Quotes: u

You’ve never heard of [Pennsic]?…It’s a great war, the loser gets to keep Pittsburgh.

Like a ski resort full of girls looking for husbands and husbands looking for girls, the situation is not as symmetric as it might seem.

Look, you granola-munching earth-shoe-wearing liberal FREAK, it has everything to do with California.

What’s even more amusing is that apparently there was some sort of flame from Amy, but I never got it. Thanks, best.com!

Current American thought has its underpinnings in the past 30 years of bad TV.

Handcrafted with pride in the United States by non-exploited, entrepreneur- type craftspeople who ride their bikes a lot

I’m one of those anti-social computer people. If they can’t send me email, well, you know…

if you’re going to play pretend, at least have a unicorn in there somewhere.

Last night as I lay in bed looking at the stars I thought, ‘Where the hell is the ceiling?’

Bad decisigns will yield bad results, even if improved mechanisms were to insure that they are efficientiy achieved.

Unix has been feverishly evolving for over 20 years, sort of like bacteria in a cesspool, only less attractive.

Unix doesn’t have a philosophy, it has an attitude.

A calorie is a calorie, and I want to get the most for my money.

Absolutely. Especially those goddamn economists. They really suck. For some reason I keep meeting economists who are full of wild ideas about fault tolerant systems. They pretend that it’s just speculation but they really think you can build scalable, reliable networks with a bunch of common sense and handwaving.

All we need is a little creativity, enthusiasm, and diplomatic immunity.

And just when I was thinking, “What Unhinged really needs right now is a good dose of evangelism.”

Andrew… I’m disappointed in you! You apparently missed the deadpan, the irony, and at least a half dozen innuendos! What more do you need, an emoticon???

Bitching at sysadmins: it’s a spectator sport.

Can anyone explain the “fragile base class problem” to me? All the Be folks were getting very worked up about it, and I have no idea what it means. It makes me very insecure. I mean, next time I’m at a geek cocktail party carrying forth about multithreaded object oriented user interfaces someone’s going to say, “But what about the fragile base class problem?” And you know chicks don’t dig guys who don’t know what the fragile base class problem is.

Christ, what a liar. Things like that just want me to spew half digested Rice Chex all over my office. In point of fact, the only thing that holds me back is the knowledge that a good, nutritious breakfast is the key to a happy and productive day.

Dan has just given me the Pilot killer app. “Keep track of all the potentially embarassing things Dan has said, to be used at the most opportune moments.”

Good God, you guys are making me sick. 50 new messages on Unhinged and not a single good flame. Bah humbug!

HEY YOU! I HAVE SOMETHING INTERESTING TO SAY NOW!!! There’s a great flame at the end, too, so if you’re into that type of stuff, read on.

I just figured out what a kloc is. Shows how much I know. It’s good that we geeks finally have a good “LOC” acronym. Fighter pilots have had G-LOC, like, for ever. If we get a few more good acronyms like FLIR, JATO, or AWACS, we’ll be just as cool as they are.

I just wanted to be the first person to use the word “terahertz” on Unhinged.

I know a good Gas'n'Sip on El Camino. We can hang out, drink some 40s, and scam on the chicks.

I know this is a hard thing for you to accept, Andrew, but I actually wasn’t being sarcastic.

I once thought that Verilog was a misbegotten spawn of Satan, with despicable syntax, miserably inadequate data structures, and hopelessly redundant semantics. I now believe that anyone who finds fault with Verilog must fundamentally misunderstand its design and purpose. Throughout, I managed to maintain the philosophic basis of my entire existance, to wit, never believe anything which anyone will ever agree with.

I was just now sitting here wondering to myself, “Why in the hell am I running out of swap space?” Then I realized that a better question would be, “Why in the hell am I running 33 copies of xemacs?”

I’ll see your stone age and raise you an ivory tower.

I’m beginning to think IRIX isn’t written in C at all. It’s written in “preprocessor”. That, and “make”.

If a cape sitting in the closet collecting cat hair makes me a goth wannabe, then i’m also a pornography addict, a terrorist, and a Paula Abdul fan.

If the bug database isn’t in the same realm of importance as the source control system then you don’t need to go any further to explain quality problems.

If you don’t like pointless fish death, avoid the pet section of your local Wal-Mart. If the blender exhibit is goldfish Columbine, Wal-Mart is goldfish Holocaust.

In my limited observations, men have “That Chick,” but for women, half the guys they’ve slept with are “That Guy.”

It was breathtaking watching the tallys add up, several times passing within hundredths of one percent of each other. It was good entertainment. But calling Florida incorrectly twice – and the election once – wasn’t the biggest embarassment for TV journalism last night. The real egg in their face was having to go to the Internet for news. The breaking news didn’t belong to any news anchor, it belonged to the Florida Secretary of State’s web site. It got to the point where the major news outlets were pointing a TV camera at a computer screen. Tom Brokaw called up the election commissioner in Florida, saying “call us back when you have any news” and the reply on the air was “just look at our web site, that’s what I do.” Jeb Bush, Florida governer, was in the Governor’s Mansion in Texas, but he wasn’t on the phone, instead he sitting at a computer looking at a web site hitting “reload” again and again. TV news reached its zenith in the gulf war when the leader of the free world was tuning in to CNN to find out what was happening in Baghdad. Last night CNN tuned into the Internet.

Kerry’s insomniac rant is, as one would expect, full of intriguing glimpses into her inner life. However what I found downright captivating, what left me buzzing with admiration was that she used the proper diacritic for Jose’s Tequilerèa despite the liberal quantities of said beverage in her bloodstream. To see such technical virtuosity and anal retentiveness in perfect synergy, undulled if not sharpened by the presence of alchohol, reveals that even when she is trying hardest to get out of her brain, Kerry is, irreconcilably, irrevocably, despite all protests to the contrary, an engineer, and a fine one at that. No wonder she can’t sleep.

My X server just crashed. I’ve been logged in on console for 53 straight days. I’m trying to decide whether I have a right to be pissed off or not.

Oh yeah, and the first person to mention the word “elisp” gets a boot to the head.

Oh yeah, that’s right. The blame is all mine. When I met Mark he was a sweet, kind, virginal chap who wouldn’t harm a flea. But I quickly made it my sworn duty to corrupt this young tabula rasa into a foul fiendish force of evil. I dragged him through the iniquitous vice dens of Pittsburgh, went on babe scamming expeditions through the trailer parks of Monroeville, and taught him to appreciate the visceral joy of cold-blooded killing. Mark opened up like a flower in the sun under the expansive munificence of my expert tuteledge, a black rose of pure evil, with sharp venemous thorns dripping the blood of the innocent.

Physics without calculus is like sex without love. It does work, but you get the feeling that there’s something missing. Calculus without physics, on the other hand, is like love without sex: it is a noble pursuit which serves as its own reward, but there is nonetheless a certain element of frustration.

Remember, statisticians are nothing but mathematicians broken down by age and sex.

SGI sold out to Microsoft and all I got was a lousy Farenheit t-shirt.

Supercomputers are not about FLOPs, despite the press releases. They are about bandwidth. If you don’t have a high bandwidth interconnect fabric, the problems you can solve are limited to “embarassingly parallel” problems like rendering animations or cracking DES. You can’t do finite element analysis on thousands of Pentiums over the Internet.

The best, most fulfilling, most rewarding, most advanced way to make the [angst and] pain go away is this: Extra Strength Tylenol

The English language is not sufficently expressive to convey how badly I needed to know that, Mark.

The Pacific Coast is extraordinarily simple. Too hot, move north. Too wet, move south. Bored, move east. Like everything else, it’s just a matter of taste.

The problem with getting in touch with our inner Slenk is that few of us actually have an inner Slenk, rather we’re just getting in touch with our inner poser.

The vast array of better things I have to do than entertain your sorry self is quite possibly beyond your imagination.

To be honest, I can imagine few things more confusing than being new to the United States and being introduced to it by Samuel Kass.

WARNING: windsurfing story ahead, no socially redeeming content

[Woody] Allen could do a remake of 'Bambi Meets Godzilla’ and he’d find a way to work in an angstful neurotic sexually frustrated male New York City Jewish artist.

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

Got your resume polished? Well, print it out and send it on cow-spotted paper to Gateway 2000, now that President and COO Richard Snyder has left the land of milk and honey to head up a new venture fund in Massachusetts. Picture yourself with the hilarious Ted Waitt exchanging side-splitting lactose intolerance jokes, while your competitors drop their PC prices every 15 minutes.

Sun’s latest JavaStation will be equipped with an accessory from Citrix Systems that allows users to run Windows applications. What is the world coming to?! Its senses, maybe.

We lie to you by not telling you things. We don’t lie by telling you things that aren’t true.

Go not to UseNet for counsel, for they will say both ‘No’ and ‘Yes’ and `Try another newsgroup’.

Yet terrible as UNIX addiction is, there are worse fates. If UNIX is the heroin of operating systems, then VMS is barbiturate addiction, the Mac is MDMA, and MS-DOS is sniffing glue. (Windows is filling your sinuses with lucite and letting it set.) You owe the Oracle a twelve step program.