Henrik Lantz

On routers from Juniper Networks, there’s an easter egg command that can provide hours (well, minutes) of joy; the show version and haiku command. Apart from the normal version information, it also prints a haiku. Some examples, for the geekier of us:

TTL down one
the end nearer with each hop
little packet, poof.

…and my favourite…

Amazing photons
carry our data worldwide,
never seem to stop.

(Note of interest: At one point it mentions that “’show version and blame’ / gave away too many names / now you get haiku.” - this is a reference to an earlier version of the easter egg which not only printed the version information, but also a list of names and email addresses of the engineers that built the software. Apparently the poor engineers were bombarded with emails so they had to remove it.)

Sometimes people around you say the weirdest things (Overheard in New York and Overheard in the office prove that!). Most of the time it’s information that will pass in through one ear and out through the other, but occasionally you stumble on real conversational gems - such as this sentence, uttered by one of my colleagues over lunch yesterday:

“I don’t want to generalize about the crap that I don’t like.”

Taste that one.