From cate3@netcom.com Thu Jun 29 07:45:32 1995
From: cate3@netcom.com
Subject: Life E.8
To: jwry.dli@netcom.com
Reply-to: cate3@netcom.com
---------------------------------------
Date: 29 Jun 94 11:06:05 PDT (Wednesday)
Subject: Life E.8
All of the following are selections from Keith Bostic's mailing list
bostic@vangogh.cs.berkeley.edu
----------------------------------------------------
Carriers battling for business in the wake of the move to 800-number
portability last year did not take into consideration the poor spelling
skills of many Americans, according to a software engineer at MCI
Communications Corp. When AT&T countered MCI's 1-800-COLLECT, which
bypasses local operators for long-distance toll-free collect service
with its own 1-800-OPERATOR program earlier this year, it probably did
not anticipate callers sloppily dialing 1-800-OPERATER - an MCI 800
number. According to the MCI engineer, MCI swept up about $500,000 in
mistaken calls in the first month of AT&T's program. AT&T now markets
the service by asking customers to call 1-800-CALL-ATT.
- Network World, May, 9, 1994
--------------------------
From: sef@kithrup.com
Drag me, drop me, treat me like an object.
--------------------------
Forwarded-by: shibumi@cisco.com (Kenton A. Hoover)
"I do not comment on pending prosecutions, uh, I mean, pending
investigations."
-- Attorney General Janet Reno, when asked to comment on the
plea bargin that Dan Rostenkowski's lawyers are attempting
to arrange.
--------------------------
]From Dallas Morning News, May 15, 1994, Weathervane column:
Workers at The Science Place in Fair Park were perplexed by several
inquiries in the days before Tuesday's solar eclipse. Some callers
found the timing inconvenient and wanted to know why the museum hadn't
scheduled the event for a weekend so more people could attend. Others
wondered if there was a rain date for eclipse-watching activities.
Texas' next major solar eclipse should be more accomodating - May 20,
2012, comes on a Sunday.
--------------------------
JOHNSTOWN, N.Y. (AP) -- Mysterious nighttime purchases of large
amounts of baby formula have puzzled investigators who suspect the
buyers are not desperate parents with hungry quintuplets.
The shoppers always buy the concentrated variety of the liquid
formula with a high-iron content. They buy as many cases as they
are allowed during the nightly visits, which began last fall.
Montgomery County Sheriff investigator Richard Polikowski said
Wednesday that chemists analyzed formula to see if it could be
combined with cocaine, microwaved and consumed as wafers. The
chemists said it could not.
Customs Service agents considered whether the formula was being
smuggling to other countries, but that did not explain why just
high-iron types would be in demand.
Robert Brock, a customs agent in Albany, said he didn't think
the purchases were drug related. He said he believes people are
buying the formula because they like it.
``I'm leading towards drugs myself,'' Polikowski said. ``It's
got to have something to do with it.''
In a typical visit, vans bearing New York City-area
registrations stop at supermarkets in Montgomery and Fulton
counties, 200 miles to the north. The occupants -- always men --
clean the stores out of Similac and Isomil with iron, police said.
Some men tried to buy 50 cases of baby formula from a Price
Chopper supermarket last week, but the store had imposed a two-case
limit, Polikowski said.
Authorities cannot detain the men for questioning because buying
baby formula in any quantity is not a crime, Brock said.
One man told a deputy he was preparing to visit his native
Dominican Republic and needed to stock up on formula to feed his
children during the trip.
Price Chopper imposed a limit because it was having trouble
keeping formula in stock for other customers, said spokeswoman
Joann Gage. She said that led one man to ask for special
arrangements to buy it in bulk. He told a corporate official that
he was selling it outside the country.
Brenda Burris, spokeswoman for Ross Laboratories of Columbus,
Ohio, which manufactures Similac and Isomil, said officials are
aware of mass-buying in several states, including Utah and
Colorado. But if there is black-market smuggling, she said, it is
not significant.
So the mystery remains.
``There's got to be a reason for what they're doing,''
Polikowski said. ``It's just a matter of the DEA or Customs
following it through.''
--------------------------
]From RISKS Forum:
From: kevinl@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au (Kevin Lentin)
The following story was related to me by a colleague of mine this morning.
She was editing some C source using a 'vi' compatible editor called
'vim'. vim is a vi clone that adds some very useful features to the
editor. Many of us use it in place of vi. On this occasion she was
logged in to a Sparcstation via a terminal annex and modem from home.
She observed that numbers in here code kept on changing. Specifically,
decreasing by one for no apparent reason. A screen redraw might change:
x = 1;
into
x = 0;
and then
x = -1;
It turns out that vim has a nifty feature whereby CTRL-A and CTRL-S add 1
and subtract 1 from a number respectively when in command mode. At the same
time, her modem was set up for XON/XOFF flow control and it seems that
somehow the CTRL-S's were getting through not only the modem but also
through her stty settings which might otherwise have interpreted the CTRL-S
as a STOP character.
The upshot of all this was that in an attempt to regulate data flow through
the modems, the XON/XOFF protocol was actually mutating her source if the
cursor was on a number when a CTRL-S came through.
The RISKS of this are painfully obvious. Critical code can end up being
mutated and having serious effects later on if the changes are undetected.
I am reminded of stories about a missing '-' causing a certain NASA mission
to fail in decades past.
Whether this situation can occur easily or whether it was an unfortunate
combination of settings, especially 'stty stop' which I suspect was changed
from the normal ^s, I do not know, but I will certainly be verifying all my
modem and terminal settings when I get home tonight.
--------------------------
Forwarded-by: whorfin@pixar.com (Rick Sayre)
If you give an infinite number of monkeys desktop
publishing software, they will eventually produce
an issue of _Wired_.
-- Marc VanHeyningen
--------------------------
Forwarded-by: whorfin@pixar.com (Rick Sayre)
Without further adieu, I got this today from a NY friend of mine who has just
gotten his PhD in math...
So here I am, walking down the street, minding my own business, when this
guy in a wheelchair with camera crew in tow thrusts a mike and a copy of
the latest Spin magazine in my face, demanding, "What does this MEAN to you?"
in a Robin Leach-esque accent.
"Kurt's dead," I deadpan.
"No, no, the MAGAZINE!"
I free associate. "Uuh. Big glossy ads, music, fluff journalism,..."
"C'mon! This is solid reporting here! We have stories on BOSnia, BURmese
SEX slaves, NirVANuh."
"OK, you've got me. We do have a copy of Spin at home and I read it on the
toilet."
"Ah HAH! Did you know that SPIN is the most POPular magazine among your age
group?" [eternal reminders that I look 19...]
"Nope"
"Are you surprised?"
"Yes"
"Why do you think that is?"
"There're a lot of toilets in America?"
[CUT]
So, a week later I walk into the math library only to find the entire staff
calling me "Spin-boy." Turns out that my confessing reading Spin on the can
got aired nationally on some Barbara Walters piece. Aargh!
--------------------------
Forwarded-by: Kirk McKusick [mckusick@chez.CS.Berkeley.EDU]
The following travelogue comes from a friend who took a trip around
the world a couple of years before the realignment of Eastern Europe.
We join our intrepid traveller as he departs Los Angeles.
``LA to London was non-stop and uneventful. British Caledonia DC10 and
it was my luck to have 4 empty seats next to me. (The rest of the
plane was full). I stayed up long enough to decide I didn't want to
see the movie and crashed for 8 hours.
Ten days later, I was on my way to Cairo. Tarom - Air Rumania. That
was a mistake. I could feel I wasn't going to like it when I tried
to reconfirm the flight in London. Tarom is the `official' airline
of Rumania (like Aeroflot is to Russia) and their office is in the
Rumanian consulate. The agent I spoke with was right out of a Bond
movie. Complete with trench coat, fur hat, and Russian accent. He
explained that no reconfirmation was required and was surprised that
I'd even bother to try.
On the day of the flight, all went well (other than a two hour delay
in boarding). There was no reserve seating. A real free for all.
[obviously they were the leading light for Southwest airlines -Ed]
I asked the stewardess about the non-smoking section. She was
incredulous at the thought and responded: "You don't have to smoke
anywhere you sit!" Great. The standard seat belt lecture was given
by this huge Rumanian woman. She went on at length in Rumanian (I
guess), then switched to English: "Sit down! Seat belt! Don't smoke!".
The plane itself was this 30 year old Russian something. First stop
was Brussells. Unscheduled or unmentioned. Added more passengers.
In flight food was hard bread, tasteless cheese and some sort of meat.
We arrived in Bucharest many hours later. The place is your grandmothers
nightmare of Siberia. Thirty below, ice and blowing snow. Cold and bleak.
We were here for a 30 minute refueling stop.
All the passengers were asked to leave the plane. Escorted to buses
and driven to the terminal. I thought that we were going into a transit
passenger holding area, but we were escorted to passport control.
The Rumanian security agent inspected my passport and announced:
"You are American?!". (This was hard to deny as he had my passport
in his hand). I acknowledged his discovery. I continued through
the X-ray machine (most countries I've been to have the X-ray machine
on the way TO the plane) and on to baggage inspection. The agent
there rummaged through my hand luggage, removing things that interested
him. He especially liked my digital travel alarm, 3 Pentel pens and
two books. Those he put into his briefcase. He eyed my walkman for
a moment, but must have decided against it. I wasn't going to argue
with him (this was communist Rumania after all). The biggest surprise
was an hour later when they loaded all the `transit' passengers into
another bus and drove us into town. Keep in mind that they haven't
explained a thing to us yet, just herded us into a bus and away we
went. Had I been singled out, I would have been scared. As it was
I was just concerned and confused. We were taken to this hotel near
absolutely nothing, shown our rooms and left. No announcements, no
explainations. The busses returned for us two days later. I still don't
know what happened or why. We were loaded onto an even older Russian
plane and continued on our way. Theoretically direct to Cairo. Another
surprise stop. This time in Athens. No one met the plane, no one drove
up at all. No passengers boarded or left. The entire flight deck
contingent (pilot, copilot, and engineer) left the plane on foot
and returned about 30 minutes later loaded with Kent cigarets, four
cartons each. This was a cigaret stop. With no further delays, we
continued on to Ciaro. Safe and sound, but two and a half days late.
A real adventure!''
One brief footnote to this story came when I asked what books the
customs inspector had scored. The answer: ``The two books stolen were
Ann Rand's `Atlas Shrugged' and my Spartacus guide (sans cover). I
know he didn't read English, so he was in for a surprise when he
discovered what he had!''
--------------------------
Forwarded-by: margo@das.harvard.edu
From: lidl@uunet.uu.net (Kurt J. Lidl)
In case you had a continuing interest in the "information" explosion...
From: newsstats@uunet.UU.NET
[1] Total traffic through uunet for the last 2 weeks
Date: Sat Jun 11 22:21:37 EDT 1994
925834 articles, totaling 1857 Mbytes (2363 including headers),
were submitted from 57889 different Usenet sites by 180351 different
users to 9887 different newsgroups for an average of 133 Mbytes
(169 including headers) per day.
--------------------------
Forwarded-by: kevindu@atm.com (Kevin J. Dunlap)
From: Francine_B._Ferraro@BCSMAC.org (Francine Beth Ferraro)
When I was in 9th grade, my high school ran a production of Fiddler.
As the only Jewish student in the cast, I was responsible for "staging"
the wedding and Shabbos scenes (kind of like a technical advisor).
I carefully researched the "steps" for the wedding, and went thru them
with the students involved in the wedding.
The play went very smoothly, but after the show, my parents and another
couple from the synagogue came up to me and said :
"It was wonderful - but tell the girl playing Golda not to _cross_
herself when the Cossacks show up!"
(She thought it would add a little religious realism. Well, close, but
wrong religion... [g])
--------------------------
Forwarded-by: "Daniel V. Klein" [dvk@lonewolf.com]
Solaris 2.1: it's slow, needs 200M of disk space and comes
without a C compiler, which makes it remarkably similar to
MS-Windows.
oleg@gd.cs.csufresno.edu
--------------------------
Forwarded-by: IN%"Tim.Finin@cs.umbc.edu" "Timothy Finin" 24-JUN-1994 13:14:32.30
TOP TEN REASONS WHY THE WHITE HOUSE STAFF LIKE THE INTERNET
This list provided by Tom Kalil, the David Letterman of the Clinton/Gore
administration. Kalil gave the closing keynote at INET'94/JENC5 in
Prague on Friday, June 17, and included this list in his talk about NII
efforts in the United States.
10. Surfing the Web is more fun than going to meetings.
9. Even reading old RFCs is more fun than going to meetings.
8. On the Internet, no one knows you're a bureaucrat.
7. It's how we get our daily marching orders from Vint Cerf,
Tony Rutkowski, and Dave Farber.
6. It's hard to write your X.400 address on a cocktail napkin.
5. We get all that great electronic fan mail on the Clipper Chip.
4. We have access to the Top Secret Air Force server with cool gifs
of UFOs and little green men.
3. We're still hoping to get on Carl Malamud's "Geek of the Week."
2. We love getting flamed by rabid libertarians on "com-priv."
1. We can send e-mail FROM president@whitehouse.gov.
--------------------------
From: lgil@manta.nosc.mil (Laura L. Gilbreath)
I found this in comp.sys.sgi.admin last week...I enjoyed it, though I
have refrigerator-sized SGIs, and am easily amused. :-)
=-=-=
From: banz@umbc.edu (Robert Banz)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi.admin
Subject: Re: Refrigerator sized problems
In article [2tsmch$kht@hacgate2.hac.com],
David Klingler [dave@eagle.hd.hac.com] wrote:
]The graphics keeps dying on all of my SGIs that are refrigerator
]sized.
Try defrosting them. Sometimes the graphics pipeline gets clogged
with a block of ice and nothing gets through. 8-P
--
Henry Cate III [cate3@netcom.com]
The Life collection maintainer, selections of humor from the internet
From: "Patrick Ryan" [p.ryan@uws.edu.au]
"Honour thy father" does not mean repeat his mistakes.
Back to my Life Humor Page
Back to my humor page
Back to my home page