Henrik Lantz

Bored? Create a South Park-version of yourself (or your friends, or your boss, or anyone else) at SP Studio.

Here’s your’s truly:

One of the more entertaining TV series I’ve seen is Brainiac: Science Abuse, a show that us non-UK-viewers can pick up via the Discovery Channel. The show should come in a big box that says “Don’t try this at home", as it tests various theories (such as “which kind of household tape is the strongest", “which office appliance is best to use as a floating aid” and “using CO₂ as the propellant, does a wheelchair go faster/further than a shopping cart") and conducts various experiments (eg. “does a person’s ears go red when people talk bad about him” and “can someone tell from the smell of your armpit what kind of junk food you had on the way home from the pub last night"). There are a lot of explosions (predominantly caravans blow up) and scantily clad big breasted women; so I assume that the target audience is predominantly male…

One of the recurring characters throughout the show is a guy called Jon Tickle (known from fantastic segments such as “Things Jon Tickle’s Body Can’t Do” and “Things Jon Tickle’s Body Can Do” - and not forgetting the memorable episode when he walked across a swimming pool filled with custard(!)), a former Big Brother contestant who has been given a new lease of life. When the program breaks for commercials, viewers are sometimes left with one of “Tickle’s Teasers” - according to Wikipedia “rhetorical, nonsensical or punning questions” - and some of them are actually pretty good. For the whole list, check out this link. Some of the better ones:

• If a word is spelled wrong in a dictionary, how would you know?
• Why does your nose run and your feet smell?
• Where does the white go when the snow melts?
• If quizzes are quizzical then what are tests? (Go on, sound it out.)
• And, I think my favourite:
• Where would we be without rhetorical questions?

An anecdote about a yellow plastic toy gun by Dilbert creator Scott Adams made me think of a story my colleague Andrew told me the other day about when he was crossing a border somewhere in Europe in his car a few years ago. The security officer pointed at his guitar case and commented something about “I hope there’s not a machine gun in that case, sir". Andrew, letting his mouth get the better of him replied “I hope so too, I can’t play the machine gun very well.".

They not only went through every inch of his car in the security check, he also got stopped in customs on the other side and had the car taken apart.

…the massive backend system used for your intranet falls over (and it’s not your responsibility to fix it) and the error message presented to the user is actually visible in the URL of the returned page; like

https://……./error.aspx?ErrorText=Unable+to+connect+to+database.++Check+database+connection+information+and+make+sure+the+database+server+is+running.

This really inspires people to be creative in tweaking the error message to endless hilarities. I prefer the subtle changes (inserting a single word or changing some tiny detail), but the one that said “Your boss gave you 3 minutes to fix this 5 minutes ago, you are FIRED!” was good too!

While I’m on the snooker theme; has anyone noticed this? There’s more than a passing resemblance between these two:

My favourite snooker commentator is Eurosport’s Kim Hartman; he’s always got something interesting to say - and if he doesn’t, he’ll speak anyway and what comes out then is most of the time even funnier. Some of his quotes can be found here (Swedish only, of course).

Here’s an interesting twist; it appears that he has a hidden career on the side of his snooker. Check out Daytime Kim vs. Nighttime Kim…

Another snippet from Overheard in the Office today, normal service will resume shortly.

HR Manager: Hey guys, I’m starting a new club in the office. Do you want to join?
Employee: Um sure, what kind of club is it?
HR Manager: It’s a club for people with Wham!’s song “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” stuck in their heads. Congratulations, you are all now members!

85 E Street
South Portland, Maine

Boss: So do you think I should get 3 pies for the meeting since we have 30 people?
Worker Bee #1: Sure, 3 pies should be enough.
Worker Bee #2: I think you need more than 3.
Worker Bee #1: How many do you think we should get?
Worker Bee #2: We need 3.14159 pi.
Boss: Get out of my office. Now.

1010 Second Avenue
San Diego, California

(snipped from Overheard in the Office.)

The ultimate cul-de-sac for the 21st century:

“I’ve got rid of all my spam, and now I need a bigger penis!”

(Courtesy of the Boom Chicago website from some time ago.)

Some people have too much time, I think we can all agree. I work, as some of my readers will know, within the field of IP networking; my employer is a European MSO, and the Internet service is one of our flagships. The team I manage is responsible for the operations of our backbones and other networks; needless to say, I am confronted with nerds for much of my waking life. (I use the term “nerd” affectionately here, don’t get me wrong - I used to be one myself until very recently.)

Back in 1990, perfectly on time for April 1st, an RFC was issued, entitled A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers (RFC 1149). This document was written by David Waitzman and it describes, in spite of its grand title, a method of carrying IP packets (the small bits of data that make the Internet work) across the world, using not electricity on copper wires and not by propelling photons down strands of optical fibre at the speed of light; no, this method uses homing pigeons to transfer data. (This RFC was actually sent to all the major manufacturers of network equipment, asking them if they supported these standards, and scaringly enough - a staggering majority of the manufacturers actually claimed that they did, for sure without reading the document in question…)

In 1999, Mr. Waitzman updated his RFC - and, again, strangely enough on the same date as the original RFC, April 1st. This time, the document (RFC 2549) also included aspects such as Quality of Service (a way of prioritizing certain kinds of traffic over others) - how you could increase the transfer rate by loading your pigeons onto air planes (if you use a Concorde, an extra plus is that your data frame (ie. the pigeon) would earn double frequent flyer points) and how the use of pigeons compared to, for example, the use of ostriches as carrier frames. All in traditional, very theoretic RFC-style language. For any nerd, these documents are a sheer joy to read.

And if you think David Waitzman is the one with too much time on his hands, listen to this:

The Bergen Linux User Group in Norway has actually taken it upon themselves to not only read the RFC (the original one), but in 2001 they actually constructed the first ever (recorded) RFC 1149-compliant network and used it to transmit data. They even built specific protocol stacks for their Linux boxes, and teamed up with Vesta Brevdue Forening, a homing pigeon organisation close to Bergen, and tested it out for real. OK, so transfer speeds weren’t all that amazing; you might even want to say terrible. But at least it works, and that’s what counts to any nerd.

(On a related note: we’re always talking about transfer speeds that we see on the internet; megabits and kilobits per second. Transfer speeds of course depend on a lot of things, such as the media used, the geographic distance between the endpoints and the load on the network. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine that the transfer speed you can extrapolate from FedExing a DVD across the Atlantic is actually faster than downloading it over a dedicated fibre connection. After all; whether it’s a streaming download or a posted CD - you can still break it down into how many bits are transferred per second.)

It’s worth spending a few minutes at Smalltime’s really innate game “Guess the Dictator or Sit-Com Character“; you think of a character in the categories above (roughly) and the system asks you questions to determine who it is, and it’s scaringly accurate. For me, the effect was a bit lost since the first one I thought of wasn’t in the database - yet. Now, the books have filled up a little, and it’s almost impossible to stump it.

Once you’ve realized the futility of the task, answer the questions as yourself and see which dictator or sitcom character you are most like. Personally, I’m apparently Alex Keaton from Family Ties (played by Michael J. Fox).