Why not? Everybody else is doing it...

a

The one thing commuting an hour each way teaches you is that if there's a traffic jam, someone better be dead.

-Mark Andy

b

Our informal mission is to improve the love life of operators worldwide.

-Peter Behrendt, president of Exabyte

I want to marry Dorothy Parker. Well, actually I probably just want to divorce her.

-Peter Berger

I know murder is illegal, but is there an exception for killing asshole coworkers?

-Peter Berger

Sexual harassment or just being one of the guys, it was always a thin line.

-Anita Blake in _Burnt Offerings_ by Laurell K. Hamilton

Just wondering: If I replace Windows with Unix, have I been emasculated or defenestrated?

-David Boyce

The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they are okay, then it's you.

-Rita Mae Brown

Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to describe the history of the computer industry for the past decade as a massive effort to keep up with Apple.

-Byte, December 1994

c

Any idiot can face a crisis. It's the day to day living that wears you out.

-Chekhov

Speaking from experience, manipulative talent is never wasted - even if nothing is accomplished, you are particularly good practice.

-Alex Crain

With no debt and $10 billion in cash, Microsoft can buy or build any sort of future it wants. All the rest of us can do is lie back and think of England.

-Robert X. Cringely

Science and engineering research are inherently depressing. You spend all your time working on a problem confused. If you cease being confused, it means that you've solved the problem and move on the next one. Thus, 99% of your time is spent in a state of confusion.

-Cube

d

So I was wondering...
% noah ampallang
No definition for 'ampallang'. Maybe you mean:
1. appalling 2. impaling 3. impelling
Uh, so which is it?

- dmd@gradient.cis.upenn.edu (Douglas DeCarlo)

Quick! While my expectations are low! Fix me up with someone!

-Fleur Dragan

If you're a girl, you have to wear a hat.

-Peter Dragan, my dad, teaching me how to change the oil in my car c. 1994

e

numbers, bizillions of em. of all the numbers in the world i think i'm using about half of 'em. at least.

-Axel Essbaum

what's combinatorics? man, what a coincidence with the birthdays... i mean, what are the odds?

-Axel Essbaum

if yer offended by naked devil-women giving each other oral sex you shouldn't walk in and say "what kind of music do you listen to?" right?

-Axel Essbaum

down side of long-term acupuncture: headphones are uncomfortable when you have needles in your ears...

-Axel Essbaum

I have come to the decision that "user-friendly" is basically a mistake because it allows any idiot to use a computer. Just like automatic transmissions are a mistake for the same reason. Also books on tape, instant coffee, and disposable pens, but I digress.

-Elliott Evans

While Federated's mail seems to be working, I will send a quick message to prove I am still alive. Help! I'm trapped in a huge financial company with intermittent email! Send MIS professionals immediately!

-Elliott Evans

Isn't that cool? I mean, if they think you committed a crime, they can only hold you for 24 hours without pressing charges, but if they just say, "He's nuts!" they can hold you for five times that; they just have to do it in a different building with "orderlies" instead of "guards." Moral: If you're going to be locked up, make sure it's for something you did, not something you thought.

-Elliott Evans

f

And you're going to deny the rest of us a webcam pic on the basis of one person with weak control over his cognitive dissonance?

-Jon Ferro

I'm not really a touchy-feely kinda person [more of a thumpy-ouchy person].

-Esther Filderman

Ignore half of what my last post said. I'm exhausted and not thinking clearly and being unintentionally bitchy, which is bad and wrong, because bitchiness should properly be contrived and plotted.

-Esther Filderman

you're right as usual, ms. fleur.

-Esther Filderman

g

I don't think people are ragging on you because you've raised uncomfortable questions. No, instead I think they're wailing on you because you come off like a total dick in email.

-Steve Gifford

I wasn't aware Perl was sexually transmitted.

-Steve Gifford

If I had a time machine I'd go back to 1970 or whatever and stand over the guy who wrote FTP's shoulder and say: "Dude, just make binary mode the default. Trust me, this will be a Good Thing. Also, lose the bell bottoms."

-Steve Gifford

VRML's not dead. It's just pining for the fijords.

-Steve Gifford

Oh shut up fleur. You're one of the guys.

-Vijay Gill

If I love you, what business is it of yours?

-Goethe

"Why do we have to hide from the police, Daddy?"
"Because we use vi, honey. They use emacs." 

-.sig of garyg@jax.jaxnet.com (Gary M. Greenberg)

I got my pager set on "vibrate" and I've been calling myself all day.

-Tracy Lee Guthery

h

you like jerks. fortunately, that fact makes this conversation possible.

-Chris Heiser

Sure. He sounds like a cool guy. EXCEPT FOR THE GLARING PERSONALITY FLAWS.

-Chris Heiser

neitzsche says 'that which does not kill us makes us stronger'. so i am afraid that you'll have to kill him. anything else will only wind up helping him in the long run.

-Chris Heiser

Fleur is, unfortunately, correct.

-Brendan Hoar

If you consider all the unpleasantness you've encountered while you're alive, it seems improbable it would all come to an end simply because you're dead.

-Peter Hoeg

i

j

I keep wanting to start keeping a journal, but first I'd have to write an autobiography to explain the first twenty years. Context is everything.

-Faisal Jawdat

As far as I am concerned, compromise is not only the cornerstone of a working relationship, but a sign that the relationship isn't working. Corollary: I'm psycho.

-Faisal Jawdat

You *are* fabulous. You're also one of the guys.

-Faisal Jawdat

Sometimes I wish that the clue level required to be able to create web pages had been a little harder. Okay, really it's all the time that I wish that.

-Faisal Jawdat

stop being melodramatic, it's working

-Faisal Jawdat

fleur dragan: fabulous, one of the guys, and SURROUNDED BY 128 LINEAR FEET OF CONCRETE.

-Faisal Jawdat

Your job sounds like hell. A very melodramatic hell.

-Gray Jones

k

since i'm so big i'll be juicy too

-Alex Kehayes

You wear your heart on your sleeve, but sometimes you take off your jacket.

-Eva Kubiczek

l

>p.s. Am I allowed to laugh at a *transcontinental* novell WAN? Hypothetically speaking?
You're allowed to roll on the floor, crying from the laughter, holding your sides for fear they'll burst. Hypothetically speaking, of course.

-Jay Laefer

We went to Belgium again for lunch today.

-Greg Landrum

It's not the BEING that feels good. It's the GETTING that feels good.

-Greg Landrum

Who the fuck are you people and WHY DO I KEEP GETTING THESE MESSAGES FROM YOU?!?!?!?!

-Greg Landrum

Let me get this straight. You're young, you're a geek, you're single...and YOU DON'T HAVE CABLE?

-Greg Landrum

From a meeting: "It's easy to think you're being gentle when you're not on the receiving end."

-Greg Landrum

I am caught between the Screwdriver of Suck and the Screw of Despair. these are actual items, not metaphors. god I hate hardware.

-Nat Lanza

Speed costs money. How fast do you want to go?

-John Lingenfelter [re: drag motors]

Welcome to the hip new Unix trend: unbundling the compiler! Sure, we'll ship you the runtime shared library objects, but the compiler and linkable library and the include files will COST YOU DEARLY! If it weren't for gcc (okay, apparently not on Clarknet) then Unix would be rapidly joining every other major OS in the THINGS THAT SUCK category for deciding that being able to WRITE CODE is some sort of OPTIONAL ACTIVITY. I think I'll start a CAR COMPANY that will sell you the SERVICE MANUAL and the HOOD RELEASE LATCH as a DEVELOPER OPTION for $1395.

-Nathan Loofbourrow

The company handbook doesn't EXPLICITLY prohibit drinking on the job.

-Nathan Loofbourrow

Be prepared; I don't think I've ever seen two and a half years of hate compressed into quite this compact a form.

-Nathan Loofbourrow

I don't have nearly this good a relationship with MY sysadmin. We haven't discussed masturbation once in my 18 months of working here.

-Nathan Loofbourrow

Sometimes I get the feeling that Windows 95 is laughing at me behind my back. No, wait. It's laughing openly in my face. Sorry. False alarm.

-Nathan Loofbourrow

fortunately, the people I work with here are all consummate professionals. yes, sirree. they're just consummating all over the place.

-Nathan Loofbourrow

m

"New For Spring on NBC's Wednesday 'Must See TV' lineup: _Idealist at Heart_, the wacky adventures of cynical Gen X'ers struggling to find some semblance of intelligent management in corporate America."

-Paul Mazaitis

Let's play 'Cheeky FDA Inspector' and 'Questionable Meat Product' tonight, dear!

-Paul Mazaitis

Life is context, Fleur.

-Paul Mazaitis

You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but shoving a pick up your friend's nose is a serious faux paus.

-Paul Mazaitis

You know how in old scary movies the violins wail as the hero puts his hand on the doorknob and slowly opens the creaking door while everyone watching screams "Get OUT!" because they know nothing good is behind that door? Get OUT! There are other, better jobs. Honest.

-Aleecia McDonald

Owl looked at him and wondered whether to push him off the tree; but, feeling he could always do it afterwards, he tried once more to find out what they were talking about.

-A.A. Milne, _The House At Pooh Corner_

n

I do think Al Gore cost me the election, particularly in Florida.

-Ralph Nader

DOS Computers manufactured by companies such as IBM, Compaq Tandy, and millions of others are by far the most popular, with about 70 million machines in use wordwide. Macintosh fans, on the other hand, may note that cockroaches are far more numerous than humans, and that numbers alone do not denote a higher life form.

-New York Times, November 26, 1991

Eventually you have to start thinking of electrons as cannonballs.

-Dale Newfield

We don't see things as they are; we see things as we are.

-Anais Nin

I can't think of a purpose where a "write-only" variable would serve any use in a programming language. [...] The closest thing I've come across in the real world was an IBM system called DISOSS, which had an extensive backup system. The problem was that, after performing backups for several months, we needed to restore a document, and couldn't find how in the manuals. We called IBM and were informed that the restore side of the backups had never been written. We converted off the system within two months, and people within IBM who had sold us the box were fired. That's what write-only gets you.

-Robert Nix from comp.lang.c

o

Apparently, the Kama Sutra is one of the earliest known texts on group theory.

-Drew Olbrich

It's all about getting off the planet.

-Drew Olbrich

OK everybody, I am NOW the FUCKING BUTT-ASS !G!O!D! of numerical methods!! Bring on your fourth-order Runge Kutta adaptive stepsize monotonically decreasing maximum allowed error fwap and I'LL MAKE the fucking computer boy BOW BEFORE ME DAMMIT and scrape him off the ROAD, the little TWIRP-ASS JELLO-HEADED yaddia-ya!!!!

-Drew Olbrich

I love stress because it's a whole lot better than depression.

-Drew Olbrich

I'll say it again! Stress really sucks, but it's a whole lot better than depression. It's sorta like how urine smells a whole lot better than vomit.

-Drew Olbrich

Also, to answer the question "When will the new spreadsheet be ready for use?" The answer is about five or six weeks, although it may appear to you to be as long as three months, since, like all programmers, I am travelling at relativistic speeds.

-Drew Olbrich

I stopped worrying about being creepy a long time ago. If I'm perceived as creepy, that's fine. In today's wacky hi-tech economy, being creepy has magically turned out to be quite lucrative.

-Drew Olbrich

Once you reach the higher levels of the cult, it is revealed that Unix is a big yummy candy gum drop covered with a thick layer of crack.

-Drew Olbrich

Let me get this straight. I'm sitting on the surface of a huge ball of heavy elements, and it's spinning, and the only thing that's keeping me from flying off is the distortion of some sort of mysterious gravitational field that is poorly understood?

-Drew Olbrich

I just feel so much better knowing that my data is safely stored away in the form of fleeting magnetic impulses on a slab of metal that's violently spinning at 7200 RPM.

-Drew Olbrich

p

Live the imagination. Lick the reality.

-Andrew Plotkin

Monday's hate is full of verve.
Tuesday's hate will grate a nerve.
Wednesday's hate is patient and slow.
Thursday's hate is ready to go.
Friday's hate is weary to death.
Saturday's hate has sour breath.
But the hate that's born on the Sabbath day
Will start the killing any damn way.

-Andrew Plotkin

The Java DB interface driver I was using suddenly acted strange: it refused to return more than 4096 rows. (Well, not "suddenly" -- this is the first time I'd tried to extract that much data at a time.) So, ok, I got to the source code.
% grep 409 *
iMsqlStatement.java: private int max_rows = 4096;

"Debugging is a deep and obscure art."

-Andrew Plotkin

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must have been caused by an incompetent grad student.

-Andrew Plotkin

That which does not kill me...makes me kill.

-Andrew Plotkin

q

r

Real hate? Get a grip loserboy... Your idea of hate is a pathetic and sickly creature in comparison to the hatred that fuels this world. Your hatred makes you right a couple of half-assed posts and gnash your teeth in frustration. Real hatred makes you go out and grab someone you don't know by the throat while your pour mace directly into his eyes nose and mouth. Hate is when you then take this coughing gasping crying wretch and beat him until your hand is bleading and cracked. hate is looking back on it and knowing that you would do it again and you would enjoy it even more the next time. Hatred is bending your life and will around some abstract focus in an effort to destroy it at any price to yourself and those you care for. Your hatred is a gasping hollow chested cousin of real hate. It lashes out weakly at anything that moves without focus or follow through. It is a petty and small hate. You have a lot to learn about hate boy. So buckle down and hang on, its gonna be a fun trip.

-Chris Rapier

Anyway, it doesn't matter, because I have never met fleur. Who the fuck is she and why the fuck is she on this list?

-Chris Rapier

Will you stop being enigmatic for just a minute? Please???

-Chris Rapier

you work with freaks because you live in a city of hippie crunchy punky newage technophillic wannabe dorks who couldn't find their way out of a tautology with a flashlight and Hume.

-Chris Rapier

I sing the song of stress! waaaa hubbbb blab blab blable snit weeeer feh! AIGH!

-Chris Rapier

We are the Burgh. Yinz need assimilated 'n at.

-Chris Rapier

looking forward to seeing you my little bundle of stress

-Chris Rapier

And it's not just because she seems genetically superior for breeding than my current girlfriend.

-Chris Rapier

San Francisco... It makes a man weird.

-Chris Rapier

Never go to bed with anyone too stupid to say OUCH.

-rec.arts.bodyart c. 1994

sorry about your computer trauma- this is why i work with people- no one expects them to work correctly.

-Christy Regenhardt

i'm not here to help--i'm here to torment under the guise of helping.

-Rick Romero

I've come to believe that size is measured in decibles.

-Rick Romero

I like the stress, it keeps me bright-eyed and perky. Okay, wild-eyed and high-strung, whatever.

-Jan Ruocco Carrier

s

A woman's appetite is twice that of a man's; her sexual desire, four times; her intelligence, eight times.

-Sanskrit proverb

You know that you are getting old when you see one of the system you architected and built in a documentary on The History Channel.

-Kent Sarff

i used to look at people when i first met them and think, "i bet i won't like you." now, i look at them and think, "i bet i won't like your web page."

-Jon Slenk

flush twice. it's a long way to redmond.

-Jon Slenk

i love feminists especially when i MAKE THEM BARK!

-Jon Slenk

so why isn't everybody trying to hire me? don't they like my sunny disposition?

-Jon Slenk

while i realize we're in The Future now, when i say magazine i mean magazine. not on-line magazine, just magazine.

-Jon Slenk

if you don't know the origin of 'foo' then you aren't a geek, OKAY? fucking KIDS THESE DAYS.

-Jon Slenk

can you say "decoupled?" well, apparently, neither can we.

-Jon Slenk

you were right, as usual. :-)

-Elise Anne Soroka

While I may make bold claims that my position is the only one that makes sense, promotes goodness, etc these are just hot air. Tools to keep me at a razor defense against the evil horde. Truth is all of it is just my personal opinion. At least with everyone taking a clear and moral stand I can tell who to shoot when the killing starts.

-Matt Sorrels

When faced with a problem, some people say 'Let's use AWK.' Now they have two problems.

-Zalman Stern

I have every sympathy with the American who was so horrified by what he had read about the effects of smoking that he gave up reading.

-Henry G. Strauss

t

I think that I hear the moderates beginning to act up:
What do we want?
GRADUAL CHANGE!
When do we want it?
IN DUE COURSE!

-Doug Tygar

Zoo orangutans
Throw feces at onlookers
But we write haikus

-Doug Tygar

u

v

w

At Group L, Stoffel oversees six first-rate programmers, a managerial challenge roughly comparable to herding cats.

-The Washington Post Magazine, 9 June 1985

As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.

-Maurice Wilkes, designer of EDSAC, on programming, 1949

x

y

z

Computer Science- as a field, we're like that asshole teenager next door.

-Jim Zelenka

miscellaneous

Thank you for patronizing Wendy's

-sign on wall of Greenway Plaza Wendy's, Greenbelt, Maryland

Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets and then teams up with three complete stangers to kill again.

- TV listing for "The Wizard of Oz" in the Marin Paper

unknown

If you're listening to 90.9 FM, this is WETA in Washington. If you're listening to 89.3 FM, this is WETH in Hagerstown. If you're listening to any other station, your radio is off, and you're hallucinating. Snap out of it!

-unknown dj

TIME IS PASSING

-grafitti in the women's bathroom @ the old 9:30 club, DC

Civilization doesn't give out, it gives in. In a society where anything goes, eventually everything will.

-if you know who said this, please let me know.

Hello Titanic, this is the Hindenburg. We are here to rescue you, send up a flare.

-seen various places, most notably a .sig at apple after the layoffs

Friends: People who know you well, but like you anyway.

-unknown

All doors will not open in Washington.

-conductor on a train to DC

just because microsoft gives you an unlimited supply of pigs to fuck does not mean you should ignore Netscape. I am sure they have a good deal on goats

-complaint about newbot

Palo Alto: Seething hotbed of content.

-on a bathroom wall of a Palo Alto coffee shop

clueless

Subject: Is the Web Up?

-name omitted to protect the clueless

I was wondering if there is anyone out there that could let me know where to start programing? I have used Basic for the longest time however I would like to get into something different. Something for windows. Is UNIX some kind of programing software? If so where do I get started?

-name omitted to protect the clueless

Fleur Diana Dragan / fleur@obscure.org / 21 April 2001