April 22, 2003
Scripting News
This is no way to live. We shall pass this way but once, and it's a pity to waste it.
But I have burned up eight $^%# hours in the last day and a half trying to get a simple perl script to send me email. It's FormMail.pl, probably the most common perl script in the universe. It checks the fields. It redirects. It does everything it should except activate sendmail.
April 19, 2003
Argh
An old man was sitting on a bench in the mall when a young man with
spiked hair came over and sat down beside him. The boy's hair was
yellow and green and orange and purple. He had black makeup around his
eyes. The old man just stared at him.
The boy said, "What's the matter, old man, haven't you ever done
anything wild in your life?"
The old man answered, "Well, yes, actually, I have. I once got drunk
and had sex with a parrot. I was just wondering if you were my son."
The truth is that if you take a little time to learn a few basic principals and some of the technical lingo, buying a new computer is no more complicated thatn building a nuclear reactor from wristwatch parts in a darkened room using only your teeth.
A sandwich walks into a bar. The barman says, "Sorry, we don't serve
food in here."
A dyslexic man walks into a bra.
"Doc, I can't stop singing 'The green, green grass of home.'"
"That sounds like Tom Jones syndrome."
"Is it common?"
"It's not unusual."
Two fish are in a tank. One says to the other, "I'll man the guns, you
drive."
Quasimodo was retiring. The priests at Notre Dame were in a tizzy. They
needed a new bell ringer. They advertised. Of course, they wanted a
hunchback. It was tradition. So they advertised far and wide and finally
found a hunchback who could have been Quasimodo's younger brother. Amazing resemblence. The priests were happy. So Quasimodo says, "Come on then, I'll show you the ropes." After they new bell ringer had been instructed
Quasimodo set off on his long looked forward to retirement.
The first day on the job the new bell ringer grabbed the rope and pulled it.
It came apart in his hands. Oh no. So he started to climb the bell tower.
He had to ring the bell for service. He go up to the tower and the rope had
broken right at the bell. Not having any time to fix it he just grabbed the
rim of the bell and gave it a huge shove. The bell swung out and came back,
hitting him in the face and giving a huge ring. The hunchback flew out the
window and fell down to the square, dead on impact.
A couple of the townsfolk ran over. They asked each other, "Who's this?"
One guy answered, "I don't know but his face sure rings a bell." A second
towsperson commented, "He's a dead ringer for Quasimodo."
April 13, 2003
A lazy Sunday morning
I love to start a Sunday morning with a good cup of coffee and The New York Times.
Headline for a review of a book on the world poker championships: I Want To Hold Your Hand.
For a review of Queen Noor's book: Monarch Notes.
Uta asks, "Didn't you used to have a Rhodia notebook?" I replied that I bought half a dozen of them in a shop on the Place Ste. Michelle two weeks ago. Trendy designer Paul Smith swears by them. I feel so in.
Jeff Einstein graced the cover of the magazine. Once a $300K/year dot-com pioneer, he sells khakis at The Gap. He could do worse. Another fellow, like me a Princeton undergrad and Harvard MBA, hasn't found squat in more than a year of searching. Lots of people are suffering from our nation's aimlessness.
My pet theory is that the economic recession has hit high performers and smart folks particularly hard. Firing them saves more money, but that's generally not what's going on. Ever since 9-11, business has been thinking short term. It's survival mode. Defcon IV. The bright folks were around to build the future. Companies figure they can do without them while they're living one day at a time.
Another section of the magazine had a portfolio of stunning portraits of people praying. Ninety per cent of Americans believe in God. Three quarters of Americans pray every day. I find this astounding. Is this due to hundreds of thousands of top performing bond salesmen and advertising gurus praying they don't have to go to work for McDonald's?
Some people's prayers have already been answered. Talk about cash cows. How about this testimonial for Google?
- Before Ms. Vavra advertised with Google, she was selling about 10 suits a month over eBay. Then she bought 50 Google keyword ads using her Visa card. The next morning, she said, sales took off. The business has continued to grow; she now sells almost 120 suits a month. She expects to spend $60,000 this year on Google search ads.
"Our business exploded from Google, and Google alone," she said.
The company stopped giving updates on the size of its computing resources in 2001. But several people with knowledge of the system said it consists of more than 54,000 servers designed by Google engineers from basic components. It contains about 100,000 processors and 261,000 disks, these people said, making it what many consider the largest computing system in the world.
When Edward Zander, Sun's former president, first visited Mr. Schmidt at Google not long ago, he was stunned. "I found dogs running through the halls, a piano in the lobby and all these food goodies around," he said. "I'm thinking to myself, `It's like chaos here.' "
I'm about three-quarters of the way through Six Degrees, just slushing along at this point. The theoretical stuff bores me. I'm looking for practical tools for optimizing networks, specifically social networks. It takes a lot of searching to come up with a few measly, useful nuggets.
I've got to polish off Six Degrees schnell, because I am so looking forward to reading Toothpicks and Logos: Design in Everyday Life by John Heskett. "The best book I have read about the design process," says Terence Conran. The back blurb claims the book "goes beyond style and taste to look at how different cultures and individuals personalize obejcts."
April 11, 2003
April Fool!
All I could come up with this year was "There are spider webs in the refrigerator."
From Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of All Time, these true April Fool's scams cracked me up:
- *#93: Eiffel Tower Moves*
The Parisien stunned French citizens in 1986 when it reported that an agreement had been signed to dismantle the Eiffle Tower. The international symbol of French culture would then be reconstructed in the new Euro Disney theme park going up east of Paris. In the space where the Tower used to stand, a 35,000 seat stadium would be built for use during the 1992 Olympic Games.
*#8: Alabama Changes the Value of Pi*
The April 1998 issue of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason newsletter contained an article claiming that the Alabama state legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi from 3.14159 to the 'Biblical value' of 3.0. Before long the article had made its way onto the internet, and then it rapidly made its way around the world, forwarded by people in their email. It only became apparent how far the article had spread when the Alabama legislature began receiving hundreds of calls from people protesting the legislation. The original article, which was intended as a parody of legislative attempts to circumscribe the teaching of evolution, was written by a physicist named Mark Boslough.
*#17: The Left-Handed Whopper*
In 1998 Burger King published a full page advertisement in USA Today announcing the introduction of a new item to their menu: a "Left-Handed Whopper" specially designed for the 32 million left-handed Americans. According to the advertisement, the new whopper included the same ingredients as the original Whopper (lettuce, tomato, hamburger patty, etc.), but all the condiments were rotated 180 degrees for the benefit of their left-handed customers. The following day Burger King issued a follow-up release revealing that although the Left-Handed Whopper was a hoax, thousands of customers had gone into restaurants to request the new sandwich. Simultaneously, according to the press release, "many others requested their own 'right handed' version."
*#23: Guinness Mean Time*
In 1998 Guinness issued a press release announcing that it had reached an agreement with the Old Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England to be the official beer sponsor of the Observatory's millennium celebration. According to this agreement, Greenwich Mean Time would be renamed Guinness Mean Time until the end of 1999. In addition, where the Observatory traditionally counted seconds in "pips," it would now count them in "pint drips." The Financial Times, not realizing that the release was a joke, declared that Guinness was setting a "brash tone for the millennium." When the Financial Times learned that it had fallen for a joke, it printed a curt retraction, stating that the news it had disclosed "was apparently intended as part of an April 1 spoof."
*#32: The True Age of Britney Spears*
In 1999 the Wall of Sound music website reported that Britney Spears was actually eleven years older than popularly believed, making her 28 instead of 17. The revelation followed on the heels of a controversial cover for Rolling Stone which had shown the young Spears in a seductive pose. The Wall of Sound's report included many specific details. For instance, it alleged that Spears was actually born Belinda Sue Spearson in West Baton Rouge on August 7, 1970, and that she had attended Robert E. Lee High School. Former classmates were said to be willing to confirm Spears' true age. The hoax prompted hundreds of people to call Spears' record label inquiring about her age.
*#35: Big Ben Goes Digital*
In 1980 the BBC reported that Big Ben, in order to keep up with the times, was going to be given a digital readout. It received a huge response from listeners protesting the change. The BBC Japanese service also announced that the clock hands would be sold to the first four listeners to contact them, and one Japanese seaman in the mid-Atlantic immediately radioed in a bid.
*#39: The Euro Anthem*
In 1999 the Today program on BBC Radio 4 announced that the British National anthem ("God Save the Queen") was to be replaced by a Euro Anthem sung in German. The new anthem, which Today played for their listeners, used extracts from Beethoven's music and was sung by pupils of a German school in London. Reportedly, Prince Charles's office telephoned Radio 4 to ask them for a copy of the new anthem. St. James Palace later insisted that it had been playing along with the prank and had never been taken in by it.
*#52: Thomas Edison Invents Food Machine*
After Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, Americans firmly believed that there were no limits to his genius. Therefore, when the New York Graphic announced in 1878 that Edison had invented a machine that could transform soil directly into cereal and water directly into wine, thereby ending the problem of world hunger, it found no shortage of willing believers. Newspapers throughout America copied the article, heaping lavish praise on Edison. The conservative Buffalo Commercial Advertiser was particularly effusive in its praise, waxing eloquent about Edison's brilliance in a long editorial. The Graphic took the liberty of reprinting the Advertiser's editorial in full, placing above it a simple, two-word headline: "They Bite!"
*#77: MITkey Mouse*
On April 1, 1998 the homepage of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced some startling news: the prestigious university was to be sold to Walt Disney Co. for $6.9 billion. A photograph of the university's famous dome outfitted with a pair of mouse ears accompanied the news. The press release explained that the university was to be dismantled and transported to Orlando where new schools would be added to the campus including the School of Imagineering, the Scrooge McDuck School of Management, and the Donald Duck Department of Linguistics. The fact that the announcement appeared on MIT's homepage added official credibility to it. But in fact, the announcement was the work of students who had hacked into the school's central server and replaced the school's real web page with a phony one.
April 10, 2003
The Second Violinist is in a practice room at Symphony Hall. The police knock on the door: "We've got some bad news for you, sir. Your house burned down and your children were injured. They've been taken to the hospital."
"That's terrible!" exclaimed the Second Violinist. "How did it happen?"
"I'm sorry to have to tell you this, sir," continued the policeman, "but it seems that the Conductor has been having an affair with your wife. They were in your bedroom, smoking cigarettes after having sex, and got careless. The cigarettes lit the bedclothes on fire and then it spread to the rest of the house."
The Second Violinist seemed stunned for a moment as a look of wonder spread over his face. "The Conductor? ... Came to MY house?"
This story may explain how things spiraled into violence in Iraq. George W. kept mentioning Saddam and Iraq in his speeches. If Saddam had been watching CNN he'd have seen the most powerful man in the world focussed on him and the country that he owned. It would have been a lot scarier for Saddam if W. had said, in response to a question about Iraq, "I delegated the issue to a one-star general, who has full authority to bomb Saddam if necessary, and he will be giving me a report six months from now."
I recall seeing a headline "President delivers ultimatum to Saddam Hussein". How much more scared would Saddam have been if the headline had read "Administrative assistant to 3rd Undersecretary of State delivers ultimatum to Saddam"?
# Posted by Philip Greenspun
April 09, 2003
Make my day
This week I've overcome the temptation to check email and blogsurf first thing in the morning. Instead, I write whatever pops into my head, often finding that it takes up just where I left off the night before.
I'm more coherent when my nerves haven't been jangled by mostly useless email and stories. An hour without interruption, that's a chunk of time I can do something with.
This routine also tricks me into thinking that I'm in control of my life.
