Category Archives: humor

humor

Living in an Online Fish Bowl

MissingEarlier this week my WebWorkerDaily editor, Simon Mackie, disappeared for over 24 hours. No Twitter updates in 2 days from @spiky_simon. His IM status showed that he was last seen over a day ago. What really tipped me off to his disappearance was a quick glance at the WebWorkerDaily post queue. Only two posts on Monday and by early Tuesday morning, no posts had been scheduled for the rest of the day on Tuesday. All of this with a pending queue of over a dozen posts just waiting to be published! This is the online equivalent of the newspapers piling up on the doorstep of the person who is trapped inside of their house under an avalanche of neglected recycling.

We worried. We panicked. We sent emails that went unanswered. I began imagining the worst. Had he been kidnapped by a rival blog network with plans to torture him to learn our secrets? Those guys over at ReadWriteWeb can be pretty devious*, so they were my prime suspects. I was just getting ready to organize a Twitter flash mob to storm the castle of our blog rivals to see if we could get him back when I was stopped in my tracks by an email. An email from Simon: “Sorry, I should have let everyone know. I’m at a GigaOM offsite meeting.”

Oh well, so much for my conspiracy theories.

This is bound to happen when we work online all day with other people that we only see online. I know that I am not the only one with fleeting thoughts about friends and coworkers who drop offline for a few days (or hours) wondering why they had been offline for so long. Are they OK? What could they possibly being doing that would require so many disconnected hours?

Admit it, you’ve had similar thoughts once or twice.

* Disclaimer: I know quite a few of the ReadWriteWeb authors, and they are some of the nicest people I know. They would never really kidnap Simon, but it makes for fun speculation.

community, fun, humor, Linux

Linux Suffers Crushing Defeat Due to Driver Errors

Today Linux suffered a crushing defeat as the Linux car crashed and placed last in the Indy 500.

The concept was very cool.  I love these community efforts where geeks pull together to do something fun outside of writing code.  In this case, the Tux 500 campaign raised just over $18,000 from people in the Linux community to sponsor a car and get Linux with the Tux logo placed on an Indy Car.

Props to commenters on the Engadget post for the driver error comment.

humor, Linux, Microsoft, operating systems

Using Microsoft Windows May be Linked to Kidney Stones

One of the most interesting press releases I have ever read.  One month after April Fools Day … coincidence?

 A key creator of open source software products that turn Mac OS X and Linux into Windows-compatible operating systems is issuing a medical warning to the open source community: trying to rid the world of its dependency on the Windows operating system may be linked to kidney stones in men in their 40s, it was reported today. (Quote from CodeWeavers Press Release)

Definitely worth a read!  (Thanks to Raven for the Twitter about the release.)

dilbert, humor, scott adams

How Many Cartoonists Does It Take to Change a Lightbulb?

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, is awesome. Here is a link to his most recent blog entry detailing his failings as a “handy person”:

Beneath the cabinets in my kitchen is a row of fluorescent lights that illuminate the countertops. One of those lights has decided to go all Baghdad on me. It crackles and pops and blinks for the entire time it is on. You might be thinking this is no big problem. All I have to do is change the fluorescent bulb, right?

I have a confession.

I am not. . . mechanical.

Or to put it another way:

Q. How many cartoonists does it take to change a light bulb?

A. More than the number living in my house.

My problem is that the light bulb is encased in some sort of impenetrable container with no indication of how it opens … (Quote from Scott Adams on Dilbert.Blog)

Enjoy!