The Prerequisite Quotes file This was originally the random .signature file, hence the general lack of long quotes and the attempts to squish things into two lines. Anything not in quotes is either mine, or I'm claiming it. I've tried to attach attributions where possible. Things tagged with "x says..." or "" are generally from Nerdsholm, the talk.bizarre mud. Things with @ are from Twitter. Oh, and since all these are simply cut and paste things, all typos, etc. have been retained from the originals. Waider. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "It's a horrible thing to watch, almost like watching an infant tottering toward a porcupine." - Kyle Jones on MIS people writing C "not much I could do about it could I lie down and look up the stars are so bright" - deirdre "When in hole, stop digging" - Cornish proverb "...see you in the future, man." and he says, "Yeah, if there is one." - Apollo 440 "Love wouldn't be blind if the braille wasn't so damned much fun." - Armistead Maupin "remember: all harddisks are the same in size: 7MB free" - Nils Faerber "These are indeed harsh times for the dim." - jott@snugbug.cts.com HTML is the computer equivalent of running over a page of text with a few coloured pens, some nice pictures and some glue. Any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy is indistinguishible from chaos. Never attribute to malloc that which can be adequately explained by stupidity AND I don't have a .sig Someone got their mojo working and all I got was this Indian spirit guide. "Somewhere the rainbow's over." - Joe Vaughan Press any other key to continue. "I can't seem to undo 2,500 years of western rational thinking just by reading a couple Gary Snyder poems." - a110@Lehigh.EDU "Life sucks. Get a helmet." - Denis Leary, as quoted by Susie on "It never rains, it POURS." "what have i become? / my sweetest friend everyone i know / goes away in the end" - NIN, "hurt" (the downward spiral) "if you can't live the lie, let it die/and if you can't live a life filled with strife/honey, just say oops/and jump through hoops/and get to the end of the line" - FLC, "Bear Hug" (Come Find Yourself) cooler than a dead polar bear and twice as fast. "GOD LOVES OTHER SELF" - Crazy John "Repetition breeds inertia." - Douglas Coupland, _Microserfs_ "I'm okay. I am not being starved, or beaten, or unnecessarily frightened." - Douglas Coupland, _Microserfs_ "What is the one thing more than any other thing that makes one person different from any other person?" - Douglas Coupland, _Microserfs_ "There's a certain uniformity of suck that must be maintained or the UNIX community won't take you seriously." - Rocco on naming books. "talking of research, i need to go frighten things in the lab. later, fun people..." - Lockhart "Windows 95 problems can be successfully addressed with a streetroller." - elrond@cgo.wave.ca "this is wonky. i am using pentium based linux system to make a 68000 executable with the source and .o and smbfs mounted dir from an NT server and the includes from a NFS server" - Jonathan Vail "It never ceases to amaze me how a 50% pay rise, overtime and low mileage can make you swallow your pride so easily." - Alan Weadick Derrick says, "So what do you do with a variable clevis and a 40,000 pound chicken?" "Junk food is considered part of the vegetable food group, because it comes from a plant. A big chemical plant. In New Jersey." - Kludge "I'm using the Intellimouse, maybe it's not that smart." - Howard Melman "When you say `I wrote a program that crashed Windows', people just stare at you blankly and say `Hey, I got those with the system, *for free*'" - Linus Torvalds $HOME is where the .heart is. "`My fault' - what you say when you detonate a grenade in the midst of your comrades and send their body parts flying." - Julian Waldby "Oh yeah, James, just a matter of geography really, what country are you in again? Is it the flat one?" - Adele "Multithreadedness, like object-orientedness, is a matter of perception. If it seems multithreaded, it is. All else is an implementation detail." - jwz "It's too bad that most people don't get the fact that an object-oriented programming style has exactly nothing to do with the programming language you use." - jwz "The electronic universe shall be mine, all mine, once I've finished mowing the lawn of course." - Mal "My evil is unjust and cruel in the smallest and most annoying way possible." - Catherine "It's a poor workman who blames his tools, unless they're WINTEL-based." - Bob "Sorry, but I use IE, so I'm clueless." - Someone on netscape.public.mozilla.general "vm-visit-when-saving is a vestige of the 1980's, when a 400MB disk drive could end your life if it fell out of a rack onto you." - Kyle Jones Zvi is entirely too amused by life for it to be Monday. Maybe it's Friday and my calendar is wrong. >> So Jon asks Nat, "Is his first name /really/ Waider?" > Isn't that your _only_ name?! - Waider/Sheila "Oh, you're always quotable. Not often quotable in polite company, but when do I mix with polite company?" - Lockhart vampyr says to waider, "re: cycling fish, yes." "my head's having a party right now, but I'm not there." - Aoife Morrison "A one question geek test. If you think it's funny, you're a geek. Seen on a California license plate on a VW Beetle: "Feature"" - Joshua D. Wachs This hangover sponsored by Guinness, Heineken and some strong-smelling green stuff I found in the fridge. "These drives do not respond to the disk query in 24 hours, considered here to be more than a reasonable response time." - BorderWare Knowledgebase "There's no place like ~." - Brian P. Casey "I remind tha audience that the Official Advice from Sasquatch, Lord of the Crepe-Paper Sausages, is to not run VM in this environment." - Kyle Jones Anyway, yes. Known bug. Try entering only numbers as your phone number, no brackets, dashes, widgets, knobs, fish or sliding trammel bars. "I'm not exactly the most responsible guy in the world, and a dead cat is not the best way to solidify a new relationship." - Søren They're not all friends, just people who can't get away from me. "...my friends don't seem to be friends at all but people whose phone numbers I haven't lost." - Nick Hornby, _High Fidelity_ "The folks from Sendmail gave me a pocket knife. It has dozens of blades with a seemingly infinite number of functions, just like Sendmail. The first time I used it, it broke, just like Sendmail." - Kludge "anyplace where you cannot feel cold shall hold you in its arms forever." - Corprew Reed "...we are in fact well and truly doomed. She says that if I leave now, I can probably get a good head start before they realize that I'm gone." - jwz "Confusion is not bad, it just has a somewhat undeserved negative reputation." - jamesc heehoo says, "Well, it's not a party until everybody has liver damage and nobody can find the carpet." "I've written a commercial for Apple Computer. It goes like this: 'Macintosh - we might not get everything right, but at least we knew the century was going to end.'" - Douglas Adams troc says, "the -> is optional, but it keeps C people's brains from exploding and turning cube farms into biohazard zones" There's a difference between "not shy" and "stalking". Tom notes that B-52s are 100% accurate. The bombs always hit the ground. "Anyone who doesn't meet these standards will be cast into the outer darkness, where there is not only wailing and gnashing of teeth, but squishy mud and frogs that go 'ribbit'." - joshua geller "Your broker is a half-naked blue-and-orange crypto-anarchist?" - Neal Stephenson / _The Great Simoleon Caper_ "it's this new keyboard. damn thing types faster than i do. i wish i knew where my old one went. it was connected to the computer when i went to bed last night." - Nikolai Kingsley "MS: a debilitating and surprisingly widespread affliction that renders the sufferer barely able to perform the simplest task." - Mel White "It's inherently difficult to get reliable information about an event that consisted of the destruction of all recorded information." - Neal Stephenson "anyone got a job for a general layabout ....... I ask here cos you know... most of you work in IT already" - Cliffy Ferret wonders what kind of "kitchen knife" is three-and-three-quarters FEET long. troc says, "you've never seen the Samurai Delicatessen skit?" "I'm a software guy at heart. Things that actually exist make me nervous." - Matthew R. Sheehan "They posted while drunk, their souls are forfeit." - Bren "Whoa! Step out of the way.... ego truck coming through!! :>" - Dalton Yossioren says, "we want pubs. and scones, i've never seen one." Wasting my life on wishes. Elsie says, "hate is self-destructive, love. all things are interconnected blah blah blah. take the money." Andrea.B.Previtera says, "I can't remember...we found a good cheap beer in an undocumented irish pub...and we had pints and pints and pints to celebrate something..." "No, I keep thinking you're a real country rather than a potato-worshipping bit of mud." - Susie "So, these portents, taken together with the eclipse and casting this disembowelled handset over my desk... um, ... oh dear ... I think I need to order a new phone from MIS." - jamesc "Being arrayed against a deity over a few lines of code didn't seem worth it, but I still think forwarding all the headers is the right to do." - Kyle Jones "The things you do are, more or less, wrong. The mistakes you do are, more or less, always the same. Sell your earrings, dance the director's ballade." - Andrea.B.Previtera "Please rant when NT works, because /that would/ be a change." - Dermot McGahon "What is this talk of "release?" We do not make software "releases." Our software "escapes" leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance people in its wake." - MoncriefJM@gvl.esys.com "It doesn't corner well. It doesn't have to. It just warps space until the street is facing the right way." - Blair P. Houghton bc says, "Tell me about Ireland" kate says, "green, lumpy, no snakes." "I'll get right on it! Oh wait, I just remembered: I'd rather eat glass." - jwz jc says, "Anyhoo....be good. They like it more that way." caitlin says, "my cat is YOWLING. what is her *damage*?" troc says, "1d4 x3 - bite, claw, claw" Ferret says, "What kind of haircut? [No technical terms, please]" "I think i was far too young when i went to uni to make any type of serious decision about what i wanted to do with my life." - Jo Gread meredith says, "i liked [the company] a lot, but i fear the relentless hip of the environment may cause me to become caustic and irritable." "/* Humans please note: you should not try to generate your children with a fork. */" - Antti Vähä-Sipilä "It would be hard to design a worse outdoor chair without making it irresistably delicious to squirrels." - L. Fitzgerald Sjoberg Veep says, "waider would understand." kludge says, "I need a bible quote which supports wiring XLR connectors pin-3 hot." rwx says, "supercite can defrob flong." "There is no place for subtlety in Mr. Action God's movies; they would get in the way of the fists of death and the helicopters of pain. " - SMC "[company]'s basic pricing strategy is to hang the user up by his heels, see how much money falls out, take it all and then ask for another $50,000 for "support"." - Phil Greenspun "Please find some beauty in your day today" - lstewart This is going to hurt, isn't it. Maybe I should just run screaming now and save myself the bother. Derrick says, "Well, there are altar girls there. But it's a sin to hit on jailbait in the house of the Lord." AjD says, "INTERNET ADMINISTRATORS NUKED MY THERMAL UNDERWEAR!" "This following prayer was taken from the Native Americans... "...just like everything /else/ they owned..." - Some priest/Waider "There was nothing in the world that I ever wanted more than to never be breaking apart..." - The Cure, _Pictures of You_ "Crying for sympathy / crocodile cries / for the love of the crowd and the three cheers from everyone" - The Cure, _Disintegration_ "I have a problem compiling the brainsplat module under the pre-sliced option terminator; I am using the mutability framewedger on the standard infernalisation build" - Telsa heehoo says, "Sounds like something you'd get at IKEA. "FloppiKlik! Ja now you KLEEK mit kein WATERGESPLUNCT an dem KOMPUTERTISH!!"" AjD says to zvi, "because it's tragicomic and demonstrates the beauty of the english language in previously unexpressed ways. also, i thought it was funny." "If you gotta ask what it /is/ all the time, you'll never get time to /know/." - Frank Zappa "operating complicated machinery when possessed of the cognitive powers of a sea slug and the disposition of a polar bear with a toothache is most unwise." - John Walker, _The Hacker's Diet_ meredith says, "it's not often you get to see someone do something that is both utterly pretentious AND unbelievably stupid AND completely revolting, all at the same time." meredith says, "oh, well. i may be invisible to sober guys with jobs, but at least my cats still love me." "have you had choirs of angels? are they now down to one slightly drunken angel singing out of key?" - kate "...and the computer will say, 'Specify type of goat'." - Rich Jeni "what men want is to be really, really close to someone who will leave them alone" - some comic, as quoted by kate. I'd fix it for you, but I don't want to break into your site. "Installing a new kernel is not rocket-science, but it's not Jerry Springer either." - Nick Vargish troc says, "Or as the 'bot says in IRC: Look buddy, doesn't work is a strong statement. Does it sit on the couch all day? Is it making faces at you? Does it want more money? Please be specific!" buzzard says, "If you are willing to put aside your kneejerk human speciesism, the AIs are perfectly sympathetically 'no worse' than humans." "disclaimer: As I have stated before, my client was nowhere near the site at the time of the incident." - Michael, the Chaotic "Maybe there's a manual page for this" - Smarasderagd "Look at the XFE makefile, can you understand what's going on ? No, not you Brian." - Ramiro Estrugo yong-mi gauges waider's pissed condition to be at 'combustible' "...all I can think that I taught you was "after you have sent the e-mail pick up the phone"" - Paul Healy "Simple: crypto derives from the word meaning "lie", so when the boss asks about the crypto stuff, lie through your teeth." - Lockhart "Something with milk", said vicky. "No, baileys and vodka", said diarmuid > > Mmmm, mango and strawberry :) > A delicious way to drown. - Lockhart / Waider That actually holds as a general rule. French folk will often help out in fluent english after you've stuttered for ten minutes, telling them you are the son of a fermented potato and would like to wash your wife's chilblains in some fresh orange juice. > > Hey, do I get points for that? > Points? For having a near photographic memory??? I don't think so!! > You got a college degree for that (honours too)! :) - Waider / Sheila > > YOW!! I'm in a very clever and adorable INSANE ASYLUM!! > Hey, that's Japan!! It's cute, they're clever, and all completely > mad!! - Zippy / Sheila `F' is group reply. This is because `G' is for sort and `g' is for get new mail. And `G' is for sort because `sort' used be called `group', and anyway `S' is for save mailbox and `s' is for file message in folder, because `f' is group reply and `F' is group reply including original text. "It's ridiculous, you go and suddenly there's no email, or at least considerably less... I suppose we just have to face the fact that life does revolve around you..." - Sheila "If at first you DO succeed, try not to look surprised" - someone @ mot.com I will HOLD you to this, yay as I hold this DUMB IDIOT PERSON'S NOSE to this GRINDY-WHEELY-THING. "Bring your beer goggles, bring your spare liver. Its drinking time :)" - jc AjD says, "if she can handle doing her job in a big crowd of drunks she's got all the credentials necessary to be a project manager in a programming group." Beware the lollipop of mediocrity. Lick it once and you suck forever. "here, have a monkey. my shorts are overflowing." - Meredith AjD feels frustrated in his attempts to establish the delinitations of horror in puppy-burying. meredith says, "they're polite, well-dressed people who talk about god. what's scary about that?" "You are so cool a tribe of penguins want to have sex in you." - AjD "I inhaled. I grabbed the brass monkey. I blew the jute." - Tom Fawcett "yeah, you're in no position to be talking. telling dirty limericks to a cat lady on the other side of the planet at half past two in the morning? really, now." - Meredith. "It's not copying, it's proactive innovation which leverages established interface paradigms." - Mike Cahn "I resemble that asparagus" - jc Drawing attention to virtue lowers your moral altitude. "One or more sentences in this post have been over-leavened with sarcasm and/or irony. The author fully expects to be misunderstood because of this, you illiterate morons. He doesn't care." - AjD "Life? hell, i haven't had time to do laundry. I'll get all sorts of life soon enough if that keeps up." - AjD This is the first line of the rest of your mailbox. "I always thought of Reality as Diplomacy without the board, rules or consistent players." - Dalton I hurt. I overdanced, I think. "People are so dead it's not funny anymore. I could deal with it if they just decided to stay dead but some of them are convinced they're partially alive and make promises they can't keep i.e. getting out of their crypts in one piece (and having their brain with them)." - Dalton Some people just don't know which side of the good/evil thing to side with, despite the obvious "fun now, pay later" advantages of the evil side for those of us who need instant gratification. "I second that scream. Waider. The voice of sanity." - Dalton "Each and every single person at [company] is a hydrocephalic ewok who couldn't slice his way out of a paper bag with a machete." - Jon Orwant "The interior decorating site is something to behold. Preferably with welders glasses." - AjD "FEH. you decent guys are all alike." - Meredith "For those that dont remember, PI is the big number that begins with three." - http://www.facade.com/legacy/amiinpi/ If at first you don't succeed, heck, her friend is pretty cute. > > Running screaming is, I find, often a satisfying (albeit ineffective) > > reaction. > Well, in fact, that was exactly my first reaction. I only thought of > debugging when I ran into some very hard office furniture. - Waider/Robert Mecklenburg meredith says, "in other news, our mini-blimp blew away." Well, it works. It's horrible, I want to cry, but it works. "THERE WAS NO BIG BANG ONLY A BIG SUCK THAT CREATED THE UNIVERSE WITH A TRUCULENTLY FIERCENESS." - Rollin Thomas "theres no polite way to deal with sales ppl" - Louise kate says, "no, there's a lot of red in heliotrope." kate says, "we're talking like #993366 or so" "Well, from what google can find, xenon hexafluoride is useful for two things. Serving as something for chemists to talk about, and making quartz detonate." - Someone on /. "Who knew competence could be such a curse?" - Roberta Smeffinfeffer .sigless workstation "is ""zig"" a technical term?" - Ralph "Am I getting slower or are you just talking faster?" - jc "Autumn is here. The gutters are full of leaves and students." - Alan Cox "I hadn't counted on falling in love this early in the plot." - dhalgren "as far as i can tell, his entire family was planted on earth as observers, and trained in the ways of humans by rogue squirrels." - AjD "Failure takes the same amount of time as success" - Dave Couse "Linus Torvalds is a lot like Bill Gates. Both are about the same height." - USA Today "So thats my news.......whip lash and nicotine withdrawal! yipppiee!" - Louise "I know nothing about what they do at CERN other than bang atoms together and produce graphs." - Alan Cox "I see lots of penguins. Is that good or bad?" "That's good dad, click yes." - BPC's dad & BPC, installing Mandrake "Since I am project leader, I must not be permitted to go insane." - Theo de Radt "In Alaska, if it happens to you, it's your fault." - _Alaska_ >> I tend to not touch my procmail setup very much. It does a small amount >> of spam filtering, and that's it. > it'll be doing a small amount of falling out the window...grrr - Waider/Louise Aside from which, every time I try to work out the order of things to make this work, my head explodes, and I'm running out of paper towel here. "I have pushed cars for men while they steered. In some sense this seems like a metaphor for my dealings with the male sex generally." - kate "where's my surprise party, where's my cake and ice cream, where's my dozen roses, where's my unconditional love?" - meredith troc says, "maybe men are from perl and women are from python." "I feel like Mac users are expected to like OSX despite the slow speed and clunky interface. We Americans, have the same problem with George Bush." - James Babb, letter to http://www.theregister.co.uk/ "it was funny in a way that you wished a fire would break out" - Louise "After explaining the situation to the machine clearly with appropriate use of a screwdriver..." - Alan Cox "This is a musical equivalent of squeezing a fully-loaded tandem trailer onto a cupcake." - AjD on an inappropriate guitar solo from Superconductor Someone made the Internet and all I got was this lousy .sig "even when american adverts try for the oblique and wordless, they're so obvious they may as well put the logo on a fish and slap you with it." - AjD "Got to love a world where chatting with a doorman eventually leads to friends you can crash with half a world away" - Broenwynn "i *have* to purchase more memory. every time someone tells me a new joke, i forget where i live." - Nikolai Kingsley quit with the wouldn't and shouldn't and get right onto the does and doesn't. "Having my eyes opened too far sprains my head." - Jeff Vogel "At the end of every seven years thou shalt make a release." - Deuteronomy on software schedules "i do this some times to check your still alive and have not been killed in some tragic accident involving alcohol, geekery, GPS and high voltage" - Bob "Be careful what you say, it might end up in Waider's .sig" - Bob, reporting someone else's comment "waider: the man that kills laptops" - Louise "Quantum teleporting is problematic for humans because the original is destroyed in the process of creating the replica." -- Australian News article Veep says, "you could scream MY PANTS ARE FULL OF EELS with a big smile or a big grimace on your face. good stuff" Ferret looks at the list of Grammy awards and decides that the only category missing is "Best Album of Broadway Musical Songs Recorded in a Suburban Shower by a Pasty White Guy With a Beard." "Flames will be automatically sent to the Windows equivalent of /dev/null, once I find where that actually is." - Tony Collins "Or better yet, stay at home and pry your kneecaps off with a crowbar. It's about the same level of pain." - SMC You say to AjD, "but seriously, looks good from where I'm slumping." "The majority were fairly uncategorizable freaks, but you could tell that even the most normal-looking people there were still the weirdest people at their day job." - jwz "that's the next major slated life change unless i get married, die, or start a cult unexpectedly." - rwx dhalgren says to waider, "dude, your computers aren't even countable, they're like some kind of giant unitary cruftdevice" "If you're seriously sick: typhoid, plague, creeping body rot, rely on the guidance of your doctor about exercise. " - John Walker, _The Hacker's Diet_ "People may hate Windows but they run it despite that because, quite frankly, they don't care about computers" - Linus Torvalds "Hold my monkey, I'm building a dam." - DSPs in Scotland "This article isn't work safe. In fact I'm not sure if it's safe at all." - Someone on Metafilter "my head is full of songs I don't like, with lyrics about things you've said." - Veep Veep says, "WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. ERASE IS BACKSPACE." "Even buddy can be hard after a few beers. You start wondering if there's two "d's" or one and if it's "ie" or "y". That's why we came up with: Dude! Although sometimes we end up calling each other "dud"." - Chuck O'Bryan "It didn't used to work like this. I want my old brain back. This is so unfair." - jwz "2.5.4x is still slightly less stable than a whale monocycling on a tightrope." - Alan Cox "[deletia] - It stands for everything that was lost." - Douglas Coupland "Went to Lost World with Dave last nite before work. The two of us were destroyed and the movie sucked too. We are no longer in awe of dinosaurs." - Donal sometimes a metaphor is just a metaphor. It's a kludge to stop some old systems from breaking, as far as I know. Much like the rest of Unix, really. I generally don't tend to recommend music, since not everone will listen to French rap, Finish rock and roll, Spanish/French/English pop and then wash it down with some ambient/trance/techno/rave/blah. "[comp.lang.javascript] is the ultimate penance group for being a self-flagellating idiot." - Lloyd Wood "He reasons that if they're not smart enough to use search engines they don't deserve free information, the right to breed, or oxygen for that matter." - Lloyd Wood I spent a lot of time being 'depressed, despite', then some time being 'depressed, because' and 'depressed, in addition to which'. Currently I think I'm at 'neutral, despite'. I'd already put in my 40 hours for this week by 10pm Tuesday. I'm torn between thinking "SQL is pretty neat" and "my GOD, who came up with this?" I hate "it should be doing this" vs. "well, it's not". "No one promised us tomorrow." - Hawaiian Proverb "Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand." - Anonymous, by way of Donal > Bush: Saddam 'is not disarming' > Oh come on. With some mood lighting and a couple of drinks he'd be as > disarming as anyone. - kate "need help send coffee" - rimrunner "So, while thinking about all this, I realized that my job could be defined as systematically, judiciously, deliberately forgetting things." - smarry "I've always suspected there was a huge 'Big Brother' database containing everyone's private details... and now I'm responsible for writing my own entry?" - Lee Maguire Your failure to install prerequisite software does not constitute an error in my code. "the good thing about true hopelessness is that you don't have to try again." - jwz You're definitely in trouble when you look at a text parsing problem and think, "this would be easier in Emacs Lisp". "i'm not sure how to express how good this feels except to say it feels like having a missing limb restored. possibly something really vital, like the head." - Meredith "I suspect that the Internet was invented so that it would be cost-effective for people who get jokes like these to make contact with one another and chuckle, mildly." - Cory Doctorow "If George Orwell did stand-up comedy, it would be like Terry Gilliam predicting the future." - John Gaeta on _Brazil_ "OK, so I like to see massive destruction delivered by gigantic, unforgiving monsters. What's wrong with that?" - John Gaeta on _Godzilla_ "nunc est bibendum" - Marius Rossillon "html is amusing, not unlike typesetting with a smith-corona." - AjD "what's the latency of dolphins?" - Kathryn _Lord of the Rings_ meets the Internet: The One Ring is engraved with "ALL YOUR RACE ARE BELONG TO US" "He hates everyone. His best friends are the ones who know this and don't care." - magpie waider says, "I'm cloning myself." catbear says, "i'm buying stock in breweries." "the good thing about [being 30] is that you don't really have another birthday for 10 years now..." - John Kennedy "how can you say 'there's a family of birds in my drier vent' incorrectly?" - willo "anything CYBER* is HOOP HURRR I'M NEO AND THIS IS SNOW CRASH AND HUBNBHAGHUBHUAG." - Rands "I can configure firewalls but I can't configure routers. Firewalls are done by HTML." - an unnamed engineer "I wish I could summon the passion to rage, but it seems too much effort for someone my age." - Bren, _It's All For Nothing_ Anything with electronics in it becomes a cooking device if you apply sufficient power. Sometimes a spectacular and brief cooking device. Well, it's pretty weird so far. I have a choice of a macintosh or a linux box with no emacs. "Dfan isn't a name, just like gnee isn't a noise" - Sian My room is a mess. Clothes, computers, cables, paperwork. But I did quit my job today, so my life isn't entirely without organization. If you people are off watching guys hitting each other with sticks, I'll probably sit in a pub and cheer on the Guinness. "Write once, run screaming" - Theodore T'so on Java pico - combines the ease of use of vi with the simple keystrokes of emacs. "Can you imagine a room full of machines .... BREATHING?" - jamesc "I have no ambition. I just look over my shoulder a lot." - Danny O'Brien "You know, what we're all seeking isn't as different as the words we use make it sound." - Hitomi "I like reading in a pub rather than in a library or study, as it's generally much easier to get a drink." - Pete McCarthy "There should be an IRC channel somewhere that just has someone leaning on the "a" key for the duration of the conflict. That's what war sounds like, even from a safe distance." - Danny O'Brien Sometimes, I think the Irish were put on this planet as a counterexample. Or possibly a worst-case scenario. Or an entire nation of devil's advocates. Just because you've been around for aeons causing unspeakable horror doesn't mean you can live in my fridge and drink all my beer. "I've never met a human being who would want to read 17,000 pages of documentation, and if there was, I'd kill him to get him out of the gene pool." - Joe Costello "It is so hard, though, to say goodbye to something that never was - that could have been so great." - charlotte "i am finding that i almost always have cat hair in my nose" - rzr_grl "that's why i eat my grapenuts. it gives me the energy i need for twelve hours of horrifying acts of vengeance." - kingmob Being on the bleeding edge means you get to find out about the new bugs first Just because I got tired of arguing with you doesn't mean you're right. "I can't bring myself to [put constants on the left side of a comparison], either. It makes the code look as if Yoda wrote it." - Eric Hancock "You know, i don't think coffee's measured in pints at all. it's measured in Small, Medium, Large, Fat American, and Reserve Tank." - AjD "Waider, you have far too many pieces of esoteric hardware." - Ralph A forwarded email is the nearest thing to immortality most of us will get. I think my Makefile has become self-aware. "Why, Win2000 + Cygwin gives you all the functionality of MacOS X!" - Lloyd "I'll procrastinate when I get around do doing it." - Donal "People who find themselves at the juncture of worlds passing and worlds coming tend to be crushed like insects" - Henry Adams "I'm the guy behind the guy next to the guy who thinks he's the guy but actually works for the guy who really is just a huge dork. Yeah, it sucks." - Rands i think food will be my appetite supressant of choice today do ponies like carrots or have I been drawn into a big pony stereotype? "I can't do this all on my own / I'm no superman." - Lazlo Bane "Somewhere between a killer whale and a stove." - Ray "this lineup has, like, two lead guitars and four rhythm guitars. it's the musical equivalent of eating coffee grounds." - AjD on Superconductor Thinking that America holds a monopoly on mediocrity is the sort of typical smallmindedness that gets you into this sort of mess in the first place. I hate having tech dreams. It reassures me that I'm still a geek. "Good things come to obsessive-compulsives who fixate." - Igby, _Igby Goes Down_ "I am the epitome of calmnitude." - Orla "this is sort of like man pages for dharma" - kate "I was probably one of the first people in Japan to have a 128K leased line in their toilet." - Joi Ito as long as the estimated estimates are approximately in the ballpark of the general vicinity of the proposed dates we should be fine --- Topic for #dev is It's not a bug, it's tradition! "he believes that if it takes 2 men 2 days to dig a trench 6 foot long then a 10 foot long one just shouldn't be attempted" - Ray "Please enjoy the services of our cabin staff" - notice on plane "Loyalty is not looking for your next job on your current employer's time" - Frederick Reinhold "We're having a party in Ronan's tonight, go and buy alcohol." - Gemma "Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions". Now they have two problems." - jwz Now my hub has died. How do hubs die, exactly? Friction from the packets? "...if I am only wrong once today, it will be a good day." - Jeff Wheelhouse I'm drunk, but I know perl. "When people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what's wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong." - Neil Gaiman "It would be very interesting if Morocco was secretly in Britain, probably just outside of Birmingham, and nobody knew it except Borders." - Neil Gaiman "I said I was sober last week and I was off by a few beers." - Donal "bad magic is fatal." - Jerry Carter "Somewhere, there's a girl you just want to kiss, wondering what to do next." - Warren Ellis In terms of ill-advised behaviour, I'm drinking wine and writing kernel code. "Yes, I do have a problem with unprovoked nuclear holocaust." - matrushkaka "my rental car is an automatic transmission yacht" - Candice "i keep hoping last.fm is some kind of unix in-joke. and then i remember that if it was explained to me i wouldn't find it funny anyway." - AjD "lovely woman, if you ignore that whole personality thing" - kathryn "I swear there are some people whose hearing is so selective they hear 'i can magically fix this using my arcane wavy things' when you say 'this dog is so dead the maggots have moved on.'" - AjD I let the things that annoy me overwhelm the petty details that might actually be more revealing of her reality. The fact that it is necessary to define the undefinable is an artefact of our increasingly litigious society. "The time-tested way to overcome language problems is of course to find a volatile girlfriend who is fluent in the language." - Maciej Ceglowski I had [...] five interviews. It was like a day at work, except in someone else's office, and spent explaining why I should be there. "great -- now all we need is someone with a working camera and a dog leash." - Meredith "When people ask Tom Waits where he's been 'til recently, he tells 'em "stuck in traffic"." - William Gibson "lack of planning on everyone else's part is apparently justification for a crisis on mine." - stevi "I can't wait for my new iBook. I'm not planning to do anything with it, I just plan on looking at it." - Ruadhrí "whilst the question may be wrong, it possibly is not stupid." - an unnamed Cisco consultant "You look like I need a beer." - unknown, as relayed by AjD "How can you not like domokun? Do you hate puppies, too?" - anotherbug "There's got to be a sense that we're going somewhere, you know? Even if it's down the pub." - Warren Ellis "As writing exercises go, there's nothing better than taking the time to translate the mess in your head into words" - Rands "There are some vexing issues in particle theory these days, although I don't quite remember or understand or care what they are. I mean, are these people just putting us on?" - Rudy Rucker "I can't brain today, I have the dumb" - rivetpepsquad "I cannot cancel my face," said IBM researcher Nalini Ratha. "More thumbs up than a Chernobyl pianist." - William Gibson "But where the pat [on the head] is located is a big deal. I mean a clip on the ear, vs a slap in the face are two such occurrences." - Donal Distance on a network: the closer something is to you, the sooner your packets get lost. I have no idea what you call this genre, but they're both in it. "The plan will be that I give some kind of structured talk for 45mins or so, break to do two or three shots, then take questions from the audience wherein I tell the same five jokes I always tell, and then everyone gets drunk." - Warren Ellis "starkle starkle little twink, how I am I drunk you think!" - Candice I'm not really sure what I did with that anger. I think I turned it into cynicism. "Indeed. There's only so much redemption available through spelling." - spiritualmonkey "I'm too drunk to be frightened by elevators." - Broenwynn "Mail.app refuses to properly sort nineteenth century email. I consider this a bug." - Maciej Ceglowski "She talks a good deal faster than I can listen." - Michael "Each one of us, imperfect and little and terribly alone, is worth everything." - Patrick Symmes "no cake or presents from the users.....sigh...oh well good bye file share" - Louise, on Sysadmin Day "The church is near but the road is icy; the bar is far away but I will walk carefully." - Russian Proverb "Quitting is for quitters." - barmaid at Lotts "It's way hard to become yourself when you've been pleasing other people all your life." - Leggy Starlitz "I don't want to continue working on this. It means breaking the pristine semi-workingness of its current state." - AjD "You're not upset, are you?" "Merely sober. The symptoms are similar." - Iain Banks, _The Bridge_ "I don't think anyone expected every planet in the known universe to look like Vancouver." - Warren Ellis ...use the fine-tuned Irish wooing method of obsessing quietly over someone while sober, and then lurchingly confessing your undying love for them while lying in a gutter at their feet... "...who actually knows what love IS? You keep thinking you've pinned it down and then you find there's something else." - suzylou I don't so much fear the bitterness. It's more the crushing heartache that concerns me. I think Guy Evolution stopped a few hundred years ago once we'd figured out how to not get mauled by large cats, and anything learned since then has been largely accidental. "There should still be a place in comics for people who smoke and drink and take drugs and fuck inadvisable people and listen to bitter noise." - Warren Ellis "A lot can happen in 2 days, of course. You can take a trip, open a cafe, meet someone new, fall in love." - smarry "If you were here / I'd never have a fear / So go on live your life / But I miss you more than I did yesterday." - MCR, "Give 'em Hell, Kid" "We are made from the sharpest things you say" - My Chemical Romance, "Give 'em Hell, Kid" "it started out with a kiss / how did it end up like this / it was only a kiss" - The Killers, "Mr. Brightside" "I paint pictures / To remember / You're too beautiful / To put into words" - P. J. Harvey, "Good Fortune" "The whole "normal" thing strikes me as the love child of denial and wishful thinking anyway." - Carolyn Hax "If you don't want to talk about your parents TO your parents, then you're probably healthier than you give yourself credit for being." - Carolyn Hax "Love is a precious commodity only when it doesn't make your life worse." - Carolyn Hax "and this guy who appears to be drunk who wanders in. that's waider. no, he's not drunk yet. he's just LIKE that." - dhalgren "A postmodern, 21st Century sound, post-9/11, irony in the music, a full awareness of the past thirty years, the long vista of time we've passed through, the dead friends and relatives, our own inevitable deaths to come, the human condition, and that good old touchstone: the ecstasy of losing yourself in the music in a crowd." - Rudy Rucker "Are your MP3s from, like, the nineteen-hundreds or something? Did you rip them with a steam turbine?" - jwz "Mr. Waide, we have Franz Kafka on line two." - Zed, reacting to one of my telco sagas "There's nothing quite so sweet as a broken chariot" - Michael Lester "One day I realised that sadness is just another word for not enough coffee" - Wally "Excessive drinking at work makes you feel sociable, light-headed and confident. In other words, it makes you feel like you work in sales. The day after, when you feel like the whole world is a grim, head-crushing torture chamber, it makes you feel like you work in IT." - someone's goats.com sig "You can't slice into this idea without hitting stupid. It's like an avocado made entirely of pit, and the pit is made of retarded. I feel dumber for thinking about this idea. You are dumber for reading about it." - askesis "The people, by the way, who say they don't fear death, that it's all part of the great circle of life? They all have one thing in common: they're alive. Ask them again when they have bone cancer." - ludickid "Freep is a bunch of loony f's who all need to be rounded up into one storage container and rolled down a hill. Into a river. Leading into a volcano. On Mars." - ariane1 "I used to worry that I'd get high and lose my shit, and it used really bother me. Then one day I got high and lost my shit, and now I don't have /that/ to worry about any more." - of unknown origin, and not the exact quote In the geek world, a script is a short and pointless program to do something that would be even more pointless if you had to do it manually. I have instead resorted to cloning tail. "Tails are for creatures that are happy." - Louise "I don't know if he's just stupid or incompetent." - Louise "Don't let your memories kill you." - Joan "the shades are vital both to conceal emotion and to hide the fact that you're unslept, drugged half to death and blatantly insane." - Warren Ellis "It reminds him of ... the way he felt once when he was in love and didn't want to be ... how he'd always find that ache, that absence in the shape of the beloved." - William Gibson, _All Tomorrow's Parties_ "People don't know what they want, not before they see it. Every object of desire is a /found/ object." - William Gibson, _All Tomorrow's Parties_ "We don't care about cancer as long as our clothes don't smell." - Elaine "Settle for nothing less than the object of your desire." - Björk "Where do you host your website?" "uh, my front room." - Stella/Waider "You forget the things you were certain you would always remember, especially the tiny things, and all too often they're the things that matter." - Neil Gaiman "kiss a stranger and make them obsess about what they're missing" - Warren Ellis "But there is another kind of loneliness which is terrible to endure. And that is the loneliness of seeing a different world from that of the people around you. Their lives remain remote from yours. You can see the gulf and they can't. You live among them. They walk on earth. You walk on glass." - Patricia Duncker, _Halloucinating Foucalt_ "If you love someone - you know where they are and what has happened to them. And you put yourself at risk to save them if you can." - Patricia Duncker, _Halloucinating Foucalt_ "It's like someone left the door to the monkeyhouse open and a typewriter truck has crashed nearby." - Chris Item "It isn't the despair which hurts, it's the hope." - Lockhart "The world is full of incoherent ramblers, and most of them, if you really take the time to listen to them carefully, and at length, turn out to be completely full of shit." - Mark Dominus "Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention to arrive safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming: Wow!! What a ride!" - Dean Karnazes "Sadly, most artists can only communicate in pictures and photos of cats." - Warren Ellis "verticality is so overrated" - Candice "We often confuse what we wish for with what is." - Neil Gaiman, _Mirrormask_ > > I should probably add it to my list of places to visit, which is > > currently, er, empty > I've never heard such lies! "The pub" seems to be permanently on > your list of places to visit! - Waider/Ruadhrí "I've heard that Brazil is planning on coming to you for Carnivale this year." - Ruadhrí "I'm immune to everything I can't spell." - Cliffy "Good things die when people forget." - Neil Gaiman "Life is most rewarding when you allow it to be so. Our drive to achieve external validation is the greatest handicap to accepting that we are in fact happy as we are." - Broenwynn "No wind, no rain, I will fix your pane. Tomorrow good for you?" - Paul "Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand." - E. M. Forster "Men were not gods after all, but as human and as clumsy as girls; even men might suffer from unexplained desires, and need help." - E. M. Forster "I had got an idea that every one here spent their lives in making little sacrifices for objects they didn't care for, to please people they didn't love; that they never learnt to be sincere - and what's as bad, never learnt how to enjoy themselves." - E. M. Forster "I love myself", he said, "but it's unrequieted" - Tom Robbins "We are under an invincible blindess as to the true and real nature of things." - Marisha Pessl "To reduce a romantic ideal to a working plan is a very difficult thing." - Erskine Childers "It's not a fight, it's a forceful exchange of opinions." - Charlie Stross "The passage of time will usually extract the venom from most things and render them harmless" - Haruki Murikami "If you're not cynical, you're not paying attention." - Noam Chomsky "Seducing an idiot has never been worth the trouble." - Arturo Perez-Reverte "To tell you the truth, sleepless nights are as unusual for me as sumo wrestlers who look good in berets." - Haruki Murikami "Implementing mail attachments in PHP is like gluing your phone bill to a frozen turkey and teaching a dog to carry it to the post office." - ajd "You! You there! With the job at the dot-com two-dot-oh company! We will help you party. Call. We also do weddings." - jwz "my favorite deep philosophical question is "now what?"" - plogon "This is why the 21st century is so fucking terrific. Had this been a face to face conversation, I would have merely dismissed you with a "yeah, right, you know how I know it's bullshit? Will Ferrell." But your ability to cite sources almost immediately enables me to rapidly switch from denial to abject horror to disdain to depression, all within the span of three content-management-system-induced seconds." - mark242 "There were no pumpkins in Ireland before the internet" - jamesc "As far as I can tell there's a moment in the life of every ultrarunner where the quiet confidence in the heart manifests as clarity in the mind, and that clarity leads to the perfect sunglasses." - littleamerica An engineer has no need of "exact". That's what hammers are for. "if God ran the inquisition, ... everyone would be found small and a little scared, and condemned to hugs" - Peter Seebach "Bogball? With sticks or with fists?" - Bob "there's nothing in the north of that county; just roads, scenery and petrol stations." - Ruadhrí on Donegal "You can only fool me five or six dozen times before I start getting suspicious." - Scott Adams "The universe tends toward maximum irony. Don't push it." - jwz its a rock and roll lifestyle yes, but somebody's got to do the dishes "The parasympathetic nervous system is up there with the Babylonians as the default explanation for anything you can't think of a good reason for." - Cecil Adams "Now, on a good day, my career seems so utterly unlikely that I wonder if I'm not about to snap out of a DMT blackout and discover that I'm not actually a famous writer of William Gibson novels but that I'm working at a used-book shop that smells of cat pee and drinking beer out of a cracked coffee mug." - William Gibson "There is no greater human hazard than a defeated Irishman abroad." - John MacLachlan, _Not Quite Dead_ "Quaffing is like drinking only you spill more towards the end." - Neil Gaiman "They had nothing in common but the English language, and tried by its help to express what neither of them understood." - E. M. Forster "May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't to forget make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself." - Neil Gaiman "When designing a program, you've got to make some tough decisions .. and when you really can't decide if this is something your users will need someday, err on the side of leaving it out. Otherwise, your users will someday err on the side of your face." - The Guy Who Overcharged $7.5m "Do not taunt happy fun Irishman, because he can use the language far better than you can. Especially the vituperative bits." - kate Proof that Hobbits are Irish: they drink pints of beer, are obsessed with "taters", ogle barstaff, blow things up, sing, smoke, and have their homeland invaded by the minions of some bastard with an upper-class English accent who lives hundreds of miles away. "i am picturing you striding into the pub as THE CORRECTOR demanding to right wrongs, but then somebody hands you a pint and you go 'oh yeah, now i remember', and settle down for a pleasant evening's chat." - AjD "I'm a professional bad influence, don't you forget that." - Candice You owe me a mug of coffee and a clean monitor. I understand some people are into that sort of thing. There are probably websites. "I'm glad my laziness translates into a positive, life-enhancing experience for you." - Ruadhrí "In 1992, a crack programming unit was "internally reassigned" by an executive star chamber for a checkin they didn't commit. These nerds promptly escaped from a maximum-paperwork office to the cubicle underground. Today, still wanted to make others look good, they survive as authors of fortune(6). If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can read the damn system manuals yourself, you NIMROD." - smarry "The best you can hope for in a relationship is to find someone whose flaws are the sort you don't mind. It is futile to look for someone who has no flaws, or someone who is capable of significant change; that sort of person exists only in our imaginations." - Scott Adams, _God's Debris_ "I just like being a piece of furniture in your weird life." - _Juno_ "even if we did work to save the world, it would not help, because now we would never remember what directory it was we saved it in" - Danny O'Brien "C has only two bugs: "missing NULL", and "shouldn't have freed that."" - jwz If you're a smartarse all the time, people won't know when you're serious. "There aren't too many perks to losing a fortune on a nightclub, but by the flames of Trogdor, getting to keep all the skull-shaped bottles for myself had better damned well be one of them." - jwz "Style makes you feel great because it takes your mind off the fact that you're gonna die." -Isaac Mizrahi "The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope." - Walter Benjamin "If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there." -Ken Thompson "The great tragedy of being a parent is that if you do your job properly, they don't need you anymore." - Neil Gaiman "Italy has had calamitous Bush-levels of national incompetence during almost its entire 150-year national existence." - Bruce Sterling "When you can't imagine how things are going to change, that doesn't mean that nothing will change. It means that things will change in ways that are unimaginable." - Bruce Sterling "You cannot reason people out of positions they didn't reason themselves into." - Ben Goldacre, _Bad Science_ "Isn't everything we do in life a way to be loved a little more?" - Celine, _Before Sunrise_ "Jez why is hep b so complex? I like my viruses to be simple." - Sinéad I have high standards. Mostly they serve to annoy others. I'd happily give my right arm to be able to play guitar like Johnny Marr. Durrrr. That wouldn't work, would it. "caffeine is a drug with a seriously narrow therapeutic window." - Ben Goldacre "C++: an octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog" - Steve Taylor "I keep asking people if money has changed me, but they assure me that, no, I'm still the same obnoxious asshole I always was." - Jamie Zawinski "I've got a whole routine which is basically Ben Goldacre lite. It's his book as a collection of one-liners; essentially taking charlatans and quacks and putting them in a large sack and beating them with a stick." - Dara O'Brian "It's always sort of depressing to discover that your entire outlook is still determined by books you read when you were fifteen." - Danny O'Brien "I don't think you should ever insult people unintentionally: if you're doing it, you ought to mean it." - Neil Gaiman "Try to be smart in the moment doing whatever you are doing." - Slash "The particular thing you do is luck, but that you do something is not." - Richard Hamming "Never let processes get in the way of doing the right thing." - Jan Chipchase "A novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it." - Randall Jarrell: "Writing is basically a job for people who like punching themselves in the face." - Warren Ellis waider just said what I was going to say, except better. "Our bodies might not look so great anymore, but time has polished our hearts." - brett "by my reckoning, the democrats are much like the republicans but without any of those pesky testicles." - Lindsay Stewart "Pfft. I manage my windows with a nine volt battery, a paperclip and a steady hand." - jwz "I had read and admired Ballard and Burroughs, and I thought of them as very powerful effect pedals. You get to a certain place in the story and you just step on the Ballard." - William Gibson @nedbat: "Some people, when confronted with a problem, think, "I know, I'll use threads," and then two they hav erpoblesms." "If we're not doing something with the information we're taking in, then we're just pigs at the media trough." - Warren Ellis "kazoos always sound sarcastic. Like ducks." - Rudy Rucker "You don't want to waste a good crisis to do what we should be doing anyway." - Frank Convery "Facebook is brainless and easy, sort of the junk food of social networking." - 2wanda "The Twitter mob were out in force, attacking each other for using the wrong words to express support for an idea they all agreed with" - Julian Simpson "Disappointment is the price of wanting a better world." - Danny O'Brien "Release Note: this update will change all the things" - Alan O'Leary "we return you to normal service and the occasional threat" - Warren Ellis "the blessed way is waider's way" - Arran McCabe "Besides, stuff should be done right. That's why it's called "right"." - mjd "sudo is not magic that fixes broken things." - Mike Larsen "I've basically concluded that when people say there haven't been enough studies, what they really mean is that the preponderance of evidence hasn't proven what they intuitively believe." - rimrunner "The world is your oyster! pity they taste yukky" - Gemma "Back then we only had 4 computers and 3 of those were waider's desktops." - brianwhi "You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better." - Anne Lamott "The principal use of most of these things seems to be to torment undergraduate CS students taking classes in Algorithms and Data Structures. Useless crap like this is why I was not a CS major." - mjd "Learn C, instead of just stringing random characters together until it compiles (with warnings)." - Linus Torvalds "to a C programmer, looking at a floating-point division without a zero-check is a bit like watching a toddler playing with a steak knife." - Underhanded C Contest