Standards-based-ranting and delurk

Based on what we have and can get, we decided to try moving over to FNF
onpxcynar-rdhvccrq punffvf jvgu Ovt Ubaxva' FNGN qevirf. If that's UI,
then well, I'd imagine you're having troubles figuring out how to post
here. Fine. Everyone and their brother says it's compatible. So, we
buy the best-fit chassis from our favorite chassis maker, and get $5k
worth of drives to shove in there. Then we find out Stuff Doesn't Work.

First, our first controller card doesn't work. And the maker declared
we send it back to the retailer if we want to return it before 30 days,
so sez my boss[1]. The second one has a shit-tastic BIOS that has all
of the worst features of a GUI (really, it has a mouse!) and none of the
good features of any interface. And once we snuck an OS on the machine,
the command line is... ghods, the terror.

Then, we find out that this backplane, made up of parts that all
proclaim cross-compatibility with Both Types Of Drives, which was part
of the chassis, was apparently having troubles with SATA drives. Oops,
sorry, no bother to tell you *before* you spent money on it. Yeah, the
industry hasn't quite gotten this figured out yet, even though the
component parts are all advertised as being fully compatible, and
designed by the same folks who were big in getting the standards set out.

After bitching about this a touch in my blog, a marketroid from The
Chassis Maker comments something completely silly[2] in less than half
an hour, while it typically takes their tech support over 24 hours to
rouse themselves to getting to the email requests sent direct to them.

AND LASTLY, I think I've solved some of the problems by realizing that
gur qevirf jr tbg pnzr sebz gur snpgbel jvgu gur whzcre ranoyrq gung
sbeprq vg gb fcrnx gur FNGN-V vafgrnq bs FNGN-VV. However, this jumper
was so damn small and tiny that with my less than superb depth
perception, I thought it was simply colored plastic at the base of the
jumper pins.[3]

The system was supposed to go into limited production last Monday, but
currently it might be going in next Monday. If things are broken in the
morning, I'm seeing if I can chuck a 3U server loaded with 16 disks far
enough to do more damage to the server than me...

AHS. ASS. AVendorsS.

-- Matt

[0] Thank-you, dearest Governor of the state, and our budget that
doesn't even simply stay put (so a loss against inflation), but gets
reduced.

[1] Bossman is quite the BOFH himself, and only recently got to tack on
"IT Coordinator" to his official title of "Sr. Research Programmer"

[2] "Everything you've ever read anywhere about the technology, even
from my own company, is wrong." Paraphrasing for brevity and blood
pressure levels.

[3] They measure about 1mm x 2mm. I pried them off with a utility
knife, and tested to actually see if they were jumpers by accidentally
crushing it with a multimeter probe.

Name and shame, please. This looks to be a vendor I want to strike off my
list of potential suppliers.

Ah, the micro jumpers. Like black goats, I never seem to have enough of them
when faffing with SCSI, but it turns out that Onzov fgncyref cebqhpr orag
fgncyrf gung svg cresrpgyl, also handily putting the costs onto somebody
else's budget.

Why do you think they put handles on them?

You really need to hook a shot-putt chain to them, though.

Jasper

In a similar vein, find a copy of "Jul Znpf Fhpx.jzi". It's about 3.5MB.

There's a man who *really* needs a trebuchet.

... bringing us back around to the kabbalistic notion to Always Read The
Manuals, even if you think you know everything about this kind of
device. Manufacturers are not only more devious that you imagine, etc.

Reading a manual revealed that a Certain Language's standard runtime
behavior changed between one release and the next such that if the
program read or wrote to a file that it knew was in a different charset
from what the program was running in, it would convert charset of the
data *on the fly, and silently*. Imagine the fun the first time the
program got run over a file full of Korean names.

Reading the manual means that we know WHY the file is full of 0x1A
characters, and roughly how to resolve the problem, and it becomes
a simple matter of time and resources to write the fixes to a dozen
large applications. Of course, in an hour, I'm off 110 miles away to a
meeting celebrating the anniversary of opening skill-based "Centers of
Excellence" instead of hacking on one of the applications, and fixing
the problem. At least the meeting will have lunch, and I can expense the
mileage at about $0.50 per mile, and my little car actually drinks less
than that even at today's fuel prices...

--
72. If all the heroes are standing together around a strange device and begin
to taunt me, I will pull out a conventional weapon instead of using my
unstoppable superweapon on them.
--Peter Anspach's list of things to do as an Evil Overlord

> AHS. ASS. AVendorsS.

> -- Matt

Aha! Not just someone who knows how to post, but someone who actually
has Something To Say!

Ah Feel Yore Pain, too. Been There, Done That, Got The Hair-Shirt.

Judges' scores (out of 10.0):
England: 9.5
Spain: 9.6
Brazil: 9.5
Singapore: 9.3
Russia: 7.2

Average: 9.02
Current place: First

Category scores (out of 5.0)
Angst: 4.9
Bitterness: 4.9
Attitude: 5.0
Cynicism: 5.0

Average: 4.95
Current place: First
(Note: the event is still open, and placements are subject to change.)

Oh, and _Well come, Brother Sysadmin_.

--
A layman knows he has to kick it.; An amateur knows where to kick it.; A
professional knows how hard.

They _WHAAAAAAAAAAT_? W the _F_?

Name and shame, please. I need to know the last good release and the
first at which the runtime behavior changed, as well.

You'll lose, overall, on the mileage expense, since wear-and-tear also
should be figured in.

--
Lots of couples say, "We want a baby."

I never heard one say, "We want a teen-ager."
-- Ruth Moore, private communication

And you believed them because? We (TINW) don't do trust here; we go to
alt.sysadmin.nicey-nicey for that. Here we are paranoid.

<UI>
3Al + Fe2O3 -> 3AlO + 2Fe + shiney!
<\UI>

Touch off with a strip of Magnesium.

I'll leave it to your professional judgement whether to just do the
hardware or to also invite the salesman for the HEoE.

--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz <http://patriot.net/~shmuel> ISO position
Reply to domain Patriot dot net user shmuel+bspfh to contact me.
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)

FhcreZvpeb. Gurl'er n pbzcnal gung bapr lbh trg fbzrguvat svtherq bhg,
vg'f ebpx-fbyvq nf nyy uryy (bhe bgure sbhe 6.6GO ANF obkrf unir
uhzna-yvzvgrq hcgvzrf, naq gurl Whfg Jbex[0]). Ubjrire, jr unq n
fvzvyne rkcrevrapr nqqvat gur FZ VCZV pneqf gb bhe bgure sbhe znpuvarf;
gur qverpgvbaf tvira ol GSZ naq grpu fhccbeg ner nyzbfg rknpgyl gur
vairefr bs ernyvgl nf V unir svtherq bhg ubj gb jbex vg.

Once we have this machine figured out, we're most likely going to buy
more Just Like It, as we can't afford to buy things like this that work
the first time in the prototype device. We never have problems with the
copies,

Decoration? I'd assume one could hook each handle up to a nub off of a
12 kV pulse capacitor a buddy of mine has. That would be Pretty.[1]

--Matt

[0] for NFS values of "Just Work," but that's a rant for another day.

[1] Charging it to 4,000 V is enough to vaporize a small peach. The air
smells of a rather pleasant combination of ozone and peach after that.

TFM says everything comes configured to work right out of the factory.
TFM says elsewhere that the whole jumper block is for factory tweaks
elsewhere, don't touch. TFM says elsewhere that one set of jumpers is
for forcing the drive to work with The Older Version of The Protocol,
but I shouldn't need to set it.

Nowhere does it say "This comes jumpered by default, get out your
big-ass glasses and your tweezers!"

While I've screwed myself over plenty from not RTFM, I think the HD
venduh is too busy trying to save $3 on tech support costs. I bet that
there's an addendum in the retail box (we bought them all OEM) saying
that it's enabled by default. Anyone want to buy me a retail 750 GB
drive so I can, erm, test this theory?

-- Matt

Someone[1] tore off a plastic handle from a rack mounted power supply
in an instrument change last week. I think that piece of decoration
was not designed to support a sideways force trying to shift the
entire rack.

[1] Not me.[2]

[2] I instead dropped a vital piece of plastic[3] off the dome catwalk
onto a surface outside the building that can't be accessed at all,
some 40m off the ground. Oh well, it might turn up when the
de-asbestosisation is completed in a few months.

[3] That supports a wallclock I was using to take very precisely timed
photos to the nearest minute in a time lapse sequence of the shadow of
the dome travelling towards the distant horizon.

--
TimC Yesterday, after years of trying, I finally managed to take a
photo of a subway train that said "INSTRUCTION CAR" just so that someday I can
caption it "...but where's the DATA CDR?" when I'm ready to make a joke that's
nerdy even by the standards of jokes about LISP. -- James "Kibo" Perry

Is it paranoia if they really _are_ out to get you?

He found his way here. I'm pretty sure which way his professional judgement
will go. I'd do the same[2] to my herd of developers but the PHB won't let me.

I've tried to get tasers [0] but he keeps rejecting the order.

Kristof

[0] Jokingly of course. Actually buying and using them would be wrong[1].
[1] But so much fun.
[2] I doubt the result would be as spectacular [1].

Folks, a friend of mine has built what's currently the world's largest
solid-state tesla coil (14' arcs, thereabouts). And he has a 12 kV
pulse capacitor, capable of vaporizing peaches at 4 kV, and shooting .5
kg aluminum rings at over 250 mph via a coil of magnet wire.

As we've discovered some DOA hard drives now, I think this is a great
time to test what would happen to servers and salesmen connected to a
5000J capacitor.

-- Matt

A (young) cow-orker has just moved into a new house. The previous
occupants left their old washing machine behind. He commented that it
shook a great deal during the spin cycle. With the benefit of many
years experience of luser behaviour, I was able to suggest to him that
perhaps he checked that the transit bolts weren't still in place.

Well - two of them were, the third had sheared through.

--
Alan J. Wylie http://www.wylie.me.uk/
"Perfection [in design] is achieved not when there is nothing left to add,
but rather when there is nothing left to take away."
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

It came with a manual?
- Brian

BTDTGTTS about two or three years ago. That was the last time I dealt
with FNGN drives on a serious basis, coming away with the impression
that it wasn't quite ready yet. It's good to know things haven't
changed much. Oh, if you want to bolt one disk into your box and hook
it up to the FNGN connector and never change it for several years, it
works fine. But as soon as you start trying to do the Shiny! new
things FNGN is supposed to be able to do (like ubg fjnc), or try to do
boring old things like setting up an array, watch out. If you got it to
work, you had to record the model and firmware version numbers of
everything to the tenth decimal place and buy *ONLY* the same stuff if
you wanted to make a second one that worked like the first.

I am also mistrustful of FNGN connectors. They're _designed_ (at least
originally) to come apart easily, which is great for yanking the disk
out of the chassis quickly and hurling across the room for the fifth
time today. It's not so good when you want to ship a peecee and have it
still work when it gets to the other end, or to deploy a peecee in an
industrial or mobile environment.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the 4x VQR CD-ROM drive that shipped with
my cow back in 1995 just keeps chugging along, even if I plug it into
the Super Ultra Really Fast Slash Big Number VQR controller card I bought
two weeks ago. Of course, it's not a really great idea to have it on the
same cable as the hard disk I bought a month ago, but it always _works_,
even if it's slow.

In other news... some of these electrons are being paid for from the
proceeds of my very first conslutting job ever. If they had called me
sooner, I could have saved them even more money, but the checks haven't
bounced so far. Hooray conslutting!

Matt Roberds

Extreme Aromatherapy. ISAGN.

> Matthew Erickson posted thus:

> Mmmmm, I sense something that SWMBO would appreciate. How many uF
> would we be looking at, here?

Should I repost my story of fun and games in the capacitor factory? I
suspect that Matthew hasn't seen it, and may find it eerily familiar.

--
I keep $DRINK[1] in the car for emergencies. If I like the taste, it was
an emergency.
-- Roger Burton West, in the Monastery
[1] Originally Red Bull.

You've got a catwalk above it and it's not accessible? FFS, a rope and
harness isn't that expensive, and there are enough people moving in and
out of Canberra that someone will know a climber or caver and can borrow
some gear.

Just make sure the OH&S officer is looking the other way.

--
Dave Hughes | da...@hired-goons.net
That's why I love VoIP. You don't get people phoning up to complain
that the network is down.- Peter Corlett, in the Monastery

A PDF on the (non-functional) HDD would be about par for the course. I'm
sure I once had real-mode CD-ROM drivers shipped on a CD with the drive,
or something equally useless.

--
Dave Hughes | da...@hired-goons.net
And you don't think the government lets you buy _real_ tinfoil do you?
-- D.C. Ross, the Monastery.

> Ohhh. Please, Uncle Mike? Tell us a story!

> Come sit down guys! Uncle Mike's telling a story!

> <sits down, eyes wide>

Over there! _YOU_! Get -- and stay -- quiet, or I'll Clickety-Click.

From the Glowbugs mailing list, a tale of a jobfh that makes being a
mere sysadmin look _good_, fun, and above all _safe_:

: I dropped out of college for a couple of years (ran out of money)
: and went to work at a capacitor factory (which will remain unnamed
: to protect the guilty) as a Quality Control Tech on the production
: line.

: The owner of the place was a MSEE, and the company specialized in
: VERY high voltage capacitors, and high voltage power supplies. We
: made a VERY good product, but the production line testing techniques
: were, to say the least, hair raising; I saw more than one tech quit
: after one day on the job.

: Typical hipot test, on an 8 MFD, 5 KV capacitor; put it on a table
: with a grounded metal top. The tech grabs a pair of home built test
: prods, connected to a high voltage supply with a variac on it, and
: applies the prods to the cap terminals.

: Specs called for charging the cap to 10 KV and holding it there for
: 1 minute.

: If the cap doesn't fail, so far so good. If it fails, it does it in
: one of a couple of modes.

: The GOOD failure mode; there is a sharp metallic click inside of the
: can as the sections arc inside of the oil and discharge.

: The BAD failure mode; the solder seals blow and oil sprays all over
: the place!

: What made it interesting every day... before starting work, we
: checked a wet bulb / dry bulb thermometer and using it's readings
: computed the humidity. If it was over 75%, we spent the day working
: on small, low voltage stuff. If you tried to charge anything big,
: sure as hell it would flash over to ground with a sound like a 12
: gauge shotgun going off in your face!

: Most of the line techs were habitually on sedatives and antacids
: because of the fear factor... and the Old Man in the corner office
: insisted that 10 KV was TOTALLY safe, and we had NOTHING to worry
: about!

: Anyway... you now have a 5 KV cap sitting there charged to 10 KV.
: What do you do with it NOW?

: VERY simple, Grasshopper.... there is a THIRD home made test probe.

: This one is tied to a bank of resistors mounted on a sheet of
: plywood. You use it to discharge this nasty little beastie.

: Not all that simple, really... it's an art that it took a couple of
: weeks to learn.

: You approach the cap like you'd approach a cobra that you're trying
: to milk for venom. SLOWLY... CAREFULLY... you move in with the
: resistor probe. You DON'T move in too fast, or you get another
: chorus of the 12 gauge Remington Pump Sonata in your face as it ALL
: lets go at once, flashing over the resistor bank.

: If you've done it RIGHT... about 6 inches from the terminal there is
: a beautiful purple streamer to the end of your probe, and a faint
: hiss as the juice goes to ground thru the resistor bank.

: Once you have the dragon stuffed back in his cage, the FIRST thing
: you do is grab one of the MANY spools of uninsulated wire lying
: everywhere and your diagonal cutters, and slap a shorting wire
: across the monster... like RIGHT NOW!

: Hairy procedure all around.

: One day a new directive came around. There was a bottleneck in the
: plant on larger capacitors; they were piling up waiting for hipot
: testing. We had only ONE high voltage testing cage (it took caps
: up to 100 KV working!), so to increase production flow the Old Man
: in the Corner Office decreed that open air testing like I just
: described would now be done on caps up to 15 KVDC working... which
: meant using hand probes about a yard long to charge to 30 KV!

: Two guys muttered obscenities along with the words "I Quit!" and
: stalked out the door. The rest of us said "No Way, Jose", and told
: the owner so in no uncertain terms!

: He came around and told us we were all cowards, and told us
: something we hadn't known about him (and which explained a lot
: really)... he'd gotten the money to start his company in London
: at the end of WW2; he'd stayed after the war & worked at DEFUSING
: UNEXPLODED BOMBS for a living!

: HE decided he'd show us how to do it, and he wanted no more bitching
: from the production line!

: The old boy grabbed the probes and a 2 MFD, 15 KV cap and had at it
: himself. EVERYBODY backed up a few yards to watch as he hoisted this
: ten pound beast onto the table top.

: You never saw such an exhibition of arcing and sparking in your
: life! Repeated shotgun blasts as that cap arced to probes, across
: insulators, and even to the steel beams that held up the building!
: Yard long test probes proved to be a good bit more awkward to handle
: than he'd thought they were.

: He FINALLY got it to 30 KV... and then went in with the resistor
: bank probe.

: Sometimes you just live right, or at least lucky. Before he got the
: probe to it the cap failed... in the BAD mode!

: There was a muffled WHOOMP! and the entire top, six inch insulator
: and all, went flying into the air as the solder seals blew out!
: That was followed by a flying spray of mineral oil, and a billion
: bits of paper and aluminum foil as the capacitor sections shredded
: themselves. It was like a cherry bomb went off inside of that
: capacitor... absolutely BEAUTIFUL, and the Old Man was COVERED with
: the flying debris as most of us dove for cover!

: Gathering up as much of his tattered dignity as he could he wiped
: off his oily glasses, put them back on, and a badly shaken MSEE
: walked away without a single word.

: Within the hour a new directive came out returning us to the old
: open air testing limit of 5 KV caps.

: Sometimes all it takes to restore sanity is for theory to meet
: reality head on...

: Mr. T., W9LBB

Sometimes you get the bear, boys and girls, and sometimes -- but only
once per customer -- the bear gets you. Get all the bears, before they
get you. Oh, and feed the sigmonster on the way out. It has a healthy
understanding of reality.

There'll be another story by and by.

--
"Paranoid" just means "a healthy understanding of the universe"
-- An attorney who wishes to remain unnamed,
on a list which also must remain unnamed,
on a day which also must remain unnamed.

VOZ v5/BF does it, at least at v5r4. It didn't do it at v5r2; it left
utf-8 alone, and it was up to you to make something sensible out of it
since you were obviously running an EBCDIC machine. Now, you slap the
debugger on it and look at the bytes in memory, and that 1208 data is
now in EBCDIC... with 0x3F bytes where all that Hangul used to be. There
is a way around this, but it's potentially Useful. One can find it will
appropriate poking on the right newsgroup.

As I said, the change was documented. It's just that the solution was
not. It makes a certainly amount of pointy-haired sense when you look at
the problem of that with a couple dozen EBCDIC character sets, things
like á move around from codepoint to codepoint, and this does fix that.

Probably. But the thing's more or less on borrowed time anyway. Nobody
really expects a US-made, mid-90's vehicle to last past 150,000 miles,
do they?

--
The pluses in my current job include laughing in the face of Nobel
laureates who have just lost the only copy of their data. (Hey,
I'm still a BOFH).
-- Bob Dowling

Thanks for that. I'd almost forgotten the pain of that. Gur bgure sha
cnegf bs gurve VCZV pneqf ner gur i2 svezjner gung qbrfa'g npghnyyl qb
i2, naq gur ubeevq qbf onfrq gbby gung zhfg or ybpnyyl obbgrq ba
qvfxyrff znpuvarf. And if any of that's UI I suggest you go and buy a
large supply of bum wine for when the real pain starts.

Julien

Oh yes indeed. Even some less pleasant smells could be very
therapeutic; sometimes I imagine the smell of Extremely Charred Luser
could be rather nice under the right circumstances. ("I love the smell
of napalm in the morning . . . .")

For that matter, Extreme Aromatherapy for lusers could also be
therapeutic (for the BOFH), provided one has an airtight therapy chamber
with a viewing window, and aromas such as cyanide or chlorine for the
luser inside.

--
Steve VanDevender "I ride the big iron" http://hexadecimal.uoregon.edu/
ste...@hexadecimal.uoregon.edu PGP keyprint 4AD7AF61F0B9DE87 522902969C0A7EE8
"bash awk grep perl sed df du, du-du du-du,
vi troff su fsck rm * halt LART LART LART!" -- the Swedish BOFH

uggc://jjj-306.voz.pbz/fbsgjner/tybonyvmngvba/ppfvq/ppfvq_ertvfgrerq.wfc

Which even subsumes several UTF-N encodings. Clearly this is a superior
standard and we should be rewriting our software to use this far more
comprehensive encoding scheme.

Did he ever publish that photograph?

-is

vi clone (I think vim) in .... what Linuxoid uses "emerge" for its
software updating?

It's especially interesting when it misjudges, because the damned html
files are written in iso-8859-1 and I don't want any utf-8 to creep in,
dammit.

Regards,
-is

Gentoo. They tend not to change the code compared to upstream though.

OG.

A year or so back, I worked out total cost of ownership for my car,
including maintenance, insurance, fuel, taxes, purchase price,
depreciation and so forth. Worked out to 43 cents/mile. But then my
car's old enough to drive itself...

--
So I was reading Twelfth Night ... and would you believe that the I LOVE YOU
hoax is the exact same trick Shakespeare uses to point out what an arrogant,
self-absorbed fool Malvolio is? --Julia McKinnell

How about nonaroma therapy, in which the luser inhales H2F2 for 30
minutes or so. Don't do this at home.

--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz <http://patriot.net/~shmuel> ISO position
Reply to domain Patriot dot net user shmuel+bspfh to contact me.
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)

My bicycle is pretty expensive to run, but that's because I keep
wanting to buy bling for it. Apparently my helmet camera is finally
being shipped, 3 months after I ordered it.

--
TimC
"Fsck! The fscking fscker's fscking fscked! FSCK!" -- via Mike Andrews in ASR

Julien

You say it like it's a bad thing.

--
TimC
You're trying to trick me into being intelligent. It won't work.
-- David P. Murphy in ASR

I hear HCN smells nice.

In completely unrelated news, I've been ordered at work to stop
making a nuisance of myself and use Outlook for mail like everybody
else.

I already use Outlook, like they all do. Now they want my mail to
look like they all do.

Pass the almonds.

Tebrgwrf,
Maarten Wiltink

I have been down this road. I just ask them to articulate
what they want - Top posting - natch, all HTML, stationary and
bloat. They can't, they think that's what e-mail is and anything
else isn't, so they give up on me.

I love the blank looks I get when I say "HTML?". I think
the PHBs call that "formatted".

--
Like The Cheesecake Factory, the California Pizza Kitchen is a tax on
the stupid. - Tim May

I was chuckling at Codepage 1210 in that list, having encountered it
last week in the process of looking up something else...

--
6. I will not gloat over my enemies' predicament before killing them.
--Peter Anspach's list of things to do as an Evil Overlord

Two different chemists have told me that it smells like peach blossoms
and that if you can smell it at all, you need to sniff some Sodium
thiosulfate mist.

> Pass the almonds.

Bitter, or ... ?

--
I'm always impressed by the Braille on wine bottle labels.
So far I've not been able to drink sufficient to find them useful.
I suppose that everybody needs goals.
-- Tony Quinn, possibly quoting someone else

I normally stick to 285, makes life much easier (rkprcg jura gur qnzarq
hfref jnag gurve pbzcvyref ybpnyvmrq).

Chris.
(I shall *not* go into the discussion of the Euro symbol that led to
my having to explain that my 1980-vintage dumb terminal would *NOT*
under any circumstances be able to display that symbol....)

--
"Help! Help! Come see the violence inherent in the sysadmin!"
- Mike Sphar in Scary Devil Monastery

So you've been ordered to distribute various pieces of malware?
Interesting. Tell your boss "I love you" [1].

[1] I have a feeling that Outhouse shouldn't be susceptible to that one
anymore, but there shouldn't be a shortage of more recent examples.

--
Dave Hughes | da...@hired-goons.net
"For is it not written, wheresoever two or three are gathered together,
yeay they will perform the Parrot Sketch." - Rob, in the SDM

MPEG! MPEG! Or more importantly, which one did ya get?

The commuter bike before the previous one ran to something like
AUD 0.02/km: 10-15,000 km and a purchase & maintenance price of $300. The
current one with fewer k's on it and a bit of play is probably running at
around AUD 1/km, but that's only because it's only got about a thousand k
on it so far.

The play bikes would be somewhat more than that, since they get a lot
fewer km/breakage.

--
Dave Hughes | da...@hired-goons.net
"Verbogeny is one of the pleasurettes of a creatific thinkerizer."
- Peter da Silva

>Pass the almonds.

Now now, be a good fellow and make nice with the program.

Here's your e-mail stationary:
uggc://gbz.nmngbz.vasb/zvfp/vzt/jc/ghk-jvasyl-xvyynu.1600k1200.wct

Remember to pick the finest font everyone has (and I do mean "finest") and
set the color to white to compliment your stationary.

Don't
Forget
Every
Line
Of
Your
Signature
File
Is
Important

Kevin

BOFH II, Revenge of the alt.TimCTV.binaries

Kevin

I have been spelling it as 'EUR' with great success for the last
eight years.

My brother, who didn't like the Euro, was very pleased with the
suggestion to spell it 'XEU' (ECU).

Tebrgwrf,
Maarten Wiltink

<something>

> Bitter, or ... ?

Yes, I am. Is this where you all say 'welcome to the club'?
It is Monday morning, half an hour into the business day.
And I need a drink.

Tebrgwrf,
Maarten Wiltink

uggc://jjj.pnzrennpgvba.pbz.nh/cebqhpgf4o.nfc?fxh=177995&qrcg=64

I highly recommend checking with them *before* placing any order, that
they have plenty of stock in, otherwise Bevba are having a bit of
trouble keeping up supply.

--
TimC
Your fault (core dumped)

Should help you document the fuckwittery of those trying to
run you over.

I just worked out that my bicycle has cost me about NOK 1.60
or USD 0.25 per kilometre. Half that is cost of bying the thing
and most of the rest tyre-related costs because our streets are
paved with glass. Something motorized would cost quite a bit
more because most of my trips are fairly short. Work is 2.6 km
(6 km with a car) and city centre is 2.5 km away from home.

--
Stig M. Valstad

"Somehow the threat of nuclear holocaust isn't so bad when you
consider the alternatives." random

The fuel consumption of the last trip on my bike was about four miles per
gallon. I had a pretty sore head in the morning too.

Was it pretty expensive fuel?

Stay away from the stout until later until the evening -- you might go
better in all regards.

--
TimC
"And Rob convinced me to learn perl. But now that I'm
sober, I'm having second thoughts." -- Alan J Rosenthal

About three quid a pint, these days.

That would probably involve them having something other than vile Guinness.

Single Malt: Laphroaig. Not sure why but it seems to work very well in a hip
flask.

Blend: Black Bottle.

Jim
--
Find me at http://www.ursaMinorBeta.co.uk
"Inspiring bold John Barleycorn! What dangers thou canst make us scorn!
Wi' tippenny, we fear nae evil; Wi' usquabae, we'll face the devil!"
- Robert Burns, "Tam O'Shanter"

> Matthew Erickson posted thus:
> >[1] Charging it to 4,000 V is enough to vaporize a small peach. The air
> >smells of a rather pleasant combination of ozone and peach after that.
>
> Mmmmm, I sense something that SWMBO would appreciate. How many uF
> would we be looking at, here?

Not very many. Double digits, methinks. It's not that there are very
many electrons being stored in the 170 lb. Orange Box of Death, but that
the ones that are being stored there are very, *very* upset about being
stuffed in this box, and *they want OUT*.

To put this in perspective with Uncle Mike's story downthread, this
would have to be pumped up to 24,000 V to be tested at that factory.

-- Matt

Orange Pekoe. I don't drink whisky at work. Or anywhere.

Tebrgwrf,
Maarten Wiltink

Especially the disclaimer.

Tony.
--
f.a.n.finch <d...@dotat.at> http://dotat.at/
TRAFALGAR: SOUTHWESTERLY 3 OR 4, OCCASIONALLY 5. SLIGHT. THUNDERY RAIN.
MODERATE OR GOOD, OCCASIONALLY POOR.

>Stig M. Valstad posted thus:

>One wonders if perchance one might build a tank tread about an inch
>wide by long enough to go over both wheels of the bike. Make sure you
>invest in a good chain^Wtread-guard too.
>

Or try to find a WWII surplus track-laying motorcycle. There's a
picture of a three-wheeler (three-treader?) somewhere. (Note: I don't
think any actually survived the war.)

--
Links to GB of free SF: <http://www.mindspring.com/~jbednorz/Free/>
Welcome back to the Wild Wild Web: <http://preview.tinyurl.com/2m32q3>
All the Best,
Joe Bednorz

I love the disclaimers. I love actually getting one and
then forwarding it to say a mailing list, with a Cc: to the
originator of the idiocy with a challenge to do something about
it.

They never do.

They know it is an empty threat for the ignorant.

--
Like The Cheesecake Factory, the California Pizza Kitchen is a tax on
the stupid. - Tim May

The Schwalbe Marathon Plus is my friend. More than a year commuting
through streets littered by broken glass without a single
puncture. Generally the debris is alcopop bottles smashed by the local
scroats on their way home - last Tuesday on my way home from the pub I
was narrowly missed by such a bottle flung from a passing car.

--
Alan J. Wylie http://www.wylie.me.uk/
"Perfection [in design] is achieved not when there is nothing left to add,
but rather when there is nothing left to take away."
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

James A Cutherbertson would be the obvious people to consult for this
sort of conversion.

http://www.lrm.co.uk/archive/Land%20Rover%20Solihull/Cuthbertson.html

"Ortva "?

UGZY jvgu rzorqqrq enj GVSS bs juvgrfcnpr fb gung gurve znvyobk vf
biredhbgn orsber gurl pna fnl "Netu!"?

Fraq nyy nggnpurq qbphzragf nf .cqs ab znggre ubj gevivny[2].

Puevf.
[2] Gunax lbh, gur hggre shpxzbaxrl ba fbzrbar'f uryyqrfx jub
chyyf gung fghag.

--
All of our email blocking disputes are handled by Ms. Waite in the
Support department. Helen has been handling disputes to our satis-
faction for many years. If your email is being blocked and you wish
to dispute the reason for the blocking, you can go to Helen Waite.
-- Morely Dotes.

Being eaten by the Great Old One would be preferable to some days at $ORK.
Where can I get a bottle?

"It's unpleasantly like being drunk."

"Well, what's so unpleasant about being drunk?"

"You ask a glass of water!"

--
Steve VanDevender "I ride the big iron" http://hexadecimal.uoregon.edu/
ste...@hexadecimal.uoregon.edu PGP keyprint 4AD7AF61F0B9DE87 522902969C0A7EE8
"bash awk grep perl sed df du, du-du du-du,
vi troff su fsck rm * halt LART LART LART!" -- the Swedish BOFH

That one's mildly amusing, although you got the capitalisation wrong. The
humour is in the choice of string to go afterwards, of course. (I found that
"ivehf.ong.gkg" or similar was the most effective.)

In any case, there's *even more* fun to be had in inserting certain
X-Headers into the message, because it integrates *too* well with CrockMail.

Don't know. All I've seen are some advertisements on T-shirts being
sold at the recent WesterCon. There are good reasons the hotel was
known as the Mariot Escher!

--
Joe Zeff
The Guy With the Sideburns
Complaining about the wait times doesn't make them shorter.
http://www.lasfs.info http://www.zeff.us

That works. Or you could simply lean the whole thing to the side to
which you wish to turn, as an alternative.

--
My Usenet From: address now expires after two weeks. If you email me, and
the mail bounces, try changing the bit before the "@" to "usenet".

Ah, sounds like the Radisson non-Euclidian at Heathrow, with its mirrored
corridors. (The overall smell of chlorine made you think you were on
another planet with inadequate life-support, too).

Chris.

--
I used to be convinced that MicroSquish shipped crap because they simply
didn't give a flying fuck as long as the sheep kept buying their shit.
Now, I'm convinced that they really do ship the best products they are
capable of writing, and *that's* tragic.
- John C. Randolph, about MS quality control.

I could describe the hotel, but that would bring back the infamous
sy**e a*zo*e*at gue**q, and we certainly wouldn't want *that* to
happen, would we?

"Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Burger" -- Ronald McDonald
http://www.lasfs.info http://www.zeff.us

Nf bccbfrq gb gur srypuvat shpxxahpxyrf jub unir rapbqrq gurve chzc'a'qhzcf
vagb rzorqqrq cqsf sbe gur qryrpgngvba bs fcnz svygref rireljurer.

Nal cerqvpgvbaf ba ubj ybat gur pbagvahvat nezf enpr orgjrra fcnzzref naq
rirelbar ryfr erfhygf va jneevat NVf?

--
David Cameron Staples | staples AT cs DOT mu DOT oz DOT au
Melbourne University | Computer Science | Technical Services
--Ah, but can you conjugate "Vodka?"
--Sure, the past tense is "money", and the future tense is "drunk"
-- bash.org/?52747

"Gurer vf nabgure gurbel juvpu fgngrf gung *guvf unf nyernql unccrarq*."

> You mean the legally completely worthless ones? How the fuck do I know if
> you meant to send me the message or not? Maybe you should try having some
> information handling policies, and you know, marking confidential stuff
> and not forwarding it to random people. Conversely, what the fuck is that
> disclaimer doing on postings to public mailing lists?

Coprorate Policy requires it on all email, of course.
Policy here is worded in such a way that it's required for
all email; some of us know better, and apply it more
selectively.

*My* ork disclaimer has its own disclaimer:

Na rznvy qvfpynvzre vf erdhverq ol guvf cbyvpl:
<hey ryvqrq>

Ivrjf fvzvyne gb zl bja ba fhpu cbyvpvrf pna or sbhaq ng:
uggc://fbzvf.nvf.qhaqrr.np.hx/qngncebgrpg/rznvyqvf/rznvyqvf.ugzy
uggc://jjj.tbyqznex.bet/wrss/fghcvq-qvfpynvzref/

rirelguvat nsgre guvf yvar vf gur qvfpynvzre
'Guvf rznvy naq nal svyrf genafzvggrq jvgu vg ner pbasvqragvny
naq ner vagraqrq fbyryl sbe gur hfr bs gur vaqvivqhny be ragvgl
gb jubz gurl ner nqqerffrq. Vs lbh unir erprvirq guvf rznvy va
reebe cyrnfr abgvsl gur flfgrz znantre. Cyrnfr abgr gung nal
ivrjf be bcvavbaf cerfragrq va guvf rznvy ner fbyryl gubfr bs
gur nhgube naq qb abg arprffnevyl ercerfrag gubfr bs Ivpgbevn
Havirefvgl.

Svanyyl, gur erpvcvrag fubhyq purpx guvf rznvy naq nal
nggnpuzragf sbe gur cerfrapr bs ivehfrf. Ivpgbevn Havirefvgl
npprcgf ab yvnovyvgl sbe nal qnzntr pnhfrq ol nal ivehf
genafzvggrq ol guvf rznvy.'

Plus four lines about what I am and who I do at the top,
of course. Goes on everything internal, and many things
external too. If I'm forced to go against common sense,
I'll damn well make sure people know it's not my fault.

Somewhere I recall seeing pics and a write up of a motorcycle looking
thing that had a tank tread instead of wheels. Google turned up this
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/07/14/motorbike/index.html
beastie. That's not the article I remember reading, but I'm pretty
sure that's the same thing.

Guzzi did a 3wheel halftrack in the 60s. Known as the "mechanical mule"
legend has it that the v-twin motor that was built for that made its way
into the V-twin bikes. (Actually the motor started life as designed for
a small car, and was grabbed to use in the mule.)

the rear wheels each could be converted to tracks.

http://www.tybrainstorm.de/review/mulo-e.html

Somewhere there's a list of the many world and national titles Moto
Guzzi motorcycles have won. I want a t-shirt with a listing of them
surrounding a pic of the mule halfway up the wall and "Moto Guzzi -
breeding will tell" as the caption.

Just to get up the nose of Ducati wankers!

Zebee

Interesting. Hadn't seen one of those before. I've seen 4 wheel ATVs
converted with these:
http://www.mattracks.com/
though, which looked pretty able to go almost anywhere. Converting
something larger, like the pickup truck, could be fun if I had a pile
of money I didn't know what else to do with.

If you design the graphic, I've got a friend with a T-Shirt printer.
Postage to .au wouldn't be all that bad.

> Any recommendations for a flask-able whisk(e)y?

Oh, speaking of which: .au monks may or may not be aware that Arran single
cask (yes, cask) in burgundy or cognac finish is available at Qna
Zhecul'f, at least at Hornsby.nsw. I've no idea whether this is any good,
but it was sufficiently interesting as a departure from the usual range
that I picked up a bottle of the cognac finish. Reports shall ensue when I
crack it.

It also exceeds the standard 40% abv by a considerable margin, so could
well represent 36 hours worth of recovery.

--
Dave Hughes | da...@hired-goons.net
Remember Jeebus loves you. Or maybe he's just sucking up to get your old
bike bits. - Phil Las Gourgues

biggest problem is getting a decent pic of the Mule. The wall one
seems to be lousy quality every time I've seen it.

Zebee

Psst, Stuart. You need to get yourself a guzzi.

--
TimC
"It never gets easier, you just go faster."
-- Greg LeMond on bicycle riding/racing

Damn, I was going to say that.

The BMTAFH spam dam I built a couple of years ago to be several steps ahead
of the curve at the time is finally starting to leak. Dammit, that'll be a
weekend lost to building a new one now.

(Although I think I might try and sell the new incarnation instead of giving
it away for free.)

Brilliant :-)

Also, http://fanf.livejournal.com/54134.html

Tony.
--
f.a.n.finch <d...@dotat.at> http://dotat.at/
HUMBER THAMES DOVER WIGHT PORTLAND: SOUTH OR SOUTHWEST 3 OR 4 INCREASING 5 TO
7. SLIGHT INCREASING MODERATE OR ROUGH. THUNDERY SHOWERS. MAINLY GOOD.

V'ir whfg frag zlfrys n grfg znvy naq V'z nccnyyrq ng $BEX'f nhgb-nqqrq
fghss:

- Svir oynax yvarf nsgre gur ZpD-pbzcyvnag .fvt V vapyhqr.
- N svsgrra yvar oybpx pbagnvavat guerr frys-cebzbgvbany nqiregf.
- N oynax yvar
- N svir yvar harasbepnoyr vafgehpgvba gb qryrgr gur znvy vs zvfnqqerffrq.
- N oynax yvar
- N guerr yvar qvfpynvzre bs yvnovyvgl sbe ivehfrf.
- N oynax yvar
- Svir yvarf tvivat gur pbzcnal anzr naq ertvfgrerq nqqerff.
- Nabgure oynax yvar, whfg sbe tbbq zrnfher.

Gung'f *guvegl-frira* yvarf bs nccraqrq qngn, bayl svir bs juvpu pbhyq
cynhfvoyl unir nal yrtny hfr. Ab jbaqre crbcyr gbc-cbfg, tvira gurl'yy or
fpebyyvat nyy qnl gelvat gb svaq gur obggbz.

I am actually sorely tempted to send all email content as PDF.
Seeing as how the intent of the latest salesbogocratic exercise
is to enforce our house style on all email recipients.

Surely we can't afford to let them change the typeface. I'm
still looking for a method to not let them change the point
size. From 0.8. And claim that it's only formatting, and I
care only about content.

Tebrgwrf,
Maarten Wiltink

Zbfg ivrjref pna frnepu .cqs svyrf. Vs lbh guvax lbhe erpvcvrag xabjf
rabhtu gb qb gung, gnxr n fperra-fubg bs lbhe rznvy, cevag vg gb n
.cqs naq fraq vg. Vzntrf nera'g frnepunoyr.

Sent rotten to hide a clue from the unworthy.

A conservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality.
http://www.lasfs.info http://www.zeff.us

And, of course, too late to do any good.

If you can't play with words, what good are they?
http://www.lasfs.info http://www.zeff.us

PDF of image scanned from a note hand-written on a traditional memo form.

BISCAY FITZROY SOLE: WEST OR SOUTHWEST 5 DECREASING 3 OR 4. SLIGHT OR
MODERATE. SHOWERS. GOOD.