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Yucks Digest V2 #21
Yucks Digest Fri, 20 Mar 92 Volume 2 : Issue 21
Today's Topics:
`Bubba Vote' Defined, Surveyed
Nine Types of Users
San Francisco USENIX Conference Wrap-Up
Saturday Night Fever - a question
The Software Blues
WhiteBoard News
The "Yucks" digest is a moderated list of the bizarre, the unusual,
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----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 5 Mar 92 13:31:58 PST
From: one of our correspondents
Subject: `Bubba Vote' Defined, Surveyed
To: yucks-request
EDITOR'S NOTE Have you noticed all the pundits on MacNeil-Lehrer
and "All Things Considered" talking about the "Bubba vote?" You know,
which way are the good ol' boys leaning this political season? AP
Southeast Regional Reporter Christopher Sullivan offers some
fictional findings.
By CHRISTOPHER SULLIVAN
ATLANTA (AP)
The critical "Bubba vote" in Super Tuesday's Southern primaries
has spoken in an Associated Press poll, favoring candidates who chew
kitchen matches, wear shirts with snaps and take a hard line on
sassing Mama.
While the spectrum of Bubba views turned out to be as wide and
lumpy as the seat of a 1979 pickup, there was near unanimity in some
areas. For example, 91 percent were more likely to trust a president
with sideburns, the survey found.
Bubbas were deeply split on other issues, including whether
candidates should drink Pepsi, rather than "Co-Cola," with breakfast.
One percent said "longneck Bud."
"Any serious candidate would have to address these and other
issues," such as a Dolly Parton postage stamp, said Dr. David Cannon,
interpreting the poll results. He is a psychologist in Clemson, S.C.,
and author of "Hey Bubba! A Metaphysical Guide to the Good Ol' Boy."
(That part is really true.)
Another scholar, Bo Whaley, who presaged many of the survey's
findings in his book "Rednecks and Other Bonafide Americans" (also
true), said Bubbas will probably decide the election.
"The only reason a lot of Bubbas won't vote is if their truck
won't start, or either they lost their jumper cables," he said from
his think tank in Dublin, Ga.
According to the Census Bureau, there are about 1.1 million
Americans called Bubba, except by their mothers.
The AP's nationwide survey of 1,409 of these Bubbas (well, six,
actually, interviewed at two Chattanooga-area truck stops and at a
barbecue place called Piggy's in Mississippi) has a margin of error
of, say, 94 percent.
The survey contained one finding that could discourage every
campaign.
When asked to describe who best exemplifies their political ideal,
67 percent of Bubbas questioned named Hoss Cartwright, from "Bonanza."
Personal issues have dogged many campaigns this year. Probing
Bubbas' views on these sensitive subjects, the poll found the
following preferences:
Slightly over half, 56 percent, said a president should be able
to roll his own cigarette, down from 71 percent in a similar poll in
1988, but dramatically higher than the 22 percent for non-Bubbas.
30 percent said it was "very important," and 22 percent "somewhat
important," that a candidate not be afraid to spit now and then.
24 percent, answering a question about what they'd add to the
presidential oath, quoted a lyric by country singer John Conlee: "I'm
a common man, drive a common van; my dog ain't got a pedigree."
Responses to another question seemed to offer the closest to a
blueprint for avoiding a shutout among the Bubba vote. Question No.
25 asked:
What's the worst thing a candidate could do: (a) drive a Toyota to
a campaign rally (b) kiss Saddam Hussein on both cheeks; or, (c) sass
his mama?
The response was unanimously (c), except for one Bubba who
muttered something about Belgian endive.
------------------------------
Date: 14 Mar 92 00:30:05 GMT
From: samjones@leo.unm.edu (Sam Jones)
Subject: Nine Types of Users
Newsgroups: rec.humor.funny
This is my own, though the style is a blatant copy of Matt Groening.
Scon is short for Student Consultant. Scons are people hired to help users
learn and work with the university's machinery. A pod is a UNM term for a
place where such machinery is made available.
The nine types of users
El Explicito - "I tried the thing, ya know, and it worked, ya know, but now
it doesn't, ya know?"
Advantages: Provides interesting communication challanges.
Disadvantages: So do chimps.
Symptoms: Complete inability to use proper nouns
Real Case: One user walked up to a certain Armenian pod manager and said, "I
can't get what I want!" The pod manager leaned back, put his hands on his
belt-buckle, and said, "Well, ma'am, you've come to the right place."
Mad Bomber - "Well, I hit ALT-f6, shift-f8, CNTRL-f10, f4, and f9, and now it
looks all weird."
Advantages: Will try to find own solution to problems.
Disadvantages: User might have translated document to Navajo without meaning
to.
Symptoms: More than six stopped jobs in UNIX, a 2:1 code-to-letter ratio in
WordPerfect
Real Case: One user came in complaining that his WordPerfect document was
underlined. When I used reveal codes on it, I found that he'd set and unset
underline more than fifty times in his document.
Frying Pan/Fire Tactician - "It didn't work with the data set we had, so I
fed in my aunt's recipe for key lime pie."
Advantages: Will usually fix error.
Disadvantages: 'Fix' is defined VERY loosely here.
Symptoms: A tendancy to delete lines that get errors instead of fixing
them.
Real Case: One user complained that their program executed, but didn't do
anything. The scon looked at it for twenty minutes before realizing that
they'd commented out EVERY LINE. The user said, "Well, that was the only
way I could get it to compile."
Shaman - "Last week, when the moon was full, the clouds were thick, and
formahaut was above the horizon, I typed f77, and lo, it did compile."
Advantages: Gives insight into primative mythology.
Disadvantages: Few scons are anthropology majors.
Symptoms: Frequent questions about irrelavent objects.
Real Case: One user complained that all information on one of their disks got
erased (as Norton Utilities showed nothing but empty sectors, I suspect nothing
had ever been on it). Reasoning that the deleted information went *somewhere*,
they wouldn't shut up until the scon checked four different disks for the
missing information.
X-user - "Will you look at those. . .um, that resolution, quite impressive,
really."
Advantages: Using the cutting-edge in graphics technology.
Disadvantages: Has little or no idea how to use the cutting-edge in graphics
technology.
Symptoms: Fuzzy hands, blindness
Real Case: When I was off duty, two users sat down in front of me at DEC
station 5000/200s that systems was reconfiguring. I suppressed my laughter
while, for twenty minutes, they sat down and did their best to act like they
were doing exectly what they wanted to do, even though they couldn't log in.
Miracle Worker - "But it read a file from it yesterday!" 'Sir, at a guess,
this disk has been swollowed and regurgitated.' "But I did that a month ago,
and it read a file from it yesterday!"
Advantages: Apparently has remarkable luck when you aren't around.
Disadvantages: People complain when scons actually use the word 'horse-puckey'.
Symptoms: Loses all ability to do impossible when you're around. Must be
the kryptonite in your pocket.
Real Case: At least three users have claimed that they've loaded IBM
WordPerfect from Macintosh disks.
Taskmaster - "Well, this is a file in MacWrite. Do you know how I can upload
it to MUSIC, transfer it over to UNIX from there, download it onto an IBM,
convert it to WordPerfect, and put it in three-column format?"
Advantages: Bold new challanges.
Disadvantages: Makes one wish to be a garbage collector.
Symptoms: An inability to keep quiet. Strong tendancies to make machines
do things they don't want to do.
Real Case: One user tried to get a scon to find out what another person's
E-mail address was even though the user didn't know his target's home system,
account name, or real name.
Maestro - "Well, first I sat down, like this. Then I logged on, like this,
and after that, I typed in my password, like this, and after that I edited
my file, like this, and after that I went to this line here, like this, and
after that I picked my nose, like this. . ."
Advantages: Willing to show you exactly what they did to get an error.
Disadvantages: For as long as five or six hours.
Symptoms: Selective deafness to the phrases, "Right, right, okay, but what
was the ERROR?", and a strong fondness for the phrase, "Well, I'm getting to
that."
Real Case: I once had to spend half an hour looking over a user's shoulder
while they continuously retrieved a document into itself and denied that they
did it (the user was complaining that their document was 87 copies of the
same thing).
Princess (unfair, perhaps, as these tend, overwhelmingly, to be males) -
"I need a Mac, and someone's got the one I like reserved, would you please
garrote him and put him in the paper recycling bin?"
Advantages: Flatters you with their high standards for your service.
Disadvantages: Impresses you with their obliviousness to other people on
this planet.
Symptoms: Inability to communicate except by complaining.
Real Case: One asked a scon to remove the message of the day because he
(the user) didn't like it.
------------------------------
Date: 3 Mar 92 19:04:25 GMT
From: eric@UCBVAX.BERKELEY.EDU (Eric Allman)
Subject: San Francisco USENIX Conference Wrap-Up
Newsgroups: comp.org.usenix
(This is a copy of an article to be published in ;login:)
I'd like to take the opportunity to thank everyone who
helped make the San Francisco USENIX conference a success.
This list is too long to list here (especially given all the
other items I want to cover). However, like a theater pro-
duction, there were probably at least two people backstage
for everyone you saw on stage.
[...some stuff deleted...]
The Rogue Talk
Much to the surprise of all of us, another talk
appeared on the program: ``Managing Large Distributed Sys-
tems'' by Win Treese was scheduled into the Thursday
8:30-10:00 AM session (at least according to the information
booklet).
Despite the fact that Win hadn't been informed that he
was giving a talk, he managed to deliver it anyway. Since
his paper was received too late to be included in the
proceedings, it is printed here in its entirety:
Management of Large-Scale Distributed Prototypes
for an
8-bit-clean RISC PC-compatible POSIX-compliant UNIX-based CASE
Environment Architecture
for
Artificially Intelligent Caching
of
Client Customizable Desktop Databases
Distributed Among
Dynamic Efficient Encrypted Event-Driven Expert Systems
that is
Extensible Fast and Fault-Tolerant
based on
Fiber Optic Global Graphical User Interfaces
for
Heterogeneous Hierarchical High Throughput
High-Temperature Superconducting Networks
in an
Integrated Highly Available Inexpensive Internationalized
Interoperable Interpreter
for
Knowledge-Based Journaling of Load-Balancing Log-Based Networks
with
Modular Low-Latency Massively Parallel Multimedia
Natural Language Neural Networks
in an
Open Pipelined Object-Oriented Framework
for
Portable Protocol-Independent Reliable Real-Time Process Migration
with a
Secure Shared Multi-Level Scaleable Self-Organizing Replicated Repository
based on
Simple Standard Superscalar Software Engineering Technology
with a
Trace-Driven Transactional Ubiquitously User-Friendly Toolkit
for
Vectorized Vendor-Neutral Virtual User Interfaces
on
Multi-Threaded RPC Servers
Don't even think about it.
Thank you Win.
The Contest
The conference contest, "Name That File System", was a
great success, with several hundred (yes, you read that
right) entries. The rules read as follows:
In the beginning, there was the file system, and it
was good enough for the disk technology of the time.
Then disks got bigger, and the block size was expanded
from 512 bytes to 1K, and the 1KFS was born.
But this was not Good Enough, and so the Fast File
System (FFS) had to be. And it came, and 1KFS went.
Then the Sun rose in the west, and there were net-
works, and NFS (Network File System) came to pass. But
the east wanted to get in on the deal, and so there was
RFS (Remote File System) too.
But there also had to be a local file system, and so
the file system switch was born of virgin parents. And
that was the end of self control.
Now we have LFS (Log Structured File System), TFS
(Translucent File System), MFS (Memory-based File System
- the file system that has files and is a system, but
isn't a file system), and being introduced at this
conference, the 3DFS (Three-Dimensional File System).
Not to mentiona few others (which I won't mention).
What's next? Surely we can think of something!
Like: SFS - Stochastic File System. When you open a
file, it opens a file at random. Opens go very quickly,
and it is useful for selecting random input to programs.
(Not I couldn't use the name RFS [Random File System]
here, because the initials were taken). MMFS - Mickey
Mouse File System. Runs in your watch. LIFS - Language
Independent File System. You have to do a set_locale()
call before you open the file; all text files are
translated into the appropriate language on reads and
writes. SSFS - Slow SLIP File System. Carefully tuned
to give performance commensurate with Serial Line IP over
a 1200 baud modem. (Also, note the rare triply nested
acronym [S [=Slow] S [=S [= Serial] L [=Line] IP [=
Internet Protocol]] F [=File] S[=System]].) SMFS o+ Send-
mail File System. I don't know what this does, but I had
to propose it now to avoid the obvious submissions. In
any case, the semantics are certainly defined by rewrit-
ing rules.
The rules of the contest are simple:
(1) All submissions must have an "XXFS" style name and a
one-line expansion of the initials.
(2) There must be a (short) semantic description of the
file system. Short and snappy is better than full
descriptions (after all, we can always read the man
page).
(3) All submissions muyst have your name and email
address. Teams are OK, but pick one person to act
as a representative.
(4) Submissions are due by 5:00 PM on Thursday. Boxes
will be set up in the registration area.
(5) We'll try to publish all submissions in ;login: and
in comp.org.usenix, so try to make your submissions
printable.
(6) Winners will be announced at 3:20 PM Friday (immedi-
ately before the last session).
(7) Decisions of the (guaranteed biased, arbitrary,
etc.) judges are final.
(8) Prizes cannot be returned.
(9) There may be other arbitrary rules added as we think
them up.
We ignored some of our own rules (as specifically permitted;
we made rules that unmade rules), as will be clear in the
winning entries.
The biased panel of judges apologizes if it missed some
especially good ones; when you read that many, your defini-
tion of what is funny seems to get a bit blurry.
We had to reject some otherwise excellent entries on
technical grounds. For example, the following entry by Bill
Roome <wdr@research.att.com> had already been implemented:
ZFS - Zork File System (also known as the Adventure File
System, but AFS has been taken): provides a Zork-like
interface. It's best illustrated by example:
$ cd src
You are in a large, dark directory. Something smells
very bad here.
$ ls
There are lots of small files here, too many to list.
$ cat x.c
You can't; your screen is full. Throw some characters
away and try again.
$ cd bar
You can't go in that direction. [The judges thought
this should read ``You are in a maze of twisty symbolic
links, all alike.'']
$ cd ..
Your way is blocked by a large, hungry lisp inter-
preter. It takes all your pages. Oh my, you are dead!
Shall I try to reincarnate you?
Several deeply philosophical submissions were received:
ZENFS - What is the sound of one head crashing? (Annadi-
ana Beaver, Rick Auricchio, Adam Moskowitz, Andy Tan-
nenbaum [the other one!], Bill Stewart, and Mike
Weaver).
ZFS - Zen File System: Extremely storage-efficient - file
contents are encapsulated in koans. Users often
achieve enlightenment, and no longer need to type `ps'
to figure out what's going on (Mike Olson
<mao@CS.Berkeley.EDU>).
EXFS - Existential File System: Analyzes the cosmic signi-
ficance of all data. Reads return random data, for
there is no difference, cosmically speaking, between
one collection of bits and any other. Writes may unex-
pectedly fail with the errno EDESPAIR, if the write
code failed to believe that the data passed would make
any change, cosmically speaking [do writes ever
succeed? -ed].
SISYFS (pronounced ``Sisyphus'') - just when you think
you've mounted a partition, it unmounts itself (Margar-
ita Suarez <marg@Columbia.EDU>).
There were several versions of PCFS (Politically Correct
File System), half a dozen BOFS (Birds of a File System),
and several SFFSs (San Francisco File System, usually refer-
ring to the `diverse culture' available in San Francisco).
We had to reject all of these on the grounds that they must
have been too obvious (?).
There were a number of special awards.
The Tongue Twister award went to Tomas Andersson
<tomas@mvsun.ericsson.se> for the pair of entries:
FSFFS - Free Software Foundation File System: puts a
copyleft on every file.
FSFFFS - FSF Free File System: no copyleft here.
The judges then amused themselves by coming up with a gram-
mar:
acr: acr_head acr_tail;
acr_head: "FSF";
acr_tail: "FS" | "F" acr_tail;
Tom Christiansen <tchrist@Convex.COM> won the ``Are We
Still Friends?'' award for PERLFS - Pathologically and
Exceedingly Repulsive Lwall-ian File System: Emulates
all other known and imagined file systems using super-
overloaded system calls that take line noise for argu-
ments. Contains extra syscalls just for reading news,
and automatically applies patches to itself upon
encountering them in any newsgroup. Current patch
level is 2,367. (Larry Wall was resplendently attired
in a rather brightly colored tuxedo during this presen-
tation.)
The ``Aren't we taking this a bit too seriously?'' award
went to Bruce Haddon <Bruce_Haddon@stortek.com> for
FFFS - Fast Fourier File System: Time (program execu-
tion) domain file requests are transformed into the
frequency domain, such that repetitive accesses are
performed only every 2**nth time. Performance improves
exponentially with load.
An Honorable Mention went to Ron Heiby
<heiby@chg.mcd.mot.com> for MFS - Marketing File Sys-
tem: provides the service of being able to stat files
that may or may not exist at some point in the future.
The date fields are always set to the end of the
current fiscal quarter.
The Children's Award goes to Bill Cheswick for SMURFS - A
small pudgy file system that only works on Saturday
morning. Only your three year old can use it.
Jef Poskanzer <jef@well.sf.ca.us> walked away with the
Sports Award for SFFS - Soccer Fan File System: Rent
one of those really uge soccer stadiums in South Amer-
ica, fill it with a million fans carrying flash cards
with ``1'' and ``0'' on them. If they do ``the wave'',
you lose your data.
The Grand Moose Award went to David Paul Zimmerman
<dpz@dimacs.Rutgers.EDU> for BFS - Bullwinkle File Sys-
tem. Special thanks go to Dan Klein and Tom Christian-
sen for providing the sound effects: ``Hey Rocky, watch
me pull a file out of my hat!'' (``Ah, that trick never
works.'') ``This time for sure!''
The Certain Award goes to Margo Seltzer
<margo@CS.Berkeley.EDU> for HUFS - Heisenberg Uncertain
File System: You can know where your file is or what's
in it, but not both.
John Kohl <jtkohl@CS.Berkeley.EDU> won the Yo-Yo Award for
(what else?) YYFS - the Yo-Yo File System: It goes up
and down and up and down, and doesn't get any work
done. (His prize was, naturally, a USENIX Yo-Yo.)
A special award went to the following entry for being the
only submission that actually compiles, printed here in
its entirety:
/*
* Copyright (c) 1992 The Regents of the Restaurant of Le Central.
* All rights deserved.
*
* Fly-Fishing Filesystem (FFFS) public definitions.
*
* This source code is derived from a restaurant tablecloth scribbled on
* by Eric Brunner, Marc Donner, Jan-Simon Pendry and Bucky Pope.
*
* Redistribution and use in cooked and raw forms, with or without garlic,
* are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
* 1. Redistributions of fish must retain the above copyright
* notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
* 2. Redistributions in cooked form must reproduce the above copyright
* notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
* menu and/or other materials provided with the food.
* 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this fish
* must display the following acknowledgement:
* This food includes fish caught with the Fly-Fishing Filesystem
* developed at the Restaurant of Le Central by its diners.
* 4. Neither the name of the Restaurant nor the names of its diners
* may be used to endorse or promote fast food products derived from
* this fish without specific prior written permission.
*
* 1.2 (Le Central) 1/22/92
*/
#ifndef _FFFS_H
#define _FFFS_H
/*
* NB: Requires the new "live", "dead" and "fresh" type
* modifiers in ANSI C.
*/
#include <fffs/license.h> /* for fishing license and legal size */
#include <fffs/utensils.h> /* for type pan */
#include <fffs/tackle.h> /* for struct lure and struct line */
#define LEGAL_SIZE(fish) (sizeof(fish) > TOO_SMALL)
/* to kill the fish, just cast it to "dead" */
#define KILL(fish) ((dead) (fish))
struct fish;
struct bite;
typedef struct bite meal[10];
/*
* VFS (victual file system) operations for FFFS.
*/
/*
* cast() takes a lure, casts it and returns a pointer to the fishing line.
* on error it returns null and sets errno to one of:
*
* ECALIFORNIA - No water.
*/
struct line *cast(const struct lure *fly);
/*
* hook() takes a pointer to a fishing line and returns
* a fish descriptor (fd).
*/
int hook(const struct line *l);
/*
* reel() takes a fish descriptor and returns a pointer to a fish.
* reel() closes the fish descriptor (fd).
* on error it returns null and sets errno to one of:
*
* EBADF - Bad Fish.
* ECONNABORTED - It got away.
* ENETUNREACH - Fishing net unreachable.
* ETOOBIG - The one that got away.
*/
live struct fish *reel(int fd);
/*
* unhook() removes the fish from the hook, returning the fresh fish
*/
live struct fish unhook(live struct fish *catch);
/*
* release() returns the live fish to the free pool.
*/
void release(live struct fish f);
/*
* fry() takes a fish, and a pan and makes a meal.
* on error it returns null and sets errno to one of:
*
* EBONES - Fish couldn't be filleted.
* EINEDIBLE - Fish caught off Long Island.
* ENOSPC - Frying pan full.
* ESTALE - Fish not fresh.
* ETOOSMALL - Fish is illegally small.
*/
fresh meal *fry(dead struct fish f, pan p);
#endif /* _FFFS_H */
Third Prize goes to Gordon C. Galligher
<gorpong@sbcoc.COM> for MJFS - Michael Jackson File
System: This file system spends 90% of its time updat-
ing itself.
Second Prize to Win Treese <treese@crl.dec.com>: SFS -
Sashimi File System: Only works on the raw device. (We
had another entry for a Sushi File System, but con-
cluded that it was implemented as a symbolic link to
the Sushi File System).
Finally, First Prize. This is a bit embarrassing: of the
hundreds of scraps of paper I carried home with me,
this entry was the one I lost, so I have to reconstruct
it. As I recall, the award goes to Simon Spero for
GBFS - George Bush File System: as seen on the best
Japanese laptops.
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 2 Mar 1992 15:47:22 -0800 (PST)
From: Barbara Hlavin <twain@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Saturday Night Fever - a question
To: eniac@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us
I have never been what you'd call a "handy" person. A number of other
single women of my age have learned to do things like repair plumbing and
replace electrical switches, but not me, nuh-uh. For one thing, what
other excuse is there for a landlord's existence? It's his fiefdom, for
tenancy of which I tithe an outrageous portion of my annual crops, let
*him* thatch the roof.
For another, I feel I already possess enough random information on how the
world works. My head is so full of facts and figures and concepts not to
mention trivia, that bubblewrap of the brain, that sometimes my hair
hurts. I believe that having opinions is a full-time career, and resent
the fact that no one will pay me for it.
But every once in a while I take on a small home improvement project that
seems modest enough to be within my competency (I have opposable thumbs),
like cleaning the toaster oven. So last week I decided to sand my wooden
cooking spoons.
Perhaps you haven't noticed, but wooden spoons have become a highly
stylized modern art form. The bowl has virtually disappeared so that
"spoon" seems an inaccurate designation for the objects. They now
resemble primitive sticks, except of course they're much more expensive.
Some of you might think that cleaning a wooden spoon by sanding it a bit
compulsive. I have an aunt who believes any such maintenance is a comical
waste of time that could be better spent shopping for replacements. Why
sharpen a knife, she reasons, when the world is full of brand-new shiny
knives with an edge that could shear sheep? This is the aunt who has
been known to throw away pots rather than open them to see what's happened
to the leftovers since last November. When I questioned her lack of
intellectual curiosity, she shrieked, "Open it!? Are you mad? My dear
child, who knows what could get loose in the house!"
Mind you, I don't disagree with her in principle, only in scale. I would
much rather throw away the refrigerator than ever defrost it again.
Anyway, mad with overconfidence, I broadened the scope of this project to
include the cutting boards. After all, I thought, how much skill is
required to rub one surface against another surface over and over and over
and over... I've polished silver, I've sharpened knives. I have a
thorough knowledge of the contours of the toilet bowl. What I'm saying is
that I thought I knew all I needed to know about sanding. Hah! There is
nothing quite so profound as total ignorance.
So here it is, Saturday evening (and you know there's something wrong with
your social life when you're spending Saturday evening sanding wooden
spoons) and I'm sitting cross-legged on the floor with the real-estate
section of the Sunday paper spread out and two packages of different
grades of sandpaper scattered about. I begin to sand a small wooden spoon.
Rub, rub, rub-rub-rub-rub-rub... I begin to regret the manicure I gave
myself earlier that day.
Half an hour later I march into the bedroom where Madhu is stretched out
watching television. "'Scuse me," I say. "Might you happen to have such
a thing as a sanding block in that formidable arsenal of tools you keep in
the back room?" Why yes he does, he says, and also a power sander.
Well, using a power sander on a wooden spoon seems like overkill to me,
but there are these four cutting boards, so reluctantly I agree to *gasp*
learn to use a tool. "Wear this," he orders, handing me a small mask the
likes of which I haven't seen since Mt. St. Helens erupted and local
residents in a panic over volcanic ash stormed the medical supply stores.
"And put some shoes on," he adds severely.
Wait a minute, this is beginning to look like work. Mask, shoes, power
tools -- do I need a hard hat?
Two hours later and the kitchen is full of sawdust. I mean there's
sawdust everywhere, on the floor, on the counter, in my hair, and it's
clear that I'm going to have to clean both the blender and toaster oven
which I regrettably neglected to move out of the room.
Sorry; I realize I'm getting carried away here, but there really is a
point to this exercise other than proving I can type for a long time
without having my hands fall off. It is now Monday, both my wrists
hurt, and the floor of one room is covered with damp oily pieces of
wood. Does anyone know how long it takes mineral oil to dry?
------------------------------
Date: 4 Mar 92 00:30:05 GMT
From: fred@amc.com (Fred Barrett)
Subject: The Software Blues
Newsgroups: rec.humor.funny
"The Software Blues"
by Fred Barrett
Hey diddle, diddle,
The bug's in the middle,
Of my interrupt service routine...
My stack has been popped,
My constants are not,
My buffers are pulling my strings...
The time that it took,
To compile all this gook,
Was productive, at least so it seemed...
It gave me a chance,
To rebuild the shell,
From the last time we blew the machine...
We hope to be done,
In a matter of days,
Version 12 of the software is due...
Then it's out to the street,
In the marketing heat,
To generate this month's revenue...
No, I can't really say,
Which problems were fixed,
Or which parts you have to buy new...
But the A.E. will call,
And it all will be solved,
By new PROM's being FedEx'd to you...
We are glad that you called,
We were happy to help,
We're proud of response time, it's true...
That should fix all the bugs,
but it won't change the fact,
That your project is now long overdue!
------------------------------
Date: Tuesday, March 03, 1992 06:42PM
From: Joseph Harper
Subject: WhiteBoard News
This first item comes from Washington State U.s Denise Blus:
Fort Lauderdale, Florida:
A woman who set up a 900 number, Dial-A-Friend, is hanging it
up after logging only one call in three months and that from a
man who wanted to know the operator's measurements.
"It makes you wonder: Is there a normal person out there to
begin with?" said Lorain Blum, who had expected people would
be willing to pay $2.99-a-minute for social service referrals and a
friendly listener.
Blum spend $8,000 setting up the line and advertising on radio,
cable television and in singles' magazines. Dial-A-Friend's sole
customer brought in $23.92 she said.
Social service information is free from Broward County's
Community Service Council.
==========
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada:
A streaker had his day in court.
The man, clad only in socks, dashed into a crowded British
Columbia Supreme Court room Wednesday and ran around until
court officials grabbed him.
"He was a blur of white," a stenographer said.
"He'd had a few beers and said Jesus told him to do it," said
another court officer.
Witnesses said Justice Mary Ellen Boyd took the interruption in
stride and merely called the next case after the man was taken away.
The man was later released without charges.
==========
Los Angeles, California:
A man dialed 911 to tell police he'd climbed into a liquor store
by cutting a hole in a roof but couldn't find a way to get out.
"When they got there, they could see him sitting on the floor by
the front counter, smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer," said
a police spokesman.
Robert William Laughton, 23, was arrested and held on $5,000 bond.
------------------------------
End of Yucks Digest
------------------------------