Three guesses why this "exercise equipment" never caught on.



You have to wonder just who the hell thought they were going to make their fortune on this thing. How could you not realize what a laughingstock this thing is?

OK, pop quiz time. Please define "patriot".



(Originally found at Cake Wrecks)

Today my girlfriend was making lunch for us and it looked lovely. I asked her what she was making and she replied tarte au thon. She speaks quietly and my French is not perfect, so when I mispronounced this as tarte au con, she was a bit surprised.

It's natural when one is not fluent to inadvertently say the wrong thing, but referring to "tuna pie" as "cunt pie" was particularly unfortunate.

I am not responsible for this. I merely found out about this from another developer, whom I'll call 'Alice', who told me about the task she was given.

Customer: we need you to write a script which synchronizes two directories.
Alice: why don't you just use rsync?
Customer: because the target box runs Windows and the admin says it doesn't work.

Alice wrote the script and it works just fine. All it does is call rsync.

Someone on Reddit asked why computer science should be taught in high school.

Best response: it will reduce teen pregnancy.

There is an artificial language called Lojban which is based on predicate logic. It was created to form a language in which it is impossible to form an ambiguous sentence. That's a bit of a shame as it would eliminate so much humor.


Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

Finally we understand. This should sink the McCain campaign completely.

( The Recently Discovered Photo )

Aries Mar 21 - Apr 19

Stop using your perceived extroversion as an excuse for being an asshole.

Taurus Apr 20 - May 20

Explaining at length to the street preacher with the odd stain on his pants why his being a Taurus is the reason for his being a proseletyzing asshole will make you a bit of a hypocrite.

Gemini May 21 - June 20

As always, you are incredibly sexy, intelligent and a tad arrogant. You are also prone to a bit of a tipple while writing astrology sendups[1].

Cancer June 21 - July 22

Inability to distinguish between anecdotes and data could lead to your downfall.

Leo July 23 - Aug 22

Discovering that your creative, generous and passionate nature is, surprisingly, a self-belief held by most people could lead to a loss of self-esteem. Do not question things too deeply.

Virgo Aug 23 - Sept 22

Due to the precession of the equinoxes, Virgo is no longer aligned with the constellation. Everything you believed about yourself is a lie.

Libra Sept 23 - Oct 22

Your manipulative nature as determined by the gravitational pull of the moon when you were born is fortunately offset by the gravitional attraction of the stainless steel operating table you were born on, as determined by

Scorpio Oct 23 - Nov 21

You are ruled over by Mars, and are thus heavily influenced by the god Nergal. Do not allow yourself to be troubled by the differences between Western and Babylonian astrology as this is merely a sinister plot to confuse you.

Sagittarius Nov 22 - Dec 21

Jupiter rocks your world. Today is a good day to ponder why astrologers didn't discover the outer planets.

Capricorn Dec 22 - Jan 19

Troubled times are ahead. Use confirmation bias to bolster your usual shrewd and authoritative tendencies.

Aquarius Jan 20 - Feb 18

As the 5th Dimension overwhelms your senses, contemplate that you only have six centuries to go before the Age of Aquarius begins. Unless you follow astrologer Dane Rudhyar, who believes it will start about five decades from now. Whether this means spiritual enlightment or better Hair will be for you to decide.

Pisces Feb 19 - March 20

Many people born under the sign of Pisces appear gullible. There is a reason for this.

1. By merest coincidence, your author is also Gemini.

Saw this older gentleman walking around our building a few times in the past couple of days. Wild hair, long jowls always engaged in conversation. Seemed like a nice bloke, but I was curious who he was. I routinely fail to recognize people in my building because there are tons of us, but something about him seemed familiar.

Then when I stepped outside of our building, I saw another gentleman frantically dialing his mobile and practically shouting into it "I just saw Jeremy Clarkson!"

Um, who?

Seems Mssr. Clarkson is one of the presenters of the wildly popular Top Gear television show.

I'm so ignorant of TV that a few days ago I was introduced to a lady who presents news on some BBC station. Can't recall her name or her face. I'm oblivious.

And just for you, I'm including a video of him. Why? Because he's driving a car in two of the buildings I'm in almost every day. I thought you might be curious about where I work. And yes, I do mean he's driving a car in those buildings.


(Side note to Aristotle: nope, this sound synchs perfectly, unlike the video I uploaded. I don't know that it's a problem on my end, but I could be mistaken)

You know the feeling when the heavy box you're lifting turns out to be empty? I just had the mental equivalent of that.

Apparently Heinz had a mayonnaise commercial showing two men kissing. One of them is "the mum" and making sandwiches in the kitchen for the kids. The "not mum" man kisses the mum goodbye.

There is nothing even remotely interesting or original about this ad, aside from the two male parents. This is at least as provocative as if it was a 1960s ad showing interracial parents -- of course, now that I stop to think about it, maybe this still applies :( -- but that's enough for this to be an interesting advertisement.

What really made me mad, though, is that Heinz pulled the ad due to some complaints to Ofcom (they regulate British communications). OK, so some bigoted wingnuts complain about this. This makes me angry. Heinz just went ahead and pulled the ad rather than stand up for decency. This makes me angrier.

Then I notice that Ofcom has an "ex kids" restriction on the ad, meaning that it must not be shown near children's programming. OK, now my rage meter is pegging into the red. Kids aren't allowed to see men kissing? A happy family is verboten because we have bigots out there? Did some religious bastard at Ofcom manage to slip in his or her personal beliefs into Ofcom regulations? This seriously pisses me off. Have our societal values become so fucking warped and perverted that something as unimportant as gender is considered to be this big of a deal? Where the fuck are people's priorities?

Seems the "ex kids" restriction is because the ad portrays food "high in fat, salt and sugar."

Oh, that's OK then.

I can't stop laughing.

Yup. I live in the UK. Witness this news article about binge drinkers. First sentence:

"Parents are to be given government advice on how much children should be allowed to drink in an effort to curb binge drinking."

And the article only gets better from there.

Geek pride, baby.

USER := $(shell whoami)

ifeq ($(USER), root)
    MESSAGE = "Okay."
else
    MESSAGE = "What? Make it yourself."
endif

NOECHO = @

me ::
    - $(NOECHO) echo $(MESSAGE)

a ::
    - $(NOECHO) echo

sandwich ::
    - $(NOECHO) echo

Riding in the elevator (er, lift) this morning, I couldn't help but notice what incredibly high heels that incredibly short girl was wearing. She was maybe 4'10", but 5 inches of that had to be heel. And she was buxom enough I idly wondered how she stayed upright, but I digress.

I found her shoes interesting because I was thinking about shoes, for some strange reason.

A while ago I was having trouble finding shoes.

No, I lie.

A while ago I was having trouble finding anyone in any shoe store who wanted to sell me a damned pair of shoes.

Typical British service, I might add. It's either fantastic or shite (I'm hard-pressed to think of a better time for this word). There is no middle ground. Shoe store salespeople inevitably do not fall into the fantastic category. I'm pretty sure it's in their interview process.

Interviewer: How are your customer service skills?

Applicant: They're fantastic!

Interviewer: Next!

And this is how I found myself in at a shoe store named Aldo, staring at a gorgeous pair of shoes and, despite the fact that the store was packed, the salesperson was very helpful. He was friendly. I couldn't believe it. Was I really buying shoes? Had I taken the tube to America by mistake? Had he lied to the interviewer?

And damn, those were nice shoes. They fit well, they looked sharp. I took them up to the counter.

"That will be £200, sir."

Excuse me? I hadn't thought to check the price. I just wanted those shoes. I checked the price tag then and yes, they were £200. There's been no mistake made (by the cashier). I've spent hours going through shoe stores, getting frustrated with being aggressively ignored and now I understand why they were so nice to me in this shop.

I still can't believe I'm wearing those shoes.

I now have one pair of running shoes (£90) and another pair of dress shoes (£70), for a grand total of £360 spent on three pairs of shoes. Over $700 US. On three pairs of shoes.

How the fuck did that happen? Admittedly, a lot of that is the exchange rate, but that first pair alone was $400 US. For one fucking pair of shoes. But damn, these are nice shoes. Of course, it's not fair to compare exchange rates because £200 to you isn't £200 to me because that's the currency my pay checks are in. It's £200 relative to the British economy. But I never would have spent $200 on a pair of shoes in the US, much less £200. I think the most I've ever spent was $80 and that was on a hideous pair of white leather shoes that I'd rather not talk about.

However, I do have one saving grace. These Aldo shoes look good. Shoe fashion seems to be a big deal over here and if you've got a boot fetish -- pant, pant -- London's a great place to be. The thing I can't figure out, though, is the mukluk. Mukluks have got to be the parachute pants of the 00s. They have to be. Please. Tell me this fashion will die a horrible death and women will burn photos of themselves wearing mukluks lest anyone know of their secret shame.

She stands there, smoldering eyes, long hair blowing in the wind, red silk blouse opened over the swell of her breasts, caressing your imagination. Your eyes meet and ... you burst out laughing because she's wearing big, furry monster feet.

Seriously, it's like these young women have whipped out their acid tongues and slain cartoon monsters. They sever their morbid trophy of feet, pluck out the bones and shove their own feet in the holes. I have expect a touch of blood to dribble down the sides of these things.

Cartoon blood, of course. You really can't take these damned things seriously.

And for female readers, my humblest, if insincere, apologies if you wear mukluks and I've offended you.

Recently, on a post to a London mailing list, my friend Andy pointed out that someone on a BBC blog had posted a very detailed error message they received. Not having lived in this country for long, the only BBC bloggers I've read have been tech people and I was thus surprised that someone techy would post something which could compromise our security.

I suppose I could have dashed off a nasty email demanding to know what the hell he thought he was doing and didn't he realize he was telling the world that this software was vulnerable to algorithmic complexity attacks?

Fortunately, though frequently an idiot, I'm not frequently an ass, so I merely sent the blogger a polite email asking if he meant for that entry to be public. The poor guy seemed surprised by the question so I felt it was important to point out some of the security implications. As it turns out, he was not technically inclined, so that was a bad assumption on my part, but he was gracious about it and pulled the offending bit from the blog post.

I kept this to myself as I didn't want to get the guy in trouble, but later in the week, I'm sitting in a security meeting and I debated mentioning this. I didn't want some manager going down and giving this guy a thrashing, but this information leak was not only unfortunate, it revealed some rather dodgy details of our gory internals (of a system which has since been upgraded, thank goodness). Prudence won the day and I mentioned the post. One of our bosses asked me to forward the email and so I did, with the following caveat:

Here's the information about the blog post I mentioned. I hadn't said anything before because the individual in question was apparently genuinely surprised that there was a security issue here and I didn't want to get him in trouble.

My boss didn't comment on this, but it was only this weekend that I discovered that the blogger, Eddie Mair, is is one of the most well respected radio presenters in this country.

Hoo boy. Way to make Americans look like either complete morons or arrogant bastards :)

I've recently entered the following curious command on my computer:

PS1='\[\033[01;32m\]api_cleanup\[\033[00m\] $ '

This makes my command prompt look like this:

 api_cleanup $                 

So why would I do that? Well, the prompt on my computer usually shows the current directory name and that name, when I'm developing new code, is the name of the current branch (copy of our code base) that I'm working on. When I asked my colleague Richard what branch name I should give our current work, he said "name it anything you want".

Heh.

So when he comes back from out meeting, he'll assume that the current branch is named api_cleanup. Had I not changed the prompt, when he came back and started pair programming with me, he would have seen this:

 richard_and_curtis_mud_wrestling_extravaganza $                 

It's going to be fun when it's time to check in the code. I'm such a geek.

I need a t-shirt which reads:

Perfectonist

That is all.

So here's the latest OKCupid spam for me:

Hello.
My name is Natalya. To me has very much liked Your structure, if You not against I with the great pleasure would get acquainted With you is closer. I liked such men as you. Write to me on mine e-mail natushe4ka1@rambler.ru If you too search serious attitudes as well as I that is necessary to us To get acquainted. Write to me I with impatience I shall wait from you
The letter.
Bye.

(You can tell it's spam because of an empty profile, a sexy pic of a hot woman and despite the email address, lists herself as living in Kansas :)

OKCupid is great, but really, their spam problem is getting out of control. Still, this one was pretty damned funny.

I was chatting with a friend I'll call 'Alex' (reprinted with permission and one line cleaned up for privacy reasons). Alex promises he would never actually kill himself, just that he feels that way times. And even if you think you know who this is, I can guarantee that it's not who you're thinking of.

Alex: I do feel suicidal occasionally but that's not how I act.
Ovid: If you ever do get that way in the future, will you promise to kill me?
Ovid: call me!
Ovid: Shit!
Ovid: s/kill/call/
Ovid: Oh god.
Alex: LOL!!!!
Alex: ROFLMAO.

Real incident. Fake names.

                 FADE IN:

                 INT. OFFICE - AFTERNOON

                 In a typical, non-descript office, sits OVID and his boss,
                 ALLEN.  In walks BILL, the IT director with a substantial
                 bandage over his nose.

                                          OVID
                              I gotta ask.  What the hell happened
                              to your nose?

                                          BILL
                                        (smiling)
                              Well, a developer wasn't getting his
                              work done.

                                          OVID
                              So you took a swing and he kicked your
                              ass, huh?

                                          ALLEN
                              Ovid, I think you need lessons in basic
                              anatomy.

                                          OVID
                              Depends on where his head was.

Once again, I still have my job, but Lord knows why.

(That's a screenplay format, in case you're wondering.)