A software layer that utilizes complex deterministic hardware resources to provide nondeterministic results.
- Inspired by a colleague’s attempts to have powerpoint paste the last
thing he cut, rather than the one before that.
In the absence of anything very grumpy to write, I have decided to share a recent revelation about my inner self, rfom quizilla’s “what obsolete skill are you?”…
You are ‘programming in QBASIC’. This programming
language (of which the acronym stands for
‘Quick Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic
Instruction Code’), which is so primitive that
it cannot easily be used for any purpose
involving the Internet nor even sound, was
current more than a decade ago.
You are independent, in a good way. When something
which you need cannot be found, you make it
yourself. In writing and in talking with
people, you value clarity and precision; your
friends may not realize how important that is.
When necessary, you are prepared to be a
mediator in conflicts between your friends.
You are very rational, and you think of things
in terms of logic and common sense.
Unfortunately, your emotionally unstable
friends may be put off by your devotion to
logic; they may even accuse you of pedantry and
insensitivity. Your problem is that
programming in QBASIC has been obsolete for a
long time.
What obsolete skill are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
I remember when you KNEW you were playing a computer game. You were just a 16×16 pixel blob. Now it’s all this! These were dead easy to do, too!
It’s a bit odd seeing him keep dying though.
Source pic:
There was another 3-d model with closer bone-structure to mine, but he had red hair and I completely failed to alter that realistically. So I’ll just have to put up with a more jutting chin and more prominent brow :-)
I finally took the plunge at about midnight last night into the precariously-stacked piles of rubbish in my small terraced house to find my cowbell. I probably could have chosen a better time. It was in a box full of old musical stuff. I learned the following:
- It is possible to play a cowbell quietly
- It is not possible to play a snare drum quietly
- It is best to let a harmonica drain before playing it when you’ve just soaked it in listerine
I decided, as I am now a grown-up geek, to run my entire oldyorksalsa.com domain from my home box. It does the DNS, it is the mailserver, and it’s the webserver. Today I tried to change some of the content on the web page and was told that the disk was full.
I found that the default installation of the operating system likes to log LOTS of information, and that it had indeed filled up the disk. I looked in a few logs to see if I could fix any problems and in one log it was complaining that it was getting mails for someone at watdenku.demon.co.uk and didn’t know how to forward them. I explained to it how to forward them.
Turns out, it was trying to notify me, by email, of this problem.
By sending email to steve at watdenku.demon.co.uk.
As soon as I fixed the snarl-up, I received 1150 messages to this effect.
Moments later, another 45. I hope outlook express isn’t going to go “bing” for every single one of these messages…
[edit] … oo here come another 463…
[edit] … having deleted over 2000 emails while reading the manual for the mail system, I’ve found out how to look in the mail queue… there seems to be about another 6000 to go…
Hello,
The cretins sending email under the name of info@whatonyork.com will not unsubscribe me from their list. I guess that you know them since your mailshot came from them. Maybe you ARE them. Each time I get one of those emails I attempt to unsubscribe. Once I got an out-of-office reply. I dutifully waited as the date of the miscreant’s alleged return to work passed, then received a mail on your behalf from the same fools.
Do you know how I may get removed? Their technical and social inadequacy casts into a dim light all events associated with them.
Creative retribution plans that have come to mind so far have included setting my from-address to info@whatsonyork.com and posting to inappropriate newsgroups asking for large binary files to be emailed to me, or going down the Gateway Internet Cafe drunk on cider (good for getting violent) and threatening them with one of their own baguettes.
Please advise how I can get removed from this mailing list, or who I should contact in this regard.
regards.
Steve