The Crapolla According to Fek'Lar

You Know You're DOOMED When...

The local teaching hospital calls to see if you can come in for their Homecoming celebration.

You've stumbled onto another issue of The Crapolla, a journal written for software professionals. No not the managers; I mean the people who do the work.

This Crapolla is sponsored by...

In This Issue...

The Happy Bunny Gets an Email From 12 Years Ago.

Technical Explanations

I swear to God on a stack of candy bars I really did send this to the Twinkee as a technical analogy explaining a problem at WTHAIS.

The Happy Bunny had been to this burrow store last week to buy carrots with his Premium Gold Black Platinum American Express Card. On Saturday (the Bunny Sabbath) he ran out of carrots and hippity hopped back to the burrow store to buy more.

The Bunny owner of the burrow store remembered that the Happy Bunny had been to his store before, and handed the bunch of yummy roots to the Happy Bunny, and swiped the Premium Gold Black Platinum American Express Card through the scanner and allowed the Happy Bunny to go on his merry way before the approval was returned.

But American Express is run by Orthodox Bunnies who observe the Sabbath, and declined the charge. So the owner of the burrow store got the shaft. He jumped up out of his hole to chase after the Happy Bunny when he was eaten by the Big Bad Wolf.

I received no follow-up questions. They were right in broadcast school, know your audience.

What is Geek Culture?

Ah the Mobile Phone. They do everything these days. They are the Swiss Army Knife of tech. Recently, the phone WTHAIS pays me to carry around started to give up the ghost. The Twinkee arranged for a replacement.

This is quite a different piece of equipment. It takes pictures, plays MP3's, has downloadable ringtones, you can shove expansion memory into it, associate pictures and ringtones with specific caller IDs. It's quite a marvel!

Then I discovered a program called BitPim. Via a Blue Tooth connection, I would be able to really hack up my phone, and do things Verizon wanted to restrict. So instead of paying for a ringtone, I could drop an MP3 on the phone and use it as the ringer. I figured I needed two. One for the Twinkee, and one for everyone else. When the Twinkee calls it's an emergency. For her, the ringer is the Red Alert Klaxon from the original Star Trek Series.

For all the other bozos who call my cell phone the ringer is the theme from the Super Chicken cartoon. (It's another thing you needed to be alive during the 60's to experience.)

I saved the best hack for last. I stumbled upon a way to make my phone a two-way telecommunications device, where you can input data on the keypad, and actually talk to people. Damn, if people could stop stumbling over all the crap they shove into phones, they might get back to using it AS A PHONE!

Don't call me, I'm using the laser feature to start a campfire.

Let's Do The Time Warp, Again!

I just got an email from me 12 years ago properly addressed to me today.

From: fek@fourheads.com
To: fek@wthais.com
Subject:

There was only an attachment whose title mentions a virus being detected. Obviously, it's spam. But it's clever spam. It uses my own username to get past the spam filter. What I also thought was cleaver was that the SpamBot found my old account from four companies ago, and matched it against my current account.

How did it find the old account? I think it's pretty obvious that data never dies, even if companies do. Someone buys the assets, and data is a gold mine. In this case, Four Heads is owned by an extremely large media company that you all know and hate at one level or another. Technical information that was published in the early 90's is still available and Googleable.

By using Google, I found a few hits on the old account. They all seem to point to one site where a colleague was sending me and a million other people dirty jokes.

This Issue's Headline submission to the National Daily World Enquiring Globe.

Nothing Bad Has Happened to Jennifer Aniston This Week!

Agent Says This Dry Spell Will End Soon. Then Quits as Her Agent.

Let's play, "Who said this?"

Heard in the halls of various software companies.

"Which part of, 'I'm working my ass off' don't you understand?"

"You screw things up good!"

"This whiteboard cleaner stinks."
"I'm sure it doesn't stink as bad as fish."
"Ok, important safety tip. Don't clean your whiteboard with fish."

"I can't make heads or tails of this, it's written in managerese."

"I wanted to go into sales, but they found out my parents were married."

Excuse Me

I need to create some obscene ringtones.

Fek'Lar
(They pay me to think. These are my thoughts. Do you think they are getting their money's worth?)

Remember: The Crapolla contains my personal opinions. That's right they're mine, so get your own! And you kids get off my lawn!

Although written with the software professional in mind, my mind tends to wander all over the place, and I sometimes write about politics, mass stoopidity, dumb things I saw, and whatever else comes to mind.

From time to time, I use salty language, thus The Crapolla is not intended for children, or certain people in the Bush Administration.

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EOJ

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