From: ftit@sussex.engin.umich.edu (Sergej Roytman)
This just happened to me: I wanted to take an elevator down to the
second floor and I hit the '1' key. Ground floor is 0 so the floor
above it is 1, right? I need a vacation. Now. When does spring
break start?
From: pereckas@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Michael Pereckas)
I once wanted to go to the basement and spent some time looking for
the 0 button before I realized that the floor below 1 is not 0 but B.
From: mllreu01@uctvax.uct.ac.za
In article [djd.716719694@reading], djd@csg.cs.reading.ac.uk (David Dawkins) writes:
] robm@void.ncsa.uiuc.edu (Rob McCool) writes:
]
]]My alarm went off this morning, I hit the snooze bar, and when it went off
]] again, I hit it again, and made a mental note that I could not do this much
]] longer because my subroutine was mallocing memory (in the clock)
]] each time it went off and printing the free memory on the front, and soon
]] I would run out.
]] ...
]]Rob McCool, NCSA STG System Administrator
]
] I had a similar experience while writing up my third year project. I was
] looking through my sports bag for my toothbrush one evening after a heavy day,
] when I found myself momentarily confused - some part of me was trying to
] do '/toothbrush' ! (search in vi text editor)
]
] I guess loads of people (huh, make that 'Unix' people) want to use grep
] while looking something up in a book...
]
] Dave
] --
Any-one here ever programme in a language called Scheme.
Typical prog looks like this:
(define Shit_lang
(lambda (crap)
(if (eq? crap ())
(display "the shit is over")
(begin
(if (eq? crap never-ending)
(delete! all)
(shit_lang (- crap 1))))))
Now consider a 38 page program like the one above.
Now consider me at 6:00 in the morning, after having coded the fucking
program in 28 almost straight hours.
gee, I wonder why (dir), (cd temp), (nc), etc don't work?
Either my computer is going to explode or I will
Bang.
From: APPMS@CUNYVM.BITNET (Alexandre Pechtchanski)
You know.... when you are trying to recall something and hear in your
head: "parity error at address..."
From: eigenstr@cs.rose-hulman.edu (Todd R. Eigenschink)
...you're writing a homework assignment, and get the end of the line
in the middle of a sentence, tack on a '\', and continue writing on
the next line.
From: ericf@npic.Corp.Sun.COM (Eric Francis)
When you pick up a rootbeer and read the label as "High Res"
not Hires...
From: ftit@ob.engin.umich.edu (Sergej Roytman)
I spent the last couple of days working on several computer-related
projects. Naturally, I was pretty tired, also pretty zonked. You
just can't hack Minix all night and not be. So as I'm putting my head
on the table for a couple hours of sleep, I think,
"telnet sleep.morpheus.com". Woke me right up. You suppose we could
make a Jargon File entry of it? It seems like the stuff Jargon is
made of. Or maybe I should just go back to sleep.
From: pt@geovision.gvc.com (Paul Tomblin)
I was just scanning the "Barnes and Noble" book catalog, and at one point
there was a picture of two books, and I couldn't quite see the one at the
back. "No problem", I thought, "I'll just click on its title bar to raise
it to the front".
From: 9125113g@lux.latrobe.edu.au (Mitch Davis)
In article [1992Sep16.145437.871@tpki.toppoint.de] kris@tpki.toppoint.de (Kristian Koehntopp) writes:
]In [BuLt8B.DCJ@unix.amherst.edu] twpierce@unix.amherst.edu (Tim Pierce) writes:
]]I've been lobbying for a "reboot" button for humans for awhile now.
]
]At the U of Kiel there is a CS professor, who pauses a while
]and then recapitulates the last two to five minutes of lecture
]if asked _any_ question during his lectures.
]
]Our theory is that any question will crash his lecture interpreter.
Excellent dude! Although I think the term "lecture engine" works better.
Here at La Trobe, we have a CS lecturer who's internals must be in LISP.
Every five minutes, he freezes solid for about thirty seconds then
continues on as if nothing ever happened.
We hypothesize that he's garbage collecting....
Mitch.
From: stirling@ozrout.uucp (Stirling Westrup)
You know, I always wondered if I wasn't a real hacker, since none of the
hacking-too-long incidences had ever happened to me. Well, now one has.
Last evening, while cleaning up my desk, waiting for one stage of a large
make to finish, I managed to stab myself under my thumbnail on a sharp
piece of sheet metal. The sheet metal is an integral part of my desk, and
was most likely put there to serve exactly the purpose it was serviing, ie.
maiming me. Anyway, in intense pain, and with blood spurting out of my
thumb, I started to make a dash for the bathroom, to find something to bind
my wounds with. After a few steps I stopped, went back and hit RETURN on
my terminal, so that the next stage of the make could progress while I was
bleeding to death in the bathroom. Its a bad sign folks, even when in
pain, I do my best to multitask...
From: Joel Sumner [js17@cornell.edu]
When you think of the lyrics of "Jump! Jump!" by Kris Kross and wonder if
they
can be assembled.....
From: anton@cv.ruu.nl (Anton H.J. Koning)
You know you've been hacking to long when you start typing semi-colons
at the end of sentences instead of full stops;
From: twpierce@unix.amherst.edu (Tim Pierce)
On the blackboard in the terminal room of our computer center, a
couple of days ago, there was a pretty lively theological discussion
going on -- you'd go in after a few hours and someone would have
written a little counterpoint to the last message. When describing
this scene to my lover later that day, I tried to recall the exact
words of the quote that sparked it all and found myself thinking, "Why
don't I just log on and download it?"
From: nj@magnolia.Berkeley.EDU (Narciso Jaramillo)
You know when you're hacking too long when you realize that all his flesh
has long since disintegrated into small bubble-like gelatinous lumps of
meat and fat and you might as well put down the axe because it's about
as tender as it's going to get anyway.
From: infidel@gl.pitt.edu (todd j. derr)
... when you can't wake up in the morning because you forgot to push a
return address on the stack the night before.
(never believed that this YNYBHTL stuff was true until that happened.)
From: tzs@stein.u.washington.edu (Tim Smith)
I'm not going to say who this is about so don't ask. He does read the net
sometimes, and has forgotten that I know about this.
Anyway, he was participating in a one-night stand with a woman. The next
morning when he woke up, he thought that she was a PDP-11 and was trying to
figure out how to boot her. Now that's someone who hacks too much.
Even better, the next time this happened to him (!), he thought the other
person was a VAX, and couldn't figure out where to put the floppy.
From: tlukka@vipunen.hut.fi (Tuomas Lukka)
.. been hacking too long when under immense stress, the following sequence
of thought occurs
'My load averages seem to be higher than ever before, the scheduler might
die any moment, and I'm running out of swap space... better kill off
some low-priority unimportant user processes'
From: tlukka@vipunen.hut.fi (Tuomas Lukka)
... when, when reading a book in front of the computer, so, that
the book is under the screen, pointing at me and I'm doing some
odd jobs on the computer every once in a while, so the keyboard
is on my lap, when I got to the end of a page, I pressed [space]!
This really happened to me about a minute ago! I'm still in the
same place, glad I had my computer ready to take note.
From: tendico@hubcap.clemson.edu (Todd Endicott)
Okay, this isn't a great one, but it did happen...
Yesterday, after leaving work, I got in the elevator and accidentally
hit a floor button between my location and my desired destination.
(D'oh!) Not only did I look for the "undo" button, I was also scornful
for a few moments about our building having such primitive elevators.
From: bernie@metapro.DIALix.oz.au (Bernd Felsche)
]I have a Sparc 2 and an HP X-terminal on my desk. Both screens at the
]same height, both colour, both about the same size. I frequently get
]confused as to why attempting to move the mouse off one screen doesn't
]move it onto the other. After all, they're both running X....
Happened to me with a sun and an ascii terminal.
It's tough when your keyboard focus moves as you drag the
mouse to the edge, and then you notice the flashing cursor
on the ascii terminal, so you start typing on the Sun
keyboard and (if you're lucky) nothing happens.
From: daz@hal.gnu.ai.mit.edu (David A. Z.)
)Happened to me with a sun and an ascii terminal.
I hate to say this (really) but I used to work at a desk with
3 PC's (doing serial network developement) and often confused keyboard
moniter correspondance.
The confusion ussually didn't last long though. After a little
bagging away at a keyboard with no result appearing on the moniter, I'd
hit CTRL-ALT-DEL and the location of the resulting disk-drive reseek noises
would soon after clue me in. :)
From: mcastro@iris-dcp.es
After been working with an hypertext system we are developing,
I sat down at home -at last!- to watch tv. After 2 min. or so
I began to wonder what I was seeing, inmediatly looking for
the INFO key in the remote control!. ( No teletext in my tv ).
BTW: I sometimes wanted grep to work with videotapes, and of
course, books; is a pity you can't grep dead trees.
From: Josef Moellers [mollers.pad@sni.de]
More than once during the last couple of weeks, the following happened
to me:
I have three children. All three show the same behaviour:
They do something they shouldn't do, we tell them to stop, the do it
just once more.
My reaction: "Well, they prefetched the instruction and are executing it
in the delay slot..."
From: zebee@sirius.ucs.adelaide.edu.au (Zebee Johnstone)
jch+@cs.cmu.edu (Jonathan Hardwick) writes:
]I've been out-scared. I only realized that I'd misspelled "comprise"
]when idling in the shower this morning, 12 hours after reading Tod's
]post. I'm not sure if I'm more worried about the time delay, or the
]very fact that my brain had been processing it in the background...
My brain always processes in the background. I obtain facts, and
then the batch processor takes over, producing the answer a while later.
Isn't it funny how the output queue always seems to be located in
the shower?
From: dave@eram.esi.COM.AU (Dave Horsfall)
After fooling around all day with routers etc, you pick up the phone
and start dialling an IP number...
From: c3q@vax5.cit.cornell.edu
I had a cs lab practicum assigment due this Thursday (12 NOV 92). I didn't
seriously get down to work until Monday. I had been using OpenWindow's
TextEditor on a Sun, and switched to Emacs (FSF's manual in hand).
After Monday 14 hr.s
Tues 12 hr.s
Wed/Thurs 21 hr.s
------
47 hr.s
of using emacs w 9 hr.s of sleep interspersed, I was in hard core EMACS mode.
Thursday night I said something in haste, and wanted to retract it.
All I could think of was C-a C-@ C-e C-w
Call me a nerd...
From: wollman@sadye (Garrett Wollman)
My boss is away for two weeks, so I have been working on his
workstation. It's a double-headed SGI Indigo with IndigoVideo, so I
have one screen that I'm actually working on, and another one for the
Video Control Panel and live video input. The way this system works,
you can move the mouse off one screen and onto the other (they are
connected at the inside borders). Today I wanted to change the
channel on the TV receiver, so I tried to move the mouse pointer off
the left side of the left-hand window to click on the `channel down'
button.
Hey, this ``Hacking too long'' stuff isn't half bad... I WANT one of
these workstations!
From: auj@aber.ac.uk (Alun Jones)
You know when you've been hacking too long when the message
New mail in /usr/spool/mail/auj
becomes an NMI
From: michaelr@spider.co.uk (Michael S. A. Robb)
... when that home project you thought would only take a single weekend has
now passed its first decade of development.
It started off as a contribution to a school project using an apple ][. Then
a new version was rewritten for an old Atari 800. Development moved to UNIX
at university, then back to MS-DOS after graduation. Wandering through my old
archives was a surprise when I saw the timestamps (Using timestamps has become
second nature to me).
It scares me to think what will happen in the future ...
{wavy dream cloud - two generations later in a futuristic house} ...
..."Children, when your great-grandfather reached your age, he started a great
project which was to last many generations. It is now your turn to join with
us in this great task which has been given to us so many generations ago
by our ancestors...."
{end of wavy dream cloud}
Does anyone know what software has the earliest recorded timestamp?
From: thayne@unislc.uucp (Thayne Forbes)
I don't know if anyone mentioned this last time but...
You know you've been hacking too long when you can remember your
ethernet (not ip) address. I was tweaking a config file this
morning, and I was rather distressed when I was able to remember
that mine is 00 AA 00 02 98 50. I think I will go home now and
take an asprin.
From: eigenstr@cs.rose-hulman.edu (Todd R. Eigenschink)
The bell rings ending class while the prof is in the middle of a
sentence, and you think, "How in the world is he going to carry that
continuation back to his office?"
From: wollman@trantor.emba.uvm.edu (Garrett Wollman)
In article [1kodicINNm79@ceres.kingston.ac.uk] cc_s525@ceres.kingston.ac.uk (Francis Bell) writes:
]In article [1kj23vINNi38@uk-news.uk.sun.com] alecm@coyote.uk.sun.com writes:
]The office opposite has a sign on the door "please make sure this door is
]locked before you leave"; the other week I found myself wondering if lock-d
]knew about the door...
Would you really want the door calling its owner up on the phone every
few minutes to find out if she has crashed yet?
(Or do I have that backwards? Sun's fault, anyway.)
On a completely different subject: It's been very cold here this past
week. One day I was walking past one of those bank time/temperature
signs, and it proudly proclaimed that the outisde temperature was -0.
For a while, I caught myself wondering if it was sign-magnitude or
one's-complement...
(That's -0 Fahrenheit, by the way, or -18 for people in civilized
lands.)
From: daniel@mertwig.uucp (Daniel Drucker)
gothick@dcs.warwick.ac.uk (Gothick) writes:
] russell@alpha3.ersys.edmonton.ab.ca (Russell Schulz) writes:
]
] ]you get in the elevator and double-press the button for the floor you want.
] While heading for my car last week, my *very* first thought was:
] "grep keys /dev/pockets"
Yesterday afternoon the following came into my head:
grep homework /dev/backpack
I got a device failure back; I had forgotten my backpack in the last
class.
From: Hamish_Hubbard@kcbbs.gen.nz (Hamish Hubbard)
...you're chatting to someone on a BBS, they phone you voice and ask
you a question, and you write the answer down on some code printout...
...you go to the movies and it takes 5 minutes to get used to the
flicker (damn low refresh rate...).
From: Jeremy_Reimer@mindlink.bc.ca (Jeremy Reimer)
] ...you go to the movies and it takes 5 minutes to get used to the
] flicker (damn low refresh rate...).
ACK... I've NOTICED this! I never used to even think about the # of frames
per second in films, these days, well....
Once I even caught myself wondering what the colour depth was...
From: peter@NeoSoft.com (Peter da Silva)
When I see a flock of birds, these days, I sit there and try to figure out the
algorithms that determine their movement.
From: msb@sq.com (Mark Brader)
* not only do you check your email more often than your paper
mail, but you remember your {network address} faster than your
postal one.
* your {SO} kisses you on the neck and the first thing you
think is "Uh, oh, {priority interrupt}."
* you go to balance your checkbook and discover that you're
doing it in octal.
* your computers have a higher street value than your car.
* in your universe, `round numbers' are powers of 2, not 10.
* more than once, you have woken up recalling a dream in
some programming language.
* you realize you have never seen half of your best friends.
[An early version of this entry said "All but one of these
have been reliably reported as hacker traits (some of them quite
often). Even hackers may have trouble spotting the ringer." The
ringer was balancing one's checkbook in octal, which I made up out
of whole cloth. Although more respondents picked that one
out as fiction than any of the others, I also received multiple
independent reports of its actually happening. --- ESR]
But I have something to add to the above, which I've also passed on
to Eric for inclusion in a later version. It turns out that *Grace
Murray Hopper* had trouble balancing her checkbook at one time, and
the reason turned out to be that she was doing it partly in octal!
From: daz@hal.gnu.ai.mit.edu (David A. Z.)
In article [1mih7pINNd29@werple.apana.org.au] acb@zikzak.apana.org.au
(Andrew Bulhak) writes:
)
)In article [1993Feb11.111834.18576@cs.hw.ac.uk] neilg@cs.hw.ac.uk (Neil MG Gall) writes:
)
)]Also on the thread of "You know you've been using a computer too long when..."
)]Er... "taking precautions" whilst staying over at my girlfriend's last night,
)]it crossed my mind that I could just comment out the code that causes her
)]to get pregnant. This kind of thing happens to me all the time, but this
)]one shocked me - I must have a one-track mind...
)
)Of course you can't comment that code out. Firstly, (unless I am very much
)mistaken) you do not have the source to your girlfriend, and even if you
)do, how are you going to recompile her? (I don't think that human beings
)are written in ANSI C, and the source would probably be many megabytes
)in length. :-) )
Humans are mostly written in DNA encoding, which can be modified.
The only real problem is that most states have a law stating that
humans must go through about 168 to 261 months of developement before you
"use them" in this fasion.
From: ssrfagg@susssys1.reading.ac.uk (Graham Fagg)
rogerj@marcus.its.rpi.edu (Diversion (Jeff Rogers)) writes:
]AAArgh!!! One of the silly ones just happened to me...
]I've been playing around with fork bombs and similar stuff lately.
]Yesterday (day before yesterday, if you must know) when my alarm clock went
]off, I thought it was spawning new alarm clock processes and I had to kill
]it quickly so it wouldn't fill up the process table and prevent me from
]doing _anything_ about it. The only problem was, there was a monitor process
]that I didn't kill, and every time I killed off one of the ring_alarm(x)
]processes, it would wait 9 minutes then spawn another one.
](When I first read a similar one to this, I thought it was just someone
]being theoritical about things that could happen. Now I know better.)
]Diversion "If only I could 'sleep 24000 &'"
Ek!
....try hitting the kill button instead of the sleep button on the clock
next time.
(Have you ever done a kill -9 -1 in your dreams... I did, and then I did it
again on the NFS server as root the following day.....)
From: rel@mtu.edu (Robert Landsparger)
...you try to bring a window to the front of something, then you realize
that "something" is a post-it (tm) on your screen...
From: jbridson@kean.ucs.mun.ca
...when in art class, you make a mistake in a drawing and look
frantically for the undo button on the paper.
Or when you begin pronouncing 'by the way' as 'bee-tee-dubbul-yoo'. =)
From: koos@kzdoos.hacktic.nl (Yup, that's me)
...When you've been low-level debugging ethernets for a week and when you
see two people at a table trying to pick up the same jar of butter and
you directly wonder if they are using the correct CSMA/CD algorithm to
avoid a re-collision...
(Yes, I need a vacation.)
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