Quarterflash Designs

The love story of Ralph and Edna…

Just because someone doesn’t love you the way you want them to, doesn’t mean they don’t love you with all they have.  Ralph and Edna were both patients in a mental hospital.  One day while they were walking past the hospital swimming pool Ralph suddenly jumped into the deep end.

He sank to the bottom of the pool and stayed there.

Edna promptly jumped in to save him.  She swam to the bottom and pulled him out.  When the Head Nurse Director became aware of Edna’s heroic act she immediately ordered her to be discharged from the hospital, as she now considered her to be mentally stable.

When she went to tell Edna the news she said, ‘Edna, I have good news and bad news.  The good news is you’re being discharged, since you
were able to rationally respond to a crisis by jumping in and saving the life of the person you love.  I have concluded that your act displays sound mindedness.

The bad news is, Ralph hung himself in the bathroom with his bathrobe belt right after you saved him.  I am so sorry, but he’s dead.’

Edna replied, ‘He didn’t hang himself, I put him there to dry.  How soon can I go home?’

Today is Mental Health Day!  You can do your bit by remembering to
send an email to an unstable friend…

Done my part!!!

Or so the email says.

One of the more imaginative Nigerian schemes, to be sure, but still full of typos. Maybe I could get rich just getting hired out to make their emails look more realistice. A 1% fee should be a nice additional income, right?

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I find myself wondering how many different support companies HP uses.

A while back my 6 month old laptop stopped booting up. Lights would come on, but nothing would ever happen. Wouldn’t even boot off of a CD.

So, I send an email, exchange a couple of things with this support person and before I even completely finished running the tests he suggested, I got an email that said they were sending a box for me to ship the laptop back in.

Box comes, I send it out, 5 or 6 days later I have it back with the memory replaced.

Great service, no questions, excellent experience.

Then there was today. (more…)

Sometimes the wrong word in the right place can give a whole new meaning to what’s written.

In a recent email to a Linux mailing list about backups and backup strategies, we find the following:

> On Tue, 2007-11-06 at 08:36 -0700, XXXXX XXXXX wrote:
> > Fifth, restore capabilities are only a website away, and can easily be
> > performed by the end user (assuming they have enough rites to do so).
This is a case where the word “rites” obviously should have been “rights”. However, the wrong word really changes the meaning. My response to the author (which I made a private reply and not a reply back to the mailing list) was:

> Sorry, but I was very amused by your typo: "rites" should have been
> "rights", but the mental image of users making the proper sacrifices and
> chanting to get their files restored made me laugh.

When you take into account the common view that users don’t know how all that networking stuff really works and it’s all magic, only understood by the Administrator and his minions, that’s what really makes this funny.

In a follow on email the author noted that spell checkers don’t help when you spell the wrong word correctly.

It just reinforces what I’ve known for a long time – spellchecking is not the same as proofreading.

The title is is related to my youngest daughter’s favorite expression:

Some people say I have A.D.D., but I say … “Hey Look, a Chicken!”

I’ve been looking into writing (or rewriting) some sort of game. In fact, I’ve started more than once. One of the drawbacks is that I am intent on being platform independent and I keep finding different tools that seem to fit the bill but I end up getting bogged down in one way or another.
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For years, starting with when I was much younger and foolisher, I’ve been known online as MadCoder42. MadCoder was already taken so I tacked on the 42 as it’s the answer to everything.

For several years now I’ve been listening to KALC (Alice 105.9) here in Denver, especially to the morning show. For a while they were using AIM to allow you to talk to them. I’m not sure why they stopped doing that, but I think it was network issues.

So, while the show was on I’d be sending in commentary on the show, occasionally getting a reply or two.

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If you search long enough you can eventually find what you’re looking for.

I do have to wonder, however, why some people have to make things so difficult.

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I’m attempting to use ECMA 334 (.Net or Mono – in my case, Mono) to create some cross-platform applications. Before striking out on my own programs I decided to attempt to run through an exercise in a book to create their application first, especially as it’s something I can use.

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because you know you can’t do it for profit :)

I’ve been given some minor inspiration that maybe my writing isn’t as bad as I think it is. I’m not yet convinced that that statement is true, but I’m willing to start the new year with an assumption that someone who makes at least part of their living by writing in a coherent manner might have a valid opinion.

Don’t expect to see grand things here – just me, blowing off steam, having a conversation with virtual friends, whatever.

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