Tag Archives: humour

My delicious.com bookmarks for April 14th through April 17th

  • Three Cheers for Afghan Women – it's a little depressing to think that, as the article notes, this is actually progress.
  • Audio slideshow: Sir Clement Freud – I only really know Clement Freud for his contribution to Just A Minute. I remember that I wasn't sure what to make of him when I first heard his lists and slow, deliberate delivery, but that changed pretty quickly. It won't be the same without him.
  • Laptop Hunters: Homeless Frank – If you've not seen Microsoft's new adverts this probably won't make much sense. If you have, you'll realise that Frank's analysis of the PCs is more nuanced that the supposedly "real" people in the original videos.

My delicious.com bookmarks for March 2nd through March 10th

My delicious.com bookmarks for February 26th through February 28th

My delicious.com bookmarks for February 12th through February 14th

  • Scientists Agree: It's in His Kiss – "Over 90 percent of human society engages in what, if you get right down to it, seems like a very strange thing to do: putting faces together and trading spit." Seems like a very appropriate thing to discuss on Valentine's Day…
  • Anti-Bootlegging Measures and the iPhone App Store – There's a lot of talk about cracked iPhone apps at the moment and the measures that developers are taking. The interesting and surprising thing here is how effective a polite message is, at least in the case of a Mac app.
  • 1234567890 Day – Finally, an event worth celebrating…

My delicious.com bookmarks for January 25th through January 27th

First Mac

I’ve started to get “into” Twitter, the micro-blogging site, in the last month or so. One trend that I picked up on is that of “hashtags” where you put a hash (pound) symbol followed by a word somewhere in your message. This makes is searchable. The most recent that I’ve participated in is #firstmac, for which my contribution was:

A white iBook G3, paid extra to get the 600Mhz version with the faster bus speed and an impossible-to-use-it -all 384Mb of memory

And that’s entirely true but I can’t tell the full story in 140 characters, hence this post.

The first Mac I ever used was at university. Durham wasn’t big on Macs but there were a few lying around in the labs. I always liked playing around with new toys and so I occasionally used one, if only to bring up a terminal to Telnet into the Unix server and check my email.

This was back in ’92 or ’93 and email was only accessible on the big Solaris and HP-UX servers. The timing also meant that PCs were on Windows 3.1 and so fairly basic. Using a Mac, an LC with a tiny colour screen if I remember correctly, at the time was pretty cool.

What I didn’t realise was that the sound on early nineties Macs was substantially more advanced than on PCs of the time. I found this out the hard and embarrassing way.

One day between lectures I made a bee-line for the LC and brought up the terminal application. The standard of my typing, then and now, is such that it usually takes several attempts to get the server name correct. The Mac would make a sound when it couldn’t find the server.

Except this time someone had changed the default system beep and replaced it with a thirty second long sound sample called “orgasm.”

Did I say that the speakers on that LC were surprisingly loud?

I don’t think I used a Mac again for nearly ten years.