April 06, 2003
Disk-thrashing sentences...
Posted by Jess in
Geek Humor
Every so often we immerse ourselves in our trade so much that it begins to creep into everyday communications and thought processes. This is not unlike my mother, who I called at home one night and she answered "Good afternoon, *place of business* may I help you?"
Or myself, who was chosen to drive and pick up the pizza that was already called in. Upon leaving, I asked what every other normal computer professional would say when asking what name the pizza was ordered under:
"What did you save it as?"
Okay everyone, make me feel better. 'Fess up!
Permalink
|
TrackBack (0)
Comments
Jess, I'm guessing that's a genetic thing. I don't think anyone else has ever experienced ANYthing like that :-)
OK, truth be told, I'm not married to a geek. She makes teeth and plays the piano and would probably brain me with a metronome if I slipped too much into geek-speak. Guess that's a good thing, having such assistance in maintaining the separation between geek and humanoid ...well, of course the espresso helps too. That and playing soccer, which, with my marked lack of skill, ensures that I get reality-inducing trashings on a regular basis.
Maybe you and Matt should take up martial arts or soccer or something else to jar your noggins regularly. Sorta like the old hard card disk drives that would suffer from 'stiction' -- you take 'em outta the PC, give 'em a good THUMP on a desk, and they'd be fine again for quite a while (and it was PRICELESS seeing the look on the user's face when I'd do that!).
She makes teeth? Though interesting that she plays the piano... I'd look at the piano, and it would look just like teeth. :-)
And I know for a fact that that wouldn't help... I used to take Capoeira (brazillian martial arts), and that was about the same time that I made my verbal faux-pas.
And I know what you mean about seeing the look on people's faces when you do stuff like that. though I don't know what the word "stiction" is, what did the hard drives do?
It's the same look that I get when I take a pencil eraser to a troublesome stick of memory. :-)
Well, martial arts can of course have the OPPOSITE of the intended effect, and can scramble the circuits :-)
As for my wife, Shirley works in dental labs, doing the waxing for gold crowns/bridges, and primarily doing the porcelain work. In fact, the waxing and casting is the same process used for jewelry, so Shirley made our wedding rings out of dental gold and platinum.
As for 'stiction', in the earlier days of PCs, when there were many PCs that *had* included only floppy drives, many companies including mine chose to extend the lives of the PCs by adding 'Hard Cards' -- 20MB hard drives that would reside in one of the PC slots. Well after a while these things had a habit of kind of freezing up -- they'd be spinning along and then just get stuck. The common term for this condition was 'stiction'. So we'd go to the affected PC, open the case, and first try whacking the hard card with a screwdriver, or (better yet) lifting the entire CPU case about 6 inches off the desk and then letting it drop. If the PC didn't then behave and boot up nicely, with the hard card unstuck, the next (and usual) solution was to open the case, remove the hard card, rap it a couple of times on the desk, and then reinsert the card and boot up the PC. Gave the users a heck of a shock, since they were typically quite scared of PCs, and here we were treating the hard drives like an old car muffler that needed to come off.
I miss those days :-) ...wait...no I don't. And I'd forgotten about the pencil eraser thing -- I've done that!
wait, espresso actually *helps* with separating humanoid from geek? hm. i must ponder. i'm usually employing caffeine to ramp geek factor up -- more human than human and all that. ;-)
Oh my, that must have been so funny to see!!
If there's one thing I've learned about Joe over the past few months, it's that he loves his espresso. ;-)
Must.... drink....more!
We used to have hard drive in a server with stiction. People thought we were nuts but we used to take it out and bang it all the time on a desk. Worked great for two years. :-)
