: "Kyle Cassidy" <CASS8806@elan.rowan.edu>
last week i sent my girlfriend a birthday card in the mail. 3 days
later it came back to me. across the front i had written
"barclay@rail9000.gatech.edu".
sometimes i don't feel so good.
From: "Paul E. King" <paulk@mercury.cs.mun.ca>
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: 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 <barf> 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" <paulk@mercury.cs.mun.ca>
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 <drsCFBpAq.LKM@netcom.com>, 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 <bart+@CMU.EDU>
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 <pgut1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz> 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 <pooh@brokendrum.stack.urc.tue.nl>
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 <acb@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au> 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 <is33jlf@nebula.syscon.hii.com>):
> "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 <is33jlf@nebula.syscon.hii.com>):
>> "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 <JXD132@psuvm.psu.edu>
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 <CIy53J.Fxn@ucc.su.OZ.AU> 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: <kodak.757375333@mentor.cc.purdue.edu>
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 <word>"
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 <falcorCJo0E8.HLE@netcom.com> 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 <sinteur@knoware.nl>
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 <CLIpwE.10q@knoware.nl> John W. Sinteur <sinteur@knoware.nl> 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.5.000FD2C2@brunel.ac.uk> 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.... <pause> 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 <thanselm@silver.ucs.indiana.edu>
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.
From: pagan@meiko.co.uk (Stephen Payne)
YKYBHTLW you haven't slept for three days...
From: hofkamp@cs.utwente.nl (Albert T. Hofkamp)
Yesterday evening, we were watching TV, and suddenly the video-image frooze,
because the video tape in the studio`s got stuck, or something like that.
After 3 seconds watching, I caught myself thinking
'How do I reset the TV ?'
Albert
From: holland@CS.ColoState.EDU (douglas craig holland)
A couple days ago, we were talking about CPR and that sort of thing, and a
nurse friend of mine said that defibrilators didn't actually start the heart,
but stopped it - useful in fibrilation cases when the heart was twitching
instead of beating. The brain then thought "Hey, the heart's not beating"
so it sends signals that start it beating properly. The instant I heard that
I thought "Cold booting the heart."
Doug Holland
From: umennis0@cc.umanitoba.ca (Sean Douglas Ennis)
In <CoK6C8.LB8@cs.utwente.nl> hofkamp@cs.utwente.nl (Albert T. Hofkamp) writes:
>Yesterday evening, we were watching TV, and suddenly the video-image frooze, because the
video tape
>in the studio`s got stuck, or something like that. After 3 seconds watching, I caught myself
thinking
>'How do I reset the TV ?'
Or when the stations a little slow, and there is a blank spot after a
commercial (screen goes black for 4 or 5 seconds), and you think
'LAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGG...' (.'s and everything).
Sean
From: benc@netcom.com (Ben Coleman)
You spot something like "Darvin's Honey Butter" in the grocery store,
and the first thing that comes to mind is "Isn't the word order wrong?"
(alas, I know this from experience).
Ben
From: combs@rs6a.wln.com ()
Jukka Marin (jmarin@messi.uku.fi) wrote:
: cm5211@scitsc.wlv.ac.uk (** Shell **) writes:
: >I was watching a program on BBC2 last night about the Internet. At the
: >end of the program, it displayed information, which I wanted, about an
: >internet site and I actually found myself thinking, for a moment,
: >`Where's the print-screen button on my remote-control?!'
: Huh? Just click the mouse and digitize the picture and then print it.. :)
And that reminds me of the times I come home all addle-pated from working
with Windows all day and I actually think of the world as mouse driven,
"Double-click on frig, [frig opens], double click on beer [beer opens]...etc."
Or even more often, when I'm watching TV and I try to fast forward through
the commercials
Camey "I just tried to reposition my cursor with my mouse" Combs
From: taylornw@ehp01.ehp.ornl.gov (Nicholas W. Taylor)
One dreary night at college in Memphis, TN, I had just come off a 10-hour
hack run and was vegetating with a few friends to the tune of Star Trek NG in
the dorm lounge. All of a sudden, a rather plastered black fellow saunters
into the lounge, hurling racial and personal epithets at us, most of which
involved detailed accounts of how blacks were going to wipe the streets with
all our white *sses. It was laughable at best, considering the rather
multicultural mix of the crowd. Being tired I ignored him. Until..
He got up in my face and started calling me a "stupid f*ckin' cracker", at
which I bacame rather pissed. I jumped up and yelled "Look, stupid! I'm a
*programmer* and a *hacker*! Sure, I've cruised a few password files in my
time, but I've never broken a system! So watch who you're callin' a cracker,
fella!"
Needless to say, he left one very confused drunk.
--Nick "I'll wipe my own *ss, thanks" Taylor
From: mayer@sono.uucp (Ron Mayer)
<CoK6C8.LB8@cs.utwente.nl> hofkamp@cs.utwente.nl (Albert T. Hofkamp):
>Yesterday evening, we were watching TV, and suddenly the video-image
>frooze, because the video tape in the studio`s got stuck, or
^^^^^^
Isn't that spelled stdio?
#include "studio.h"
Oops. YKYHBHTLW you apply a "C" spell/syntax checker to usenet articles.
Ron
From: rdm@metapro.DIALix.oz.au (Rob Masters)
...you look at a printout and think "The contrast on the line printer
needs to be turned up. And why is it printing in reverse video?"
When the printer is printing black on white...
From: benco@soda.berkeley.edu (Ben Cottrell)
YKYBHTLW, after a long night of debugging and *way* too many Cokes, you think
"With 32 megs of RAM on this machine, I think I can afford to set aside a
bigger urine buffer... hmm, wonder where the #define macro is?"
From: taylornw@ehp01.ehp.ornl.gov (Nicholas W. Taylor)
...you wake up from a terrific dream and scramble to write it
down, not because of the dancing elephants, nudes, and flying Picassos, but
because you saw dancing with _them_ the algorithm to solve your latest
programming project.
--Nick "and a pink horse wearing boxers" Taylor
From: steveo@highett.mel.dbce.csiro.au (Stephen Oakes)
... you're proof reading a (hard-copy) manual, and you think:
"Shit, that phrase should be hypertexted..."
From: at425@yfn.ysu.edu (Tom Salyers)
YKYBHTLW...your girlfriend has a little makeup bag with silhouettes
of the Arc de Triomphe on it, and your first thought upon viewing it at
6 AM is "Hm....jumpers. Wonder what those go to."
And yes, I finish sentences with prepositions in the morning...=)
From: joberreu@bach.seattleu.edu (Jesse Oberreuter)
YKYBHTLW:
You start coding on a turned off keyboard & correct your mistakes.
You wake up exhausted from an all night dream state debugging run.
You can see everything going on on your monitor with your eyes closed.
Your fingers are too tired to type anymore.
After four days straight you ask a co-worker to open a bottle of liquid
refreshment for you because you've become too weak.
You explain your dyslexia by saying your name server's cache is out of
sync. with its multi-dimensional vectored hash table.
Many, many more avail on request... BTW, these are all real & I have
witnesses :)
From: jhis01@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (Jonathan Warwick Histed)
taylornw@ehp01.ehp.ornl.gov (Nicholas W. Taylor) writes:
> ...you wake up from a terrific dream and scramble to write it
>down, not because of the dancing elephants, nudes, and flying Picassos, but
>because you saw dancing with _them_ the algorithm to solve your latest
>programming project.
This has actually happened to me (well, sort of)...
I had just finished a project for an AI paper - solving the 8-puzzle using
heuristic searches...being a typical hacker, I wrote the program in C rather
than use a time-saving(tm) language such as Prolog. :-)
Anyway, I finished and went to bed at 3am (yes, I know - it's early, but
I was soffering from a condition called No Coke). I woke at around 8:30am
remembering a dream in which the algorithm (in C, of course :-) was scrolling
by in the background, and I was executing the algorithm in the foreground,
complete with little 3-d models of 8-puzzles, and "pointers".
It brought new meaning to the oft' spoken lecturer phrase "you should be
able to do this in your sleep". :-)
On a similar note, I got a call from a friend last weekend, who had just been
offered a different job with his firm, which happened to be in a different
city.
He said: "I'm moving to Wellington(*)"
All I could think to say was: "So, you've had an upgrade. What version?"
Which seemed totally logical to me - he'd been upgraded to a new position,
and I wanted to know what position it was. He thought otherwise (not a
Computer Scientist)...
(*) Wellington = capital city of New Zealand, as opposed to Auckland which
is the larget city in New Zealand, and was the capital before some idiot
decided physical centralisation would be a neat idea.
From: rsf@mother.idx.com (Rob Freundlich)
YKYBHTLW you pick up the phone and try to dial using your computer's numeric
keypad ...
From: ai731@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (Janice Wright)
...your alarm clock goes off and your dream returns to the WWW home page.
...happened to me the other night, scary, isn't it...
Janice
From: umisef@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au (Bernd Meyer)
aus001@axp1.rrz.Uni-Koeln.DE (Dionisius) writes:
>David DeLaney (dbd@martha.utcc.utk.edu) wrote:
>> Dave "a switch for everything and everything in its switch" DeLaney
>"A switch to rule them all, a switch to find them,
> a switch to bring them all and in the darkness bind them."
YKYHBHTL when you try something like "ls --mordor". And you know that
someone else has been hacking far too long when this gives a listing of
all the hidden files ("once you put that one ring on, you start
perceiving the world in a completly different way").
Bernie
From: ande0870@gold.tc.umn.edu (Gregory T Anderson)
YKYBHTLW your alarm clock goes off, and in the dream-state
that you're in, you attempt to telnet alarm.clock in order to turn it
off.
Greg (alarm.clock connection refused)
From: lstowell@pyrnova.mis.pyramid.com (Lon Stowell)
When your buddy the cabinet maker says "please hand me a bastard file"
and you 'rcp /unix......."
From: insom@galaxy.ucr.edu (chris ulrich)
In article <CpEAnv.8ty@news.cis.umn.edu>,
Gregory T Anderson <ande0870@gold.tc.umn.edu> wrote:
>
> YKYBHTLW your alarm clock goes off, and in the dream-state
>that you're in, you attempt to telnet alarm.clock in order to turn it
>off.
>
> Greg (alarm.clock connection refused)
Earlier this evening, I got out of my roommate's car, and the
seatbelt failed to retract. I asked myself if something had
happened getty and if anyone would be able to log back in to
his car.
Sigh
From: im14u2c@cegt201.bradley.edu (Joe Zbiciak)
YKYHBHTL when you're sitting there, and something as absurd as this comes
to mind (with relatively little effort:)
Old MacDonald had a card,
And he did I/O.
And on that card he had a chip,
That did Vid-e-o.
With VRAM here,
And a RAMDAC there,
Here a bit,
There a bit,
Everywhere a BitBlt...
Old MacDonald had a card,
And he did I/O.
And on that card he had a chip,
That did Aud-i-o.
With a FM synth here,
And a MIDI port there,
Here a DAC,
There a DAC,
DMA from front to back...
Old MacDonald had a card,
And he did I/O.
And on that card he had a chip,
That did Ser-i-al
Clear-To-Send here,
Request-To-Send there,
Here an ACK,
There a NAK,
Every an an ACK, ACK...
Old MacDonald had a card,
And he did I/O......
(anyone care to add verses? BTW, I wrote it alll myself.)
--Joe
From: eeyimkn@unicorn.nott.ac.uk (M. Knell)
YKYBHTLW your regular typos (the ones you _always_ make) are so habitual that
your profile aliases 'ks 0k' to 'ls -l'. I know mine does... *grin*
-- mpK.
From: eeyimkn@unicorn.nott.ac.uk (M. Knell)
In article <2qg222$7i9@cegt201.bradley.edu>, im14u2c@cegt201.bradley.edu (Joe Zbiciak)
writes:
>
> YKYHBHTL when you're sitting there, and something as absurd as this comes
> to mind (with relatively little effort:)
(excellent song deleted)
> Old MacDonald had a card,
> And he did I/O......
And on that card he had a chip
That did T-C-P.
With a SYN SYN here
and an ACK SYN there
Here an ACK
There an ACK
Eventually an ACK FIN...
Mike
From: im14u2c@cegt201.bradley.edu (Joe Zbiciak)
In <2qh0m6$qn0@unicorn.ccc.nottingham.ac.uk> eeyimkn@unicorn.nott.ac.uk (M. Knell) writes:
>YKYBHTLW your regular typos (the ones you _always_ make) are so habitual that
>your profile aliases 'ks 0k' to 'ls -l'. I know mine does... *grin*
I've made links between all of the following to "finger": dinfer, fubger,
and dinfwe.
From: tovey@mundil.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Matthew Ian TOVEY)
YKYBHTLW you're coding away, after being called up for a meal, and you
insert a line:
if (dinner == cold)
before you realise what you've done.
That night, I also dreamt in C. I don't remember details, I just awoke
realising that I'd had a very well structured dream, full of "while"s and
for loops.
Matt
From: ande0870@gold.tc.umn.edu (Gregory T Anderson)
In article <9413021.17877@mulga.cs.mu.oz.au>,
Matthew Ian TOVEY <tovey@mundil.cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
>YKYBHTLW you're coding away, after being called up for a meal, and you
>insert a line:
>
>if (dinner == cold)
>
>before you realise what you've done.
>
>That night, I also dreamt in C. I don't remember details, I just awoke
>realising that I'd had a very well structured dream, full of "while"s and
>for loops.
>
>Matt
I had a dream in C last quarter...we, C++ if you wanna be
exact. It was after I'd pulled an all-nighter to finish a program,
and I got about two hours of sleep. My dreams were troubled with
visions of for loops that wouldn't work right. Quite hellish, really.
Greg
From: awilson@merle.acns.nwu.edu (Andrew Wilson)
YKYBHTLW...
you see someone race by on a 'ZUMA Sport Cycle' (or some such) and you
think "Wait. I killfiled that guy already. Why am I seeing him?"
From: pkinnes@csupomona.edu
From a friend who was too lazy to write his own damn post:
YKY Girlfriend's BHTLW:
She falls asleep with her arm around your shoulder, and after a few
minutes, she starts 'typing' on you in her sleep.....
From: lstowell@pyrnova.mis.pyramid.com (Lon Stowell)
When you realize that all of life's problems are because we are
living in Revision 1.0 of the universe.
From: ande0870@gold.tc.umn.edu (Gregory T Anderson)
YKYBHTLW you're reading a book, look up to see what page
you're on, and upon seeing 111, the first number you think of is 7.
Greg
From: srchopr@chv.lincoln.cri.nz
.. you get ready to jump on someone requesting old business cards and you find
they want them for "details of drymatter sampling".
Sue "Craig who?" Knight
From: murraygs@newton.ccs.tuns.ca (Gregory Scott Murray)
YKYBHTLW when you're taking notes and when the prof goes back and adds a few
lines to a paragraph on the other side of the board, you try and insert a line
before realizing its pen and paper...
Scott
From: jgrimm@horacemann.pvt.k12.ny.us (James Grimmelmann)
YKYBHTLW. . . .
During a break, the stroke of inspiration you've been waiting for hits you. .
. .
. . . in Latin.
This may actually be a case of YKYBSARPWYSHBHTLW (You've Been Studying
Ancient Roman Poetry When You Should Have Been Hacking Too Long When), but it
actually happened to me. I genuinely typed in several lines of code that
were nothing more than a partial transcription of the works of Catullus.
From: ab401@freenet2.carleton.ca (Paul Tomblin)
In article <wb8fozCpttt2.Bo5@netcom.com>,
David Lesher <wb8foz@skybridge.scl.cwru.edu> wrote:
>
>> POLICE FIND COW ON ROOF OF 5-STORY MIT DORMITORY
>>
>> Amid cheers of students she is coaxed down stairway to street
>
>Coaxing is the hard part. As I'm sure Bernie knows, neither equine nor
>bovine is inclined toward walking down stairs.
When I read this, I thought: "Well, why didn't they just run twisted pair,
then?"
Paul "and I don't mean Homulka and Bernardo" Tomblin
From: insom@galaxy.ucr.edu (chris ulrich)
Yet another weird dream.
Last night, I had a dream that I was trying to gain weight, and
I was doing so by recompiling my binaries with static links.
chris
From: agrino@enkidu.mic.cl (Andres Grino Brandt)
When you start to 'logout' from one server and 'login' to other server
every time you turn over yourself while sleeping.
Worse even, you do 'map *.*' every time something in bed disturb you ...
Just surviving from a 3 days high fever ...
Yours
From: mrw9e@fulton.seas.Virginia.EDU (Michael Robert Williams)
In my office, we keep an old Selectric typewriter for labels and forms that
don't easily fit into the printer. The other day I finished typing a form,
and then tried to press <alt><F4> to turn the machine off. I need to sleep
more and use Windoze less.
From: awg1000@phx.cam.ac.uk (A.W. Garrard)
(at the risk of lowering the tone of the group)
... you go to the toilet and start looking for a disc-eject button.
I stopped just short of working out that I was a Mac, and hunting for
a paperclip. I'm glad I didn't try to work out where to put it. Scary,
isn't it?
I also had one of those days when I woke up very slowly, and the room
was fuzzy because I'd gone to sleep with my contact lenses in. I'm still
trying to work out why I thought 'awful picture... need more processing
power... what do you expect from a Z80?'
But then a friend of mine when he got drunk one evening was last
heard mumbling about a stack overflow and not being able to push
his accumulator.
I think we need help.
Andrew Garrard
From: ande0870@gold.tc.umn.edu (Gregory T Anderson)
When you wake up in the middle of the night because you have
to go to the bathroom, and remember that just before you woke up, the
contents of the a4 register were 'need to pee'.
Greg "Too much 680X0 assembly" Anderson
From: hucke@sumter.cso.uiuc.edu (Matt Hucke)
YAYKYBHTLW...
I had a strange dream last night... I was using an automatic
bridge-building machine (place it on a riverbank and press a button).
Every time more wood or iron was needed, it would be malloc()'d. I did
this too many times without free()'ing the old building materials, and
crashed the river, flooding the city.
From: stets@stets.stgt.sub.org (Thomas Stets)
pburgess@netcom.com writes in article <pburgessCpzKCL.32s@netcom.com>:
> Funny how one's brain will actually sit there trying to work these things
> out... Just today (and in a nearly fully conscious state), I was passing
> by a tuxedo rental place with their front window painted in big, day-glo
> letters: "'94 PROM HEADQUARTERS!" I was thinking it might have something
> to do with upgrading one's BIOS chips.
> --
> Phillip Burgess (pburgess@netcom.com)
A similar thing happened to a some days ago. I passed a car with a sign
saying "For Sale: Ford Fiesta 1.0", and I went on thinking why
anyone would buy such an early version of a car...
From: stan.salter@ablelink.org (Stan Salter)
When I went into the Local Bar today they just got it a new beer that
has just been released in Canada. Red Dog Beer. On the centre of the
neck label is ALT BEER. Here I am in the bar trying to read unread
articles.
stan.salter@ablelink.org
From: noien@chmeds.ac.nz
Here's a dark, dark YKYBHTLW ......
I work in a Cancer treatment clinic. My job involves setting
up Radiotherapy beams (beams of radiation aimed at a tumour
in order to kill it off).
To do this we are setting up an SGI based system in
which a 3D model of the patient is made from CAT
scan data. The beams are then simulated on this
model, and if the clinicians think it's all
go then the treatment goes ahead.
Last night I dreamed I was diagnosed as having
cancer. I went into work and there was a 3D model of me
(insides and all) being rotated, scaled etc. on the SGI.
The operators were trying to line up the beam, and the SGI
was giving them all sorts of problems. The simulation
software was playing up, they were out of swap space, the
disk was full, the print queues were screwy ......
So I was frantically trying to fix these problems,
due to my vested interest, and I was getting slowly weaker
and weaker. We run a VAX 11/750 as well and I kept saying "Use
the VAX, it's old, I know, no 3D pictures but it works", but
they were in love with the SGI 3D graphics and wouldn't hear
of it. They kept saying "You can fix it" and I kept on trying
frantically to wrestle with the UNIX command line ....
Finally as I expired, slumping forward
onto the keyboard, the mouse falling from my hand,
my last thought was "God Damn UNIX Systems!". Then I woke up.
Guns don't kill people. Graphics do.
From: jbaxter@sandtrap.Stanford.EDU (Joel Baxter)
In article <1994May23.165802.501@chmeds.ac.nz> noien@chmeds.ac.nz writes:
>
>Here's a dark, dark YKYBHTLW ......
>
[ frightening dream omitted]
>
> Guns don't kill people. Graphics do.
>
Or, YKYBHTLW, at first glance, you read the above line as "Gnus don't
kill people..."
From: tweber@cc.brynmawr.edu (Weber Tracy L)
YKYBHTLW --
I have this bad habit of actuallt typing in my dreams when I'm thinking
simple sentences... Sometimes even with a dvorak keyboard in mind...
Also, I have this bad tendencey to think that I can just pull out my
Sega Carts and put in a blank disc to save my game...
Joshua
From: cms@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Colin Simpson)
When you suddenly realise while walking in a supermarket that it is more
efficient to count in binary upon your fingers.
Thereby allowing you to count upto 1023 on your fingers !!!
Or you could try two's compliment and get negative numbers
Ahh ahhh !!! I've been Hacking too long !!!!
From: ag129@ucs.cam.ac.uk (Alasdair Grant)
... when you find yourself looking in the RFC index to see which
RFC "RFC 822" is defined in.
From: zaphod@cs.hut.fi (Seppo J Niemi)
A couple of years ago when I was deep into mudplaying, I was
constantly saying things like 'open door', 'enter room' or 'get
<object>' to myself. Sometimes when I had to put up with an annoying
person, I'd say 'kill <person> with sword'; fortunately I didn't have
a sword at hand ;-)
Nowadays I work as a system administrator and sometimes, when I meet
assholes or just plain stupid people, I wish I could just say 'su root'
and 'kill -9' - or at least 'kill -15'. I guess that would make me a true
'Bastard operator from Hell'...
From: koen@wsinis04.info.win.tue.nl (Koen Holtman)
...when you read the string
f@%$ck
in a flame message and the first word that comes to mind is fsck.
Koen.
From: bernie@metapro.DIALix.oz.au (Bernd Felsche)
Fax machine rings, answers...
You type "who" to find out where the fax is coming from...
And wonder why it doesn't show up.
From: mark-r@spec0.ee.man.ac.uk (Mark Robinson)
YKYBHTLW...
You ask someone if they want 'tea eor coffee' because they can't have both..
Mark
From: pjx@ichaos.nullnet.fi (Petteri J„ntti)
In article <2sh2co$4ue@saturn.haverford.edu>,
Weber Tracy L <tweber@cc.brynmawr.edu> wrote:
>In article <2sg55u$suu@bach.seattleu.edu> joberreu@bach.seattleu.edu (Jesse Oberreuter)
writes:
>>
[Dreams deleted]
I woke up one morning shocked (remembering bits and pieces of the dream just
before waking up). In the dream I did hear the alarm clock and I was desperately
trying to telnet to a port on it. It was terrible. I knew I remembered the
address of the alarm clock right, yet could connect to it to turn it off. I
must have tried many different routings in my attempts to access the bastard.
Finally I woke up and discovered that I would be late again.
Hmm, too much configuring messes up your head. :)
-Petteri
From: sethm@pnet1.pnet.com (Seth J. Morabito)
You know you've REALLY been hacking too long when...
Ugh. This JUST happened to me about 10 minutes ago, resulting in
my nearly collapsing on the floor laughing...
I, like most geeks my age, have a Casio Data Bank watch. One of the spiffy
ones with apointments, phone numbers, stop watch and timer, and of
course a calculator. Well, I've been using the timers and calculator
more than usual today, and I just now noticed that the stop watch
was still going long after it's services had been called for. So I stopped
it. Then it occured to me that the count-down timer and calculator might
also still be going, and I'd better check.
And so Help me, at that one moment I had every intention of typing
'ps -aux' on it's tiny little keyboard and seeing what processes
I had going.
When the realization of what I had been thinking hit, it hit hard.
It's been one of those days.
Ugh.
-Seth J. Morabito
From: jwbirdsa@picarefy.picarefy.com (James W. Birdsall)
In article <Cqr4Cn.2GB@metapro.DIALix.oz.au> bernie@metapro.DIALix.oz.au (Bernd Felsche)
writes:
>Fax machine rings, answers...
>
>You type "who" to find out where the fax is coming from...
>
>And wonder why it doesn't show up.
...when you're just sitting there because the network is toast and
a phone in a nearby office rings and you wonder how the hell that's
possible with the network down...
From: tovey@mundil.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Matthew Ian TOVEY)
I was walking past a building the other day when I noticed how shabby it
looked: Bricks painted black, and peeling all over.
Having spent the previous x days doing script-based ray tracing, I
immediately looked for the texture setting to change it to something more
appropriate...
Matt
From: gamble@sugar.NeoSoft.COM (Ben Gamble)
... you see "Subject: Re: Emailing Exes" and think, "Well, there's
uuencode, and btoa."
And it turns out to be about sending email to your former lovers.
From: skybird@satelnet.org (Scott Pallack)
You walk into a used bookstore, ask if they have any books about UNIX and
wonder why they are giving you funny looks.
From: rmurray@netcom.com (Roger Murray)
This morning I looked at my wardrobe and realized that most of my shirts were
red, green and blue. Just before deciding to buy some shirts I had seen the
previous day, I thought for a split second "Why not just convert these shirts
to CMYK so I could have four colors instead of only three?"
At least I didn't ask the salesperson where the PANTONE-colored shirts were
when I got to the store. :-)
From: maddison@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au (David Maddison)
You have an itch and you try to move the mouse pointer off the
screen so you can scratch it...
David Maddison
From: csk@eecs.nwu.edu (Chris Kush)
You have a weekend of moving crap into your new apartment ahead, and
reflect in all seriousness that it would be a hell of a lot easier just to
move the REFERENCES to the boxes than the boxes themselves.
Chris "Hey Dad, give me a hand with &refrigerator" Kush
From: iyoung@buddy.wright.edu (Ian Young)
When, in that drowsy state just before you fall asleep, your thoughts
stray to a girl you just met and you think: "yes, but is she windows
compatible?"
From: ai731@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (Janice Wright)
...you're sitting in front of your terminal with the manual for the latest
upgrade of your favorite software, and you reach out to hit the space bar
to see the next page of text...
Stop the hard drive, I want to get off!
Janice
From: woodman@bnr.ca (Dave Woodman)
You half wake-up about 45 minutes before the alarm is due, receive a bladder
alert, and think setbuf(stream, bladbuf) before going back to sleep.
And yes, I've already thougnt of the "flush()" based jokes, and all their
relatives! No bad jokes are needed on stream I/O, either.
Dave.
From: jayhan@cs.washington.edu (Jay "Thierry" Han)
... the microwave oven has finished its program, so the light goes
off, and you wonder which button you should push to get out of the
screen saver.
From: jayhan@cs.washington.edu (Jay "Thierry" Han)
... the dishwasher makes too much noise, so you try to figure out a
way to pipe its output to /dev/nul to make it quiet.
From: jayhan@cs.washington.edu (Jay "Thierry" Han)
... you're programming that stupid VCR and you wish you could modify
its .Xdefaults or .emacs or maybe a .vcrrc file to change the menu
layout.
From: jayhan@cs.washington.edu (Jay "Thierry" Han)
... you have the Webster's installed in your system, and want to
look up a word (say, aardvark), and type "man aardvark".
... you look for words related to "vitamin", so you type "apropos
vitamin".
From: STUBRADFOWC@MERCUR.USAO.EDU (Bill Bradford)
You Know You've Been Hacking Too Long When:
A friend tells you, "My phone number is xxx-3270" and you think,
"Wow... IBM terminal.."
You change your PIN to an Intel CPU number designation so it's easy to
remember.
You Know You've Been Playing DOOM Too Long When:
The first time you walk into a building, you think, "Wow... This would
make a great PWAD level.." or "WAIT a minute! How'd they do THAT with
the current 1.2 engine?"
(All of these are true, esp. the YKYBPDTLW ones; a friend and I spend our
spare time in our 8am class designing WADs..)
Bill Bradford
From: hartmans@bga.com (Sam Hartman)
about a month before graduating from high school, I was at an award
presentation banquit. They told us all to line up. I turned to the person
next to me, who I also knew was interested in computers, and said, "Should
we settle for bubble, or try to explain quick sort?"
--Sam
From: crosby@rintintin.Colorado.EDU (Matthew Crosby)
You know you've been wiring nets too long:
Someone asked me today where someone else was, and I answered with the subnet
number of the lab he was in rather then the name--"I think he's in 202 or
maybe 250." (as opposed to room 1-5 or whatever) Whats scary is that the
other person didn't need me to clarify and it took me about ten minutes before
I realised what I was doing.
From: roth@ux4.cso.uiuc.edu (Roth Mark Daniel)
...you are thinking of accepting a summer position involving some
documentation work, and you think, "Yeah, but would that look good on
my man page?"
From: mje@pookie.pass.wayne.edu (Michael J. Edelman)
...you're driving home from the office late at night, and you're puzzled as to why
not only doesn't the brightness knob on the dashboard change the brightness of
the image in front of you, but there's no contrast knob, either...
--mike
From: and1000@cus.cam.ac.uk (Austin Donnelly)
...you see an advert for a pine table, and wonder how you can sell
a mailer's data structures.
Austin
From: lstowell@pyrnova.mis.pyramid.com (Lon Stowell)
You see a posting on misc.consumers asking how to get rid of gophers
and you immediately flash on the word "firewall".
From: lrucker@parcplace.com (Lee Ann Rucker)
You see the phrase " made a net profit for publishers" in a post and
automatically read a "." between "net" and "profit"
From: berndm@cs.monash.edu.au (Bernd U Meyer)
pietzcke@mibm.ruf.uni-freiburg.de (Tim Pietzcker) writes:
>...when you read rot13'd articles and don't even notice it...
... when you read the sentence "he looked at the unclouded sky" in a Clarke
novel, and misread it as "he look at the uuencoded sky"
Bernie
From: mike@bob.sc.colostate.edu (Mike Loseke)
When you finish paging through the new copy of your favorite magazine
and think to yourself "Why didn't I just grep for what I was looking
for instead of catting the whole thing?".
From: cwfertig@vax1.umkc.edu
You try to PrtSc on your tv remote.
From: teney931@cs.uidaho.edu (Aric TenEyck)
True story:
I work at McDonald's. We have a number of different beepers, buzzers, and
so on to tell us when the food is done cooking. About two weeks ago, I
transfered from a different McDonald's. At that one, the meat steamers
made a high pitched beeping noise when they needed more water. At the one
I work at now, the fryers for McNuggets(tm), fish, and so on make the same
noise when it is time to take the food out. I have had problems with
this, because when I heard the noise in the background, I would usually
ignore it, because the steamers still have plenty of water when they
start beeping for more. However, taking the food out of the fryers is a
fairly high priority thing. To solve this problem, I just told myself
that I needed to set up the interrupt vector for that beeping to point to
the fryer area of my brain. The really sad part is that it worked.
From: wturner@acorn.co.uk (William Turner)
When you are on a bus/train, and you mentally
stack people as they get on & it annoys
you if they don't get off in the reverse order :-)
William
From: tomv@vismag.limmat.net.ch (Thomas Voirol)
...you read an ad from a kitchen appliances supplier advertising
"The kitchen steamer" and immediately ask yourself what on earth
anyone would want to back up to tape in a kitchen.
From: simond@perception.manawatu.gen.nz (Simon Dawson)
When you prefer to query someone 4000 miles away about the
meaning of a word, coz he knows, rather than get up and
walk 4 metres to the bookshelf to check one of those RL
dictionaries..
When you realize you haven't called friends for weeks, because
everytime you remember, it's 3am, or 3pm and they're asleep
or at work, so you start mentally debugging a system for
queueing messages, to automatically call them at a specific
time.. before you realise it's supposed to be interactive,
and you don't have the speech h/w or s/w...
When you are 'trying' to have sex, and she says no, and you
think.. "I'll just take a copy while this version is being used
by the sleep process, work with that instead, then merge the
differences when I've finished"..
SImon
From: tomv@vismag.limmat.net.ch (Thomas Voirol)
One from my C64-days:
Whenever I come upon a word that ends with a $-sign, for example a system table
on our mainframe that's called tgp$, I pronounce it tgp-string. In my heaviest
64-hacker-times, I couldn't even parse prices in American catalogs correctly.
From: giannini@nova.umd.edu (Jodi Giannini)
Today someone in the lab came up to me, and said
'Do you have any applications?'
And I began to rattle them off, rapid fire:
'lotusquattroprowordperfectexceleratorharvardgraphicswindows...'
when he interrupted and said 'No, I mean *job* applications.'
I very sheepishly went into the office, and got him one.
It sure makes you wonder, doesn't it.
Jodi G.
From: wturner@acorn.co.uk (William Turner)
...you read a sheet of paper, and then remind yourself
to mark it as unread so you can read it again later...
William
From: stano@swh1.swh.sk (Stano Meduna)
.. when you call a lift before you lock your home door, so the
I/O is in progress while you are working on the door.
.. when you are rewiring the office and think of how good it
would be to replace old yellow cable with some coffee-distributing
device.
From: ablock@nubis.rutgers.edu (Aaron Block)
You Know That You have Been Webbing To Long When...
Everywhere you see an underline word or sentence you want to click on
it to follow the link. Even on TV and in the newspaper.
Aaron Block
From: s921878@minyos.xx.rmit.EDU.AU (Daniel John Lee Parnell)
... when you see a sign that says "New developments in Hepititus C" and
think it is advertising a programming seminar..
Daniel
From: samir@donald.cc.utexas.edu (Samir Mahendra)
In article <31a4oi$a5v@saturn.haverford.edu>,
Joshua M. Burgin <jburgin@unixmail.haverford.edu> wrote:
| Simon Slavin <slavins@psy.man.ac.uk> writes:
||You hear the TV say "We're Animany
|| Dave DeLaney
|| Animaniacs"
||and look up real quick wondering what picture they used with the name.
||
|
|Well, it's actually "Dana Delaney" but I knew what you meant. And
|Every time I hear that part of the song I want to insert Dave's name
|instead. Am I alone here?
You mean that they're *not* saying Dave DeLaney. I coulda sworn...
OBYKYBHTLW: While playing "Magic: The Gathering" with some friends for
the first time, you come across an Interrupt card, and with no further
explanation, you look at each other and start laughing.
From: acbul1@penfold.cc.monash.edu.au (acb)
YKYBHTLW......
..... you spontaneously compose code in your head for no reason.
..... when that code is assembly language.
Happened to me last night. In the shower, I found myself coding a
LALR(0) parser in 6502 assembly language. Don't ask me why.
From: roberson@hamer.ibd.nrc.ca (Walter Roberson)
You know you've been hacking too long when...
= You are thinking about different covers which have been done
for a particular song, and you mentally refer to them as different
"implimentations" of the song.
= You realize that you've left the milk out all night, and think,
"No problem, it's just the instantiation of the milk-carton class.
I'll apply a destructor to it, garbage collect, and CONS up a new one!"
= You don't go sit around cafes late at night reading poetry, but you
do go sit around cafes late at night reading ANSI C, POSIX, or C++ books.
= You smile when you notice that the cafe not only has an listing
for "soft drinks" on its menu, but also has a separate listing for Jolt Cola.
= You wonder why the cafe menu unfolds instead of being pull-down or
pop-up or roll-over.
= A software company you deal with snail-mails out a new 12-page manual
to all of its users, but deliberately skips you, figuring that you will
understand the software completely the first time you look at it,
so they might as well save the postage. In fact, they haven't sent
you any manuals for years, as the first time they sent you a manual,
you corrected it and sent it back to them.
Walter Roberson roberson@ibd.nrc.ca
From: paulp@nic.cerf.net (Paul Phillips)
(You Know You Have Not Been Hacking Long Enough When...)
you see the subject header in comp.lang.perl "Comparing two dates" and
your mind immediately starts weighing the relative merits of different
women.
-PSP
From: acbul1@penfold.cc.monash.edu.au (Andrew Bulhak)
Mika Leivo (leivo@cs.Helsinki.FI) wrote:
: When you see somebody you don't know making a mess of what he is doing
: and you think: Hmm, that must be a Micro$oft product.
: And realice only minutes later that :
: A) Micro$oft doesn't make people
: B) If it did, they wouldn't live / walk for very long.
Yep.
I often catch myself thinking "his code must be really bogus" or "you
can't talk to her -- only the interface code has been implemented".
Or just plain "Intel inside".
"s/he's a nice person but I'll wait for the next release."
: When you tend to tell your friends:
: If only I got a couple of hours with the source-code of world,
: preferably in C, and a quick recompile/reboot.
Yes. Or at the very least, the root password for the Universe.
From: duncan@smug.student.adelaide.edu.au (Slakko)
YKYBHTLW...
You are taking notes in a lecture. You stop highlighting before the last
full stop because you think "If I highlight the full stop, the cursor will be
on highlight and I'll have to turn it off from the menu."
Only took me about 0.25 seconds to notice, but still AAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHH!
Duncan "M-tp" Richer
From: umennis0@cc.umanitoba.ca (Sean D. Ennis)
You're listening to the radio before you go to sleep, and a particularily
annoying anouncer comes on to tell you his oppinions on life, what the next
piece (of music) will be, and it's entire history - and you think there's
got to be a way to parse out these headers and just get the name of the
piece. I like the music, otherwise I'd just throw him into a kill file.
Sean
From: spam@access1.digex.net (Spam I am)
This thread reminds me of something that boiled out of
my brain in a strange house full of computers on New Year's day:
> From: John Rehwinkel <spam@fandom-house.org>
> Date: Sat, 1 Jan 94 12:23:41 EST
> Subject: System Anarchy for new year
So, I wake up New Year's morning, and cron lights
off and tells me the time has arrived for annual system
maintenance.
I go and get the cheat sheet. Okay, what do I
do first? "Run `fsck'". Fine.
spam> fsck
/dev/raw/brain: last mounted on /
i=69 mode=670411 owner=root
unreferenced file -- reconnect? n
clear? y
superblock corrupt -- repair? y
65472 files, 33748898 blocks.
Gee. A missing file. In my BRAIN. Yuck.
I wonder what it is...
/excretory/bladder: file system is full
Shit. No. Piss. I gotta pee during system
maintenance. Go to bathroom. Prepare everything.
spam> urinate -f -g -x
/dev/penis: no such file or directory
AAAAAAAAAAAUAGH! I think I just found my missing
file...
spam> ls -l /dev/p*
crw-rw-rw- 1 root 121, 0 Sep 26 1962 /dev/pancreas
crw-rw-rw- 1 root 71, 0 Sep 26 1962 /dev/parathyroid
crw-r--r-- 1 root 67, 0 Sep 26 1962 /dev/pineal
crw-r--r-- 1 root 75, 0 Sep 26 1962 /dev/pituitary
spam> mknod /dev/penis c ...
Er, what's the major device number?
spam> grep -i penis /sys/spam/conf.c
#include "penis.h"
#if NPENIS > 0 I certainly hope so!
extern int penisprobe(); Sounds fun.
extern int penisattach(); Detachable penis?
extern int penisopen(); Ouch.
extern int penisclose(); Messy without this one.
extern int penisioctl(); Should be able to control these things.
extern int penisintr(); This is important!
penisopen, penisclose, nodev, nodev, /*69*/
penisioctl, penisintr, nodev, nodev,
Aha!
spam> mknod /dev/penis c 69 0
spam> chmod a+rwx /dev/penis
spam> urinate -f -g -x
Ahhhhhhhh......
Whew.
Okay, done with that. What's next?
"Get current patches and bug fixes"
spam> autopatch
br0: connecting to spamsite.arcturus.exp
connected.
available: flirt.o
details? y
Bugs fixed:
bug 4488229:
reported by chused@husc.harvard.edu
parser problem, responds incorrectly to replies like
"yes, but not ever".
bug 4488104:
reported by carole@intercon.com
protocol is not robust to glitches on communications link
bug 4388288:
reported by dreamy@fandom-house.org
clueserver is BROKEN!
install? y
flirt.o: 1/1/94 29837988 bytes.
available: flame.o
details? y
Bugs fixed:
bug 40228478:
reported by feste@world.std.com
trace log is way too long
bug 39874511:
reported by jym@remarque.berkeley.edu
decision module is unstable -- flames on trivia, ignores bait
bug 37993040:
reported by raoul@athena.mit.edu
deconstruction module is too efficient -- overreduces arguments
install? y
flame.o: 1/1/94 92347892384729847 bytes.
available: fuck.o
details? n
install? n
reason? I never get to use it anyway.
available: hack.o
details? n
install? y
hack.o: 1/1/94 564 bytes.
available: horsesense.o
details? ^Y
session disconnect requested by user.
Screw this. I'll muddle through till next year.
HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYBODY!
-- Spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
From: mje@pookie.pass.wayne.edu (Michael J. Edelman)
...when you're reading news with xvnews on the SPARC on your desk and
you come across this really neat Windows trick, so you turn your attention
to the Gateway box on the left side of your desk running Windows, slew the SPARC
mouse to the left, and are puzzled as to why the cursor arrow didn't make
it all the way over to the Gateway's monitor...
Yes, I *really* did this...
--mike
From: acbul1@penfold.cc.monash.edu.au (Andrew Bulhak)
... when you try repeatedly to say something to a person who
does not respond, and eventually give up, thinking something like "I
guess this means that Kris is down".
-- acb [happened to me the other week]
From: Erik_Schmidt@p99.wharfrat.fido.de (Erik Schmidt)
... you're attending a party and want to take some pictures and ask: 'may I
take a Gif of you?'.
From: iyoung@discover.wright.edu (Ian Young)
you're cooking, and when you want someone to start boiling water, you tell
them "hey, could you init the noodles?"
You leave your bags sitting at the help desk, and then go to lunch.
When you realize you need something from your bag, you start back
towards the lab, stop, and think "Hey, why don't I just FTP my
paper to the cafeteria?"
From: samir@mickey.cc.utexas.edu (Samir Mahendra)
You see a motorcycle with "VT500" painted on the side, and you
immediately start looking for a terminal.
You start thinking in terms of if...then statements and while loops,
and after a night spent drinking, you start using goto's.
From: berndm@cs.monash.edu.au (Bernd U Meyer)
samir@mickey.cc.utexas.edu (Samir Mahendra) writes:
>You start thinking in terms of if...then statements and while loops,
>and after a night spent drinking, you start using goto's.
You come into your shower, discover a trail of ants, wash most of them
of but spare those which are between you and your towel (and way above
you head, anyway), and a minute later recognize that the remaining ants
are helplessly waiting for something to happen, and the thought that
crosses your mind is "Whoever wrote the firmware for those parallel
beasts didn't provide a very efficient fault recovery. They are
deadlocked!"....
You think about a hardware design you are working on, and catch yourself
thinking "I have 50ns here. Wow, that's HEAPS of time"....
Bernie
From: str8jkt@cyberspace.com (Glenn M. Brockett)
I had a nasty one lately... I was trying to fall asleep, and found that
I couldn't shut down my system properly... Every time I told my body to
`shutdown`
It would shutdown and reboot back into the runtime... This happened about
4 times before I realised I was dreaming this... I still couldn't shut
down my body till I imagined putting a DOS disk into the system and just
powered down when I got the prompt.
Too much Unix lately.
From: fat@Indy (Irtegov Dmitry Valentinovich)
You know you have been hacking too long when:
You think how to describe a half-awoke state of mind,
and the first idea is: `single-user mode'.
Then you understand, that single-user mode is really a sleeping state,
zero mode (when is safe to powerdown) is a coma or anabiose (sp?),
and half-awoke state is `changing from mode 1 to multiuser'
Cheers,
Fat Brother.
From: rls3@Ra.MsState.Edu (Roger L Smith)
str8jkt@cyberspace.com (Glenn M. Brockett) writes:
>I had a nasty one lately... I was trying to fall asleep, and found that
>I couldn't shut down my system properly... Every time I told my body to
>`shutdown`
>It would shutdown and reboot back into the runtime... This happened about
>4 times before I realised I was dreaming this... I still couldn't shut
>down my body till I imagined putting a DOS disk into the system and just
>powered down when I got the prompt.
I started dreaming the other night that I was having a hard drive failure.
I suddenly woke up to realize that I was having stomach cramps. This has
actually happened to me about three times. Stress kills!
From: hjv@phil.ruu.nl (Hendrik Jan Veenstra)
... when, while reading a book and being somewhere halfway, and reading a new
crucial bit of information on one of the main characters that makes you want to
re-read the parts in which he was mentioned earlier, your first thought is "Oh,
I'll just do a grep "name" on the foregoing chapters. Happened to me this
week...
YKYreallyBHTLW... you realise it's been 4 years since you last read a book, and
then that book was a manual.
Or worse: it's been 4 years.. etc, but you don't even realise it...
From: marge@tippy.com (Rich Herdman)
You know you have been hacking too long when:
You're at Wal-Mart with your 9 week old son and upon seeing a new
baby bottle from Fisher Price called a 'Flow Control' bottle, your first
thought is:
"Hmmm... is that hardware flow control or software flow control?"
Rich "and what leads would I use on my kid's face?" Herdman
From: nilo@login.dknet.dk (Nicolai Thilo)
You know you have been hacking too long when:
You 'briefly' lie down on the bed with all the lights in the room
left on and think "the screen blanker will take care of that" and go
to sleep with all your clothes on..
From: pburgess@netcom.com (Phillip Burgess)
Some background: There's a second annual parade in Pasadena, called the
"Doo-Dah Parade", intended to make a mockery of the Rose Parade. A few
years ago I was meeting with some other computer nerds in Pasadena and
this actually happened:
1) Nerd #1 steps into Nerd #2's apartment, they exchange greetings, and
Nerd #1 tells Nerd #2 that "today is the Doo-Dah Parade."
2) Nerd #2 asks, "What's the dude operand?"
3) Hilarity ensues.
4) Nerd #3 knocks on door, comes in, greetings are exchanged, and then
Nerd #2 tells Nerd #3 that "they're having the Doo-Dah Parade today."
5) Nerd #3 asks, "What's the dude operand?"
Maybe you had to be there.
From: gkb@aber.ac.uk (GARY BARNES)
YKYBHTLW you happen look at the instructions on your gas meter as to what
to do in the event of a gas leak, and when you see that it says
"Open windows" you think, "Oh smeg, do I have to?".
Gaz
From: ab401@freenet.carleton.ca (Paul Tomblin)
I was in New york City for the first time this weekend, and I kept seeing
orange road signs that said "ALT. RTE. BERRY AVE" (or some other street name)
and my first thought was that somebody had newgrouped a new alt group that I'm
not going to bother to addgroup.
From: acbul1@penfold.cc.monash.edu.au (Andrew Bulhak)
You Know You've Been Hacking Too Long When.....
.....you are about to feed your cat and you find yourself thinking
half-consciously, "is this an AT&T cat or a Berkeley cat?"
Happened to me...
- acb [And I didn't even associate it with /bin/cat either.....]
From: Huge@axalotl.demon.co.uk (Hugh Davies)
You know you've been hacking too long when...
You look at every word that ends in the letter 'd' and wonder what kind
of daemon it is...
From: paulp@nic.cerf.net (Paul Phillips)
you look at your notes from the last half hour and realize that you
have written "date" twice.
-PSP, time impaired
From: bram@fangorn.xs4all.nl (Bram Smits)
... you see a tape called 'hard drive' at the videostore and you think
'who would want to make a movie of THAT ?'. (no, it wasn't in the XXX
section).
From: us224353@dawn.mmm.com (Chris Sonnack)
You see a sign about a casino bragging that they "shell out more
often", and you wonder: Borne, Korn or C?
From: Perry.Rovers@kub.nl (Perry Rovers)
- you read posts from some guy who uses $ instead of > for replies
and think: this guy must be using VMS
- you try to resize the physical screen of a laptop by dragging a mouse
From: root@foobar.hanse.de (Jens Stark)
... your wife wakes you up MUCH too early, so your brain is almost working
in single step mode and you have a dream obout a salesman who offers you
"just a trouble-fee quick processor upgrade". Oh, well - sounded like a
great idea to me at that time !
Jens
From: malloy@crash.cts.com (Sean Malloy)
When I've been spending too much time in the editor, either at work running
X on my workstation, or at home with a windowing editor, I will
occasionally run into a problem where a sheet of paper I'm referring to as
I write will be covering the part of the screen where the cursor is, and
I'll make several futile attempts to pop the window on the monitor up over
the sheet of paper in front of it -- the metaphor coming off the desktop
and biting me.
From: Benjamin.D.Taylor@CS.CMU.EDU
While waking up one morning, I had gotten into this sleep GUI (oddly
reminiscient of the Borland IDE) and realized it was time to wake up.
So what did I do? I pulled down the upper-left menu to Exit. When it
didn't work, I felt really silly and *that* woke me up.
Ben Taylor
From: "Bob Krampetz" <bobk@vnet.IBM.COM>
You know .... when: you *do* drive home, but all the licence plates
you see are valid assembler op codes.
From: Adrian Booth Computing Consultants <abcc@perth.dialix.oz.au>
You know you've been *administrating* too long when you keep looking
suspiciously at how close some CDs and a speaker or telephone are...
(you know, floppies, magnetic fields... never mind)
From: sieber@sfu.ca
Well, along with a (large) number of other people, I never thought
this sort of thing would happen to me. Imagine my surprise when, the
other day, after writing down a few items in columns on a piece of
paper, I realised that the next item would need more room than I had
left in one of the columns. No problem, I'll just highlight the
block, and cut and paste to move it over.... pause.... <smack>
If only life could be that easy.... ;-)
-=<Dirk>=-