The Loony Bin
(
loonies@bloodaxe.demon.co.uk
)
Tue, 30 Apr 1996 18:47:36 +0100
Hiya folks...
Here's some more computing stuff...and as I threatened before, there's
still more to come...:-)
Wishes & Dreams...
- ANDREA
--
************<andrea@bloodaxe.demon.co.uk>************
******************<ajc6@ukc.ac.uk>*******************
*** ***
*** THE LOONY BIN ***
*** loonies@bloodaxe.demon.co.uk ***
*** ***
******************Internet Goddess*******************
*********************ANDROMEDA***********************
You know you've been hacking to long when...
...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.
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.
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 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)
You know.... when you are trying to recall something and hear in your
head: "parity error at address..."
...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.
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.
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".
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...
When you think of the lyrics of "Jump! Jump!" by Kris Kross and wonder
if they can be assembled.....
You know you've been hacking to long when you start typing semi-colons
at the end of sentences instead of full stops;
... when you can't wake up in the morning because you forgot to push a
return address on the stack the night before.
This is someone I know, but I'm not saying who as I hope he has
forgotten about it. 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....
... 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'
... when, when reading a book in front of the computer, so, that the
book is under the screen, pointing at me and I'm doing some odd jobs on
the computer every once in a while, so the keyboard is on my lap, when I
got to the end of a page, I pressed <space>!
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.
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 banging 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. :)
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?
After fooling around all day with routers etc, you pick up the phone
and start dialling an IP number...
I had a cs lab practicum assigment due this Thursday. 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 47 hrs 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
... when that home project you thought would only take a single weekend
has now passed its first decade of development.
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?"
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
outside temperature was -0. For a while, I caught myself wondering if it
was sign-magnitude or one's-complement...
While heading for my car last week, my *very* first thought was:
"grep keys /dev/pockets"
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.
...you go to the movies and it takes 5 minutes to get used to the
flicker (damn low refresh rate...). Once I even caught myself wondering
what the colour depth was...
When I see a flock of birds, these days, I sit there and try to figure
out the algorithms that determine their movement.
Erm... "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. Of course I can't comment that code out.
Firstly, I do not have the source to my girlfriend, and even if I did,
how am I 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. :-) )
Yesterday 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.
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....
...you try to bring a window to the front of something, then you realize
that "something" is a Post-It (tm) on your screen...