Date: 10 Aug 92 20:14:16 PDT (Monday)
Subject: Life 8.I
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The following has been gathered from the Whiteboard News at MicroSoft
robkp@microsoft.com
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Fast News Forum:
When the percussionist for the Space Coast Philharmonic's
all-woman performance quit at the last minute, the Florida
group fill in with a man. The dressed him in a robe,
powdered his mustache and ordered him to "maintain a low
profile." No one noticed.
Satan's Arch Drive in Prescott, Arizona, was renamed Arch
Drive after homeowners complained the name was scaring
away potential buyers.
Police arrested a 17-year-old boy in Waskom, Texas, when the
automatic locks sealed him into a van he was trying to steal.
**************************
From: Dan Morrow
Subject: Today's Top Ten - 5/4/92
TOP TEN WAYS TO SPEND THE EXTRA HOUR OF DAYLIGHT SAVINGS
10. Twenty three-minute eggs.
9. Write 'Police Academy' sequels 7 through 15.
8. A wagonload of microwave waffles.
7. Tell your family you love them. (#7 has been brought to you
by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.)
6. Try on every pair of pants in your closet as you yell out
the window, "They fit!"
5. Whittle.
4. Memorize lyrics to "American Pie".
3. Call Time/LIFE. Hit on Judy the Operator.
2. Train your monkey to ride one of those little tricycles.
1. Shampoo, rinse, repeat. Shampoo, rinse, repeat. Shampoo,
rinse, repeat.
**************************
Fairview Heights, Illinois:
Police in Fairview Heights, got a big break in their investigation into
a burglary and safecracking ring earlier this week when they spotted 2
men rolling a safe across the highway in the city's business districts.
The pair was charged with breaking into a nearby restaurant and police
expect to make more arrests in a string of burglaries that have plagued
the area for months--including one that involved a stolen tow truck
used to haul the safe away from an Arby's restaurant.
**************************
Troy, Illinois:
You may not be able fight City Hall, but you can get their attention if
you have a 65-ton crane.
"We were just sitting there when we heard this rumbling noise, then the
building started shaking so we jumped up and ran out," office manager
Joan Eberhart said. "Next thing we knew, part of the wall was lying on
Bud's floor."
A crane driver accidentally backed into the building Monday while
trying to demolish another building. The crane's boom knocked a gaping
hole in the front wall of the city administrator Bud Klaustermeier's office.
"This is not a good way to start off this week," Klaustermeier said.
"We certainly do have an open door policy now," City Clerk Mary
Chasteen joked Tuesday.
No one was hurt in the accident in the town 20 miles east of St. Louis.
Klaustermeier is sharing quarters with the mayor while engineers
inspect the building for structural damage and repairs are made.
The crane driver "was just being careless and wasn't watching the guy
he was supposed to be watching," said Scott Bailey, site supervisor for
AALCO Wrecking Company.
**************************
From: Joseph Harper
Subject: WhiteBoard News
Los Angeles, California:
The bride's wedding dress was stolen. The groom's tux was
looted. And the photographer and limousine service
canceled at the last minute after rioting hit south central Los
Angeles.
But Victoria LeMelle and Roger Compton walked down the
aisle Saturday in a church fragrant with carnations, white
roses and the smell of smoke from the fires that nearly
ruined their nuptials.
"I'm happy anyway," the new Mrs. Compton, a 28-year-old
bus driver, said Sunday. "We just decided we weren't going
to let a bunch of ignorant people get in our way. May the
2nd was our day, and nobody was going to stop us."
==========
Kansas City, Missouri:
Edwin Newman, the retired newsman and now crusader for
clear, simple English, tried to enlist help in Kansas City for
his campaign to stamp out pompous, inflated language. He
urged an audience to correct people's grammar and write to
companies that advertise with nonsense.
Newman, who has written two books on English usage,
decried such repetitive terms as "pre-planning, self-
confessed, co-equal and successfully thwarted."
"This language is deplorable," said Newman, blaming its
prevalence on chatty broadcasters, bad songwriters,
computers, politicians, slick advertisers and corporations.
"Are we really better off when libraries are learning resource
centers?" he asked. "Is it safer to drive on roads that once
had crash barriers but now have impact attenuators?"
----------------------------------------------------
From some stuff Bob Cherry's collected over the years:
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Capabilities of C Programmers
=============================
NOVICE:
-- puts ``include stdio.h'' in his code - but is not sure why,
-- has heard of pointers---but has never seen one.
USER:
-- has had a bad experience with pointers,
-- knows the difference between ' and ".
KNOWLEDGEABLE:
-- uses: if (a==b) c=1; else c = 0;
-- uses pointers - but only in place of arrays,
-- loves writing code on VMS.
EXPERT:
-- uses: c = (a==b) ? 1 : 0;
-- uses pointers comfortably,
-- is jazzed when he finds a compiler bug because he found it,
-- has figured out what && and || are for,
-- refuses to write C code on VMS.
HACKER:
-- uses: c = a==b;
-- writes code which use pointers to functions,
-- writes macros instead of simple functions,
-- uses bitwise operators because they are like assembler,
-- writes simple code with ``cat '' and compiles it with ``!cc'',
-- uses argv and argc.
GURU:
-- avoids bitwise operators due to portability,
-- is annoyed with compiler bugs,
-- writes code portable enough to port from VMS but doesn't relish the thought,
-- can answer most C questions after a little thought.
WIZARD:
-- writes compilers with ``cat '' (and they work!),
-- reads device driver source with breakfast,
-- can tell what question you are about to ask - and answer it,
-- is on a first-name basis with Dennis, Bill, and Ken.
Wade Guthrie
**************************
(HC3: I've since been told this was written by Dave Barry.)
To succeed in a business or organization, it is sometimes helpful to know
what your job is, and whether it involves any duties. Ask around among
your coworkers. "Hi," you should say. "I'm a new employee. What is the
name of my job?" If they answer "long range planner" or "lieutenant
governor," you are free to lounge around and do crossword puzzles until retirement. Most other jobs, however, will involve some work.
There are two major kinds of work in modern organizations:
1. Taking phone messages for people who are in meetings, and
2. Going to meetings.
Your ultimate career strategy will be to get to a job involving primarily #2,
going to meetings, as soon as possible, because that's where the prestige is.
It is all very well and good to be able to take phone messages, but you are
never going to get a position of power, a position where you can cost thousands
of people their jobs with a single bonehead decision, unless you learn how
to attend meetings.
The first meeting ever held was in the Mezzanine Era. In those days, the job
of humans was to slay prey, bring it home and figure out how to cook it. The
problem was humans were slow and basically naked, whereas the prey had warm
fur and could run like an antelope -- in fact it was an antelope, only back
then nobody knew this.
At last someone said, "Maybe if we just sat down and did some BRAINSTORMING
we could come up with a better way to hunt our prey!" It went extremely well,
plus it was much warmer sitting in a circle, so they agreed to meet again
the next day, and the next.
But it was pointed out that, prey-wise, the humans had not produced anything,
and the race was pretty much starving. This was a serious point so the humans
put it right near the top of their AGENDA! At which point some of the people
in the meeting, who were primitive but not stupid, started eating plants.
Thus was born modern agriculture. It could never have happened without meetings.
The modern business meeting, however, might be better compared with a funeral,
in the sense that you have a gathering of people who are wearing uncomfortable
clothing and would rather be elsewhere. The major difference is that most
funerals have a definite purpose. Also, nothing is ever really buried in
a meeting.
An idea may look dead, but it will always reappear at another meeting later
on. If you have ever seen the movie "Night of the Living Dead" you have a
rough idea of how modern meetings operate, with projects and proposals that
everybody thought were killed rising constantly from their graves to stagger
back into meetings to eat the brains of the living.
There are two major kinds of meetings:
1. Meetings that are held for basically the same reason that Arbor Day
is observed -- namely tradition. For example, a lot of managerial meetings
fall into this category. You'll get used to this kind of meeting. You'd
better, because this kind accounts for 83% of all meetings (based on a study
in which I wrote down numbers until one of them looked about right). This
type of meeting operates the way "Show and Tell" does in nursery school, with
everybody getting to say something, the difference being that in nursery school
kids actually have something new to say. When it's your turn, you should say
you're still working on whatever it is you're supposed to be working on. This
may seem dumb, since OBVIOUSLY you'd be working on whatever you're supposed to
be working on, and even if you weren't, you'd claim you were, but this is the
traditional thing for everyone to say. It would be a lot faster if the person
running the meeting would just say, "Everybody who is still working on what he
or she is supposed to be working on raise your hand!" You'd be out of there
in five minutes, even allowing time for jokes. But this is not how we do it
in America. My guess is, it's how they do it in Japan.
2. Meetings where there is some alleged purpose. These are trickier,
because what you do depends on what the purpose is. Sometimes the purpose is
harmless, like somebody wants to show slides of pie charts and give everybody
a copy of a big fat report. All you have to do in this kind of meeting is
sit there and have elaborate fantasies, then take the report back to your
office and throw it away, unless of course you're a vice president, in which
case you write the name of a subordinate in the upper right hand corner,
followed by a question mark, like this: "Pat?" Then you send it to Pat
and forget all about it (although it will plague Pat throughout the following
weeks and months).
But sometimes you go to meetings where the purpose is to get your "input"
on something. This is serious, because what it means is they want to make
sure that in case whatever it is turns out to be stupid or fatal, you'll get
some of the blame. So you have to somehow escape from the meeting before
they get around to asking you anything. One way is to set fire to your shoes.
Another is to have an accomplice interrupt the meeting and announce that
you have a phone call from somebody very important, such as the president
of the company, or the pope. It should be either one or the other. It
would sound fishy if the accomplice said, "You have a call from the
president of the company. Or the pope."
You should know how to take notes at a meeting. Use a yellow legal pad.
At the top, write the date and underline it twice. Now wait until an
important person such as your boss starts talking. When s/he does, assume
an expression of rapt interest, as though the secrets of life itself were
being revealed. Then draw interlocking rectangles on the legal pad. If it
is an especially lengthy meeting, you may draw more elaborate doodles and
a caricature of your boss.
If somebody falls asleep in a meeting, have everybody else leave the room.
Then collect a group of total strangers right off the street, and have them
sit around the sleeping person until s/he awakens. Then have one of them say,
in a very somber voice: "Terry, your plan is very, very risky. However,
you've given us no choice but to try it. I only hope for your sake, that you
know what you're getting yourself into." Then they should all file quietly
from the room.
**************************
For all those born before 1945
WE ARE SURVIVORS!!! Consider the changes we have witnessed:
We were born before television, before penicillin, before polio shots,
frozen foods, Xerox, plastic, contact lenses, Frisbees and 'The Pill.'
We were before radar, credit cards, split atoms, laser beams, and ballpoint
pens; before pantyhose, dishwashers, clothes dryers, electric blankets, air
conditioners, drip-dry clothes--and before man walked on the moon.
We got married first and then lived together. How quaint can you be?
In our time, closets were for clothes, not for "coming out of." Bunnies
were small rabbits and were not Volkswagons. Designer Jeans were scheming
girls named Jean or Jeanne, and having a meaningful relationship meant
getting along well with our cousins.
We thought fast food was what you ate during Lent, and Outer Space was the
back of the Riviera Theatre.
We were before house-husbands, gay rights, computer dating, dual careers
and commuter marriages. We were before day-care centers, group therapy
and nursing homes. We never heard of FM radio, tape decks, elecric
typewriters, artificial hearts, word processors, yogurt, and guys wearing
earrings. For us, time-sharing meant togetherness--not computers or
condominiums; a "chip" meant a piece of wood; hardware meant hardware;
and software wasn't even a word!
In 1940, "made in Japan" meant JUNK and the term "making out" referred to how
you did on your exam. "MacDonalds" and instant coffee were unheard of.
We hit the scene when there were 5 & 10? stores, where you bought things for
five and ten cents. Sanders or Wilsons sold ice cream cones for a nickel or
a dime. For one nickel you could ride a street car, make a phone call, buy
a Pepsi or enough stamps to mail one letter AND two postcards. You could buy
a new Chevy Coupe for $600, but who could afford one; a pity, too, because gas
was 11? a gallon!
In our day sigarette smoking was fashionable, GRASS was mowed, COKE was a
cold drink and POT was something you cooked in. ROCK MUSIC was a Grandma's
lulaby and AIDS were helpers in the Principal's office.
We were certainly not before the differenc between the sexes was discovered,
but we were surely before the sex change; we made do with what we had. And
we were the last generation that was so dumb as to think you needed a husband
to have a baby!
No wonder we are so confused and there is such a generation gap today!
BUT WE SURVIVED!! What better reason to celebrate?
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