General Computing Humour #2

Quick Reference

• 50 Ways to Worry People in the Computer Lab
• Obituary of Inmos
• "User"
• Not by Jerry Pournelle
• Good Times Virus
• Disk Care
• Charge of the Code Brigade

50 Ways to Worry People in the Computer Lab

1. Log on, wait a sec, then get a frightened look on your face and scream "Oh my God! They've found me!" and bolt.
2. Laugh uncontrollably for about 3 minutes and then suddenly stop and look suspiciously at everyone who looks at you.
3. When your computer is turned off, complain to the monitor on duty that you can't get the damn thing to work. After he/she's turned it on, wait 5 minutes,turn it off again, and repeat the process for a good half hour.
4. Type frantically, often stopping to look at the person next to you evily.
5. Before anyone else is in the lab, connect each computer to a different screen than the one it's set up with.
6. Write a program that plays the "Smurfs" theme song and play it at the highest volume possible over and over again.
7. Work normally for a while. Suddenly look amazingly startled by something on the screen and crawl underneath the desk.
8. Ask the person next to you if they know how to tap into top-secret Pentagon files.
9. Use Interactive Send to make passes at people you don't know.
10. Make a small ritual sacrifice to the computer before you turn it on.
11. Bring a chainsaw, but don't use it. If anyone asks why you have it, say "Just in case..." mysteriously.
12. Type on VAX for a while. Suddenly start cursing for 3 minutes at everything bad about your life. Then stop and continue typing.
13. Enter the lab, undress, and start staring at other people as if they're crazy while typing.
14. Light candles in a pentagram around your terminal before starting.
15. Ask around for a spare disk. Offer $2. Keep asking until someone agrees. Then, pull a disk out of your fly and say, "Oops, I forgot."
16. Every time you press Return and there is processing time required, pray "Ohpleaseohpleaseohpleaseohplease," and scream "YES!" when it finishes.
17. "DISK FIGHT!!!"
18. Start making out with the person at the terminal next to you (It helps if you know them, but this is also a great way to make new friends).
19. Put a straw in your mouth and put your hands in your pockets. Type by hitting the keys with the straw.
20. If you're sitting in a swivel chair, spin around singing "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" whenever there is processing time required.
21. Draw a pictue of a woman (or man) on a piece of paper, tape it to your monitor. Try to seduce it. Act like it hates you and then complain loudly that women (men) are worthless.
22. Try to stick a Ninetendo cartridge into the 3 1/2 disk drive. When it doesn't work, get the supervisor.
23. When you are on an IBM, and when you turn it on, ask loudly where the smiling Apple face is.
24. Print out the complete works of Shakespeare, then when its all done (two days later) say that all you wanted was one line.
25. Sit and stare at the screen, biting your nails noisily. After doing this for a while, spit them out at the feet of the person next to you.
26. Stare at the screen, grind your teeth, stop, look at the person next to you, grinding. Repeat procedure, making sure you never provoke the person enough to let them blow up, as this releases tension, and it is far more effective to let them linger.
27. If you have long hair, take a typing break, look for split ends, cut them and deposit them on your neighbor's keyboard as you leave.
28. Put a large, gold-framed portrait of the British Royal Family on your desk and loudly proclaim that it inspires you.
29. Come to the lab wearing several layers of socks. Remove shoes and place them of top of the monitor. Remove socks layer by layer and drape them around the monitor. Exclaim sudden haiku about the aesthetic beauty of cotton on plastic.
30. Take the keyboard and sit under the computer. Type up your paper like this. Then go to the lab supervisor and complain about the bad working conditions.
31. Laugh hysterically, shout "You will all perish in flames!!!" and continue working.
32. Bring some dry ice and make it look like your computer is smoking.
33. Assign a musical note to every key (ie. the Delete key is A Flat, the B key is F sharp, etc.). Whenever you hit a key, hum its note loudly. Write an entire paper this way.
34. Attempt to eat your computer's mouse.
35. Borrow someone else's keyboard by reaching over, saying "Excuse me, mind if I borrow this for a sec?", unplugging the keyboard and taking it.
36. Bring in a bunch of magnets and have fun.
37. When doing calculations, pull out an abacus and say that sometimes the old ways are best.
38. Play Pong for hours on the most powerful computer in the lab.
39. Make a loud noise of hitting the same key over and over again until you see that your neighbor is noticing (You can hit the space bar so your fill isn't affected). Then look at your neighbor's keyboard. Hit his/her delete key several times, erasing an entire word. While you do this, ask: "Does your delete key work?" Shake your head, and resume hitting the space bar on your keyboard. Keep doing this until you've deleted about a page of your neighbor's document. Then, suddenly exclaim: "Well, whaddya know? I've been hitting the space bar this whole time. No wonder it wasn't deleting! Ha!" Print out your document and leave.
40. Remove your disk from the drive and hide it. Go to the lab monitor and complain that your computer ate your disk. (For special effects, put some Elmer's Glue on or around the disk drive. Claim that the computer is drooling.)
41. Stare at the person's next to your's screen, look really puzzled, burst out laughing, and say "You did that?" loudly. Keep laughing, grab your stuff and leave, howling as you go.
42. Point at the screen. Chant in a made up language while making elaborate hand gestures for a minute or two. Press return or the mouse, then leap back and yell "COVEEEEERRRRRR!" peek up from under the table, walk back to the computer and say. "Oh, good. It worked this time," and calmly start to type again.
43. Keep looking at invisible bugs and trying to swat them.
44. See who's online. Send a total stranger a talk request. Talk to them like you've known them all your lives. Hangup before they get a chance to figure out you're a total stranger.
45. Bring an small tape player with a tape of really absurd sound effects. Pretend it's the computer and look really lost.
46. Pull out a pencil. Start writing on the screen. Complain that the lead doesn't work.
47. Come into the computer lab wearing several endangered species of flowers in your hair. Smile incessantly. Type a sentence, then laugh happily, exclaim "You're such a marvel!!", and kiss the screen. Repeat this after every sentence. As your ecstasy mounts, also hug the keyboard. Finally, hug your neighbor, then the computer assistant, and walk out.
48. Run into the computer lab, shout "Armageddon is here!!!!!", then calmly sit down and begin to type.
49. Quietly walk into the computer lab with a Black and Decker chainsaw, rev that baby up, and then walk up to the nearest person and say, "Give me that computer or you'll be feeding my pet crocodile for the next week".
50. Two words: Tesla Coil.

[Call Pro-Entropy at +1-305-265-9073 (14.4K/8/N/1) for 24 hours of chaos!]
Internet: darsys@Pro-Entropy.cts.com ("Real" Name: Eric A. Seiden)

Obituary of Inmos

Dear All,

Well we have it more-or-less officially now from Graham Nice! He indicated that things were pretty tense and depressed down at Aztec West and that a lot of people might be looking to jump ship ...

The word is that from here on, words like:

• INMOS
• occam
• transputer

Q. How many SGS-Thomson executives does it take to change a light bulb?
A. (from an ST spokesperson): ``Light-bulbs? Light-bulbs?? I think we might have done light-bulbs once upon a time, but I think they got banned along with INMOS, occam and the transputer. Our customers don't want to know about light-bulbs - it's not on their tick-list!''

... or:

Q. What's the difference between SGS-Thomson and the German Democratic Republic (DDR) in early 1992?
A The DDR had much better foresight.

Anyone else want to have a go?

Still cheerful despite the world,

Peter.

"User"

Finally, a song for my generation! I apologize in advance; this is what happens after too many fruit punch Snapples at night. :)

User

In the day of sysop nerds I was a flunkie
Jolt in my brains and body feeling chunky
With the plastic mouse balls spray paint the Commodore
System install with the hard drive on the floor

Kill the process and put it in /dev/null
Email flaming with the user hitting D-control
Shell's called Reno and it's written in C
Got a couple of xterms, keys set to repeat

Root came sayin' I'm insane to complain
About an online wedding and a stain on my screen
Don't believe everything that you make(1)
You get a cracker from Europe and a login that's fake

So write your code in Perl in the dark
Saving all your hacks for working at a tech park
Yo - punch it

So - dumping core
I'm a user, baby, so why don't you kill(1) me?
(Double dense floppy)
So - dumping core
I'm a user, baby, so why don't you kill(1) me?

Forces of evil in a MUD/MOO nightmare
Ban all the members in a phony #chat channel 'cause
One's got a handle and the other's got a .plan
One online spammed the other and ran

With the FTP and the insane print job
The daytime crap of the alt.test slob
He hung himself with a call to ping
Twenty milliseconds and it's spitting out another string

RTFM if you can't relate
Trade the Sun for a car and the Web for a date
And MIME is a nifty hack for mailing to a newbie
That's choking on my MPEGs

So - dumping core
I'm a user, baby, so why don't you kill(1) me?
(Get crazy with the caps lock)
So - dumping core
I'm a user, baby, so why don't you kill(1) me?
(Drive-by BIFF post)

...
Yo, bring it on down
...
I'm a hacker, I'm a winner
Program's gonna work, I can feel it

So - dumping core
I'm a user, baby, so why don't you kill(1) me?
(I can't retrieve you)
So - dumping core
I'm a user, baby, so why don't you kill(1) me?
(NULL)
So - dumping core
I'm a user, baby, so why don't you kill(1) me?
(Sprecken sie DOS, eh, baby)
So - dumping core
I'm a user, baby, so why don't you kill(1) me?
(Know what I'm typin'?)

--
Kevin Hughes * kevinh@eit.com
Enterprise Integration Technologies Webmaster (http://www.eit.com/)
Hypermedia Industrial Designer * Duty now for the future!

Not by Jerry Pournelle, oh no

This was recently posted to my 'humor' conference on BIX and is reposted here with the author's permission.

Parody Bit

When we finally got home from the monthly Rambling Writers Conference (this time in Djemaa-el-Fna), we found Fractal Manor's main hall shoulder deep in brand-new state-of-the-art totally free computer hardware and software for me to check out. Drat. I'll never get around to most of it, of course, and probably will end up dumpstering 90% or more. What I really need to properly handle all of the wonderful things companies send me absolutely free to review and enjoy with no obligation whatsoever on my part, is a trash compactor.

I thought I'd start by reconfiguring my main computer, the Hyena 986SXDXMCMXCIV. Right now the sectors on the hard disk run clockwise, but I heard a rumor that you can squeeze 0.2% more throughput by running them counterclockwise. It's worth the effort. Recommended.

I slid the shrink-wrap off version 7.126 of DiskMember Gold (I know, you thought I'd never upgrade from version 4.79, especially after all my bad-mouthing of versions 5.33 and 6.02, but what can I say? Only a Corinthian drinks kevis in a Veronese cantola.) and fired it up. No joy. I reread the documentation to no avail, then scanned the whole manual in, OCRed it, spell- checked the file and uploaded it to BIX with a question mark appended.

While I waited for a response, I tried the software out on the TriskaDeck 1313. This is the machine Bill Gibson uses when we collaborate. It loaded fine and ran fine, but it seems to have automatically moved every hard disk sector to a random location and erased all the File Allocation Tables. Luckily I had backed up the entire hard disk to a CD-ROM with the new BitByter 7000 CD-ROM Mastering Deck (only $40,000 and worth every penny. Recommended.) so in only 6 more hours I was back where I started.

While the disk was humming, I checked BIX with the Niebelungen Valkyrie we keep in a corner for when Sandy Solzhenitsyn is here writing. No answers yet.

On the chance that he might have some insight, I buzzed Bill Gates. He mumbled something about it probably being a hardware problem before excusing himself. That seemed plausible.

I called Jan Toady, president of Hyena, who indicated that a helicopter of ground-assault technical assistants was hovering near Fractal Manor 24 hours a day and that all I had to do was give the word and they'd parachute in. (Based on my own experience, I think Hyena offers the best service in the business, and not just because I mention their products every month in my column which millions of avid computer buyers read either. I bet you'd get the same service I do. Recommended.) I chuckled and said I'd try to puzzle it out a little more myself. He said okay and then talked me into accepting a free laptop with holographic display and telepathic mouse. A nice guy.

I also got Mike Spindler, Lou Gerstner and Ross Perot on a conference call, but except for a few offers on tractor trailers full of new equipment they couldn't help me.

My wife Svetlana (whose reading program can teach anyone with a $3000 computer how to read, and which is now available for PC-compatibles, Apples, Macintoshes and the Cray XMP for only $49.95 plus shipping and sales tax where applicable, have your MasterCard or VISA card ready and call 1-800-555-1212, operators standing by 24 hours a day) stuck her head in to say Hi.

That gave me the idea to try calling my sons for help. Number one son Bud is now Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but when I called him he was busy in the War Room with the Secretary of Defense and some darn nerve gas missile crisis. It's always something with those civilians. Second son Robbie was in the middle of performing emergency brain surgery on the President, but promised to get back to me when he had a breather. Chip was arguing a landmark civil rights case before the Supreme Court when he answered my beeper message, but he seemed to think it was hardware. That would confirm Bill Gates's idea, if you'll recall. It could be true. On the other hand, it could be false. On the gripping hand, it could be some combination of hardware and non-hardware. A tough call, any way you looked at it.

I must have caught youngest son Ernie in an aerobics class in his college dorm room, because he seemed to be having trouble breathing when I called, and I could hear a husky female voice in the background saying, "Don't stop." He only said, "Check the plug, Dad" and hung up. His comment started me thinking.

The Hyena has this long black wire sticking out the back that terminates in a plug-like connector. The plug has two parallel flat metal prongs, and a third round prong about half an inch below the midpoint of a line segment joining the two flat metal prongs, if you follow me. A little searching behind the desk where Jack Updike likes to work when he visits revealed an outlet in the wall with a corresponding arrangement of holes. It seemed too good to be true. I tried inserting the plug in the outlet. No joy. A quick call to Steve Hawking suggested that it was a space symmetry problem, and I rotated the plug 180 degrees and tried again. It slid home perfectly.

Well, I'm about out of room here now. Next month I hope to get to this big red switch located on the side of the Hyena. Close study of the manuals suggests that it is somehow related to the functioning of the plug in the outlet. I'll have the whole story for you in the next column, along with a report on the Jet- Setting Pen-Wielders Seminar in Montevideo.

This month's favorite game is still Checkers. There is something both deceptively simple and enticingly complex about this game that I have yet to master. Highly recommended.

The book of the month is Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, on CD-ROM with clips from Hercules Meets Godzilla. It's like being there.

Continent of the month is Australia. Give it a look.

Copyright (C) 1993, 1994 by Edmund X. DeJesus and Computer FunHouse. All rights reserved. Contains no user-serviceable parts.

Good Times Virus

NOTICE: Virus Alert

What makes this virus so terrifying is that it is passed on by the very people it infects. This virus has already caused massive network bandwidth clogging and eaten up millions of megabytes of disk space.

This new mutating virus can infect machines of any type, running any operating system. It can be passed through Email, News or even bulletin boards. The only requirement is that the host machine must be connected to the information superhighway in some way.

Luckily we now have a good means of detecting the virus. It often included in a message with a title like: "New E-mail virus detected" or "Warning: Good Times virus is back". It usually takes the form of an otherwise innocent looking message warning about another virus called Good Times. The reality is that the good times virus is just a red herring and the actual virus is the warning message itself.

This terrifying virus causes people to make multiple copies of the warning message, sending it to every place they can think of. The virus quickly propagates across building, company, country and even world wide networks.

This virus must be stopped. Do not pass the good times warnings along. We must kill these messages wherever we see them.

This notice has been brought to you by SERTZ. We are dedicated to keeping the internet free of these types of viruses. Please pass this notice along by mailing to mail-lists or posting to news groups. We must get the word out.

Note: when sending this warning out title the message Good Times so that people will recognize it.

Rand Whillock
whillock@src.honeywell.com

Proper Care Of Floppy Disks

1. Never leave the diskette in the disk drive, as data can leak out of the disk and corrode the inner mechanics of the drive. Diskettes should be rolled up and stored in pencil holders.
2. Diskettes should be cleaned and waxed once a week. Microscopic metal particles can be removed by waving a powerful magnet over the surface of the disk. Any stubborn metallic shavings can be removed with scowering powder and soap. When waxing the diskettes, make sure the surface is even. This will allow the diskette to spin faster, resulting in better access time.
3. Do not fold diskettes unless they do not fit into the drive. "Big" diskettes may be folded and used in "little" disk drives.
4. Never insert a diskette into the drive upside down. The data can fall off the surface of the disk and jam the intricate mechanics of the drive.
5. Diskettes cannot be backed up by running them through the Xerox machine. If your data is going to need to be backed up, simply insert two diskettes into the drive. Whenever you update a document, the data will be written on both diskettes.
6. Diskettes should not be inserted or removed from the drive while the red light is flashing. Doing so could result in smeared or unreadable text. Occasiionally the red light remains flashing in what is known as a "hung" or "hooked" state. If your system is "hooking" you will probably need to insert a few coins before being allowed access to the slot.
7. If your diskette is full and you need more storage space, remove the disk from the drive and shake vigoursly for 2 minutes. This will pack the data enough (using Data Compression) to allow for more storage. Be sure to cover all the openings with Scotch tape to prevent loss data.
8. Data access time can be greatly improved by cutting more holes in the diskette jacket. This will provide more simultaneous access points to the disk.
9. Diskettes may be used as coasters for beverage glasses, provided that they are properly waxed beforehand. Be sure to wipe the diskettes dry before using. See item 2 for more details.
10. Never use scissors and glue to manually edit documents. The data is stored much too small for the naked eye, and you may end up with data from some other documents stuck in the middle of your own. Razor blades and Scotch tape may be used, however, provided the user is equipped with an electron microscope.
11. Periodically spray the diskettes with insecticide to prevent system bugs from spreading.

The Charge of the Code Brigade

(with apologies to Tennyson (but he's dead))

From: jeff@purple.com (Jeff Abrahamson)
Subject: The Charge of the Code Brigade

Half a Mb, half a Mb,
Half a Mb farther.
Churning out code, fixing bugs:
The six coders.
"Forward, the Code Brigade,
Aim for the ship date," he said.
Churning out code, fixing bugs:
The six coders.

"Forward, the Code Brigade!"
Was their a one dismayed?
Well though the coders knew
Some bits were rotten.
Theirs not to feel surprise,
Theirs not to close their eyes,
Theirs but to see sunrise.
Churning out code, fixing bugs:
The six coders.

Bugs to right of them,
Bugs to left of them,
Bugs in front of them,
Crashes and freezes!
Stack traces so bizarre,
Pointers to near and far,
Zero dereferenced there,
Heap scrambled, frantic now.
Churning out code, fixing bugs:
The six coders.

Compiling and linking this,
Errors, more pizza, 'tis
One week to ship, can't miss.
Investors are anxious, and
Marketing's giddy.
Caffeine is fuel in here,
CPU's screaming near
100 megaherz, fear
Has no place, nor tear.
Nor Walter Middy.
Churning out code, fixing bugs:
The six coders.

Bugs to right of them,
Bugs to left of them,
Bugs behind them,
Crashes and freezes!
Errors are fewer now,
Testing says all is going well,
Talking of freezing now:
Code, though, not cursors.
Demos and champagne soon.
Freezing code, no more bugs,
Sleepy coders.

When will their stock price fade?
Oh, the IPO they made!
All the world wondered.
Honour the app they made!
Honour the Code Brigade,
Noble Six Coders.