It would take too long to describe this office (an ISP) I worked in, but the following, very real, memo which was sent out by the office manager says a great deal:
Sent: 03/30/1999 From: Marcus To: All Employees Subject: Client Meeting Tomorrow
Everyone please remember that I am meeting with a client tomorrow afternoon in the conference room. This meeting could lead to significant business for us, so please dress appropriately (business casual) and refrain from doing anything obnoxious while they are in the office. Their head honcho has been know to be a bit on the uptight side, so the following behaviour should be avoided:
1. Playing loud music, especially any songs expressing an overt desire for anal sex. 2. Scooting your ass on the carpet. 3. Referring to their existing website as being "ass", "suk", or "suk-ass". 4. Displaying any AVIs or MPGs that feature oral sex, be it human, canine, equine, or bovine. 5. Discharging firearms.
Kerry:The Republic leadership are fascist motherf^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H out of touch with their genitals^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H the American people.
Bush:Kerry is a drunken^H^H^H^H^H^H^H vacillating liberal who likes crack whores^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H will raise taxes.
Nader:I am still committed to causing confusion^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H providing an alternative in the political process.
I just sent a suggestion to Google that they should index deleted and revised text in Word documents. Wouldn't that be fun?
Corporate America has found a new advertising medium in blogging. However, to cut costs they have turned their prison-run call centers into "blog farms." While the results were extremely entertaining, they ended up sending the wrong message.
---
Slash, Rapist: Nothing in life is better than roughly grabbing the firm, artificial nodules of a semiconscious drunken whore and yelling exuberantly, "Ollie, Ollie, Oxen Free" at the top of my lungs to passing fear-filled elderly couples. Afterwards I had a Raging Cow with a shot of tequila in it...
Jim Tumor, Paranoid Schizophrenic: At the party we all had Raging Cows and celebrated by taking a slightly soggy slice of very moldy wheat bread and meticulously fashioning a quaint decorative party hat out of it for our dearest companion and pet lama, Cuthbert...
Lonnie Tingle, Murderer: Man, those Raging Cow drinks are great! I wish my life could have been as good as one of them. I guess it all went wrong when I repeatedly stabbed my parents with a dull kitchen knife because the circumcision I had when I was 8 days old went horribly awry...
Dave Candyman, Burglar: Often while enjoying the quaint bouquet of a Raging Cow, I would follow rich looking strangers at the local mall parking lot until they noticed. To explain myself I would innocently explain that I was looking for my baby brother, and at the same time, memorize their licence plate number...
Delbert Flapdoodle, Habitual Drunk: Gosh darn! Life can sure be funny sometimes. I always thought Raging Cow was an insult. It wasn't until the time my Jug and Washboard band was mistakenly booked to perform in a seedy dive in Harlem that I learned the truth...
Mac Soul, Stalker: As we relaxed on the couch, we shared a Raging Cow. I needed her to understand me. I would never hurt her in a million years! So I kept slowly massaging her delicate legs in a way that said, "Don't worry, I know we are just friends - but - if you ever want to take it further then it's fine with me." I kept waiting for her to say yes. Desperately waiting. Desperate...
Magzo Berman, Sociopath; I am taping the empty bottle of Raging Cow on my keyboard. Tap. Tap. Tap. Just 'cause I like the sound of the tapping, ever tapping, like the tapping on my chamber door. Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore!" Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha and ha!
When my father's job relocated him from Indiana to Tennessee in 1966, he took me to Oak Ridge to tour the museum. At that time they had an exhibit that allowed you to drop a dime down a slot and it would be exposed to a radioactive source. To prove that the dime picked up some of the radiation you could hold it up to a detector and the detector would dutifully click a little bit more. I thought it was "groovy" and processed several dimes. I must have carried those dimes around in my pocket for months.
Fast forward 12 years later to 1978, where my father and I are taking a long road trip together. As we pass by Knoxville we decide to take a small detour and visit the museum again. Of course, by this time they had moved to a new building and all the old exhibits had been removed (I think the van der graaf generator was about the only thing that made the transition). We looked around but couldn't find the dime irradiator, so we grabbed the tour guide and asked where it was. The tour guide shuffled his feet nervously and said, "we don't do that anymore - it became unsafe when they changed to composition of the dimes." He then hurried off.
While I am sure that whatever radiation those dimes picked up was low energy, short lived, and short range - I sometimes wonder why I haven't had kids yet...
I'm sure you could mirror a terrabyte of shareware and demos (esp game demos) if you don't mind clicking one tons of links at download.com.
I remember back in ye olde days there were scads of stuff floating around in the Mac community when FTPing was all the rage. These days hosting a robust FTP server is a dangerous proposition.
I bet you could legally mirror tons of Micro$oft security patches and you can FTP directly to them.
"What I'm looking for is a detailed users' manual for a Baloney Detection Kit (as Carl Sagan called it.)"
May I suggest How to Think About Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age, which has good skeptical thought guidelines. It is out of print, but here is the 'zon page anyway.
I had the honor and the horror of being a minor peon in The Great ZapMail Experiment and would like to add some additional details. It is obvious to me Clay Shirky was wandering in darkness on his ZapMail analogy.
Briefly put:
1) The price of a emergent fax machines was too steep for small businesses. The prices dropped amazingly in the next four years. (In retrospect, you young'un's would say it was too slow.)
2) Faxes in 1984 were crappy as hell and most all used thermal paper with a very short lifespan. Uncle Fred was bringing 415 dpi (not 300) to the world on crisp heavy bond paper. Hot damn!
3) There actually was a discussion in 1983 about faxes being unacceptable to most trial judges in legal proceedings. (i.e. they would only allow 'real' original documents to be used in court.) Uncle Fred hoped that FedEx would be able to convince the legal community that ZapMail was absolutely, positively as good as the original and tamper proof. I don't know what specific game plan Uncle Fred had in mind, but he was a visionary when it came to ARM (Analog Rights Management). Of course, once any Tom, Dick, or Harry could get their hands on a fax machine, the stigma of duplicated documents instantly disappeared.
After 1988 I was fortunate enough to get a few lasers and a handful of DRAM from a friendly FedEx engineer, which I subsequently lost... I've been feeling bad about that for a while now.
In late 1995 I worked for a web shop that was desperate for clients. In an attempt to beef up sales, we hired a friend of the CEO to act as a salesman and marketing drone. This poor guy didn't know squat about the web, let alone computers. Believe me, we really tired hard to teach him, but the only information that he ever would retain were buzzwords.
Fast forward a month later. We are pitching a large consumer products firm about the Wonders of the Web; trying to give them an idea of what the web can do for them. In the middle of the presentation our sales guy blurts out, "It's totally CASE SENSITIVE!"
You could have heard a pin drop as we stared very hard at our pet freak.
Throw off the chains of Mad Deadly Worldwide Gangster Communist Frankenstein Radio Earphone Slavery and depolarize your driver's licence stripe! Buy an ell-skin wallet. Abrade the back with sandpaper. Better yet, re-encode the stripe with the word VOID for each piece of information you don't want to be public.
Slashdot Mirror
Kerry: The Republic leadership are fascist motherf^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H out of touch with their genitals^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H the American people.
Bush: Kerry is a drunken^H^H^H^H^H^H^H vacillating liberal who likes crack whores^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H will raise taxes.
Nader: I am still committed to causing confusion^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H providing an alternative in the political process.
I just sent a suggestion to Google that they should index deleted and revised text in Word documents. Wouldn't that be fun?
I've only ever seen two kinds of Flash: funny and annoying. I would gladly, oh yes, gladly do without one so that I am spared the other!
Corporate America has found a new advertising medium in blogging. However, to cut costs they have turned their prison-run call centers into "blog farms." While the results were extremely entertaining, they ended up sending the wrong message.
---
Slash, Rapist: Nothing in life is better than roughly grabbing the firm, artificial nodules of a semiconscious drunken whore and yelling exuberantly, "Ollie, Ollie, Oxen Free" at the top of my lungs to passing fear-filled elderly couples. Afterwards I had a Raging Cow with a shot of tequila in it...
Jim Tumor, Paranoid Schizophrenic: At the party we all had Raging Cows and celebrated by taking a slightly soggy slice of very moldy wheat bread and meticulously fashioning a quaint decorative party hat out of it for our dearest companion and pet lama, Cuthbert...
Lonnie Tingle, Murderer: Man, those Raging Cow drinks are great! I wish my life could have been as good as one of them. I guess it all went wrong when I repeatedly stabbed my parents with a dull kitchen knife because the circumcision I had when I was 8 days old went horribly awry...
Dave Candyman, Burglar: Often while enjoying the quaint bouquet of a Raging Cow, I would follow rich looking strangers at the local mall parking lot until they noticed. To explain myself I would innocently explain that I was looking for my baby brother, and at the same time, memorize their licence plate number...
Delbert Flapdoodle, Habitual Drunk: Gosh darn! Life can sure be funny sometimes. I always thought Raging Cow was an insult. It wasn't until the time my Jug and Washboard band was mistakenly booked to perform in a seedy dive in Harlem that I learned the truth...
Mac Soul, Stalker: As we relaxed on the couch, we shared a Raging Cow. I needed her to understand me. I would never hurt her in a million years! So I kept slowly massaging her delicate legs in a way that said, "Don't worry, I know we are just friends - but - if you ever want to take it further then it's fine with me." I kept waiting for her to say yes. Desperately waiting. Desperate...
Magzo Berman, Sociopath; I am taping the empty bottle of Raging Cow on my keyboard. Tap. Tap. Tap. Just 'cause I like the sound of the tapping, ever tapping, like the tapping on my chamber door. Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore!" Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha and ha!
When my father's job relocated him from Indiana to Tennessee in 1966, he took me to Oak Ridge to tour the museum. At that time they had an exhibit that allowed you to drop a dime down a slot and it would be exposed to a radioactive source. To prove that the dime picked up some of the radiation you could hold it up to a detector and the detector would dutifully click a little bit more. I thought it was "groovy" and processed several dimes. I must have carried those dimes around in my pocket for months.
Fast forward 12 years later to 1978, where my father and I are taking a long road trip together. As we pass by Knoxville we decide to take a small detour and visit the museum again. Of course, by this time they had moved to a new building and all the old exhibits had been removed (I think the van der graaf generator was about the only thing that made the transition). We looked around but couldn't find the dime irradiator, so we grabbed the tour guide and asked where it was. The tour guide shuffled his feet nervously and said, "we don't do that anymore - it became unsafe when they changed to composition of the dimes." He then hurried off.
While I am sure that whatever radiation those dimes picked up was low energy, short lived, and short range - I sometimes wonder why I haven't had kids yet...
I'm sure you could mirror a terrabyte of shareware and demos (esp game demos) if you don't mind clicking one tons of links at download.com.
I remember back in ye olde days there were scads of stuff floating around in the Mac community when FTPing was all the rage. These days hosting a robust FTP server is a dangerous proposition.
I bet you could legally mirror tons of Micro$oft security patches and you can FTP directly to them.
Have fun and see a doctor, dude:
ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/
Larry Nives is lovin' this, I betcha.
Two words: Flash Crowds
Considering how bad I had the hots for his daughter Alissa, someone is badly misinformed.
May I suggest How to Think About Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age, which has good skeptical thought guidelines. It is out of print, but here is the 'zon page anyway.
Briefly put:
1) The price of a emergent fax machines was too steep for small businesses. The prices dropped amazingly in the next four years. (In retrospect, you young'un's would say it was too slow.)
2) Faxes in 1984 were crappy as hell and most all used thermal paper with a very short lifespan. Uncle Fred was bringing 415 dpi (not 300) to the world on crisp heavy bond paper. Hot damn!
3) There actually was a discussion in 1983 about faxes being unacceptable to most trial judges in legal proceedings. (i.e. they would only allow 'real' original documents to be used in court.) Uncle Fred hoped that FedEx would be able to convince the legal community that ZapMail was absolutely, positively as good as the original and tamper proof. I don't know what specific game plan Uncle Fred had in mind, but he was a visionary when it came to ARM (Analog Rights Management). Of course, once any Tom, Dick, or Harry could get their hands on a fax machine, the stigma of duplicated documents instantly disappeared.
After 1988 I was fortunate enough to get a few lasers and a handful of DRAM from a friendly FedEx engineer, which I subsequently lost... I've been feeling bad about that for a while now.
However, because of this article I have discovered that you can buy ZapMail print engines online! Damn, I love the internet!
"Never before had so small and so harmless an object created such consternation."
They said that about George W's brain, too.
[Evil Laugh] Traveller players of the universe unite! Now is our chance.
The poor guy, three years to work his Rogue up to level 50 and then suddenly they nerf his Sneak skill! There outta be a law!
In late 1995 I worked for a web shop that was desperate for clients. In an attempt to beef up sales, we hired a friend of the CEO to act as a salesman and marketing drone. This poor guy didn't know squat about the web, let alone computers. Believe me, we really tired hard to teach him, but the only information that he ever would retain were buzzwords.
Fast forward a month later. We are pitching a large consumer products firm about the Wonders of the Web; trying to give them an idea of what the web can do for them. In the middle of the presentation our sales guy blurts out, "It's totally CASE SENSITIVE!"
You could have heard a pin drop as we stared very hard at our pet freak.
Throw off the chains of Mad Deadly Worldwide Gangster Communist Frankenstein Radio Earphone Slavery and depolarize your driver's licence stripe! Buy an ell-skin wallet. Abrade the back with sandpaper. Better yet, re-encode the stripe with the word VOID for each piece of information you don't want to be public.
I find it ironic that W3C's website isn't fully compliant:
= ht tp%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org
;)
http://validator.w3.org/p3p/20020128/p3p.pl?uri
But, at least they're trying.
Woodrow Wilson and Balance of Power: The 1990 Edition, two things that got me through college and prepared me to be the l33t Doom player I am!