X-NEWS: spcvxb.spc.edu alt.folklore.computers: 57068 Xref: spcuna alt.folklore.computers:57068 rec.humor:127115 Path: spcuna!uunet!EU.net!sun4nl!hacktic!blackhl.hacktic.nl!kzdoos.hacktic.nl!koos From: koos@kzdoos.hacktic.nl (Koos van den Hout) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,rec.humor Subject: You know when you've been hacking too long, Canonical list of Keywords: hacking humor Message-ID: Date: Sun, 28 Nov 93 11:12:42 GMT Distribution: world Organization: HIN / BBS Koos z'n Doos Lines: 1807 * 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. I have left the names of the persons who made the entries intact. More entries still welcome ! * 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 0x07F 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@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 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 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 ! 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 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 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 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 (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" 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" 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 machine, you automatically try to check mail. your first reaction to the above is that mail is down you try to ^Z out of Quattro you decide to stay in school...just to keep your Internet account! From: mah@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Martin Hay) Yesterday morning when my _analogue_ alarm went off, I woke up (just), tried to work out exactly what the hell was going on, fumbled about and finally grabbed the thing (alarm clock, you sick shit :-) ), and then spent about 20 dazed seconds trying to remember exactly how to turn it off. I then spent about another five finding the little lever, and about another ten trying to manouver my thumb onto it before I could have peace until my Hi-Fi started up (digital alarm). Sorry to disappoint anyone, but I am totally incapable of thought (coherent or otherwise) when I wake up. From: dave@gilly.UUCP chambles@whale.st.usm.edu (John William Chambless) writes: >ObYKYBHTL: this AM when the alarm went off, my first thought was >"hit 'i' to return to the elm menu..." My last alarm-clock delusion was trying to figure out what username it was running under, so I could look at its crontab file to see when it was going to ring... Usually I just look at all its glowing LEDs, mistake it for my modem, and wonder what the *HELL* its doing!?!? :-) From: eigenstr@cs.rose-hulman.edu (Todd R. Eigenschink) I saw a friend who works in the computing center from whom I had borrowed an ethernet tee. I said something like, "Oh, shoot, I have to give that back to you." Without even thinking, he responded, "Just email it to me." I was about to ask if I should compress it, but thought better of it. :-) From: u912078@daimi.aau.dk (S|ren Erland Vest|) The classical one (no flames please) : YKYBHTL... when you get a headache from looking at 3-dimensional objects.. :) From: peter@NeoSoft.com (Peter da Silva) Let's see. I once dreamed I couldn't get into the bathroom because I'd broken the device driver for the door. I once dreamed I couldn't open my eyes because I'd broken the device driver for my eyelids. That was particularly irritating, because I couldn't fix the code because I couldn't open my eyes! From: nmehl@ccat.sas.upenn.edu (Nathan J. Mehl) You know you've been hacking too long when, while taking notes in a class, you begin to /*COMMENT OUT*/ the sections where the professor is going on a silly digression. (The really scary thing is that, in my case, "too long" means about two months of trying to teach myself C. Says something for either my high impressability, or just my general lack of sleep lately.) From: ttg242@newton.sps.mot.com (David Thornewill von Essen) In article nmehl@ccat.sas.upenn.edu, nmehl@ccat.sas.upenn.edu (Nathan J. Mehl) writes: >You know you've been hacking too long when, while taking notes in a class, >you begin to /*COMMENT OUT*/ the sections where the professor is going on >a silly digression. Another indication of hacking too long is frantically trying to hit the non-existent ENTER key on the alarm clock in the hope that it will scroll the numbers off the screen so that you can enter the command to kill the noise. Giving up, going back to sleep regardless of the now blaring radio, to be asked later by a non-hacking flatmate "What the hell was going on?" True, and happened more than once. I am now married, the alarm clock is on her side! From: bernie@metapro.DIALix.oz.au (Bernd Felsche) In <1ul2r1$4tk@uniwa.uwa.edu.au> chester@tartarus.uwa.edu.au (Craig Abbott) writes: >>the numbers off the screen so that you can enter the command to kill the >>noise. Giving up, going back to sleep regardless of the now blaring radio, >>to be asked later by a non-hacking flatmate "What the hell was going on?" How about waking up before the alarm clock and the first thing that you do is return a FILE pointer. This is highly disturbing, and almost enough to make you head for the drinks cabinet. The must be some way of clearing the stack before you sleep(). On the weekends, I usually alarm(0) but this morning's return() from my sleep() almost caused a SIGHUP. From: andreww@uniwa.uwa.edu.au (Andrew Williams) chester@tartarus.uwa.edu.au (Craig Abbott) writes: >ttg242@newton.sps.mot.com (David Thornewill von Essen) writes: >>Another indication of hacking too long is frantically trying to hit the >>non-existent ENTER key on the alarm clock in the hope that it will scroll >>the numbers off the screen so that you can enter the command to kill the >>noise. Giving up, going back to sleep regardless of the now blaring radio, >>to be asked later by a non-hacking flatmate "What the hell was going on?" >I had this happen recently too, projects were due. My alarm clock has a >9 minute "snooze", so, every 9 minutes I would stare at the clock, realise >that the beeping meant ERROR and wonder what the output meant. Then I >would fumble around with it till it stopped and lie back down to try and >figure out what was wrong. Problem: Even though I hadn't yet changed >the code - the output was different every time it beeped an error.... >Try solving *that* bug! I remember one day, as the alarm was blaring, spending 5 or 10 minutes thinking about how to make the clock radio run backwards. The frightening thing was the fact that while I was awake enough to ponder the innards of my clock, I wasn't quite up to realising that MY clock running backwards wouldn't be enough to let me stay in bed... And then theres the morning I [thinking about an upcoming house move], decided that a simple solution was to borrow an exabyte drive from uni and tar and compress the house contents, and restore it at the new address. I even remember worrying about whether tar would create the destination rooms properly if I specified absolute pathnames... From: v37262d@kaira.hut.fi (Mancko H|glund) In article <1993Jun3.062039.24102@newsgate.sps.mot.com> ttg242@newton.sps.mot.com writes: >In article nmehl@ccat.sas.upenn.edu, nmehl@ccat.sas.upenn.edu (Nathan J. Mehl) writes: >>You know you've been hacking too long when, while taking notes in a class, >> >Another indication of hacking too long is frantically trying to hit the >non-existent ENTER key on the alarm clock in the hope that it will scroll Or picking up the phone and answering with the the program statement you're about to enter into your code. You can almost hear the ????'s coming over the lines (unless, of course, the caller is another programmer, and a quick-witted one at that). From: u912078@daimi.aau.dk (S|ren Erland Vest|) [alarmclock delusions del'ed] Hi, I recently had a project due, and had been working in X-windows on a Sun3 all night. About 6 o'clock in the morning I was debugging, and wanted to take some notes on a piece of paper beside the computer. I spent about 3 minutes trying to figure out, why that d*mn mousecursor wouldn't go to the paper, so I could write on it..... Then I realized...:) From: m91nen@tdb.uu.se (Nils Engstrom) Reminds me of a very strange dream I had just the other day: I don't remember the beginning, but I found myself waiting for a bus with two packets of breakfast cereal in one hand. (I have no idea why.) Somehow it was very difficult to catch a bus, but eventually one stopped. Oddly enough, it was the same bus and driver that just drove past, and I could still see it leaving... I got on the bus, and the driver asked me a a question, whether I was in a hurry or somesuch. I was then beginning to realize, that things were not quite in order... *Poof* Suddenly, I'm in Emacs, editing the Makefile for my dream! I even edited a few lines before waking up, but I can no longer recall its contents. This was the second time I had a dream in a dream. Does this happen to any one else? n "Be careful not to screw up the terminating condition when you dream recursively!" From: delusion@casbah.acns.nwu.edu (Albert Schmezer) ... when you get your high school Senior Class yearbook photo taken with your favorite IBM-PC keyboard... Couldn't get the yearbook photo people to include the whole CPU, had to settle for a picture with the keyboard in my hands, kinda guitar style... From: majcher@acsu.buffalo.edu (Murali) m91nen@tdb.uu.se (Nils Engstrom) writes: >This was the second time I had a dream in a dream. Does >this happen to any one else? Constantly. I seem to keep having these dreams where I'm dreaming and I wake up and so on and etc...but even _better_ are the computer/internet dreams. The ones where, for an hour or so before I wake up, I'm somehow logged into EtherNet :), reading all my mail and news, and replying to things...and then I wake up. (Then I have to come to work and _really_ do all those things...) I wonder if anybody ever gets those messages...? Of course, then there was the time when I was out dancing till six or seven in the morning, went to bed, and woke up around two in the afternoon...later that night, my then-SO said something about me being logged on earlier that morning...apparently, around 10AM, I had gotten out of bed, made myself breakfast, and logged on! I immediately went to check, and yep, I had been on for about an hour that morning, _while_I_was_still_asleep_! So, fearing the worst, I checked my .history file, and sure enough, I _had_ sent mail to people...eek. Couldn't tell who, though, so I had to send out some more preemptive (or would that be postemptive?) letters, explaining that I had been sleepwalking the 'net, and any email that they had gotten from me that was lewd, obnoxious, or otherwise unrestrained, was a result of my somnetulation... Murali (and boy was _she_ surprised to hear that...) From: andyh@syma.sussex.ac.uk (Andy Holyer) ... when you discover something that's happened in you own office *after* you've read about it on Usenet. My Co-worker just had his hair cut this afternoon. He then got involved in a ramble about the length of his hair. I hadn't looked round!!! I found out about it from the net!! Help!!! From: faught@convex.com (Danny R. Faught) As an addendum to the "have you ever sent email to someone at the next terminal" idea - It has been difficult lately to get the attention of my officemate because he listens to a walkman most of the day. He suggested that I send him email. I suggested that I could just throw my Koosh(tm) at him until I get his attention. It's so much more personal :-) From: jwbirdsa@picarefy.picarefy.com (James W. Birdsall) In article <1993Jun4.134014.14129@nntp.hut.fi> ebbe@shsibm.shh.fi writes: >Or picking up the phone and answering with the the program statement >you're about to enter into your code. You can almost hear the ????'s coming >over the lines (unless, of course, the caller is another programmer, and >a quick-witted one at that). Well, I once had a situation where I was carrying so much state in my head that when a friend called to ask if I wanted to do dinner, I couldn't clear enough space to check my schedule. After about thirty seconds, I gave up: ME: "I don't know. Do I?" HIM: "Yes." ME: "OK, when and where?" HIM: "We're all meeting at my room at six." ME: "Fine. See you then." From: sonix@schunix.uucp (Duane Morin) After one particular night of thrashing about in my sleep, I rolled over and looked at my digital alarm clock to see that it was now "01 E" oclock. Heavens, my eyes were working in hexadecimal. I shook my head a few times, then reached out and turned the poor devil rightside up. 3:10. Much better. From: alien@acheron.amigans.gen.nz (Ross Smith) In article <1993Jun10.032813.16347@picarefy.picarefy.com> jwbirdsa@picarefy.picarefy.com (James W. Birdsall) writes: > HIM: "We're all meeting at my room at six." > ME: "Fine. See you then." Yeah, I've had conversations like that, too. At least, I think I have ... the trouble is that the information content never reaches my long-term memory; if you asked me five minutes later, I'd be prepared to swear on a copy of Kernighan & Ritchie that nobody had said anything to me about dinner... From: jsandler@encore.com (Jeff Sandler) I was driving to the store last night, thinking about bank accounts.. I have my checking account in Tallahassee, where I go to school, and my savings account in Ft. Lauderdale, where I'm working for the summer. Neither have branches in the other location. I was thinking about how to transfer money from my savings to my checkings quickly - I thought I might buy something that I couldn't cover from the one account. I quickly decided that I didn't want to wire money to myself.. Then I realized that it was probably just a matter of setting up my .rhosts file properly, and the transfer would be transparent! From: Jeremy_Reimer@mindlink.bc.ca (Jeremy Reimer) Got this one while 'multitasking', IE reading an old copy of Byte while fiddling around with my desktop settings. :) I was reading the famed article "Is UNIX dead?" in the Sep 92 issue (it only took them until the fourth paragraph to admit that it was not, but I see an alarming increase in these kinds of 'bait' headlines... IE the recent 'DOS 6 - the ultimate upgrade?' articles) There were some screenshots of various GUIs including NeXTstep, SVR4.2 (didn't this become UnixWare?) and the oh-so-exciting Win NT) Anyway, that's veering off the topic. The topic is this: beige. Beige is an absolutely horrible colour for hardware in my opinion, maybe because I have seen too much of it. Everything is beige; beige monitors, beige keyboards, mice, printer cables... Let's face it, it's the colour of cowards. Beige should be permanently banned for hardware, but of course then we'd get sick and tired of what is now the K00L!!!1111 colour, namely black. Black is cool. Little black lights on a black blackground lighting up black and so forth. I was even considering wasting^H^H^H^H^H^H^H spending some $ on having the stupid case painted, when I was hit with an absolutely brilliant idea: open up the System folder, click on Setup, and edit the System icon to show a cool black monitor instead of a boring beige one! Wouldn't that save some money! Actually, the idea of software that is able to alter the physical appearance of your hardware is a great one, and I think systems like this should be designed immediately. From: iisakkil@vipunen.hut.fi (Mika Iisakkila) Jeremy_Reimer@mindlink.bc.ca (Jeremy Reimer) writes: >Actually, the idea of software that is able to alter the physical appearance >of your hardware is a great one, and I think systems like this should be >designed immediately. One night I had a dream that all the windows in my house (wish I had one, that was when I knew I was dreaming) had been converted to huge transparent LCD displays. All of them were running Windows NT. That was alarming, especially as I have never even seen NT running. Many people would have probably hung themselves first thing in the morning, but I though it would be way cool to have 2 x 1.5 m naturally backlit LCD screens, with a vivid animated desktop... (apologies to afw). From: dam@st-andrews.ac.uk (Douglas Andrew McIntosh) Seeing all of this stuff about computer dreams. I was just having a normal type dream last night when there was a noise or something outside.The image in my mind just blacked out and my DOS prompt came up ( GOTHIC H:\ ) I saw logout come up on the screen and then woke up properly feeling very confu- sed...typing this I just had a feeling of deja vu...I hope I wasn't dreaming of writing this post :) From: cq377@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (David C. Williss) I saw a billboard for a new radio station in Lincoln, Nebraska, called KMEM (1480 AM). I found myself wondering if you had to be logged in as "root" to listen to it or if it would be enough to have a radio oned by root with the SUID bit set. From: bwh@beach.cis.ufl.edu (Brian W. Hook) you know you've been programming too long when everything in your life turns into code...witness this: main() { while ( sleeping ) { sleeping = !Rested(); if ( AlarmIsOn() ) sleeping = 0; } BrushTeeth( self ); Shower( self ); Dress( self ); Enter( car, self ); while ( !Started( car ) ) { if ( Inserted( key ) ) Turn( key ); else Insert( key ); } } You get the idea...better yet, when you're sleeping and someone is trying to wake you up, and you're wondering if you can CLI. :-) From: sonix@schunix.dmc.com (Duane Morin) Watching television and reading news at the same time. Right hand on the keyboard, left hand had the remote control. Tried to change the television channel by pressing "n". Tried to move to the next article by clicking the remote. Argh. I hate that. And another one (not rn related, however)...had a dream a while back that my SO and I were (god help us) icons in a GUI and I couldn't get closer to her than I was because the window manager demanded minimum space between icons and kept knocking me back into place whenever I tried to overlap her location. Rats. I'm going to finish my game, and then go away from these things for a long, long time. Something about no unit of time shorter than a season. (I know the correct quote, don't anybody give it to me. :)) Well, no I'm not. Duane From: sonix@schunix.dmc.com (Duane Morin) Oh, man... Last night, I'm in a conversation on a VERY non-computer related topic, when my friend makes the statement that, let's just say, given adequate access to the entire female body, one would certainly spend more time in certain areas than others. (There, I did that so as to offend as few people as I could.) Anyway. It happened that my girlfriend was also part of this conversation. At this statement, my brain did something of the following: I created a topographical data structure representing the surface area of her body, broke it up into roughly equivalent area, and sorted them according to priority. Someone should take my computer away. And, with stuff like THAT happening, it'll probably be her! Duane From: ins559n@aurora.cc.monash.edu.au (Andrew Bulhak) Today I went to McDonalds for lunch; since it was a pleasantly warm day, the restaurant was full of customers, and there were several long queues and not enough attendants. The first thing that came to my mind was whether this McD, being a multiprocessor situation, implements the bakery algorighm for scheduling. After some minutes in the queue, I observed that the load averages must be astronomical..... From: mcovingt@aisun3.ai.uga.edu (Michael Covington) From my 8-year-old daughter, today: "What would it be like if pets had pets? That would be so... _recursive_!" From: amb@mundil.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Aaron Marcus BURNHAM) Hacking at a friend's place on the weekend, I was offered the dregs of the chips he was having for tea. They were in a cardboard box inside a paper bag, and after eating what was left in the box, I screwed up the bag and put it aside. But my friend said I hadn't finished them, so I had a look in the bag under the box and saw the fries that had fallen in between. "Ahhh", I said, "Chip cache", and then said something about false-bottomed boxes before I realised what he was lauging at. Aaron "stop the spead of quoted middle names from AFU" Burnham. From: rkroll%cmptech.uucp@csn.org (Russell Kroll) ... your dog is named "Kludge", in this case pronounced (klooj) From: kulesa@acsu.buffalo.edu (Royal Nuisance) ...for some reason you never *did* get around to reading yesterday's newspaper, and when you place *today's* newspaper on top of it on the kitchen table, you think: "X-Supersedes:"... ...you see numerous references to the campus medical building, Michael Hall, in campus publications, and the first thing that pops into your head is rec.gambling net.personality Michael R. Hall... ...you're the only one in the room who gets a kick out of the fact that the #2 and #3 spots on the 1993 Forbes 400 list of wealthiest individuals are, respectively, Bill Gates and entertainment mogul John Kluge... --The Royal Nuisance, of the State University of New York at Buffalo. From: "Paul E. King" You may be interested in the following: When sending X-mas cards you try to put your greeting into a dynamic link library. When debugging code, you figure the project isn't getting enough attention and needs a little more self-esteem. When listening to your answering machine, you try to pass the messages to a calling subroutine. From: jwbirdsa@picarefy.picarefy.com (James W. Birdsall) I was flipping through the TV listings the other day and the title of an old Lucy episode caught my eye: "Lucy Is a Process Server." It took me about fifteen seconds to make that one resolve sensibly. From: auj@aber.ac.uk (Alun Jones) Last week I was trying to get PC-NFS upgraded on the PC I use (for my sins...) Due to the non-standard driver I have to use it took about 3 attempts to get it up & running. Anyway, last night I walked into a public terminal room and on the whiteboard there were notes for some class. The first thing that hit my eyes was the phrase: net profit It took a while for me to parse that one right! From: cpu@chac.win.net (Kip Crosby) Yesterday I was making arrangements to pick up a new laptop and, since this was a new vendor too, I needed the address. The salesrep told me it was 2048 Fourth Street, I laughed, she asked me why, and I said "Well, it's 2K 2-squared street." She paused and asked me, much too gently, "Do you think like that a lot?" From: tsw@cypher.apple.com (Tom Watson) In article , drs@netcom.com (Data Rentals and Sales) wrote: > > While working in pre-hexadecimal days, I once added up an expense > report in octal (because there were no 8'2 or 9's in it), quite by > mistake. The next day I got a call from a young lady in accounting. > "Uh, Mr. Quitt? Your expense report has all the right signatures on > it, but I can't get it to add up to the same number you did". "What > do you get?" (She responded with the correct total, which fortunately > had a nine in it). "Uh, go ahead and use that number - I see what I > did wrong". Yeah, right - try and explain it? > > > Your error was caught in time. I had a friend who, while programming a PDP-8 (it was a while ago) added (or subtracted) her checkbook in octal. Things were interesting, but soon hit the fan (a check bounced, or something). In those days thinking in octal was done on an 8+ hour basis. She had a hard time explaining it to her husband (who was in Material Science at the time). From: ScottM@cup.portal.com (Scott - Maxwell) I was adding up my phone bill today (just checking AT&T's math) and when I was done I realized I had added the thing in hex. From: acb@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au (Andrew Bulhak) You Know You've Been Raytracing Too Long when..... Today, when I was commuting home on the bus (50 minutes each way), when I finished reading the newspaper, I had some ~25 minutes to spend just sitting there (this was somewhere near the former Motorola plant whose street number is 666, but I digress), and my glance fell on the earrings of the woman seated directly in front of me. I caught myself thinking about how the gold texture of the earrings looks _so_ _much_ like the gold texture done by Persistence of Vision. -- Andrew "The earrings must have taken long to define too, as they were toroidal" Bulhak From: gavin@sdl.ug.eds.com (Gavin Matthews) Andrew Bulhak (acb@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au) wrote: > You Know You've Been Raytracing Too Long when..... You know you've been playing with a Newton too long when you're reading a cartoon and you look back to see if any of the hand-printed words have changed into different type-written words. From: R_WINES@TRZCL1 (Rodney Wines) I'll sometimes be watching the credits for a movie or TV show scroll by, and I'll want to read something, and I'll start to look for the "scroll lock" key, or for my mouse so I can scroll backwards ... From: davidw@fulcrum.co.uk (David Wilkinson) YKYBHTL when as you go to sleep at night your dreams take the form of IP packets bouncing around your head, and then you suddenly realise that the reason they are bouncing around is because you forget to set up the address of the name server, so they don't know where to go... From: mhamiltn@herman.cs.uoguelph.ca (Andrew M Hamilton-wright) Travis Corcoran (corcoran@dewey.icd.teradyne.com) was shortened to saying: >pre-processor before a standard C compiler), and I haven't had any >compiler courses, haven't used lex or yacc, etc. >The result is that I spend a lot of time reading manuals and >experimenting. >The other morning the phone rang pretty early. In my sleep I tried to >remember if yacc had enough look ahead to parse: I know the feeling -- a couple of months ago, when I was yaccing my first major code, I was heard to say: "Man, I'm YYhungry -- anyone up for lunch?" 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. Grtx. KH /-- Koos van den Hout ----------------------------------------------- Sysop --\ | Datacomm, networking, E-mail... BBS Koos z'n Doos (+31-3402-56619 2400) | | Inter-: koos@kzdoos.hacktic.nl (+31-3402-36647 14400 v32b v42b MNP5) |