* 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 0x1C4 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: life: sleep ring answer_phone sleep { continue_sleeping(); } or wether I'd have to use a rule like: life: sleep ring answer_phone { wake_up(); } From: huge.wgc1@rx.xerox.com (Hugh Davies) When it strikes you that the name of the manufacturer of th coffee machine in your office - Tchibo - is a pretty obscure way to spell the The Name of He Who Greps in order that he won't find it.... From: sjpaavol@plootu.Helsinki.FI (Santeri Paavolainen) I was hacking in the front of a X-terminal, and listening to a radio show, in which I hear a rather funny joke, and thought "now, quickly, I just move this mouse pointer to my voice memory before the memory of the joke fades away and cut the joke and paste it to another window (with the intention to post it to some local humor newsgroup)". I was just about to move the mouse before the truth hit me. Ummmm. From: searlea@cs.aston.ac.uk (A SEARLE) ...when someone is sitting next to you and you don't have the energy or the motivation to talk. You just write to them....it's sad, but that's me Ash From: Bartosz Blacha Heh, heh, heh, last night I woke up my roommate screaming in my sleep, because my code ran into an endless loop and I couldn't get out of it... From: jim@chiba.tadpole.com (Jim Thompson) You're fighting with your (now ex) wife, and something deep in the back of your mind wants to fire up 'adb' on her head. Jim From: and1000@hermes.cam.ac.uk (Austin Donnelly) You Know Youve Been Hacking Too Long When... " " " " FTPing " " " ...after a heavy FTP session you type ls -l at the DOS prompt and are surprised to see an error. Austin From: pgut1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann) From a phone conversation with a friend: "blah blah blah, blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah... ....ummmm.... .....damn page faults!". Peter. From: eeibht@eeiud.ericsson.se (Brendan Hassett) You Know You've Been Hacking Too Long When... ...you think "I've never seen that assembler mnemonic before..." and you realise that you're looking at a licence plate. From: chambles@whale.st.usm.edu (John William Chambless) In article <1993Dec9.223826.3285@cs.aukuni.ac.nz>, Peter Gutmann wrote: > >I once put a Reply-To: line on an envelope without even thinking about it... I've noticed a similar symptom in myself and others: the tendency to refer to people in speech by their login names: "I left mail for dfw, but never heard from him..." Hmmm...now that I think about it, I don't KNOW the full names of some of my friends! From: mason@cis.umassd.edu (Mason Bliss) In <2eckpf$2bpe@whale.st.usm.edu> chambles@whale.st.usm.edu (John William Chambless) writes: >I've noticed a similar symptom in myself and others: the tendency to refer >to people in speech by their login names: Even more annoying: once of the people that runs our school mud with me occasionally refers to me by my mud name. Call me humorless, but whenever he does it, I stare at him uncomprehendingly until he uses my real name, which is also my login name. :) From: pgut1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann) In <1993Dec8.013346.19356@infodev.cam.ac.uk> M.J.Jennings@amtp.cam.ac.uk (Michael Jennings) writes: > Today, I wished to transfer some money from my cheque account >to my savings account at a different bank. The easiest way to do this >is to write a cheque to yourself. Therefore I got out my chequebook and >wrote out a cheque, making it out to 'mjj12@amtp.cam.ac.uk'. > I am really a long way gone. I once put a Reply-To: line on an envelope without even thinking about it... Peter. From: Ernst 'pooh' Mulder Or when you urgently want to talk(1) to someone, and can't find him logged in anywhere on any system and you go desperate. And then someone tells you to use a phone... never thought of that. (Even worse if you then think "phone? I haven't got a VMS account!") pooh From: bj@inmos.co.uk (John Honniball) I got into the shower the other day and found that the head was badly blocked with lime scale -- hard water round here. I thought: Hmm... Time to de-gauss the shower head again... BJ. (John Honniball) From: juanm@clark.net (Juan Molinari) Today I read a sentence that made me do a double-take and shake my head in confusion until it sunk in... "Freud suggested that people are born with two drives [...]" (meaning Eros & Thanatos, not A: and C:) From: enf1@ellis.uchicago.edu (Eric Fischer) In article <1993Dec13.161902.6412@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu> zevans@nyx10.cs.du.edu (Zack Evans) writes: >In article <199312121624.DAA01511@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au>, >Andrew Bulhak wrote: > >>On one machine, I believe I even aliased vi to "EDIT.COM"..... > >And thereafter every file on that machine contained at least one occurrence of >ZZ. a pseudo-related problem: I've been using emacs for years, but over the summer was finally forced to become a vi user, due to the inavailability of anything else other than ed. Now I can switch between the two environments relatively easily, but often I find that whenever I want to move the cursor in emacs after inserting text, I'll press Escape first. Which, of course, means that when I use a VT100 arrow key, I get the "You have typed ESC ESC... do you really want to do this?" argh. Eric From: slavins@hera.psy.man.ac.uk (Simon Slavin) YKYBH Lisp TLW: You wake up while finishing a particularly vivid dream and think "How many brackets do I have to close to get out of this thing." Me. Wednesday. Arghhhhhhhhhhh ! Simon. From: enf1@athens.uchicago.edu (Eric Fischer) Well, it finally happened to me last night: You know when you've been hacking too long when you're lying in bed trying to figure out why your dream thread has to explicitly yield to handle the alarm clock interrupt when obviously the interrupt handler should just be able to fork off a new pre-emptive awake process, and eventually decide that being awake must make non-reentrant system calls and have to run as a co-operative thread. This being the result of staying up until 2:00 re-reading the text for an 8:00 Operating Systems final... Eric From: frank@twg.com (Frank McConnell) when you read (the writings of ): > "He's not wired up to code." ...and you think about { caffeine | mindset } and hacking.... From: ab401@freenet.carleton.ca (Paul Tomblin) frank@twg.com (Frank McConnell) writes: >when you read (the writings of ): >> "He's not wired up to code." >...and you think about { caffeine | mindset } and hacking.... Short Shameful Confession: I didn't realize there was another interpretation other than Frank's until I read this about 4 times. It was only then that I realized that the original poster probably meant something to do with house wiring and electrical codes. It took a while. From: elascurn@daimi.aau.dk (Lars R{der Clausen) Thus spake mason@cis.umassd.edu (Mason Bliss): >In <2eckpf$2bpe@whale.st.usm.edu> chambles@whale.st.usm.edu (John William Chambless) writes: >>I've noticed a similar symptom in myself and others: the tendency to refer >>to people in speech by their login names: A conversation from a couple months ago: Me: Gnort! Gnort: Why can't you call me 'Lars'? Me: Because your name is 'Gnort' everywhere but in reality! -Lars 'No, not that Lars. The other one.' Clausen From: arensb@cfar.umd.edu (Andrew Arensburger) I just got a bottle of window cleaner and cleaned the screen on my machine. Then I reached for the virtual desktop manager so I could clean the other five virtual screens. From: msb@sq.sq.com (Mark Brader) Raymond* Chretien has just been appointed as Canada's new envoy to the US. The (Toronto) Globe and Mail reported this this morning with this headline: PM's nephew to get top posting Only when I saw it, I first read it as PM's nephew to stop posting I didn't know he was on Usenet... *I may have the first name slightly wrong; I don't have a paper with me. From: woodman@bnr.ca (Dave Woodman) ... you fire up an xterm, invoke the on-line phone directory, double click on the number you want and just can't paste it onto the phone's LCD display! From: mikej@access.digex.net (Mike Jacobs) Ernst 'pooh' Mulder (pooh@brokendrum.stack.urc.tue.nl) wrote: : Or when you want to point at something happening somewhere else in your : room, and grab your mouse to do so... just as bad... I was showing a coworker a new windows card game I dl'ed and how to play it. to show that a cards get stacked on a pile, I moved the mouse to the pile then LIFTED it to get that 3-D effect! From: ab401@freenet.carleton.ca (Paul Tomblin) tramm@bourbon.ee.tulane.edu (Tramm "Birdbath" Hudson) writes: > Of course, YKYBHTLW you mention kermit, and absolutley >no one in the room thinks of the Frog. What frog? :-) From: faught@convex.com (Danny R. Faught) You know you're in hopeless computer nostalgia mode when you see a package at Drug Emporium called "Run Stop" and you wonder why they'd be selling keys for the C64 keyboard there. Danny "but computers are so much more interesting than pantyhose" Faught From: jlowrey@skat.usc.edu (John 'Fritz' Lowrey) ... when you hear an advertisment for FTD Florists on the radio and the say their phone number is 1-800-FTD-XXXX, and you think, "Wow, dial-up FTP... an 800 number too!". I need a break! Fritz From: Jim Durrell YKYBHTLW.... I just spent the last week hacking the final project for my distributed OS class, a file system with 3 disks, multiple clients, etc... . Monday my fiancee woke me up with this big passionate kiss and I found myself wondering how she was possibly running with only one disk booted. :) I realized what I was doing and tried to shake it off.... Then all of a sudden I realized I was only kissing one of her and my algorithms for distributing the workload across the three of them wasn't working. That led me back to the problem of why I couldn't find the other two running.... Thank god the semester is done... :) -- Jim From: jgeorge@nbi.com (Joe George) Okay. It finally happened to me. I was driving down the road today, and I saw a billboard for a car I want to buy (a Saturn, I have one, this is the second one I was thinking about) and I thought for a moment of getting a personalized license plate for it, but then I gave up when I remembered that the State of Georgia doesn't allow special characters in a license plate. /dev/car just wouldn't be the same without the slashes. Joe "wants a coffee mug that says /dev/coffee" George From: nick@garion.it.com.au (Nick Bannon) You know you've been hacking too long when... On the bottom of a New Year's champagne bottle's cork, (ignoring for the moment the fact that I was logged on then) you see the printed letters 'ASA', and the frst thing that springs to mind is a well-known encryption algorithm... Nick. From: kodak@mentor.cc.purdue.edu (Jason 'KodaK' Balicki) I'm cleaning off me desk, making a trash pile. With every item I put on the pile I'm thinking: delete. . . delete . . . From: pgut1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann) In kim@lewis.vislab.su.edu.au (Kim Lester) writes: >> >>Joe "wants a coffee mug that says /dev/coffee" George >There are mugs I believe that have "/dev/mug" on them, >this is perhaps more appropriate as unix does not assume >anything about a "file"'s contents... :-) The large box full of rubbish next to me is marked "/dev/bin". From: maddison@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au (David Maddison) 1) You're speaking to someone on the phone and they mention something like a book and you ask can you FTP a copy across. 2) You're walking through the city at a busy time and when you're trying to navigate an easy route through the crowd you think of yourself as a TCP/IP network packet. 3) You speak to a non-Internut person and think they're familiar with the Nutwork and have an email address and know about the newsgroups you've been reading. 4) You can't understand that it is possible that some people don't have email. 5) You go to the supermarket and wonder what the TCP/IP address of the scanner is and whether it can be "fingered". 6) You categorize people into those with 'Net addresses and those without. David Maddison Based in Melbourne, Australia From: pgut1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann) In <2g3vi4$93e@sunb.ocs.mq.edu.au> maddison@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au (David Maddison) writes: >How long do you think you could go without 'Net access. >When you go on vacation do you make special arrangements like >taking a laptop and modem with you? I spent a few days in hospital some time ago... after about the second day I had to check my mail and news, so I hobbled out to the bus stop, caught a bus home, spent a few hours catching up on everything, hobbled back to the bus stop, and got back to the hospital in time for the evening patient ping. I managed to borrow a laptop from a friend to see me through the next few days (at the rate of a book every two hours I'd exhausted my reading material). When I finally kick the bucket I'll probably crawl out of my grave every few days just to check my mail..... Peter. From: dave@gilly.cca.org You notice an unbelievably stupid and obnoxious and unreasonably- posted commercial post from some total moron who you've already attacked for this sort of thing, and you're just bopping into vi to flame the shit out of him, when..... the alarm goes off and you wake up. ARG!!!!! From: root@umibox.hanse.de (Bernd Meyer) elascurn@daimi.aau.dk (Lars R{der Clausen) writes: >Two years ago, I found a pair of sunglasses with a small sticker saying >'ANSI compliant'. I immediately bought them, only to loose them in Germany >a week later. I haven't been able to find any like them since. *sniff* Not to mention the cooking gear that said "Super email" on the cover and took me about ten seconds of heavy thinking to get right.... Bernie From: kim@lewis.vislab.su.edu.au (Kim Lester) One evening after a heavy week of network configuration I needed to call a technical colleague, sooo I picked up the phone and dialled his IP address (I used "*" for dot) and I only twigged halfway thru dialling cause the "dot" didn't feel quite right... -Kim From: jeremy.reimer@iflex.wimsey.com (Jeremy Reimer) JB> From: kodak@mentor.cc.purdue.edu (Jason 'KodaK' Balicki) JB> Organization: Purdue University JB> Message-ID: JB> JB> I'm cleaning off me desk, making a trash pile. With every item I JB> put on the pile I'm thinking: JB> JB> delete. . . delete . . . I had a similar thing happen to me recently. I saw one of my manilla file folders on the floor (such is my highly organized paper filing system) and I suddenly realized that I was just standing there, looking at it... Then I realized that I was trying to mentally "double-click" on it to reveal the contents! To me this is prime proof that the idea that GUIs have to look like "real-world equivalents" is bunk, because nobody (or very few people) use the real world equivalents enough any more to be more familiar with them than they are with files, directories, etc. Nevertheless, I still like OS/2's WPS, even if it does cause me to look at real file folders strangely. Jeremy Reimer From: abcc@DIALix.oz.au (Adrian Booth Computing Consultants) In <010294124717Rnf0.77b7@kzdoos.hacktic.nl> koos@kzdoos.hacktic.nl (Koos van den Hout) writes: >jgeorge@nbi.com (Joe George) writes: >>second one I was thinking about) and I thought for a moment of getting a >>personalized license plate for it, but then I gave up when I remembered that >>the State of Georgia doesn't allow special characters in a license plate. >Is it possible to get a personalized license plate without living in the >given state or without even owning a car (the last one seems a bit impossible >to me...). >I'd **LOVE** to have a plate with 'RFC822' on it. Yesterday I was driving behind a car that had "RWX-726" as its plate number: I caught myself trying to guess if 726 was the inode number or the file's size in bytes... This implies that there already *is* an RFC-822 plate, at least Down Under! From: bereza@elm.csis.gvsu.edu (Bill Bereza) When you see a bag of snack chips calles CC Ricers and your first thought is that Ricers is getting a carbon copy of the chips. From: mhamiltn@herman.cs.uoguelph.ca (Andrew M Hamilton-wright) . . . you want to find the full definition of a word found in "spell" -- and it takes a minute to figure out why "man " didn't work . . . From: jolomo@netcom.com (Joe Morris) ....you pour Mountain Dew into a clear glass and it looks tasty. ....you hear an old song with extranious "Yeah"s and "Allright"s and think of the compiler defines to stick around those output statements, #ifdef OBNOXIOUS, and actually get to the point where you're thinking about yet another rcs of the Makefile, and then realize: "My friends are right, these computers have done hypnotized me" From: kodak@mentor.cc.purdue.edu (Jason 'KodaK' Balicki) bereza@elm.csis.gvsu.edu (Bill Bereza) writes: >When you see a bag of snack chips calles CC Ricers and your first >thought is that Ricers is getting a carbon copy of the chips. My first thought was that it would complain about either not finding the file "Ricers" or spouting "bad magic number". From: falcor@netcom.com (Howard J. Poe) mason@cis.umassd.edu (Mason Bliss) writes: >In falcor@netcom.com (Howard J. Poe) writes: >>Plumbing multi-tasks the same way MS-Windoze does... non-preemptively. >Heh... That reminds me: Last week, my toilet started to back up. The first >thing through my mind was "Argh! The toilet crashed!". >Odd... I sometimes feel that my house is so messy because I have a poorly implemented garbage collection algorithm. Hmm... maybe I should work on debugging it. -Howard J. Poe From: ScottM@cup.portal.com (Scott - Maxwell) I was staying at my friends house one night and his Golden Retriever was hanging out in his room. We were getting ready to sack out after a long hacking session (MATRIX [C-64 Unix] hacking). Ivan (the dog) was sitting next to my bed and I said "Give me your paw" Ivan laid down on the floor instead. My friend said "The shake hands feature on the dog has a bug in it." It took about 15 seconds for the 2 of us to realize what he had just said. We ended up laughing hysterically about it for about an hour. From: elascurn@daimi.aau.dk (Lars R{der Clausen) ...the connection out of the house finally is repaired, and you exclaim: 'Ah! The world is up again!' -Lars From: matstyer@acs.eku.edu A couple stories of my own: About three weeks ago, I woke up in the middle of the night, look at the clock and saw "3:14", and immediately thought "Pi!" This week I caught myself trying to cut and paste one of my dreams ("let's just take part of this dream and put it over there") A year or so I was teaching a class on computer architecture, and we were doing cache. I had the students working on an in-class assignment simulating a cache, they were going along "hit"..."hit"..."miss"..."miss"... when I hear one of students say, "You just sunk my battleship!". From: michael@hal6000.thp.Uni-Duisburg.DE (Michael Staats) YKYHBHTL when you are listening to a talk about computer speech reconition and think that this talk should be "speech recognized" and filtered with | uniq | sed s/quasi//g because the speaker often repeats some word three times or more at the end of a sentence (or in the middle...). The sed line should be clear :-) Michael From: gothick@dcs.warwick.ac.uk (Gothick) ...when you turn the cold tap up, and the shower gets hotter, and you immediately think "God, this shower's badly written". Matt From: fanf@inmos.co.uk (Anthony Finch (PFUE)) You know you've been emailing too much when... I was in the middle of composing an email to someone in the same building when he came up behind me to look at a book I have. This completely threw me since my brain thought he was in two places at once. Anthony "Gung'f jung jr pnyy n urnqshpx" Finch From: lance@avalon.demon.co.uk ("Lance S. Buckley") YKYBHTLW: You pop a disk out of the floppy drive when you've finished taping Ren & Stimpy on TV. It was in the middle of a backup and it won't recover. Shoot me, make it clean and quick. From: enf1@ellis.uchicago.edu (Eric Fischer) In biology class a few minutes ago, the professor was talking about various characteristics of DNA, and brought up dinucleotide repeats, sections of DNA which contain the same two nucleotides over and over again. And what was going through my mind? "Hmmm... it's probably a way of trying to catch segmentation faults... you'd think we'd have evolved a better form of memory protection by now. Or maybe there used to be code there and somebody patched the binary and wrote over it with no-ops..." 0xDEADBEEF, Eric From: hucke@sumter.cso.uiuc.edu (Matt Hucke) enf1@ellis.uchicago.edu (Eric Fischer) writes: >And what was going through my mind? "Hmmm... it's probably a way of >trying to catch segmentation faults... you'd think we'd have evolved a Yet another YKYBHTLW... I bought a compact disk (music, rather than data). While reading the booklet, I noticed that for _each_ of the ~20 songs, the name of the writer and the producers were listed, as well as "stereo". Only a single item was "mono" rather than stereo, and only one had a different writer. And then the thought struck me, "they must have wasted at least 600-700 bytes by repeating all of this; pointers to a single instance would have been sufficient." It was a few seconds before I realized that "bytes" was meaningless, as the cost of printing the booklet was proportional to the page count rather than how many characters are present... From: isc26532@leonis.nus.sg (Chan Nicodemus) When you: Listen to a faulty cassette tape on your stereo and think to yourself that you have to disinfect it for viruses and hope your other tapes haven't been infected yet. Nico. From: pagan@meiko.co.uk (Stephen Payne) YKYBHTLW you wake up to find your emacs buffer full of spaces and beeping at you. From: Perry.Rovers@kub.nl (Perry Rovers) When you: read a snailmail message and wonder why there are no dots in the address. Also, when you're trying to cook something and suddenly the ftp sites for recipes appear in your mind. From: faught@convex.com (Danny R. Faught) YKYBHTLW you pick up your trusty office water cup that hasn't been properly washed in weeks and think, "Man, I'd better check out a newer copy from revision control." From: benco@soda.berkeley.edu (Ben Cottrell) Yesterday I was in a hurry to do something, and I had to eat dinner first. The thought that ran through my head was: cat /dev/plate > /dev/mouth & Strange... From: mbridson@morgan.ucs.mun.ca (Mary Bridson) I had oen of 'those' experiences today, taking notes in class. I've been working on designing a language and writing a compiler for it recently. I was taking notes in class when I suddenly had the thought, "Wait, that sentence is ambiguous... won't parse. Have to put braces around the two clauses..." Suddenly I realized I was planning to redesign English. =) I don't know what to make of dreams involving BNF notation... From: cskerr@hellcat.ecn.uoknor.edu (Charles S Kerr) You know you've been hacking too long when... I saw the following sign: "road const." on the interstate while I was driving home late from a long night at the computer lab. My reaction was: "thank Grok the road has a const type-qualifier; wouldn't want anyone fooling around with the value of the road while _I'm_ driving on it." OTOH, if the number of years that interstate's been torn up is any indication, I might have had it right after all. From: Morten.Sickel@si.sintef.no (Morten Sickel) A friend of mine told me about some problems with his car. I had heard of a lot of other cars of the same kind that had somethisng that seemed as the same thing so I answered: "That is probably a known bug" Until I realized that the ohter cases I had heard about was with older cars: "But it maybe is corrected in that version" From: sommers@gatwick.sgp.slb.com (Roger Sommers) In article lo5@agate.berkeley.edu, benco@soda.berkeley.edu (Ben Cottrell) writes: > >Yesterday I was in a hurry to do something, and I had to eat dinner first. >The thought that ran through my head was: >cat /dev/plate > /dev/mouth & Like it. How about: $ egrep -v '(celery|broccoli|spinach)' /dev/plate | cat - /dev/beer_can \ | chew | swallow 2>/dev/burp | digest 2>/dev/fart > /dev/toilet & All without leaving your seat ;o) And yes, I'm a fussy eater. So what? % egrep '(celery|broccoli|spinach)' /dev/plate > ~fido/foodbowl & Nothing wasted. -Rog. From: John W. Sinteur You Know You Have Been Hacking Color Too Long when... you drive home in the early evening - which is special enough to make you note the blue-to-red colors of the sky, caused by the setting sun, and you wonder if it would look any better in 24 bits color... How many dpi is the sky, anyway? -John From: elascurn@daimi.aau.dk (Lars R{der Clausen) I am reading a book of psycology at the moment. In the section about language, there was an example of a context-dependent sentence: 'There's a bug in the living-room.' The first meaning I thought of was neither of those the book had. But I can't help wondering what a bug in a living-room would be like - slanting walls, no windows (Yeah!) or what? -Lars From: ccusbdm@brunel.ac.uk >hemr@hulaw1.harvard.edu (Kurt Wm. Hemr, Harvard Law School) writes: >>In article <2k25a3$ep9@belfort.daimi.aau.dk>, >>elascurn@daimi.aau.dk (Lars R{der Clausen) writes: >>>[YKYBHTLW...] >[etc...] Well, I answered the phone this morning, and started to log into it by spelling out my login_ID and password. Luckily I didn't get as far as my password before I realised what I was doing. Then this afternoon, I wondered what time it was, and looked at my screen for the clock - *that reflex seems to be better ingrained than glancing at my watch*! From: jwbirdsa@picarefy.picarefy.com (James W. Birdsall) In article John W. Sinteur writes: >How many dpi is the sky, anyway? Rather a lot. I recall once looking up at some wispy clouds against a background of blue sky and thinking that the resolution had to be extremely high to get such good detail on the clouds... Oops. From: klukens@halcyon.com (Kay Lukens) Yesterday morning when I turned on the Interplak toothbrush, it emitted a series of faint chimes, and the brush did not move. I said to my husband, "Look at this! The toothbrush is doing Sad Mac!" Kay Lukens From: pgut1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann) In ccusbdm@brunel.ac.uk writes: >Well, I answered the phone this morning, and started to log into it by >spelling out my login_ID and password. Luckily I didn't get as far as my >password before I realised what I was doing. I was arranging to meet a friend of mine at 10am at a computer disposal sale, and he mentioned that he had a champagne breakfast at a place called Pt. Chevalier on that day. I arranged a time to meet on the basis that he could get to the sale at about 10, spend maybe an hour there, and then still have plenty of time to get out to Pt.Chev in time for the champagne. He mumbled something about the event starting at 8:30. "Why on earth would anyone want to have breakfast at 8.... oh". It wasn't until then that I realised that most of the world doesn't live in night mode. Peter. From: im14u2c@cegt201.bradley.edu (Joe Zbiciak) YKYHBHTL when you say to yourself "I pinged reality and determined our connection to the host was down..." (Said this morning, as I sent wakeup packets to myself every 20 minutes or so, but was unable to get a stable boot (even yet.) (Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwn) --Joe "Will sleep for food... ;-)" Zbiciaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa From: ily@bronze.lcs.mit.edu (Rob Freundlich) YKYBHTLW your alarm clock goes off and you think "great! we have connectivity! Put away the OhmMeter!" (happened to a friend who's been trying to solve a network problem for _far_ too long) From: pgut1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann) A few days ago for some reason I woke up during the morning with a very bad case of shivering (which had nothing to do with the actual temperature, it's as hot as anything here even at night - I still don't know what caused it). Anyway, after about 15 minutes of shaking I thought "I suppose I should run some diagnostics on my arms and legs to find out what's wrong". Then I found the flaw: "If I do find a problem, what do I do about it? I don't think you can get spare limbs" (at least that proves I was still capable of rational thought). Eventually I managed to get back to sleep again... Peter. From: lance@avalon.demon.co.uk ("Lance S. Buckley") ... you read a letter in a magazine, from a total _moron_, and you spend a good 30 seconds wondering which key to hit so you can follow up with that brilliant flame which just popped into your head. From: kirrilyr@union3.su.swin.edu.au (Kirrily Robert - SINN Editor) I've had two horrilbe YKYBHTL experiences lately, which I thought I would relate... The first happened to my flatmate, who was listening to a song on the radio by John Farnham (Australian singer, classic rock stations, peoples mothers like him). My flatmate stared at the radio perplexed for a while and then asked "Are these lyrics 'lifted up by INTEL' or have I been spending too much time at the computer??" He had been spending too long at the computer - the lyrics are 'Lifted Up By ANGELS'. The second incident happened to me, when I was thinking about an ex-bf. I'm still a little ashamed to admit it.... but my thought was "nice hardware.... pity about the interface" *cringe* From: becker@rowlf.cc.wwu.edu (Cloud Dancer) ... you start assigning interrupt priority levels to things in your life. I realized this when I was programming, and my girlfriend asked me how I was doing. It took about a minute for me to rely, and she teased me about paying more attention to my computer than her. I automatically replied that my brain had IRQ0, and my eyes IRQ1, and ears IRQ2. Only when she looked at me quizically did I realize what I had said. :-) Cloud Dancer From: Thomas Ward Hanselman Here's another one: I was walking in the nearby mall one day, when I heard someone say 'seashell'. The first thing that popped into my mind was UNIX's C Shell!. TH. From: dave@CS.Arizona.EDU (Dave Schaumann) Last night, I was listening to the radio, and someone used the phrase "there's only 3 of them in the world". It struck me as odd that there were 3; after a moment I realized that the reson it seemed odd is that 3 is not a power of 2... From: at425@yfn.ysu.edu (Tom Salyers) Prime example: Driving home the other night, I heard this really detestable cover version of an old Nilsson song and thought, "Wow, I really hate the way they ported this song." From: bcombee@nyx10.cs.du.edu (Ben Combee) I was driving down Piedmont Drive here in Atlanta when I saw a billboard for The Container Store. It had in big letters "Destination: Organization". I immediately thought "No, no, no! RFC-822 doesn't specify a Destination field, although it would be correct if it went 'Organization: Destination'". From: walth@netcom.com (Walter Howard) You're having a great brainstorm with someone and then someone else stupid walks into the room and you think, "Uh oh, 300 baud". From: jiml@up.edu (Jim Little) I'm one of those people who has a great difficulty getting up in the morning. Well, this morning, I woke up about an hour early. I glanced at my clock in surprise, then thought to myself, "Wow, somebody must have upgraded the firmware to v1.1." I prompty went back to sleep. -Jim "I need a vacation" Little From: bh@access3.digex.net (Bill Harrison) I was watching the television, and a boring scene was on the program. I wondered why the screen blanker hadn't kicked in. I misspelled something with a pen today and my first thought was to hit delete.. From: oldsma@mary (Manny Olds) YKYBHTLW ... You are reading an article about comas (no, not punctuation), and the article talks about "does not respond to outside stimuli", and you think, "I guess they have to do a hard reset." From: oldsma@mary (Manny Olds) YKYBHTLW ... You start having dreams with a text-based interface. From: djohnson@seuss.ucsd.edu (Darin Johnson) My Aunt and Uncle raised sheep for awhile, and she used to do a bit of part-time vet work occasionally as well. So when I told her I was working at an AI center, she gave me a strange look :-) She thought I meant Artificial Insemination. From: lrucker@parcplace.com (Lee Ann Rucker) I overheard someone saying "I'm getting antsy" (slang for nervous) and thought "getting ANSI what?" From: at425@yfn.ysu.edu (Tom Salyers) So I'm watching _Schindler's List_ the other night and notice the sign on Schindler's factory: "Deutsche Emailwarenfabrik" (apologies to German speakers if I mangled that =) ) . The first thought in my head: "Email? In the forties? Nahhh...." Someone please kill me.....=) From: wollman@ginger.lcs.mit.edu (Garrett Wollman) About a week ago, one of the elevators in our building got stuck with the doors halfway closed on the first floor. I informed a security guard, he squeezed into the empty car, and sure enough, the doors were stuck. He then went over to the control panel and proceeded to flick switches: no luck. He finally turned off the elevator power and turned it back on again. My first comment was, ``Rebooting the elevator...'' (Scary thing is, there might actually be a PeeCee hiding somewhere that I can't see that actually really was controlling the thing...) -GAWollman From: umennis0@cc.umanitoba.ca (Sean Douglas Ennis) You read the Motor Harley Davison Cycles Logo on the back of someone's jacket and think it said Motorola (sp?). Sean From: M.D.Crowther@bradford.ac.uk (Mark Crowther) .... you think "I wonder if my letter (snail mail) has reached its destination yet?" "Yes, it must have otherwise it would have bounced..." [I really found myself momentarily thinking this this morning!] From: bittle@antares.canisius.edu (Jason Bittle) here's me YKWYBHTL... I was driving with my friend, and he was talking how he took some books out of a local public library. I asked him if he could check out some lacrosse books when he asked "how come you can't do it". Before I even realized it, I blurted out "I don't have an account there." (meaning I don't have a library card) Then I thought (but didn't say) I wonder if I could use archie and ftp it.. Gotta get out more.. From: lrucker@parcplace.com (Lee Ann Rucker) You panic when someone says "The Sun's just gone down" From: pete@minster.york.ac.uk (Pete Fenelon) In article <2ntivm$eb8@news.dmpe.CSIRO.AU> Stephen Oakes wrote: ; ...you go wine tasting, and tip the left-overs into the "bit-bucket". ...you type ``telnet localhost 13'' to get the date and time after you've been drinking too much! pete From: ksh@charybdis.128.227.224.10 (Kevin S Ho) > You panic when someone says "The Sun's just gone down" YKYBHTLW: you don't get that for a minute, teh realize that there sometimes is a large object in teh sky that rises whe I go to bed. From: s934186@minyos.xx.rmit.EDU.AU (David John Chapman) ... when you put some chocolates on the coffe table, and someone asks if they can have some, and you say "yeah, they're for global distribution" From: hucke@sumter.cso.uiuc.edu (Matt Hucke) s934186@minyos.xx.rmit.EDU.AU (David John Chapman) writes: >... when you put some chocolates on the coffe table, and someone asks if >they can have some, and you say "yeah, they're for global distribution" Similarly, when buying food, it was private by default, but if I wanted my roommates to know they could eat a certain item, I would inform them that "I've declared this as public". (this was around the time I was learning C++...) From: n1ist@netcom.com (Michael L. Ardai) This morning, I looked next to my bed and found three sneakers. My first thought was 'oops - parity error'... Then again, the reason that you often lose one sock in the washer is someone leaving the washing machine set on odd parity :-) /mike From: cpu@chac.win.net (Kip Crosby) This morning, after staying up till four the night before with my balky Laserjet, I hastily put two pieces of bread in the toaster, pushed down the slider, and thought foggily "Why didn't the drive light go on?" From: cpu@chac.win.net (Kip Crosby) This morning, after staying up till four the night before with my balky Laserjet, I hastily put two pieces of bread in the toaster, pushed down the slider, and thought foggily "Why didn't the drive light go on?" From: smoke@cs.pitt.edu (Sheldon Smoker) Here's a good one: I was dreaming about a Makefile one night after working late, and as I was in the quasi-sleep-awake mode around 11:00 the next day my throat was really dry. I thought, "cat something | throat" would help relieve my thrist. Then I woke up and thought hhhmm, "throat < something" would be more efficient... ack! Sheldon. From: pagan@meiko.co.uk (Stephen Payne) YKYBHTLW you haven't slept for three days... From: hofkamp@cs.utwente.nl (Albert T. Hofkamp) Yesterday evening, we were watching TV, and suddenly the video-image frooze, because the video tape in the studio`s got stuck, or something like that. After 3 seconds watching, I caught myself thinking 'How do I reset the TV ?' Albert From: holland@CS.ColoState.EDU (douglas craig holland) A couple days ago, we were talking about CPR and that sort of thing, and a nurse friend of mine said that defibrilators didn't actually start the heart, but stopped it - useful in fibrilation cases when the heart was twitching instead of beating. The brain then thought "Hey, the heart's not beating" so it sends signals that start it beating properly. The instant I heard that I thought "Cold booting the heart." Doug Holland From: umennis0@cc.umanitoba.ca (Sean Douglas Ennis) In hofkamp@cs.utwente.nl (Albert T. Hofkamp) writes: >Yesterday evening, we were watching TV, and suddenly the video-image frooze, because the video tape >in the studio`s got stuck, or something like that. After 3 seconds watching, I caught myself thinking >'How do I reset the TV ?' Or when the stations a little slow, and there is a blank spot after a commercial (screen goes black for 4 or 5 seconds), and you think 'LAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGG...' (.'s and everything). Sean From: benc@netcom.com (Ben Coleman) You spot something like "Darvin's Honey Butter" in the grocery store, and the first thing that comes to mind is "Isn't the word order wrong?" (alas, I know this from experience). Ben From: combs@rs6a.wln.com () Jukka Marin (jmarin@messi.uku.fi) wrote: : cm5211@scitsc.wlv.ac.uk (** Shell **) writes: : >I was watching a program on BBC2 last night about the Internet. At the : >end of the program, it displayed information, which I wanted, about an : >internet site and I actually found myself thinking, for a moment, : >`Where's the print-screen button on my remote-control?!' : Huh? Just click the mouse and digitize the picture and then print it.. :) And that reminds me of the times I come home all addle-pated from working with Windows all day and I actually think of the world as mouse driven, "Double-click on frig, [frig opens], double click on beer [beer opens]...etc." Or even more often, when I'm watching TV and I try to fast forward through the commercials Camey "I just tried to reposition my cursor with my mouse" Combs From: taylornw@ehp01.ehp.ornl.gov (Nicholas W. Taylor) One dreary night at college in Memphis, TN, I had just come off a 10-hour hack run and was vegetating with a few friends to the tune of Star Trek NG in the dorm lounge. All of a sudden, a rather plastered black fellow saunters into the lounge, hurling racial and personal epithets at us, most of which involved detailed accounts of how blacks were going to wipe the streets with all our white *sses. It was laughable at best, considering the rather multicultural mix of the crowd. Being tired I ignored him. Until.. He got up in my face and started calling me a "stupid f*ckin' cracker", at which I bacame rather pissed. I jumped up and yelled "Look, stupid! I'm a *programmer* and a *hacker*! Sure, I've cruised a few password files in my time, but I've never broken a system! So watch who you're callin' a cracker, fella!" Needless to say, he left one very confused drunk. --Nick "I'll wipe my own *ss, thanks" Taylor From: mayer@sono.uucp (Ron Mayer) hofkamp@cs.utwente.nl (Albert T. Hofkamp): >Yesterday evening, we were watching TV, and suddenly the video-image >frooze, because the video tape in the studio`s got stuck, or ^^^^^^ Isn't that spelled stdio? #include "studio.h" Oops. YKYHBHTLW you apply a "C" spell/syntax checker to usenet articles. Ron From: rdm@metapro.DIALix.oz.au (Rob Masters) ...you look at a printout and think "The contrast on the line printer needs to be turned up. And why is it printing in reverse video?" When the printer is printing black on white... From: benco@soda.berkeley.edu (Ben Cottrell) YKYBHTLW, after a long night of debugging and *way* too many Cokes, you think "With 32 megs of RAM on this machine, I think I can afford to set aside a bigger urine buffer... hmm, wonder where the #define macro is?" From: taylornw@ehp01.ehp.ornl.gov (Nicholas W. Taylor) ...you wake up from a terrific dream and scramble to write it down, not because of the dancing elephants, nudes, and flying Picassos, but because you saw dancing with _them_ the algorithm to solve your latest programming project. --Nick "and a pink horse wearing boxers" Taylor From: steveo@highett.mel.dbce.csiro.au (Stephen Oakes) ... you're proof reading a (hard-copy) manual, and you think: "Shit, that phrase should be hypertexted..." From: at425@yfn.ysu.edu (Tom Salyers) YKYBHTLW...your girlfriend has a little makeup bag with silhouettes of the Arc de Triomphe on it, and your first thought upon viewing it at 6 AM is "Hm....jumpers. Wonder what those go to." And yes, I finish sentences with prepositions in the morning...=) From: joberreu@bach.seattleu.edu (Jesse Oberreuter) YKYBHTLW: You start coding on a turned off keyboard & correct your mistakes. You wake up exhausted from an all night dream state debugging run. You can see everything going on on your monitor with your eyes closed. Your fingers are too tired to type anymore. After four days straight you ask a co-worker to open a bottle of liquid refreshment for you because you've become too weak. You explain your dyslexia by saying your name server's cache is out of sync. with its multi-dimensional vectored hash table. Many, many more avail on request... BTW, these are all real & I have witnesses :) From: jhis01@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (Jonathan Warwick Histed) taylornw@ehp01.ehp.ornl.gov (Nicholas W. Taylor) writes: > ...you wake up from a terrific dream and scramble to write it >down, not because of the dancing elephants, nudes, and flying Picassos, but >because you saw dancing with _them_ the algorithm to solve your latest >programming project. This has actually happened to me (well, sort of)... I had just finished a project for an AI paper - solving the 8-puzzle using heuristic searches...being a typical hacker, I wrote the program in C rather than use a time-saving(tm) language such as Prolog. :-) Anyway, I finished and went to bed at 3am (yes, I know - it's early, but I was soffering from a condition called No Coke). I woke at around 8:30am remembering a dream in which the algorithm (in C, of course :-) was scrolling by in the background, and I was executing the algorithm in the foreground, complete with little 3-d models of 8-puzzles, and "pointers". It brought new meaning to the oft' spoken lecturer phrase "you should be able to do this in your sleep". :-) On a similar note, I got a call from a friend last weekend, who had just been offered a different job with his firm, which happened to be in a different city. He said: "I'm moving to Wellington(*)" All I could think to say was: "So, you've had an upgrade. What version?" Which seemed totally logical to me - he'd been upgraded to a new position, and I wanted to know what position it was. He thought otherwise (not a Computer Scientist)... (*) Wellington = capital city of New Zealand, as opposed to Auckland which is the larget city in New Zealand, and was the capital before some idiot decided physical centralisation would be a neat idea. From: rsf@mother.idx.com (Rob Freundlich) YKYBHTLW you pick up the phone and try to dial using your computer's numeric keypad ... From: ai731@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (Janice Wright) ...your alarm clock goes off and your dream returns to the WWW home page. ...happened to me the other night, scary, isn't it... Janice From: umisef@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au (Bernd Meyer) aus001@axp1.rrz.Uni-Koeln.DE (Dionisius) writes: >David DeLaney (dbd@martha.utcc.utk.edu) wrote: >> Dave "a switch for everything and everything in its switch" DeLaney >"A switch to rule them all, a switch to find them, > a switch to bring them all and in the darkness bind them." YKYHBHTL when you try something like "ls --mordor". And you know that someone else has been hacking far too long when this gives a listing of all the hidden files ("once you put that one ring on, you start perceiving the world in a completly different way"). Bernie From: ande0870@gold.tc.umn.edu (Gregory T Anderson) YKYBHTLW your alarm clock goes off, and in the dream-state that you're in, you attempt to telnet alarm.clock in order to turn it off. Greg (alarm.clock connection refused) From: lstowell@pyrnova.mis.pyramid.com (Lon Stowell) When your buddy the cabinet maker says "please hand me a bastard file" and you 'rcp /unix......." From: insom@galaxy.ucr.edu (chris ulrich) In article , Gregory T Anderson wrote: > > YKYBHTLW your alarm clock goes off, and in the dream-state >that you're in, you attempt to telnet alarm.clock in order to turn it >off. > > Greg (alarm.clock connection refused) Earlier this evening, I got out of my roommate's car, and the seatbelt failed to retract. I asked myself if something had happened getty and if anyone would be able to log back in to his car. Sigh From: im14u2c@cegt201.bradley.edu (Joe Zbiciak) YKYHBHTL when you're sitting there, and something as absurd as this comes to mind (with relatively little effort:) Old MacDonald had a card, And he did I/O. And on that card he had a chip, That did Vid-e-o. With VRAM here, And a RAMDAC there, Here a bit, There a bit, Everywhere a BitBlt... Old MacDonald had a card, And he did I/O. And on that card he had a chip, That did Aud-i-o. With a FM synth here, And a MIDI port there, Here a DAC, There a DAC, DMA from front to back... Old MacDonald had a card, And he did I/O. And on that card he had a chip, That did Ser-i-al Clear-To-Send here, Request-To-Send there, Here an ACK, There a NAK, Every an an ACK, ACK... Old MacDonald had a card, And he did I/O...... (anyone care to add verses? BTW, I wrote it alll myself.) --Joe From: eeyimkn@unicorn.nott.ac.uk (M. Knell) YKYBHTLW your regular typos (the ones you _always_ make) are so habitual that your profile aliases 'ks 0k' to 'ls -l'. I know mine does... *grin* -- mpK. From: eeyimkn@unicorn.nott.ac.uk (M. Knell) In article <2qg222$7i9@cegt201.bradley.edu>, im14u2c@cegt201.bradley.edu (Joe Zbiciak) writes: > > YKYHBHTL when you're sitting there, and something as absurd as this comes > to mind (with relatively little effort:) (excellent song deleted) > Old MacDonald had a card, > And he did I/O...... And on that card he had a chip That did T-C-P. With a SYN SYN here and an ACK SYN there Here an ACK There an ACK Eventually an ACK FIN... Mike From: im14u2c@cegt201.bradley.edu (Joe Zbiciak) In <2qh0m6$qn0@unicorn.ccc.nottingham.ac.uk> eeyimkn@unicorn.nott.ac.uk (M. Knell) writes: >YKYBHTLW your regular typos (the ones you _always_ make) are so habitual that >your profile aliases 'ks 0k' to 'ls -l'. I know mine does... *grin* I've made links between all of the following to "finger": dinfer, fubger, and dinfwe. From: tovey@mundil.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Matthew Ian TOVEY) YKYBHTLW you're coding away, after being called up for a meal, and you insert a line: if (dinner == cold) before you realise what you've done. That night, I also dreamt in C. I don't remember details, I just awoke realising that I'd had a very well structured dream, full of "while"s and for loops. Matt From: ande0870@gold.tc.umn.edu (Gregory T Anderson) In article <9413021.17877@mulga.cs.mu.oz.au>, Matthew Ian TOVEY wrote: >YKYBHTLW you're coding away, after being called up for a meal, and you >insert a line: > >if (dinner == cold) > >before you realise what you've done. > >That night, I also dreamt in C. I don't remember details, I just awoke >realising that I'd had a very well structured dream, full of "while"s and >for loops. > >Matt I had a dream in C last quarter...we, C++ if you wanna be exact. It was after I'd pulled an all-nighter to finish a program, and I got about two hours of sleep. My dreams were troubled with visions of for loops that wouldn't work right. Quite hellish, really. Greg From: awilson@merle.acns.nwu.edu (Andrew Wilson) YKYBHTLW... you see someone race by on a 'ZUMA Sport Cycle' (or some such) and you think "Wait. I killfiled that guy already. Why am I seeing him?" From: pkinnes@csupomona.edu From a friend who was too lazy to write his own damn post: YKY Girlfriend's BHTLW: She falls asleep with her arm around your shoulder, and after a few minutes, she starts 'typing' on you in her sleep..... From: lstowell@pyrnova.mis.pyramid.com (Lon Stowell) When you realize that all of life's problems are because we are living in Revision 1.0 of the universe. From: ande0870@gold.tc.umn.edu (Gregory T Anderson) YKYBHTLW you're reading a book, look up to see what page you're on, and upon seeing 111, the first number you think of is 7. Greg From: srchopr@chv.lincoln.cri.nz .. you get ready to jump on someone requesting old business cards and you find they want them for "details of drymatter sampling". Sue "Craig who?" Knight From: murraygs@newton.ccs.tuns.ca (Gregory Scott Murray) YKYBHTLW when you're taking notes and when the prof goes back and adds a few lines to a paragraph on the other side of the board, you try and insert a line before realizing its pen and paper... Scott From: jgrimm@horacemann.pvt.k12.ny.us (James Grimmelmann) YKYBHTLW. . . . During a break, the stroke of inspiration you've been waiting for hits you. . . . . . . in Latin. This may actually be a case of YKYBSARPWYSHBHTLW (You've Been Studying Ancient Roman Poetry When You Should Have Been Hacking Too Long When), but it actually happened to me. I genuinely typed in several lines of code that were nothing more than a partial transcription of the works of Catullus. From: ab401@freenet2.carleton.ca (Paul Tomblin) In article , David Lesher wrote: > >> POLICE FIND COW ON ROOF OF 5-STORY MIT DORMITORY >> >> Amid cheers of students she is coaxed down stairway to street > >Coaxing is the hard part. As I'm sure Bernie knows, neither equine nor >bovine is inclined toward walking down stairs. When I read this, I thought: "Well, why didn't they just run twisted pair, then?" Paul "and I don't mean Homulka and Bernardo" Tomblin From: insom@galaxy.ucr.edu (chris ulrich) Yet another weird dream. Last night, I had a dream that I was trying to gain weight, and I was doing so by recompiling my binaries with static links. chris From: agrino@enkidu.mic.cl (Andres Grino Brandt) When you start to 'logout' from one server and 'login' to other server every time you turn over yourself while sleeping. Worse even, you do 'map *.*' every time something in bed disturb you ... Just surviving from a 3 days high fever ... Yours From: mrw9e@fulton.seas.Virginia.EDU (Michael Robert Williams) In my office, we keep an old Selectric typewriter for labels and forms that don't easily fit into the printer. The other day I finished typing a form, and then tried to press to turn the machine off. I need to sleep more and use Windoze less. From: awg1000@phx.cam.ac.uk (A.W. Garrard) (at the risk of lowering the tone of the group) ... you go to the toilet and start looking for a disc-eject button. I stopped just short of working out that I was a Mac, and hunting for a paperclip. I'm glad I didn't try to work out where to put it. Scary, isn't it? I also had one of those days when I woke up very slowly, and the room was fuzzy because I'd gone to sleep with my contact lenses in. I'm still trying to work out why I thought 'awful picture... need more processing power... what do you expect from a Z80?' But then a friend of mine when he got drunk one evening was last heard mumbling about a stack overflow and not being able to push his accumulator. I think we need help. Andrew Garrard From: ande0870@gold.tc.umn.edu (Gregory T Anderson) When you wake up in the middle of the night because you have to go to the bathroom, and remember that just before you woke up, the contents of the a4 register were 'need to pee'. Greg "Too much 680X0 assembly" Anderson From: hucke@sumter.cso.uiuc.edu (Matt Hucke) YAYKYBHTLW... I had a strange dream last night... I was using an automatic bridge-building machine (place it on a riverbank and press a button). Every time more wood or iron was needed, it would be malloc()'d. I did this too many times without free()'ing the old building materials, and crashed the river, flooding the city. From: stets@stets.stgt.sub.org (Thomas Stets) pburgess@netcom.com writes in article : > Funny how one's brain will actually sit there trying to work these things > out... Just today (and in a nearly fully conscious state), I was passing > by a tuxedo rental place with their front window painted in big, day-glo > letters: "'94 PROM HEADQUARTERS!" I was thinking it might have something > to do with upgrading one's BIOS chips. > -- > Phillip Burgess (pburgess@netcom.com) A similar thing happened to a some days ago. I passed a car with a sign saying "For Sale: Ford Fiesta 1.0", and I went on thinking why anyone would buy such an early version of a car... From: stan.salter@ablelink.org (Stan Salter) When I went into the Local Bar today they just got it a new beer that has just been released in Canada. Red Dog Beer. On the centre of the neck label is ALT BEER. Here I am in the bar trying to read unread articles. stan.salter@ablelink.org From: noien@chmeds.ac.nz Here's a dark, dark YKYBHTLW ...... I work in a Cancer treatment clinic. My job involves setting up Radiotherapy beams (beams of radiation aimed at a tumour in order to kill it off). To do this we are setting up an SGI based system in which a 3D model of the patient is made from CAT scan data. The beams are then simulated on this model, and if the clinicians think it's all go then the treatment goes ahead. Last night I dreamed I was diagnosed as having cancer. I went into work and there was a 3D model of me (insides and all) being rotated, scaled etc. on the SGI. The operators were trying to line up the beam, and the SGI was giving them all sorts of problems. The simulation software was playing up, they were out of swap space, the disk was full, the print queues were screwy ...... So I was frantically trying to fix these problems, due to my vested interest, and I was getting slowly weaker and weaker. We run a VAX 11/750 as well and I kept saying "Use the VAX, it's old, I know, no 3D pictures but it works", but they were in love with the SGI 3D graphics and wouldn't hear of it. They kept saying "You can fix it" and I kept on trying frantically to wrestle with the UNIX command line .... Finally as I expired, slumping forward onto the keyboard, the mouse falling from my hand, my last thought was "God Damn UNIX Systems!". Then I woke up. Guns don't kill people. Graphics do. From: jbaxter@sandtrap.Stanford.EDU (Joel Baxter) In article <1994May23.165802.501@chmeds.ac.nz> noien@chmeds.ac.nz writes: > >Here's a dark, dark YKYBHTLW ...... > [ frightening dream omitted] > > Guns don't kill people. Graphics do. > Or, YKYBHTLW, at first glance, you read the above line as "Gnus don't kill people..." From: tweber@cc.brynmawr.edu (Weber Tracy L) YKYBHTLW -- I have this bad habit of actuallt typing in my dreams when I'm thinking simple sentences... Sometimes even with a dvorak keyboard in mind... Also, I have this bad tendencey to think that I can just pull out my Sega Carts and put in a blank disc to save my game... Joshua From: cms@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Colin Simpson) When you suddenly realise while walking in a supermarket that it is more efficient to count in binary upon your fingers. Thereby allowing you to count upto 1023 on your fingers !!! Or you could try two's compliment and get negative numbers Ahh ahhh !!! I've been Hacking too long !!!! From: ag129@ucs.cam.ac.uk (Alasdair Grant) ... when you find yourself looking in the RFC index to see which RFC "RFC 822" is defined in. From: zaphod@cs.hut.fi (Seppo J Niemi) A couple of years ago when I was deep into mudplaying, I was constantly saying things like 'open door', 'enter room' or 'get ' to myself. Sometimes when I had to put up with an annoying person, I'd say 'kill with sword'; fortunately I didn't have a sword at hand ;-) Nowadays I work as a system administrator and sometimes, when I meet assholes or just plain stupid people, I wish I could just say 'su root' and 'kill -9' - or at least 'kill -15'. I guess that would make me a true 'Bastard operator from Hell'... From: koen@wsinis04.info.win.tue.nl (Koen Holtman) ...when you read the string f@%$ck in a flame message and the first word that comes to mind is fsck. Koen. From: bernie@metapro.DIALix.oz.au (Bernd Felsche) Fax machine rings, answers... You type "who" to find out where the fax is coming from... And wonder why it doesn't show up. From: mark-r@spec0.ee.man.ac.uk (Mark Robinson) YKYBHTLW... You ask someone if they want 'tea eor coffee' because they can't have both.. Mark From: pjx@ichaos.nullnet.fi (Petteri Jäntti) In article <2sh2co$4ue@saturn.haverford.edu>, Weber Tracy L wrote: >In article <2sg55u$suu@bach.seattleu.edu> joberreu@bach.seattleu.edu (Jesse Oberreuter) writes: >> [Dreams deleted] I woke up one morning shocked (remembering bits and pieces of the dream just before waking up). In the dream I did hear the alarm clock and I was desperately trying to telnet to a port on it. It was terrible. I knew I remembered the address of the alarm clock right, yet could connect to it to turn it off. I must have tried many different routings in my attempts to access the bastard. Finally I woke up and discovered that I would be late again. Hmm, too much configuring messes up your head. :) -Petteri From: sethm@pnet1.pnet.com (Seth J. Morabito) You know you've REALLY been hacking too long when... Ugh. This JUST happened to me about 10 minutes ago, resulting in my nearly collapsing on the floor laughing... I, like most geeks my age, have a Casio Data Bank watch. One of the spiffy ones with apointments, phone numbers, stop watch and timer, and of course a calculator. Well, I've been using the timers and calculator more than usual today, and I just now noticed that the stop watch was still going long after it's services had been called for. So I stopped it. Then it occured to me that the count-down timer and calculator might also still be going, and I'd better check. And so Help me, at that one moment I had every intention of typing 'ps -aux' on it's tiny little keyboard and seeing what processes I had going. When the realization of what I had been thinking hit, it hit hard. It's been one of those days. Ugh. -Seth J. Morabito From: jwbirdsa@picarefy.picarefy.com (James W. Birdsall) In article bernie@metapro.DIALix.oz.au (Bernd Felsche) writes: >Fax machine rings, answers... > >You type "who" to find out where the fax is coming from... > >And wonder why it doesn't show up. ...when you're just sitting there because the network is toast and a phone in a nearby office rings and you wonder how the hell that's possible with the network down... From: tovey@mundil.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Matthew Ian TOVEY) I was walking past a building the other day when I noticed how shabby it looked: Bricks painted black, and peeling all over. Having spent the previous x days doing script-based ray tracing, I immediately looked for the texture setting to change it to something more appropriate... Matt From: gamble@sugar.NeoSoft.COM (Ben Gamble) ... you see "Subject: Re: Emailing Exes" and think, "Well, there's uuencode, and btoa." And it turns out to be about sending email to your former lovers. From: skybird@satelnet.org (Scott Pallack) You walk into a used bookstore, ask if they have any books about UNIX and wonder why they are giving you funny looks. From: rmurray@netcom.com (Roger Murray) This morning I looked at my wardrobe and realized that most of my shirts were red, green and blue. Just before deciding to buy some shirts I had seen the previous day, I thought for a split second "Why not just convert these shirts to CMYK so I could have four colors instead of only three?" At least I didn't ask the salesperson where the PANTONE-colored shirts were when I got to the store. :-) From: maddison@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au (David Maddison) You have an itch and you try to move the mouse pointer off the screen so you can scratch it... David Maddison From: csk@eecs.nwu.edu (Chris Kush) You have a weekend of moving crap into your new apartment ahead, and reflect in all seriousness that it would be a hell of a lot easier just to move the REFERENCES to the boxes than the boxes themselves. Chris "Hey Dad, give me a hand with &refrigerator" Kush From: iyoung@buddy.wright.edu (Ian Young) When, in that drowsy state just before you fall asleep, your thoughts stray to a girl you just met and you think: "yes, but is she windows compatible?" From: ai731@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (Janice Wright) ...you're sitting in front of your terminal with the manual for the latest upgrade of your favorite software, and you reach out to hit the space bar to see the next page of text... Stop the hard drive, I want to get off! Janice From: woodman@bnr.ca (Dave Woodman) You half wake-up about 45 minutes before the alarm is due, receive a bladder alert, and think setbuf(stream, bladbuf) before going back to sleep. And yes, I've already thougnt of the "flush()" based jokes, and all their relatives! No bad jokes are needed on stream I/O, either. Dave. From: jayhan@cs.washington.edu (Jay "Thierry" Han) ... the microwave oven has finished its program, so the light goes off, and you wonder which button you should push to get out of the screen saver. From: jayhan@cs.washington.edu (Jay "Thierry" Han) ... the dishwasher makes too much noise, so you try to figure out a way to pipe its output to /dev/nul to make it quiet. From: jayhan@cs.washington.edu (Jay "Thierry" Han) ... you're programming that stupid VCR and you wish you could modify its .Xdefaults or .emacs or maybe a .vcrrc file to change the menu layout. From: jayhan@cs.washington.edu (Jay "Thierry" Han) ... you have the Webster's installed in your system, and want to look up a word (say, aardvark), and type "man aardvark". ... you look for words related to "vitamin", so you type "apropos vitamin". From: STUBRADFOWC@MERCUR.USAO.EDU (Bill Bradford) You Know You've Been Hacking Too Long When: A friend tells you, "My phone number is xxx-3270" and you think, "Wow... IBM terminal.." You change your PIN to an Intel CPU number designation so it's easy to remember. You Know You've Been Playing DOOM Too Long When: The first time you walk into a building, you think, "Wow... This would make a great PWAD level.." or "WAIT a minute! How'd they do THAT with the current 1.2 engine?" (All of these are true, esp. the YKYBPDTLW ones; a friend and I spend our spare time in our 8am class designing WADs..) Bill Bradford From: hartmans@bga.com (Sam Hartman) about a month before graduating from high school, I was at an award presentation banquit. They told us all to line up. I turned to the person next to me, who I also knew was interested in computers, and said, "Should we settle for bubble, or try to explain quick sort?" --Sam From: crosby@rintintin.Colorado.EDU (Matthew Crosby) You know you've been wiring nets too long: Someone asked me today where someone else was, and I answered with the subnet number of the lab he was in rather then the name--"I think he's in 202 or maybe 250." (as opposed to room 1-5 or whatever) Whats scary is that the other person didn't need me to clarify and it took me about ten minutes before I realised what I was doing. From: roth@ux4.cso.uiuc.edu (Roth Mark Daniel) ...you are thinking of accepting a summer position involving some documentation work, and you think, "Yeah, but would that look good on my man page?" From: mje@pookie.pass.wayne.edu (Michael J. Edelman) ...you're driving home from the office late at night, and you're puzzled as to why not only doesn't the brightness knob on the dashboard change the brightness of the image in front of you, but there's no contrast knob, either... --mike From: and1000@cus.cam.ac.uk (Austin Donnelly) ...you see an advert for a pine table, and wonder how you can sell a mailer's data structures. Austin From: lstowell@pyrnova.mis.pyramid.com (Lon Stowell) You see a posting on misc.consumers asking how to get rid of gophers and you immediately flash on the word "firewall". From: lrucker@parcplace.com (Lee Ann Rucker) You see the phrase " made a net profit for publishers" in a post and automatically read a "." between "net" and "profit" From: berndm@cs.monash.edu.au (Bernd U Meyer) pietzcke@mibm.ruf.uni-freiburg.de (Tim Pietzcker) writes: >...when you read rot13'd articles and don't even notice it... ... when you read the sentence "he looked at the unclouded sky" in a Clarke novel, and misread it as "he look at the uuencoded sky" Bernie From: mike@bob.sc.colostate.edu (Mike Loseke) When you finish paging through the new copy of your favorite magazine and think to yourself "Why didn't I just grep for what I was looking for instead of catting the whole thing?". From: cwfertig@vax1.umkc.edu You try to PrtSc on your tv remote. From: teney931@cs.uidaho.edu (Aric TenEyck) True story: I work at McDonald's. We have a number of different beepers, buzzers, and so on to tell us when the food is done cooking. About two weeks ago, I transfered from a different McDonald's. At that one, the meat steamers made a high pitched beeping noise when they needed more water. At the one I work at now, the fryers for McNuggets(tm), fish, and so on make the same noise when it is time to take the food out. I have had problems with this, because when I heard the noise in the background, I would usually ignore it, because the steamers still have plenty of water when they start beeping for more. However, taking the food out of the fryers is a fairly high priority thing. To solve this problem, I just told myself that I needed to set up the interrupt vector for that beeping to point to the fryer area of my brain. The really sad part is that it worked. From: wturner@acorn.co.uk (William Turner) When you are on a bus/train, and you mentally stack people as they get on & it annoys you if they don't get off in the reverse order :-) William From: tomv@vismag.limmat.net.ch (Thomas Voirol) ...you read an ad from a kitchen appliances supplier advertising "The kitchen steamer" and immediately ask yourself what on earth anyone would want to back up to tape in a kitchen. From: simond@perception.manawatu.gen.nz (Simon Dawson) When you prefer to query someone 4000 miles away about the meaning of a word, coz he knows, rather than get up and walk 4 metres to the bookshelf to check one of those RL dictionaries.. When you realize you haven't called friends for weeks, because everytime you remember, it's 3am, or 3pm and they're asleep or at work, so you start mentally debugging a system for queueing messages, to automatically call them at a specific time.. before you realise it's supposed to be interactive, and you don't have the speech h/w or s/w... When you are 'trying' to have sex, and she says no, and you think.. "I'll just take a copy while this version is being used by the sleep process, work with that instead, then merge the differences when I've finished".. SImon From: tomv@vismag.limmat.net.ch (Thomas Voirol) One from my C64-days: Whenever I come upon a word that ends with a $-sign, for example a system table on our mainframe that's called tgp$, I pronounce it tgp-string. In my heaviest 64-hacker-times, I couldn't even parse prices in American catalogs correctly. From: giannini@nova.umd.edu (Jodi Giannini) Today someone in the lab came up to me, and said 'Do you have any applications?' And I began to rattle them off, rapid fire: 'lotusquattroprowordperfectexceleratorharvardgraphicswindows...' when he interrupted and said 'No, I mean *job* applications.' I very sheepishly went into the office, and got him one. It sure makes you wonder, doesn't it. Jodi G. From: wturner@acorn.co.uk (William Turner) ...you read a sheet of paper, and then remind yourself to mark it as unread so you can read it again later... William From: stano@swh1.swh.sk (Stano Meduna) .. when you call a lift before you lock your home door, so the I/O is in progress while you are working on the door. .. when you are rewiring the office and think of how good it would be to replace old yellow cable with some coffee-distributing device. From: ablock@nubis.rutgers.edu (Aaron Block) You Know That You have Been Webbing To Long When... Everywhere you see an underline word or sentence you want to click on it to follow the link. Even on TV and in the newspaper. Aaron Block From: s921878@minyos.xx.rmit.EDU.AU (Daniel John Lee Parnell) ... when you see a sign that says "New developments in Hepititus C" and think it is advertising a programming seminar.. Daniel From: samir@donald.cc.utexas.edu (Samir Mahendra) In article <31a4oi$a5v@saturn.haverford.edu>, Joshua M. Burgin wrote: | Simon Slavin writes: ||You hear the TV say "We're Animany || Dave DeLaney || Animaniacs" ||and look up real quick wondering what picture they used with the name. || | |Well, it's actually "Dana Delaney" but I knew what you meant. And |Every time I hear that part of the song I want to insert Dave's name |instead. Am I alone here? You mean that they're *not* saying Dave DeLaney. I coulda sworn... OBYKYBHTLW: While playing "Magic: The Gathering" with some friends for the first time, you come across an Interrupt card, and with no further explanation, you look at each other and start laughing. From: acbul1@penfold.cc.monash.edu.au (acb) YKYBHTLW...... ..... you spontaneously compose code in your head for no reason. ..... when that code is assembly language. Happened to me last night. In the shower, I found myself coding a LALR(0) parser in 6502 assembly language. Don't ask me why. From: roberson@hamer.ibd.nrc.ca (Walter Roberson) You know you've been hacking too long when... = You are thinking about different covers which have been done for a particular song, and you mentally refer to them as different "implimentations" of the song. = You realize that you've left the milk out all night, and think, "No problem, it's just the instantiation of the milk-carton class. I'll apply a destructor to it, garbage collect, and CONS up a new one!" = You don't go sit around cafes late at night reading poetry, but you do go sit around cafes late at night reading ANSI C, POSIX, or C++ books. = You smile when you notice that the cafe not only has an listing for "soft drinks" on its menu, but also has a separate listing for Jolt Cola. = You wonder why the cafe menu unfolds instead of being pull-down or pop-up or roll-over. = A software company you deal with snail-mails out a new 12-page manual to all of its users, but deliberately skips you, figuring that you will understand the software completely the first time you look at it, so they might as well save the postage. In fact, they haven't sent you any manuals for years, as the first time they sent you a manual, you corrected it and sent it back to them. Walter Roberson roberson@ibd.nrc.ca From: paulp@nic.cerf.net (Paul Phillips) (You Know You Have Not Been Hacking Long Enough When...) you see the subject header in comp.lang.perl "Comparing two dates" and your mind immediately starts weighing the relative merits of different women. -PSP From: acbul1@penfold.cc.monash.edu.au (Andrew Bulhak) Mika Leivo (leivo@cs.Helsinki.FI) wrote: : When you see somebody you don't know making a mess of what he is doing : and you think: Hmm, that must be a Micro$oft product. : And realice only minutes later that : : A) Micro$oft doesn't make people : B) If it did, they wouldn't live / walk for very long. Yep. I often catch myself thinking "his code must be really bogus" or "you can't talk to her -- only the interface code has been implemented". Or just plain "Intel inside". "s/he's a nice person but I'll wait for the next release." : When you tend to tell your friends: : If only I got a couple of hours with the source-code of world, : preferably in C, and a quick recompile/reboot. Yes. Or at the very least, the root password for the Universe. From: duncan@smug.student.adelaide.edu.au (Slakko) YKYBHTLW... You are taking notes in a lecture. You stop highlighting before the last full stop because you think "If I highlight the full stop, the cursor will be on highlight and I'll have to turn it off from the menu." Only took me about 0.25 seconds to notice, but still AAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHH! Duncan "M-tp" Richer From: umennis0@cc.umanitoba.ca (Sean D. Ennis) You're listening to the radio before you go to sleep, and a particularily annoying anouncer comes on to tell you his oppinions on life, what the next piece (of music) will be, and it's entire history - and you think there's got to be a way to parse out these headers and just get the name of the piece. I like the music, otherwise I'd just throw him into a kill file. Sean From: spam@access1.digex.net (Spam I am) This thread reminds me of something that boiled out of my brain in a strange house full of computers on New Year's day: > From: John Rehwinkel > Date: Sat, 1 Jan 94 12:23:41 EST > Subject: System Anarchy for new year So, I wake up New Year's morning, and cron lights off and tells me the time has arrived for annual system maintenance. I go and get the cheat sheet. Okay, what do I do first? "Run `fsck'". Fine. spam> fsck /dev/raw/brain: last mounted on / i=69 mode=670411 owner=root unreferenced file -- reconnect? n clear? y superblock corrupt -- repair? y 65472 files, 33748898 blocks. Gee. A missing file. In my BRAIN. Yuck. I wonder what it is... /excretory/bladder: file system is full Shit. No. Piss. I gotta pee during system maintenance. Go to bathroom. Prepare everything. spam> urinate -f -g -x /dev/penis: no such file or directory AAAAAAAAAAAUAGH! I think I just found my missing file... spam> ls -l /dev/p* crw-rw-rw- 1 root 121, 0 Sep 26 1962 /dev/pancreas crw-rw-rw- 1 root 71, 0 Sep 26 1962 /dev/parathyroid crw-r--r-- 1 root 67, 0 Sep 26 1962 /dev/pineal crw-r--r-- 1 root 75, 0 Sep 26 1962 /dev/pituitary spam> mknod /dev/penis c ... Er, what's the major device number? spam> grep -i penis /sys/spam/conf.c #include "penis.h" #if NPENIS > 0 I certainly hope so! extern int penisprobe(); Sounds fun. extern int penisattach(); Detachable penis? extern int penisopen(); Ouch. extern int penisclose(); Messy without this one. extern int penisioctl(); Should be able to control these things. extern int penisintr(); This is important! penisopen, penisclose, nodev, nodev, /*69*/ penisioctl, penisintr, nodev, nodev, Aha! spam> mknod /dev/penis c 69 0 spam> chmod a+rwx /dev/penis spam> urinate -f -g -x Ahhhhhhhh...... Whew. Okay, done with that. What's next? "Get current patches and bug fixes" spam> autopatch br0: connecting to spamsite.arcturus.exp connected. available: flirt.o details? y Bugs fixed: bug 4488229: reported by chused@husc.harvard.edu parser problem, responds incorrectly to replies like "yes, but not ever". bug 4488104: reported by carole@intercon.com protocol is not robust to glitches on communications link bug 4388288: reported by dreamy@fandom-house.org clueserver is BROKEN! install? y flirt.o: 1/1/94 29837988 bytes. available: flame.o details? y Bugs fixed: bug 40228478: reported by feste@world.std.com trace log is way too long bug 39874511: reported by jym@remarque.berkeley.edu decision module is unstable -- flames on trivia, ignores bait bug 37993040: reported by raoul@athena.mit.edu deconstruction module is too efficient -- overreduces arguments install? y flame.o: 1/1/94 92347892384729847 bytes. available: fuck.o details? n install? n reason? I never get to use it anyway. available: hack.o details? n install? y hack.o: 1/1/94 564 bytes. available: horsesense.o details? ^Y session disconnect requested by user. Screw this. I'll muddle through till next year. HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYBODY! -- Spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa From: mje@pookie.pass.wayne.edu (Michael J. Edelman) ...when you're reading news with xvnews on the SPARC on your desk and you come across this really neat Windows trick, so you turn your attention to the Gateway box on the left side of your desk running Windows, slew the SPARC mouse to the left, and are puzzled as to why the cursor arrow didn't make it all the way over to the Gateway's monitor... Yes, I *really* did this... --mike From: acbul1@penfold.cc.monash.edu.au (Andrew Bulhak) ... when you try repeatedly to say something to a person who does not respond, and eventually give up, thinking something like "I guess this means that Kris is down". -- acb [happened to me the other week] From: Erik_Schmidt@p99.wharfrat.fido.de (Erik Schmidt) ... you're attending a party and want to take some pictures and ask: 'may I take a Gif of you?'. From: iyoung@discover.wright.edu (Ian Young) you're cooking, and when you want someone to start boiling water, you tell them "hey, could you init the noodles?" You leave your bags sitting at the help desk, and then go to lunch. When you realize you need something from your bag, you start back towards the lab, stop, and think "Hey, why don't I just FTP my paper to the cafeteria?" From: samir@mickey.cc.utexas.edu (Samir Mahendra) You see a motorcycle with "VT500" painted on the side, and you immediately start looking for a terminal. You start thinking in terms of if...then statements and while loops, and after a night spent drinking, you start using goto's. From: berndm@cs.monash.edu.au (Bernd U Meyer) samir@mickey.cc.utexas.edu (Samir Mahendra) writes: >You start thinking in terms of if...then statements and while loops, >and after a night spent drinking, you start using goto's. You come into your shower, discover a trail of ants, wash most of them of but spare those which are between you and your towel (and way above you head, anyway), and a minute later recognize that the remaining ants are helplessly waiting for something to happen, and the thought that crosses your mind is "Whoever wrote the firmware for those parallel beasts didn't provide a very efficient fault recovery. They are deadlocked!".... You think about a hardware design you are working on, and catch yourself thinking "I have 50ns here. Wow, that's HEAPS of time".... Bernie From: str8jkt@cyberspace.com (Glenn M. Brockett) I had a nasty one lately... I was trying to fall asleep, and found that I couldn't shut down my system properly... Every time I told my body to `shutdown` It would shutdown and reboot back into the runtime... This happened about 4 times before I realised I was dreaming this... I still couldn't shut down my body till I imagined putting a DOS disk into the system and just powered down when I got the prompt. Too much Unix lately. From: fat@Indy (Irtegov Dmitry Valentinovich) You know you have been hacking too long when: You think how to describe a half-awoke state of mind, and the first idea is: `single-user mode'. Then you understand, that single-user mode is really a sleeping state, zero mode (when is safe to powerdown) is a coma or anabiose (sp?), and half-awoke state is `changing from mode 1 to multiuser' Cheers, Fat Brother. From: rls3@Ra.MsState.Edu (Roger L Smith) str8jkt@cyberspace.com (Glenn M. Brockett) writes: >I had a nasty one lately... I was trying to fall asleep, and found that >I couldn't shut down my system properly... Every time I told my body to >`shutdown` >It would shutdown and reboot back into the runtime... This happened about >4 times before I realised I was dreaming this... I still couldn't shut >down my body till I imagined putting a DOS disk into the system and just >powered down when I got the prompt. I started dreaming the other night that I was having a hard drive failure. I suddenly woke up to realize that I was having stomach cramps. This has actually happened to me about three times. Stress kills! From: hjv@phil.ruu.nl (Hendrik Jan Veenstra) ... when, while reading a book and being somewhere halfway, and reading a new crucial bit of information on one of the main characters that makes you want to re-read the parts in which he was mentioned earlier, your first thought is "Oh, I'll just do a grep "name" on the foregoing chapters. Happened to me this week... YKYreallyBHTLW... you realise it's been 4 years since you last read a book, and then that book was a manual. Or worse: it's been 4 years.. etc, but you don't even realise it... From: marge@tippy.com (Rich Herdman) You know you have been hacking too long when: You're at Wal-Mart with your 9 week old son and upon seeing a new baby bottle from Fisher Price called a 'Flow Control' bottle, your first thought is: "Hmmm... is that hardware flow control or software flow control?" Rich "and what leads would I use on my kid's face?" Herdman From: nilo@login.dknet.dk (Nicolai Thilo) You know you have been hacking too long when: You 'briefly' lie down on the bed with all the lights in the room left on and think "the screen blanker will take care of that" and go to sleep with all your clothes on.. From: pburgess@netcom.com (Phillip Burgess) Some background: There's a second annual parade in Pasadena, called the "Doo-Dah Parade", intended to make a mockery of the Rose Parade. A few years ago I was meeting with some other computer nerds in Pasadena and this actually happened: 1) Nerd #1 steps into Nerd #2's apartment, they exchange greetings, and Nerd #1 tells Nerd #2 that "today is the Doo-Dah Parade." 2) Nerd #2 asks, "What's the dude operand?" 3) Hilarity ensues. 4) Nerd #3 knocks on door, comes in, greetings are exchanged, and then Nerd #2 tells Nerd #3 that "they're having the Doo-Dah Parade today." 5) Nerd #3 asks, "What's the dude operand?" Maybe you had to be there. From: gkb@aber.ac.uk (GARY BARNES) YKYBHTLW you happen look at the instructions on your gas meter as to what to do in the event of a gas leak, and when you see that it says "Open windows" you think, "Oh smeg, do I have to?". Gaz From: ab401@freenet.carleton.ca (Paul Tomblin) I was in New york City for the first time this weekend, and I kept seeing orange road signs that said "ALT. RTE. BERRY AVE" (or some other street name) and my first thought was that somebody had newgrouped a new alt group that I'm not going to bother to addgroup. From: acbul1@penfold.cc.monash.edu.au (Andrew Bulhak) You Know You've Been Hacking Too Long When..... .....you are about to feed your cat and you find yourself thinking half-consciously, "is this an AT&T cat or a Berkeley cat?" Happened to me... - acb [And I didn't even associate it with /bin/cat either.....] From: Huge@axalotl.demon.co.uk (Hugh Davies) You know you've been hacking too long when... You look at every word that ends in the letter 'd' and wonder what kind of daemon it is... From: paulp@nic.cerf.net (Paul Phillips) you look at your notes from the last half hour and realize that you have written "date" twice. -PSP, time impaired From: bram@fangorn.xs4all.nl (Bram Smits) ... you see a tape called 'hard drive' at the videostore and you think 'who would want to make a movie of THAT ?'. (no, it wasn't in the XXX section). From: us224353@dawn.mmm.com (Chris Sonnack) You see a sign about a casino bragging that they "shell out more often", and you wonder: Borne, Korn or C? From: Perry.Rovers@kub.nl (Perry Rovers) - you read posts from some guy who uses $ instead of > for replies and think: this guy must be using VMS - you try to resize the physical screen of a laptop by dragging a mouse From: root@foobar.hanse.de (Jens Stark) ... your wife wakes you up MUCH too early, so your brain is almost working in single step mode and you have a dream obout a salesman who offers you "just a trouble-fee quick processor upgrade". Oh, well - sounded like a great idea to me at that time ! Jens From: malloy@crash.cts.com (Sean Malloy) When I've been spending too much time in the editor, either at work running X on my workstation, or at home with a windowing editor, I will occasionally run into a problem where a sheet of paper I'm referring to as I write will be covering the part of the screen where the cursor is, and I'll make several futile attempts to pop the window on the monitor up over the sheet of paper in front of it -- the metaphor coming off the desktop and biting me. From: Benjamin.D.Taylor@CS.CMU.EDU While waking up one morning, I had gotten into this sleep GUI (oddly reminiscient of the Borland IDE) and realized it was time to wake up. So what did I do? I pulled down the upper-left menu to Exit. When it didn't work, I felt really silly and *that* woke me up. Ben Taylor From: "Bob Krampetz" You know .... when: you *do* drive home, but all the licence plates you see are valid assembler op codes. From: Adrian Booth Computing Consultants You know you've been *administrating* too long when you keep looking suspiciously at how close some CDs and a speaker or telephone are... (you know, floppies, magnetic fields... never mind) From: sieber@sfu.ca Well, along with a (large) number of other people, I never thought this sort of thing would happen to me. Imagine my surprise when, the other day, after writing down a few items in columns on a piece of paper, I realised that the next item would need more room than I had left in one of the columns. No problem, I'll just highlight the block, and cut and paste to move it over.... pause.... If only life could be that easy.... ;-) -==- From: mpk@frink.demon.co.uk (Mike Knell) In article <1994Nov17.144419.5148@bay.cc.kcl.ac.uk>, Chris Richardson wrote: >It was the early hours of this morning, and I was sleeping the fitful (worrying nerdy dream deleted) >which would be much faster than processing them all manually... > >It was then that I was woken up, feeling rather odd. I blame all the >beer. I had a similiar experience -- it's *always* after having drunk too much beer (in my case, Newcastle Brown, Old Peculier and Guinness all seem to have the best effects). The most recent one (and thankfully, about the only one I can remember) involved meeting my dream woman, then finding out later on that she was a sendmail wizard as well. Weird. Not sure why sendmail in particular, but there you go... -- mpK. From: acb@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au (Andrew Bulhak) You Know You've Been Hacking Too Long when: ..... you hear a tape of New Order's _Blue Monday_ and think, "hey, they're good! Sounds just like the MOD file....." From: bev@ctdnet.acns.nwu.edu (Bev Thurber) This really happened to me this morning..really..it did.. I woke up with my cat climbing on me. My first thought was that the cat was the source code for my blanket. Then, instead of correcting that, I thought "No..the cat wouldn't compile to the blanket..." It took me a really long time to figure it out..That was *weird*! From: jeffrey@agora.rdrop.com (Jeff Raihanan) Last summer I wiped out while mountain biking down a rocky hill (29 stitches in the face, ouch!). My first thought as I got up from the dirt was "Uh, Oh. System crash. Restore from backup." :-( From: gwebster@ugly.UVic.CA (Snow Dog) Today's episode of the "I'm a geek" YKYBHTLW sweepstakes: Walking past a clothing store with a sign saying "Browsers Welcome". First thought: Netscape or NSCA Mosaic? Second thought: They forgot to print the URL. Third thought was Hacking to long... From: pgregg@nyx10.cs.du.edu (Paul Gregg) You wake up early and think "Bollocks I killed the wrong sleeping process." From: michael@tychonic.antioch.edu (Michael Smith) When you wake up to street repair and think, "Head crash!!!!" From: paulp@nic.cerf.net (Paul Phillips) You hear the line in a Moody Blue's song "one more time to live" and think "Damn, isn't DNS configured yet?" From: hwolfe@corona.unomaha.edu (Herb Wolfe) I was on a couple of talk programs earlier this morning, and watching tv, when I switched to a different channel on the tube. Anyways, I was waiting for the show on the first channel to come back on, and kept waiting for a message like "activity on other channel" so I would know when to turn it back on. That's about as bad as looking for scroll back for the tv, which I do on occasion. From: nhill@deviant.jolt.com (Nate Hill) Some JERK called me at three o'clock this morning and hung up on me. I stumbled around in a total daze, a thousand different random things went through my mind then it all went blank. When I started to figure out where I was, I thought "I must have caught an NMI and did a core-dump." From: samir@goofy.cc.utexas.edu (Samir Mahendra) I dreamt that I had selected a large part of a binary file with the mouse (in X) and had accidentally clicked the second mouse button in an xterm. As I tried desperately to kill the window, the sound of the bell from the occasional ^G grew louder and louder, and I woke up to the sound of my bedside alarm going off. It was really wierd. I need to spend less time in the X terminal lab. From: irish@eskimo.com (Irish) ....After tinkering with X all day you look down and try to change the font on your keyboard. From: 926286ki@udcf.gla.ac.uk (Sam Kington) One of the classic ones, but I thought I'd mention it: a friend of mine, after an all-nighter, wanted to reset his machine, so tries to click on the reset switch with the mouse... From: Xcott Craver This one's a true story. Just finished a final for CSCI 567, Applied systems programming in MVS/ESA (AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!) and was not in a stable mental state thereafter. I left the final, exhausted, walked to the student center to wait for a #3 bus, and when a bus rolled by I peered outside to see what kind it was, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, and suddenly thought.... Oh, wait, I have to wait for the Service Provider to provide me with a bus number. And then, later on the radio was playing Meatloaf's "Objects in the Rear-view Mirror etc. etc.," and was repeating that annoyingly tacky phrase over and over and over and over near the end of the song (as is 'Loaf's style) and I thought "Hey, someone should tell that guy that if he doesn't terminate soon he's going to go down with an S322..." I will have better days. From: ande0870@gold.tc.umn.edu (Greg Anderson) When the alarm clock goes off, you think that by hitting the snooze button, you redirect the music to /dev/null. From: Kell Soennichsen Last night when my alarm clock went off I couldn't figure out how to hit the snooze bar on the GUI because Windows wasn't installed on the alarm clock :-) From: connorbd@cleo.bc.edu (Brian Connors) About a week ago I had spent a sizeable chunk of the previous night trying to get a printout of the ISO Ada 95 draft standard (don't ask why). The next day I was over at the local rink (BC's Conte Forum, FWIW) playing an hour or so of pickup hockey. I got back and was flipping through my freshly bound copy of ISO/IEC Standard 8652:1995 waiting for one of my roommates to relinquish the shower when I caught myself thinking, "Ada is a full-check programming language..." Collapsed in mixed hysterics and disbelief and left my roommate's girlfriend bewildered when I explained it to her (because she happened to be there). From: Perry.Rovers@kub.nl (Perry Rovers) YKWYBHTLW: you've been working with VMS for hours and everything you write down on paper afterwards comes out in ALL CAPS. Happened to me yesterday. [VMS has this habit of displaying output with only capitals] From: tieu@trance.helix.net (Steven Tieu) You know you've been using computers too long when.. you can put those sticker labels on diskettes straight everytime without even trying. From: gkb@aber.ac.uk (Gary Barnes) You are listening to an audio CD which has one track you don't like on it, and you immediately think "I'll delete that one". From: M.J.Jennings@amtp.cam.ac.uk (Michael Jennings) Like many hackers, I often work at the keyboard all night. Sometimes I will doze off at the keyboard. One of the things that will often wake me is the system beep from my workstation, which in this case is usually the xbiff indicating that I have received mail from someone. Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I was on a bus in Bangkok. I was suffering from jet-lag, and was consequently dozing a bit on the bus. I heard a loud beep (actually somebody pushing the 'I want to get off at the next stop' button) which had roughly the same pitch as my system beep. I immediately woke up, and the thought 'I wonder who is sending me mail' went through my mind. Sad. Really sad. From: paulp@nic.cerf.net (Paul Phillips) YKYBHTLW you're reading about a nice solution to the Dining Philosopher's problem, but the thought of a table covered with plates of spaghetti is so compelling that you have to get up and make yourself a meal at 2:15 AM. From: rsf@mother.idx.com (Rob Freundlich) YKYBUsingWindozeTLW you're in Staples looking at electronic organizers and need some assistance, and there's no salesperson around, so you look around the counter for the F1 key. From: im14u2c@cs1.bradley.edu (Joe Zbiciak) Here's something really bad-- You know you've been hacking too long when you think nothing of spending MORE money to ship your computer home for the holidays than yourself. I spent $66 on a round trip train ticket home, and I am spending about $70 to ship my computer both ways... (Of course, I just got a larger monitor, and I don't know how much it will be to ship it back to school... it's a 20" monitor and it weighs about 70 lbs...) From: alanh@primenet.com (Alan Hamilton) ....you get some e-mail from someone thanking you for your help in getting their computer working, and you can't remember who the person is or what their problem was. From: creed@netcom.com (Chris Reed) YKYHBHTL When your 5 year old daughter asks how you got the playing cards out of the computer. This happened to me when I played a game of solitaire with real cards that I got for Christmas. WTWCT. Its time for a reality check. From: lstowell@pyrnova.mis.pyramid.com (Lon Stowell) Either one too many YKYBHTL postings or too much Hard Copy when you see the personalized license plate and can't figure out whether it is a "computer thing" or bragging about resolution of an unsatisfactory relationship" SO EXCD No, it wasn't a White Bronco, some sorta little red foreignmobile. From: and1000@thor.cam.ac.uk (Austin Donnelly) YKYBHTLW... ...you wake up from a dream about refilling a laser printer that's out of paper and beeping its paper out indicator, only to realise the beeping's coming from your alarm clock. From: simond@perception.co.nz (Simon Dawson) YKYBHTLW... You're dozing off.. dreaming about going to visit a friend's house, except every section of road that you're walking down is another line of code (the road-code?).. so you get to a corner, and there's this while loop.. by this point in the dream, you know you're going mad, so you're not functioning correctly, and you're wondering to yourself (in the dream) "Do I go to the next line after I have executed this loop, or do I stay here standing on the corner, staring at this loop command forever?".. so eventually you step out into the middle of the road, and there's a Get #1, , Life_Experience there.. and you're looking at it, going Man.. Do I really want this Life Experience? Hows this going to affect running my program? Needless to say I woke up in a cold sweat.. and went to sleep in my bed, instead of on the couch.. From: aardvark@bf.rmit.edu.au (Chris Anderson) The other day I was wandering along the street and I saw three guys from a local home delivery soft drink place walking along the other side. All of them had these bright red shirts and caps, and I noticed that the guy on one end had his cap forward, the one in the middle wasn't wearing his, and the guy on the other end had his cap on backwards. The first thing that occured to me was "How cool, a trinary hat system..." I think I need a vacation. From: naraht@drycas.club.cc.cmu.edu (Randy Finder) You Know You've Been Hacking Too Long When..... You seen a car in front of you with License Place (Delaware) 32767 and the first thought that comes to mind is "Wow, he got lucky, the next plate is negative." (Signed integers in C go from -32768 to 32767) From: dpe@saucer.cc.umr.edu (David Edwards) YKYBHTLW: You start filling out snail mail envelopes by hand and need to flag them to someone specific's attention and you start trying to figure out how to add a X-attn: and X-mailstop: to the envelope... From: root@wombat.hanse.de (Bernd "Bernie" Meyer) 926286ki@udcf.gla.ac.uk (Sam Kington) writes: >I was going through some old tapes, trying to remember when I'd recorded >the stuff on them, and thought: "Damn, why don't tapes have date >stamps?" If only you knew HOW often I have been looking at some kind of non-electronic mess (let it be a book, my desk or the pile of fabric I call my wardrobe; Also applies for coins in a wallet etc) and just went ff thinking "well, I'll sort it, and then grep for the stuff I want". Another of those moments is when you look at the (real life) bulletin board at uni, and long for a "find -newer" (treating it as a directory) or a "diff"" (treating it as a single file). My only consolidation is that I will probably live to see most of these ideas implemented :-) Bernie "Also waiting for all my appliances to get ethernet" Meyer From: Nik.Clayton@brunel.ac.uk (Nik Clayton) You Know You Have Been Reading News Too Long When: You're reading the Spaf book on security, and it mentions the "Perl package by Larry Wall". You then spend the next 30 seconds flicking through the following pages to work out where Larry's response is. Hey, he greps everything else. PS: Hi Larry. From: corlepnd@aston.ac.uk (PND CORLETT) I was using my Amiga the other night, when I had an itch in my back. I then thought that the sharp-looking mouse pointer would be ideal to scratch it with. It looks as if RL has lost me as well... From: R!ch You Know You've Been Hacking (6502 Assembler) Too Long When... This morning, on the way to work, I saw a car with the registration number PHK 123 X; my first thought was: "Push K? What sort of register is K?". I think I've been working on my 65C02 emulator too long... From: jeff@owlnet.rice.edu (Jeff Smith) After using Wavefront (a 3-D modelling and photo-realistic rendering package) all day, I walked outside at sunset and thought to myself: "Hmmn! Somebody turned the Ambient and Diffuse down too far!" smith P.S. And I did breifly wonder about reassigning the material of my shirt to a different texture.. From: matrix@gonzo.wolfe.net (Chris Spiegel) yeah, the other day when I got up, I was thinking, "Now what directory did I put shower.exe in?" Then when I realized, I got up, and started towards the shower, and thought "Where's the help file for the shower?" Finally I figured out I knew how to take a shower.. :) And another thing... I don't know HOW many times when I was talking to someone (voice) how the heck to say ':)' It has eluded me every time... Matrix From: dehrig@mirac.unm.edu (Dan Ehrig) You're cramming for an exam at Denny's around 1:30 am and you keep finding that your brain has had CRC errors while downloading text. Stupid loud drunk people. -Dan (really wishes it were 12:30 yet so he could just take the damn thing) From: kenbrody@cloud9.net (Kenneth Brody) Paul D. Walker (pdwalker@hk.super.net) wrote: [...] : The best one that I saw was a guy by the name of Derek when I was : working at BNR. He was running X-windows on his Sun and he was trying : to minimize some of his windows to clear up some desktop space. : One of the windows took three clicks before he realized that is was a : sticky note stuck to his screen. YKYBHTLW... You read the second paragraph and wonder why he couldn't close the note window, and then realize he meant the _paper_ sticky notes. From: jtihon@hawk.ece.ucdavis.edu (Jack Tihon) James E. McNalley (mcnalley@metnet.geog.pdx.edu) wrote: : Kenneth Brody (kenbrody@cloud9.net) wrote: : : You know you've been hacking too long when... : YKYBHTL in ASCII text when you have to edit all the html code : you write from *this* to this. : mcnalley@metnet.geog.pdx.edu -or- http://metnet.geog.pdx.edu/~mcnalley/ <.sig nixed> YKYB using TeX TLW... you take notes and {\bf bold} and {\it italicize } key words and YKYBHTLW you use '||' and '!' instead of "or" and "not" ... or worse yet you use '\/' and '~'. From: ph3057@irix.bris.ac.uk (JAI. Holtom) YKYBHTLW someone leaves your door open after they've been in your room, and you move the pointer to start hunting for the close door icon.... It happened an hour ago on my own box.... From: Xcott Craver Had another Y..W.. the other day, when arguing with another grad assistant about what can and can not be easily done in Windows(Copyright Nabisco,1987). "Sure," he told me, "you can do that. In fact, I have a book with code for it right here," and tapped a book on his wall. ONCE. I'm not much of a GUI man ("All you really need is 8 switches and LED's to read the PSW and registers!") but for the life of me it just didn't seem right that he only clicked the book once. He seemed to be thinking the same thing, tho, and quickly responded, "Oh, no, I was just highlighting it." From: tony.lima@toadhall.com (Tony Lima) YKYBHTLW ... "VENDOR TO INCREASE VAR BASE" read the headline in "Computer Reseller News." "Just what the world needs," I thought, "another damn database package." - Tony "who remembers VisiOn?" Lima From: kenbrody@cloud9.net (Kenneth Brody) Dann Lunsford (dann@luns.sna.com) wrote: : I was doing an inventory of my closet recently, and (under some old skeletons) : I found both volumes of Ahl. Man, what a trip! I still have some old CC, too. YKYBHTLW... You find that you still have both volumes... and they're autographed by Ahl! From: Charlie_Gibbs@mindlink.bc.ca (Charlie Gibbs) You see the licence plate MAX-255, and your first thought is, "Poor fellow, he only has an 8-bit accumulator." (Happened on the way to work this morning.) On the other hand, if he's proudly displaying an "Intel Inside" sticker, forget it. He deserves everything he gets. :-p From: pburgess@netcom.com (Phillip Burgess) YKYBHTLW you're HAPPY that the warranty has expired on computer equipment that cost more than some cars. Now I get to try to fix it myself before those computer store gorillas start pawing around in there. From: giersig@ds1.kph.tuwien.ac.at (Roland Giersig) You Know You've Been Playing Computer Games Too Long When... your one year old daughter hands you three of her building blocks, a square, a triangular and a circular one and your first thought is "Hmm, Electronic Arts!" From: 926286ki@udcf.gla.ac.uk (Sam Kington) You know you've been hacking too long... ...when you're in the supermarket checkout, and there's a big space between your stuff on the conveyor belt, and the stuff belonging to the guy in front, and you think "uh-oh, the heap's getting fragmented." From: cpierce1@ed7590.pto.ford.com (Clinton Pierce (R)) In article <3nils7$ibl@news.tuwien.ac.at>, giersig@ds1.kph.tuwien.ac.at (Roland Giersig) writes: |> your one year old daughter hands you three of her building blocks, |> a square, a triangular and a circular one and your first thought |> is "Hmm, Electronic Arts!" You Know You've Been Watching Too Much Star Trek Voyager When... You're handed the same blocks and think UPN! From: ande0870@gold.tc.umn.edu (Greg "Torgo" Anderson) You come home after a 12 hour hack session, and fire up MWord. After working on your homework that's due 2morrow, you try and use C-x C-s to save it. Twice. And you can't figure out why it's beeping at you. Also, the urge to use C-k to clear off a line happens many-a-time. From: rhand@slip.net (Roger Hand) You Know You've Been Reading Alt.folklore.computers too long when . . . You're behind a car with the license plate 2LED486 and your first thought is "Hmm . . . not a bad system, but he shouldn't have skimped on the display" And your second thought is "Can't wait to get home and post this to a.f.c" From: kenbrody@cloud9.net (Kenneth Brody) Dave Fischer (dave@cca.org) wrote: : justinm@ixc.net (Justin Moe) writes: : > I don't see why anyone would want to stop the handshaking... It's music to my : >ears. Just love the sound of a V.34 connect in the morning.... : ...it sounds like..... BANDWIDTH. YKYBHTLW You can tell the type of connection being made by the sound. (I once heard a term I like to use for it: The modem mating call.) From: ande0870@gold.tc.umn.edu (Greg "Torgo" Anderson) In article <3oas6g$khn@news.cloud9.net>, kenbrody@cloud9.net (Kenneth Brody) wrote: > YKYBHTLW > You can tell the type of connection being made by the sound. The other day, I was watching VR5 (hey, it replaced Mantis...anything that did that favor to the world deserves to be watched now & then), and this guy was connecting to some other computer. After hearing the handshake, the first thing I said to my friend was, "What kinda crap is this? He's using a 2400 modem?" Greg(New! Modem's Greatest Handshakes! Only $19.95!) From: barrett@cs.umass.edu (Daniel Barrett) In article , Greg "Torgo" Anderson wrote: > I was working on some computer architecture homework, and I hadda find >out the bit-pattern for the addiu instruction, which was in chapter 3. >So, I flip to chapter 3, and the first thing in my mind is 'cat -n >chapter3 | grep addiu'. I can beat that. :-) Back in 1988 when I was a UNIX systems administrator at The Johns Hopkins University, I went to buy a candy bar from a vending machine. I deposited my money, pressed the button, and nothing happened. Pulling the "coin return" lever did nothing. Nevertheless, I smirked to myself... knowing that if necessary, I could use my root password to get inside and fix things. True story. From: R!ch I saw a car on the way to work this morning, registration number GOT 329K. My first thought was "Only 329K? I've got 36 megs!". From: gkb@aber.ac.uk (Gary Barnes) In article , R!ch wrote: :I saw a car on the way to work this morning, registration number :GOT 329K. My first thought was "Only 329K? I've got 36 megs!". There's a Land Rover in Aberystwyth with the reg BAD 890 K. YKYBHTLW you think "Ouch!". From: cs132bog@sleet.seas.ucla.edu (Bryen K. Ogawa) You're listening to the Forrest Gump soundtrack, and you're listening to Aretha Franklin's RESPECT, and you "hear" the following lines: .... T-C-P socket-socket-socket .... (or something like that) From: connorbd@cleo.bc.edu (Brian Connors) I've been thinking "grep " constantly lately. Fun part is, I'm a Mac diehard. Weird... From: dave@stimpy.umd.umich.edu (Dave Good) Lately, every time I watch TV, and *just miss* part of a show I wanted to see, I think, "no problem, I'll just press the scrollback key and look at what's in the buffer......." From: Phil Smith III you're sitting in the deli downstairs from your office and the lights go off and back on, an obvious power hit; you start to put your sandwich down, since it obviously won't be good for anything any more... From: linley@netcom.com (Bruce James Robert Linley) ...you seem to be the only one who thinks that the new UPSP stamps *are* priced at a nice round number (32 cents). From: pburgess@netcom.com (Phillip Burgess) You Know You've Been Hacking Too Long When... Your Netcom account balance is shown as "$-0.00", and you wonder for a moment whether this has the same bug as the money lender in the old Apple ][ game "Taipan", where you could overpay your balance and make millions on interest. From: umennis0@cc.umanitoba.ca (Sean D. Ennis) you're watching the movie "The Langdoleers (sp?)", and you see those cannon balls with teath come onto the screen, and the first thing you think of is "Garbage collection.... it's gotta be. From: kenbrody@cloud9.net (Kenneth Brody) Tony Lima (tony.lima@toadhall.com) wrote: : This must be a troll. My local BBS has 8 nodes, all running : 28.8K modems. I connect at 9600 myself. - Tony "remembers 150 : baud" Lima YKYBHTLW, you can still read (although slowly) the punched paper tape you still have in an old dresser drawer --- without a tape reader. Kenneth "remembers 110 baud" Brody From: mikem@sashimi.wwa.com (mike magin) YKYBHTLW... you're writing something with pen and paper, and you think for a moment, "how do I save in this editor". It really happened to me today. From: husen@thanatos3.altair.wes.mot.com (Eric P. Husen) YKYBHTLW... You start balancing your checkbook in hexadecimal. I unintentionally did this one day after far too many hours debugging assembly level code. From: ande0870@gold.tc.umn.edu (Greg "Torgo" Anderson) I recently spent 16 straight hours of SGI GL-based graphics programming, writing a horrendously slow (first try) ray-tracer, and by the time I got back home, it was an hour b4 I would be getting up. So I decided to forgo that silly sleep thing, and head out to class. Foolish person I am, with 3 classes from 8 to 12:30. I was of course dozing off thru all of them. Every time I nodded off, images of vectors flying down to stab me, and huge spheres and cones bouncing around. This continued thru all my classes, and filled most of my dreams during my nap between lunch & dinner. Too much ray tracing hurts the noggin. From: Nik.Clayton@brunel.ac.uk (Nik Clayton) Knowing me Nik Clayton, knowing you A.J.Cribbin@bradford.ac.uk (a.j.cribbin), ah-ha. >You still write with a /pen/ ? I think you'll find that should be /dev/pen Unless you keep all your device files in the root directory of course (the mind boggles). From: Steven Mading YKYBHTLW you find yourself composing regular expressions on the fly in your head to help look up something in the encyclopedia, or to find the restroom on on of those building room-directory boards, or to find your favourite show in the T.V. listings. When you go so far that you begin looking for the '^' key on the T.V. remote control (so that you can make sure you only find your T.V. show's name when it's at the start of an entry), then it's time to go to sleep. Expecially when you think you've found the carat (^) key on the remote, so you hit the key and nothing happens. So you hit it again. And again. And again. And ... dammit - why is the T.V. so loud all of a sudden? From: ph330812@student.uq.edu.au (Jason Parker) YKYBHTLW: you're trying to think of a filename to save your latest whiz-bang coomand under, and you hit the [TAB] key, expecting tcsh to think of the rest for you. From: thomas@geac.co.nz (Thomas Beagle) Kasper van Wouw wrote: >I was once asked in a test about the addressspace of a 64 bit computer. >For some weird reason I know this is 18446744073709551616. I think >1.8e10 would be close enough for an answer. Were you allowed to answer in binary? :-) Path: kzdoos!blackhl.xs4all.nl!xs4all!sun4nl!EU.net!news.sprintlink.net!sunserver.insinc.net!news.Direct.CA!scipio.cyberstore.ca!vanbc.wimsey.com!news.mindlink.net!rover.ucs.ualberta.ca!news.bc.net!info.ucla.edu!nnrp.info.ucla.edu!news.ucla.edu!eijkhout reading an underlined word in a book gives you the impulse to click on it to see what it links to. Happened to me yesterday. From: waynel@sequent.com (Wayne Lewis) In article <1995May20.124911.12767@rgfn.epcc.edu>, Alder F. Castanoli wrote: >mike magin (mikem@sashimi.wwa.com) wrote: >> YKYBHTLW... > >I wrote a note to a user on pine yesterday, and at the end of the note I >found I had typed: > >:wq > >That might have worked if I had set vi as the editor, but the blasted >thing was in pico. > >When I realized my mistake, I decided I would not send the note but call >the user on the phone, so before I realized it, I had then typed: > >:q! > I am always typing `j` & `k` in Pine and other apps to move up and down the mail selections...it really pisses me off when I find that Pine is asking me which folder to jump to... From: ande0870@gold.tc.umn.edu (Greg "Torgo" Anderson) ...I booted up 2night, and saw the usual slew of icons on the desktop, and the first thought in my mind was, "Gee, I should clean this up, so it'll be easier to move back home..." (I'm moving back to rent-free land 2morrow). From: camz@wooga.cuug.ab.ca (Martin Zimmerman) I decided to go to the gym again after having been away from it for a couple of months. As I was getting changed and rumaging through my gym bag I realized I couldn't find my combination lock. After a couple of minutes I did find it and then as I pulled it out I said to my friends "Gee, I don't know if I even remember the password to this thing". Took me a few seconds to realize that the lock has a combination, not a password and that I had even said anything wrong. By this time my friends were laughing their heads off. From: aecolley@maths.tcd.ie (Adrian Colley) YKYBHTL when you're reading a book, and the doorbell rings, and you sit in confused silence for several seconds, trying to figure out how to type control-Z. From: afelson@rainbow.rmii.com (Adam Felson) I'd once been working way too many hours on a project... In the middle of the night my cat started walking over me and I recall spending a few minutes trying to remember what data type the cat was... suddenly I said "You're not a data type! You're a cat!" From: jbyrd@tiac.net (Jim Byrd) Once a fly landed on my screen, and I tried to brush it away with the mouse cursor. From: erwinp@intac.com (Phillip Erwin) I remember last summer when I had been doing coding for days on end (God, I don't even remember sleeping), and I had to write a note to my mother, I not only had difficulty holding the pen, but I also wrote: begin writeln('Mom, please.... That's the truth! From: crawford@scipp.ucsc.edu (Mike Crawford) Early in my freshman year I stayed up all night doing Calculus. In the morning, I leaned against a wall in the kitchen watching my friend prepare some cheerios. As I did so, space aliens intersected my body with an infinitesimally thin planar beam, then scanned it accross my body adding up all the areas. I snapped awake with a feeling of profound embarrassment that they had measured my volume precisely. Several years later, I lay in bed asleep and had a dream in which I wished to drive my car onto the highway onramp to go home from my programming job, but I was frustrated because I could not find the right scanf() format string to read my car into the highway. In between, I bought my first car. A few days later I stayed up all night programming. I got paid in the morning, and spent much of the day blowing my paycheck. Then I decided to drive to my parent's house to show them my car. (This was in Fairfield, ordinarily a two-hour drive from Santa Cruz). I woke abruptly going 30 miles an hour in an intersection on University Avenue in Berkeley without any memory as to how I got there - this was real, not a dream. A while later, after night fell, each of the headlights in the oncoming traffic formed a little raster-scanned IBM PC character, like they had on the original DOS mono monitors. The whole of the oncoming traffic spelled out things like "Look out! You're going to crash!". From: kyle cassidy last week i went to visit my mother -- we were standing in the kitchen and she said "kyle, click on the light".... it took me a good 5 seconds to figure out how to do it. From: phd96@cc.keele.ac.uk (Steve Pugh) Jeff DelPapa (dp@world.std.com) wrote: : In article <3sqds5$dr0@lyra.csx.cam.ac.uk>, : Michael Jennings wrote: : > You are reading a (printed) newspaper or magazine and : >you read something that is incorrect or you disagree with. : >You therefore wonder where is the f key for you to post : >a followup article. : > : > Anyone else had this experience? : Well yesterday listening to the drivel in favor of the Exon amendment : on nightline, I really wanted to say a few things, and was annoyed : that they don't have a letters section. The other I was reading a book, and I wanted to refer back to something I had read earlier on. It was most annoying that I couldn't press "/" to do a search. And as if that wasn't bad enough, it seems that even "grep" doesn't work on books. Another similar thing that happened to me was this: I was writing an actual letter (you know, with an actual _pen_) to someone who doesn't have an E-mail address. I kept wanting to put a :-) after the humourous bits. Then I thought to myself "hang on, I'm not restricted to sideways smileys; with a pen it's possible to draw them the right way up". But then I realised that the recipient wouldn't understand what a smiley was anyway. The road to cyberspace is strewn with real-world obstacles. From: jgt7c@darwin.clas.Virginia.EDU (Old Man Kensey) At work, we paste price labels for intangible "items" (labor, shipping) on the register's monitor. Today I was thinking, "Gee, we rarely use shipping, let's move it to the bottom, and put labor at eye level on the right, where it's easily spotted." After thinking which, I reached for the mouse... From: billd@netaxs.com (Bill Duetschler) Once I aimed my remote at the TV and pointed it at the upper left corner, where the "close" box should have been, and double-clicked the "power" button on the remote. From: mjarvis@qns2.qns.com (Michael Jarvis) YKYBHTLW you groggily wake up in the morning after a late night debugging and you try to power-cyle your alarm clock. (true story) From: lynn@garlic.garlic.com (Anne & Lynn Wheeler) you've been in the machine room for close to 40 hrs straight and the system starts acting strangly ... so you want to restore the system disk and find the door to the tape library locked. you kick the solid fir door once and it splitters from top to bottom so you can get the restore tapes. as a reminder they install the door as a tabletop across two filing cabinets in the programmers area. From: bhamlin@netcom.com (Brian Hamlin) As dawn passes after an all nighter, wondering why all of those other people starting work in the cubes next to you move around so much.. or, "What's that ? It's those damn birds again..." btw- I now enjoy getting up in the morning, well-rested, and moving around a lot, often and vigorously :)_ From: jdb@tiac.net (Jim Bailey) In article <1995Jul10.133249.21566@vtf.idx.com>, rsf@mother.idx.com (Rob Freundlich) wrote: -> In article <19950706.7B0E468.27A4@julian.slip.uwo.ca>, -> leadfoot@julian.slip.uwo.ca (Alexander M. Bilan) wrote: -> > Once when having typed at the computer most of the day, I actually had to -> >write(!) something down and made a spelling error. I stopped mid-word, while -> >my hand immediately went to where the 'delete' key is supposed to be. -> -> You Know You've Been Using Pen Computing Too Long When your pen-and-paper -> notes start using the Graffiti character set and you draw a backwards line to -> erase a mistake. As a newton user, I've found myself trying to do the Newton scrub gesture to delete a word on paper. Luckily, no one really notices so it isn't really embarrasing. From: ande0870@gold.tc.umn.edu (Greg "Torgo" Anderson) While driving along, you come up behind a car who's license plate reads "961 EXE", and you wonder why anyone would name a program "961". From: gerdw@cougar.vut.edu.au (David Gerard) This morning, I dreamt that I was reading Usenet and accessing the Web by something like a wireless modem in my mind. (I'm pretty sure there was no device used in the dream -- that it was a sort of mental soft-modem.) I remember being asleep (in the dream) and knowing I was asleep ... and still reading the news in my sleep. I was even carried off to somewhere else by someone (hospital?) and I remember my sleeping-but-aware mind (in the dream) thinking, "Damn, hope the connection holds ..." I guess that would count as Usenet-by-telepathy. From: reid@psi.ch (Dr Ivan D Reid, µSR Facility, PSI) In article <3ti5eu$q7q@netaxs.com>, billd@netaxs.com (Bill Duetschler) writes... >Once I aimed my remote at the TV and pointed it at the upper left corner, >where the "close" box should have been, and double-clicked the "power" >button on the remote. Almost did that myself yesterday. I wanted to check the time-lapse satellite pictures on the service channel to see how the thunderstorms were developing. I managed to catch the right portion of their cycle of info, but apparently there was a glitch in the Mac they use to cycle the pictures, and it stayed stuck on one particular frame. After staring at it for a minute or so, I started thinking about clicking on the spinning globe to break the connexion and try again... From: rea@st-andrews.ac.uk (Robert E Arthur) I swore I would never add to this again (I O/D'd on the thread a year or two back!), but today I was labelling a disk, and suddenly thought `I can't do that - it's write-protected' From: shoppa@almach.caltech.edu (Timothy D. Shoppa) A friend of mine, when he had his wisdom teeth pulled, was asked if local anesthetic would be good enough. He said "No, I want global anesthetic." From: jon@powerslv.demon.co.uk (Jon Kale) In message Bernd "Bernie" Meyer wrote: > CREETE writes: > > >When you try to pick the mouse up to answer the phone. > > When you think "I'll call that company", and instinctively reach for the > keyboard and start typing the number > > Bernie "It works for the TV's volume control, honestly!" Meyer When, after a *loooong* session sweating over Cubase (top MIDI sequencer), you find yourself trying to control the CD player with "(",")","0","1" and "2" and "Enter" on the numeric keypad. From: bill.bochnik@ustc.mhs.ciba.com (Bill Bochnik) In article , s5cfh@csc.liv.ac.uk says... Yesterday was a particularly bad day (Con_ed dropped our power for 5 hours). Anyway, I was sitting at my PC at 11pm, with a vt420 next to it. I was working on the pc, and went to switch to the terminal, so I grabbed the mouse and ... From: mikej@gacorp.com (Michael A. Jacobs) you see a license plate with ATZ on it and instantly think 'OK' From: provers@kub.nl (Perry Rovers) You start your wordprocessor and get ready to type your username and password. (actually, it happened to me while starting almost any application today and only in 3 out of 20 cases it was needed) From: aecolley@maths.tcd.ie (Adrian Colley) YKYBHTL when you're driving on a motorway and you worry that you shouldn't be driving as root, in case you crash and do damage to your car. If there was a way to do your driving in an unprivileged user mode, I'd feel safer with that. From: erwinp@nile.intac.com (Phillip Erwin) : : you see a license plate with ATZ on it and instantly think 'OK' I've got a similair one, I saw a license plate `PGP 823', and the first thing that came to my mind was, `Hey, the release hasn't gotten that far, has it?' From: mkc@maja.bull.se (Mikael Cardell) You see a license plate on a bus with DDN on it and think "Uh, a military bus, perhaps I should get off". From: dokee@escape.com (inc.) You are afraid to turn off the TV without unmounting syncing disks and unmounting the file systems. From: dokee@escape.com (inc.) YNYBHTL when you're lying in bed after a day of learning sed and awk and you start to think you're a file system. From: chambles@whale.st.usm.edu (John William Chambless) You hear "This is NPR" and you think it means National PAcket Radio. Then you tell a coworker about it, and he doesn't see a mistake. From: rune@nvg.unit.no (Rune Sandnes) I saw a Swedish car in town the other day, with a licence plate that went something like `DNS 123'. I automatically parsed that to `Domain Name Service', and laughed a bit at myself for doing so. Later that day, I told a fellow hacker about the incident, that I had seen a DNS-registered car, and automatically parsed that into `Domain Name Service' "Why should a car be registered in DNS?" he pondered. The very notion that I was talking about the car's registration plates didn't occur to him at all :-)