Humor/Satire

I was wrong, but I wasn’t alone!

Dave Farquhar Humor/Satire

I thought the meeting was at 6. I hurried. I really did. But traffic was horrible, and the journey that can take as little as 7 minutes took closer to 15. Despite my best efforts, it was 6:05 when I pulled into the parking lot.
I noticed there weren’t very many cars there. Good–I wasn’t the only one who got stuck in the unusually thick traffic. There’s nothing worse than being the last one to arrive at a meeting. I know. I do it a lot.

Jamie, a girl of about 19, smiled as I walked in. We chitchatted, I don’t remember about what, but at some point she asked, “The meeting’s at 6, right?” I said yes, as far as I knew. “I don’t know where everybody is,” she said.

It was 6:30 before the next person arrived. Jamie asked her when the meeting was. She said 7. A guy arrived five minutes later. Jamie asked him the same question and got the same answer. It was starting to look like we were wrong.

“Well, at least if we’re going to be idiots, it’s not just one of us,” Jamie fumed, trying to make herself feel better. It didn’t work very well.

“Actually I think this is kinda cool,” I said. “When I’m wrong in a group, it’s usually a group of guys.”

She missed the joke. Or maybe she just didn’t think it was funny. I can never make sense of the mind of a woman.

“I’m gonna quit asking people,” Jamie said.

She asked the next five people who showed. They all said the meeting was at 7. I watched Jamie getting madder and madder.

Meanwhile, I tried to remember the last time I’d been 55 minutes early for anything. I couldn’t remember. I was late to my own high school graduation. I couldn’t help but chuckle. I tried to go serious whenever Jamie looked my direction. I didn’t want to make her feel worse, after all.

Finally, our fearless leader arrived at about 6:50. Jamie gave Brent a talking-to. If you’re a guy, you’ve had those. Many times.

Finally, in desperation, Jamie pointed at me. “He thought it was at 6 too!” She may have been outnumbered, but at least she wasn’t alone.

Brent brushed it off and as Jamie stormed away, he gave me the do-I-owe-you-an-apology? look. I just shrugged my shoulders.

“I’m male,” I said. “I’m used to being wrong.”

My Klez adventures

Dave Farquhar Humor/Satire , , , , , , ,

Today should have been a happy day. After all, the Kansas City Royals finally wised up and sent the worst manager of its history, Tony Muser, packing. And there was much rejoicing. It was all over the front page of the Kansas City Star. In other news, Boeing 747s are having a difficult time avoiding pigs, and Royals utilityman Donnie Sadler is hitting .265.
Unfortunately, a serious development in my life quickly jarred me back into the real world. An e-mail message arrived. I had Klez! I guess I shouldn’t have double-clicked on that attachment titled “Hot young 32-year-olds dressed like middle-school cheerleaders want you!” at work. But since everything on the Internet is true, and since the kid who mows my friend’s cousin’s neighbor’s lawn says his uncle told him e-mail travels over the Internet, I thought I’d better check it out. Opening that unexpected attachment from a complete stranger seemed like a good idea at the time.

The evidence that I had the Klez virus pointed back to a really old e-mail account I had, back in my days at the University of Missouri. So this must not have been the result of me opening the last “Hot young 32-year-olds dressed like middle-school cheerleaders want you!” e-mail I got. It must have been the result of a “Hot young 32-year-olds dressed like middle-school cheerleaders want you!” e-mail I got sometime in 1997 or 1998.

That’s really scary. Klez had the ability to trigger itself FIVE YEARS before it even existed, yet lie dormant until such a time as it did exist. Very powerful stuff. Very scary stuff. This is even bigger than the firing of Tony Muser. I think I should leak this discovery to The Register. Or maybe The Inquirer.

Then I looked at the headers more closely, and I noticed that even though it referred to that really old account, it also had a reference to my new Verizon account.

Then I realized I don’t have a Verizon account. So there’s only one possible explanation. Klez signed me up for a Verizon account! The nerve of it! And I’ll bet it’s using that e-mail account, and possibly also the cell phone that goes with it, to make marriage proposals to one of my ex-girlfriends. Probably the closet homo sapien. I’ll be in even more serious trouble after it realizes that all of my ex-girlfriends are closet homo sapiens and it proposes to all of them. This is bad. Really bad. I don’t think I’ll be able to blame this on Tony Muser.

I sure hope those cheerleaders know my new address in St. Louis. After all that scary Klez stuff, I could use some cheering up. They haven’t shown up yet, but that message never said when they’d show up.

When I went to lunch on that wonderful Tuesday, there was a TV in the lunchroom. There are always TVs in the lunchroom when important, newsworthy events of national impact occur. It was there so we could watch the latest developments of the Tony Muser firing as they unfolded on CNN.

I don’t think my coworkers believed me when I said that. So instead we talked about what I had learned about Klez. They were all really excited to hear about it. One of them asked if it had really neat graphics. I said sometimes. Another one asked if it would run on something as ancient as a Pentium 4 1.7 GHz with GeForce4 Ti4400 video. I said it probably would. They all wanted copies.

When I got back from lunch, there was something else waiting for me in my e-mail: an invitation to a meeting to standardize our virus delivery to one or two tools and formats. I thought this was a great idea, because when we limit our clients’ abilities by forcing them to use limited tools–tools that were designed for another purpose entirely, of course–of our own choosing rather than their choosing, they are always much more productive and they thank us for it. Ideally, these tools should cost a lot of money and should require expensive outside consultants to set them up, so that these outside consultants can later go to the clients directly and do what consultants always do, which is this: Tell people what they already know. In this case, what they already know is how this overpriced, clueless consultant can do the job much better without our involvement. Next thing we know, we’re out of the picture, the clients are happy, the consultants are happy, and I’m happy because there’s not as much work for me to do, and if this kind of thing happens often enough, I’ll find myself without a job and then I’ll have something in common with my longtime hero, Tony Muser.

So of course I was falling all over myself to attend this meeting.

I asked the person who invited me if his new laptop has a DVD drive. He said it did. I told him I’d bring a copy of Office Space to the meeting. He said he didn’t have the drive configured to work in Linux yet because he hadn’t yet had the need to watch a movie on his work laptop.

Obviously, he needs to go to this meeting even more than I do, if he’s too busy doing real work to waste time watching DVDs really loudly on his work laptop and disturbing the rest of us in the office. It’s all due to the lingering effects of the decisions Tony Muser made during his tenure as Kansas City Royals manager, of course.

I’m sure a few scenes from Office Space will help us to prove our point. And, besides, if you read User Friendly, you know it’s fun to violate the DMCA.

Tony Muser will have a lot more time to do that kind of thing from now on.

The giant homo sapien conspiracy against me

Dave Farquhar Humor/Satire , , , , , ,

I’m confused, I’ve finished my book (reading one, not writing one–that’ll be the day), and I’ve found I’m in no mood for P.J. O’Rourke. Meanwhile, my readers are egging me on.
It’s part of a plot. I can tell. It’s part of that huge homo sapien plot to take over the world. You gotta watch them homo sapiens.

I learned yesterday than I’m no good at plotting. I’m no good at conspiring. This surprised me. You see, at the age of 23, my next-door neighbors decided the whole world was a huge conspiracy–though they weren’t quite smart enough to figure out that it was the homo sapiens behind it, but you’ll find that out soon enough–and somehow, even at my very young age, I’d managed to rise to the very top of that conspiracy.

They didn’t get out very much. They also happened to believe that the X-Files was really a documentary. You see, constitutionally, the government is required to disseminate that information. So they dress it up like fiction. That way, they’ve fulfilled their constitutional duty in an underhanded way. But really smart people (like them) could see through the whole thing.

Well, I’m not sure if they actually ever said that, but I sure did get sick of listening to UFO conspiracy stories. I can’t remember if they ever went so far as to try to tell me the X-Files was real.

I came out of that experience feeling like I had connections and conniving ability, like I could conspire if I really wanted to.

So as a friend and I started to weave this vast conspiracy, this person asked me a question that let all the air out of my balloon: What if [the person we were conspiring against] already has plans?

Dang it. I didn’t bother finding that out. I just assumed this person had nothing better to do than to fall into my carefully laid trap, which I’d been carefully laying out… because… I… No, not because I didn’t have anything better to do. I had lots of better things to do. I just didn’t want to do them.

Why doesn’t anyone believe me?

You’re in on that homo sapien plot too, aren’t you? You gotta watch them homo sapiens. They’ll take over the world if we’re not careful.

But I just went off on one of my really long digressions. Or maybe it was two of them. So, Steve DeLassus takes offense at me using the word “litter” and implying the trademark “White Castle” in the same sentence. Obviously, Steve’s forgotten one important thing. I’m a transplant to St. Louis. I’m not a native. I’m native to Kansas City. And let me tell you something about Kansas City. White Castle went to Kansas City… and flopped. No grace about it. We’re talking a big, messy belly-flop right onto dry, hot pavement.

Evidently, in Kansas City people wondered the same thing I did the couple of times I’ve had occasion to eat a White Castle. I wondered whether the little cardboard box the thing came in would taste better than the smelly, greasy thing they tried to pass off to me as a hamburger. I know it would be easier on your digestive tract and on your arteries.

White Castles are obviously a creation of the homo sapiens. But not even their most carefully laid plot could save them from the discriminating palates of Kansas City. Good on them. The Kansas Citians, that is.

The St. Louisans aren’t doing such a good job of staving off the plot. White Castle isn’t even a St. Louis creation.

Which leads me, somehow, to Bruce Edwards’ question. Evidently, where he used to live there was a chain of White Castle clones. We had one of those, in Columbia, where I went to college. It opened up the first semester of my freshman year. They bought a tiny drive-thru, painted it pink, and hung out a big pink-and-green sign that read in neon-style letters: Grill ‘n Chill. Their specialties: cheap belly bombers and thick milkshakes. The student newspaper I was writing for at the time reviewed it. “Completely unoriginal,” the reviewer said. I never bothered to check it out. To me, it seemed like cloning a Yugo. Why bother? Not that I had much of a chance to check it out. Within a couple of months, the venture went belly-up, and the atrociously colored pink building stood there vacant for years, a painful reminder of the failed venture. Well, I guess it wasn’t so painful if you remembered your sunglasses. I used to have a neat pair of black wraparounds. I think one of my ex-girlfriends took them. She never did like them. I think she was a closet homo sapien. That would explain a lot about her. Like how she walked upright, breathed oxygen, communicated using spoken words… I never did try to sneak out with any of her genetic material–you know, a bit of hair, or some nail clippings–to test, but I’ll bet she was carbon-based too.

And there I’ve gone, and taken the question and made it all about me. What, do I look like the guy on a date?

I blame the homo sapiens. They keep distracting me. They’re all around me. They’re everywhere, you know.

Anyway, back to the question, which I hadn’t even finished writing out when I got so rudely sidetracked: Some of his coworkers offered him $100 plus the price of the (ahem) food if he could eat 100 belly bombers in a 24-hour period. Bruce asked how I’d respond to an offer like that.

Well, I’m thinking that in exchange for three meals at Smokestack BBQ in Kansas City and $100, I might be willing to think about the sight and smell and taste of 100 belly bombers. But one would have to seriously raise the stakes for me to eat 100 of the wretched things over the course of a day. I get sick to my stomach if I take my vitamins too early in the day.

And that has absolutely nothing to do with homo sapiens. Which surprises you, I’m sure. I know it surprises me.

So, no, I’d tell my friends they could spend all weekend getting acquainted with their toilets if they wanted, but I sure wouldn’t be joining them.

Steve then made the smooth (as a gravel road) transition to the subject of Pepsi and toilets. About a year ago, Steve got one of those annoying forwards that clog up everyone’s inbox (if that’s not a homo sapien plot, I don’t know what is) that was something like 25 things you didn’t want to know about cola. It talked about how you could dissolve a nail in a can of Coca-Cola inside of a week, and other weird stuff. Well, I had a two-liter of Pepsi in my fridge. I’d had company over, and whoever it was only drank one or two glasses, leaving me with most of a two-liter that I had no intention of drinking, because when I want caffeine, I generally want coffee. One of the claims of the message was that a can of cola would do a very nice job of cleaning your toilet.

Now, knowing that if I read it on the Internet it must be true, I took the advice to heart. My toilet was badly discolored because I’m a bachelor and out to impress no one–or I figure if I’m going to impress someone, it won’t be with my toilet. Now, it’s never been as bad as that “worst toilet in Scotland” scene in Trainspotting, but I thought I had a pretty formidible test for that quantity of Pepsi. So I poured it in one morning before I left for work.

I came home about nine hours later. I stirred the contents of the bowl around with my toilet brush, but couldn’t get a good look at the interior. I guess it was a little cleaner. But I decided to let it sit a while longer.

Finally, around 8 p.m., I couldn’t stand it any longer. I had two choices: abandon the experiment, or use the sink. I’m not that much of a bachelor. (I’ve managed to fight off some of that homo sapien influence that so pervades our society these days.) So I flushed the toilet. And you know how they talk sometimes about “ring around the toilet?” I definitely had one of those. But the dirty part was the top of the bowl.

So forget about those fancy-dancy, high-fallutin’ blue things you hang in your toilet. Once every couple of months, buy yourself one of those 59-cent two-liter bottles of generic cola. Take it home, dump it in the bowl before you go to work, and let it sit. It’s cheaper than those blue things and it’s a whole lot easier than scrubbing. Does a better job too. And it’s better for the environment too, since there’s no poisonous bleach involved. Moby would be so proud of me.

I’m sure those homo sapiens don’t want you to know that.

Pretentious Pontifications, Part III

Dave Farquhar Humor/Satire

David is engrossed in some video game. It is called Alter Ego, and it is more than 15 years old. I guess when you lack adequate equipment, you have to get your kicks in whatever way you can.
David, get into the 20th century and get a Pentium IV, please. You are embarrassing me. At least get a Pentium 4 1.5 GHz. Then you would be able to play games from 1990 without sitting around and drumming your fingers.

But I digress. It runs in the family. David is worse about it, of course. I have been getting lots of fan mail, and I do have to say I really appreciate it. The kind epistles have been the source of many frissons in recent days. I also appreciate the creative ways people send it. One message was attached to a brick, hurled through a window of my estate in Ladue. I also received a message in a bottle. It was written on a rag, then doused with pellucid–but not potable–alcohol, stuffed into the bottle and lit on fire to get my attention. I would have been almost lachrymose, but unfortunately, I was unable to put the fire out quickly enough, and by the time I did extinguish it, the alcohol had washed out the message.

I appreciate the gesture, but obviously the person who did it had too much nescience to realize the deleterious effect the alcohol would have on the message. But that is certainly curable. Bask in my apposite genius long enough, and it will start to rub off on you. I know, I really should write more often, so you might have more opportunity. Once I have built up an audience (maybe David’s addiction to old computer games is useful for something after all), I will have to branch out on my own and open up a pay site.

So, whoever you are, thank you, I adore you too, but if you want to show your adoration, try delivering the message in another way. Perhaps you should take after the gentleman who tied up my quondam manservant long enough to express his love with desuetuded soap on my dashing Rolls. The message was mostly maledictions, unctuous of course.

I do not recommend, however, that you attempt to give me a 21-gun salute all by yourself outside my front gate. Unfortunately, gunshots are strictly prohibited in Ladue, so my adoring fan was promptly arrested. It is very unfortunate that I was not at home at the time. I would have tried to exculpate him by explaining to the officer what he was doing.

But tomorrow is another day, and I am quite sure that the claques will continue.

Priorities (Or: How to spend Valentine’s night on the couch)

Dave Farquhar Humor/Satire , , ,

It’s that special time of year, when a man’s thoughts turn to…
Computers. Or other gadgets. Just like they always do. Men don’t need a Hallmark holiday to think about what they really want.

Steve DeLassus called me up the other night. He wanted to talk about tape drives and CD-RWs. He wanted to know if it was safe to buy an ATAPI CD-RW drive, or if he should buy SCSI. He knew about my terrible experiences with first-generation ATAPI CD-RWs. I burned as many coasters as I did successful discs, and in those days, a coaster was an expensive mistake.

I told him where to get Plextor CD-RWs for next to nothing (Newegg.com). Steve checked yesterday morning, but they were out of them, as it turns out. So Steve looked at Hyper Microsystems and found some good prices on Plextor units. Not earth-shattering like the deal I saw at New Egg a couple of weeks ago, but good. We had initially talked about 12X units. But the 16X unit was $4 more, and the 24X unit was $20 more than that. “You can ride that train all the way up to the $179 40X burner,” I said.

Steve hasn’t responded to that as I write this. Considering what I paid for my 2X burner in 1998, that $179 Plextor 40X unit is a steal.

But there’s something else to consider: The overhead in burning a disc. It takes the computer a little time to figure out the disc layout, and that speed is dependent on the host computer (and the software it’s running), not the burner. It didn’t seem like much time in the days of 2X burners, but compared to the three minutes it takes to lay down a mountain of data on the disc with a modern burner, it’s started to look significant. Secondly, it takes some time to close a disc. I haven’t taken a stopwatch to it, but the 12X unit I use in one of my offices at work seems to take about the same amount of time to close a disc as the 2X unit I use in another office. The 12X unit doesn’t burn a disc 6 times as fast as the clunky 2X unit. And the 24X unit definitely won’t be twice as fast as a 12X.

Since I don’t have all those burners and don’t have the time to make a scientific test, I went to CDRLabs.com to get some figures. Their testbed has changed over time–they keep it constant across drive generations, but the 12x unit was tested in a different system than the 40x unit, and they overclock. Storage Review’s methodology is much better. But the numbers are good enough to illustrate the point.

Results of burning 651 MB of data, along with the cost of the drive:
12x: 6:43 ($124)
16x: 5:11 ($129)
24x: 3:54 ($149)
40x: 3:26 ($175)

Even given the advantage of a faster computer and newer software, the 40x unit still can’t double the speed of the venerable 12x unit.

Why the diminishing returns? Constant Angular Velocity. Very high-speed burners use the same technique as high-speed readers, so you don’t get a constant 40x. The 40x drive starts out at 20x and steps up to 40x as it reaches the outside of the disc. The average writing speed is closer to 30x. Obviously, the less data you burn, the less the 40x drive will help you.

I also pointed out to Steve that there’s more to this than the hard dollar cost. It’s Valentine’s Day time, and there’s the wrath of the wife to deal with. There’s always a hidden cost involved, no matter what you’re buying, and sometimes it doesn’t have a whole lot to do with what you’re buying.

I could quote Proverbs 31:10 and say that a wife is a treasure and therefore you should always treat her as such, and therefore you should buy the $59 refurbished 8x drive for you, a $39 dozen roses for her, and–here’s the kicker–then spend $80 filling her car with flowers the week after Valentine’s Day, when your money buys three times as much. See? I’m a thinking man.

Then again, you can go for bragging rights and find yourself singing along with Dave:

That’s okay, hey hey hey, love songs bite anyway!

(In which case, you’ll probably find yourself spending Valentine’s night on the couch. Or on the porch. I can’t say I’ve ever experienced this, but I don’t think it would be very pleasant to be stuck out on the porch wearing something skimpy in Missouri in February.)

So, to recap, for those of you taking notes: Spending $179 on a 40x CD-RW drive for you and giving a home-made Valentine’s Day card to your wife will lead to very bad things.

Burning a CD full of sappy love songs and then bragging about how it only took four minutes to burn (the 40x drive doesn’t burn audio at full speed) won’t make it any better. Sorry.

But I seem to have gotten off the subject somehow.

As far as tape drives go, I can tell you that Quantum DLT tape drives rock because that’s all we use at work. They’re built like tanks and last forever. The tapes are cheap and take a lot of punishment. They back up at a rate of about 5 MB/sec, which makes them faster than the hard drives of 10 years ago. And they work fabulously with Seagate Backup Exec, which severely reduces headaches when people want stuff restored. Considering they start at about $3995, they’d better have something going for them.

Steve’s needs are a bit more modest. An 8-gig IDE Travan drive from the likes of Seagate is cheap. The tapes run about $30, but for the quantities of data Steve will be backing up (he and I both rely on CD-Rs for backups now) and the frequency at which he’ll be doing so, a drive and tapes designed for light duty ought to do fine. When it comes to tape drives, you can buy a cheap drive that uses expensive tapes, or an expensive drive that uses cheap tapes. A lesson most people have to learn quickly is that it’s much easier to get a cheaper drive past the glare of your wife or boss and then buy the more-costly media as you need them. Media’s an OK purchase. Hardware is bad.

That’s why Zip drives have been so successful, and why Iomega is still in business.

I think if Steve wants to spend Valentine’s night on the porch, he needs to buy a DLT drive, then take out a cash advance to make his first minimum payment.

Then he can gloat about how much money he’s saving on tapes.

Slap-happy

Dave Farquhar Humor/Satire

Hey, it’s time for the weekend! No? What do you mean? I’ve put in my 40 hours… You mean yesterday was Wednesday? It’s Thursday, not Saturday? Rats.
Do me a favor. Pray that the people I support quit opening attachments they get from their non-corporate mail accounts. Once we get these virus infestations under control, I can go back to a regular work schedule and having a life.

One amusing story from this week. On Tuesday, the administrative assistant flagged me down. “Would you lock up Tim’s laptop in the back room? He went home and left it in his cube again.” So I went and got his laptop and locked it in our staging room. I left a note on his desk.


Tim,

All your laptop are belong to us.

I didn’t sign it or anything.

This morning, Tim walked into my area. “You have my laptop back here?”

I got out the key and opened the staging room. “How’d you know?” I asked.

“Something about the way the note was worded told me to come find you,” he said.

I guess I’m just too predictable. And obviously I’m slap-happy because I think that’s absolutely hilarious. I think I really need to get some sleep.

The only Internet chain letter that actually works

Dave Farquhar Humor/Satire

One of my coworkers got a phone call this afternoon and immediately started laughing. It was his wife on the phone, and she was telling him about how a bunch of people in her department had gotten a chain letter that promised if they forward it to a certain number of people, a picture of Tweety Bird or something will appear on their screen. They were wondering why it didn’t work. For all I know, they were ready to call the helpdesk and complain their computers were broken because the chain letter didn’t work. His wife, knowing better, started laughing and immediately shared the story with her systems analyst husband.
That gave me an idea. Why not devise a chain letter that absolutely will do what it says it will do, especially if it manages to go five or six generations without the chain breaking? Here goes nothing:

Dear friend:

This is another one of those Internet chain letters. You’ve undoubtedly received tons of them before and deleted them. This chain letter is different. It actually works.

Below you will find a list of 100 e-mail addresses. The way this works is simple. Remove the top address, then add your e-mail address to the bottom. Forward a copy of this message to all 99 people ahead of you. If there are no addresses at the bottom of the message, insert the e-mail addresses of 99 of your friends or co-workers, and forward a copy to them. Be sure to include your own address at the bottom. If you really want to get results, attach a 40-megabyte MPEG movie as well.

Very soon, one angry person, or if you’re very lucky, an angry mob, will appear at your doorstep or cubicle and beat you to a bloody pulp for clogging up their inboxes with useless junk. If you’re not so lucky, you’ll get a nice visit or phone call from your mail administrator politely telling you to cut it out.

Pretty neat, huh?

Your friend,

Dave Rhodes