Text 3682, 213 rader
Skriven 2006-03-14 07:44:34 av Greg Sears (3:633/104)
Kommentar till en text av George Pope
Ärende: Re: Rumours from Funny. .
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GS> GP> My new fave beer is an oatmeal stout from Montreal. . .
>
> That would be a French BEER then!!! Humm thought they made wine? ;-)
George Pope was saying F unny stuff to Greg Sears
GP> Those aren't French ("french" are from FRANCE!!!); these are
> Quebeckers (from CANADA!!!!)
Ok so that makes them.........canucks EH!! ;-)))
GP> A variety of Canadian funnies. . .
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< c u t >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
GP> Dingwall, Nova Scotia
It's healthy one can laugh at his home-land/peoples .......
AND
Not get tossed in prison or worse!! Good on canada!! '-)
> OBJoke: for our Moderator and all-round friend/servant
CHIP THRILLS:
The Joke Of Silicon Valley
by Judith Stone
Don't be offended by St. $ilicon's high-tech religion... It's
hackrilege, not sacrilege; he's just pulling your joystick!
You could say that Jeffrey Armstrong has moved beyond wetware and
software, beyond hardware to har-dee-har-hardware... And that's about
all your could say, because once Armstrong gets rolling, there's no
chance to do much else but make the sign of the monitor and shoult
hallelujah... But hush... He's telling the congregation how it came to
pass that he quit his marketing job at a California computer company to
become a full-time stand-up-saint...
"One night, as I was home in Santa Cruz, working on my computer,
lightning struck the satellite dish on the roof of my house... I was
rendered unconscious, and when I awoke, the keyboard prayer was on the
screen----'Our program who are in memory, HELLO be thy name' I was given
the name Saint $ilicon, and the Giver of Data, G.O.D., instructed me to
start the Church of Heuristic Information Processing, CHIP, the first
user-friendly religion."
That was in 1984... Since then, the cherub-faced, 40 year-old
Armstrong, a.k.a. Saint $ilicon, the fourth-quarter prophet and strict
fun-damentalist, has been ministering to "the data-distressed, the
unwired masses, the D-based and D-filed,: mostly at corporate events
like sales meetings, motivational seminars, and conventions of
computer-store owners... One of his favorite gigos (garbage in, gospel
out) was Apple's Christmas party...
Usually Saint $ilicon preaches to the sort of people who actually
understand those Wang commercials in which attractive young computer
jocks howl with laughter over what the MIS guy does after they take a
DEC workstation and, via a Wang PBX, get it talking to his own mainframe
through a Wang VS... But tonight not one of his flock sports a
nerdpack... There is a guy wearing a rather large, four-sided healing
crystal in a deerskin shamanic pouch; Saint $ilicon icon is the guest
speaker at the High Frontiers Monthly Forum, a new-age Chautauqua
sponsored by the more-or-less quarterly magazine that's devoted to "the
cutting edge of science, technology and/or psychoactivity."
Among the men and women gathered in the meeting room of Shared
Visions Bookstore in Berkeley, Califormia, are a stockbroker who's going
back to school to become a therapist, a software designer who's going
back to school to become a therapist, a therapist, a holistic video
engineer, and a man whose card says REVERSING ENTROPY IS EVERYBODY'S
BUSINSSS... The crowd is friendly, technohip, bright... Okay, a couple
of people are having an animated discussion about the mystical acoustic
properties of tarantula spider silk, but basically it's hearening to see
the sixties rebooted, laid back but on-line...
The lectern's been transformed into a red-velvet-draped pulpit for
Saint $ilicon, who wears a white suit with a button on the lapel that
says HAS YOUR DATA BEEN SAVED?... At his neck is a clear plastic brooch
with flashing green, red, and yellow lights controlled by a
voice-activated computer; it looks a bit like petri dish surrounded by
tiny Christmas bulbs... Oh yeah, and a silicon chip is stuck to his
forehead... ("The MIT group wear their chips on their shoulders," he
tells the crowd.)
In the compelling twang of a down-home Bible Belter, Saint $ilicon
rocks into the Sermon on the Monitor... "Dearly C-loved, we are
assembled here together because PCing is believing... We're here to
console you; ASCII and ye shall receive... We say there is a life worth
debugging... Data, data, everywhere, but not a thought to think, that's
the problem... Friends, perhaps you know someone out there with a
terminal illness, some poor hacker with bloodshot eyes in data distress
who's been attacked by the evil one, Glitch, and his wicked helper,
Missingstuffinfiles... Even if your data has been blown all to HAL,
there's not a thing we can do to bring it back...But we can solace
you in your hour of need...
"And that is why the Giver of Data has downloaded to me, from the
heavenly host mainframe, the Keyboard Prayer for the data distressed...
Now let us make the sign of the monitor [a square traced in the air, if
you'd like to try it at home], bow our heads, and pray responsively."
The crowd mumbles goodnaturedly: "... Forgive us our I/O errors as we
forgive those whoose logic circuits are faulty... Lead us not into
frustration and deliver us from power surges... For thine is the
algorithm, the application and the solution, looping forever and
ever... Return!"
Saint $ilicon holds aloft a Binary Bible, which, he says, he
translated from the ancient Geek, and reads from its first book, Sysgen
I:i: "in the beginning, the Giver of Data generated silicon and carbon
and the system was without architecture, and uninitialized, and
randomness was upon the arrangement of the matrix...." Then come the
announcements... For the "Cathode-lics" in the audience, CHIP is opening
a new high school, Our Lady of Perpetual Upgrades ("We don't have nuns,
we have nulls") and a new junior high school, PC Jr., the Immaculate
Deception...
Papal bull isn't the only kind of Saint $ili slings... He's an equal
opportunity tease, offering to perform circuitcisions and bar-code
mitzvahs; he quotes from the Ten Commands ("Thou shalt not pirate
programs") and the Twenty-third PROM for the programmable read-only
memory ("Yea, though I commute to the Valley each day, I fear no evil,
for my Mazda is running... You prepare a desk for me in the office of
my competitors... ") For Bootists, there's a mantra (Ohms EPROM RAM
ROM); for the CMOSlems, readings from the glorious Core-RAM: and for
aging hippies, Beep Here Now by RAMDOS...
"Let us turn to hymn number 1101101," the saint cries, exhorting the
faithful to make a joyful noise..."Amazing space," they sing... "how
sweet it is, to have a disk like thee, My files were lost, but now
they're found... There's room on my PC."
During intermission, when Saint $ilicon has finished hawking such
holy relics as posters, buttons, and tapes, he talkds about the true
message of his on high tech antics... "Essentially, I created Saint
$ilicon, the patron saint of appropriate technology, to save myself from
the adverse effects of working seven years in the computer industry,"
says Armstrong... "He's the embodiment of certain idealisn."
Like most saints, $ili Armstrong has an odd resume... The Detroit
native holds degrees in psychology and creative wrting from Eastern
Michigan University, and in history and comparative religons from the
University of Califormia at Santa Cruz... A former street poet and vice
president of a garment company, Armstrong was planning to teach when
federal budget cuts dried up positions in the humanities... To support
his wife and daughter (ten year old Guenevere, who thinks his act's a
scream), Armstrong became a Middle East sales representative for
Apple... Later he was marketing manager for Corvus Systems, then Nestar
Systems, two Silicon Valley firms...
My job was to help customers understand what the engineers were
doing... I was what I call an intelligent interface between end users
and people who were creating the technology... I'd go to the engineers
and say, "What does this do?" and they'd say 'Do?'... They got so cut
off from the rest of the world... I learned that's the only danger of
technology, disconnecting from reality... That's when you hurt yourself
and other people...
"Science and traditional religions run on algorithms that is, ridid
rules... Following rules blindly, inflexibly, leads to danger... I
developed the Church of Heuristic Informations Processing to teach a
model of thinking for technological era: Heuristic thinking is flexible
and varied, offering rules of thumb, not strict, specific laws... Our
generation is challenged to absorb a lot of new information, while
staying rooted but not rigid."
The best way to keep people supple, he thinks, is by getting them to
laugh at themselves... There will be no salvation for the computer
industry until prepars to meet its mocker...
Tonight's audience is ready to laugh, even when they don't get it
all... "I'm just a beginner with computers," says the man with the
crystal size Big Rock Candy Mountain..."Some of it was over my head, but
he's funny."
The saint's career is going divinely... He seems to be a solid hit on
the circuit circuit, where the silicon savvy get all the in jokes and
hang around after the sermon to tell some of their own... ("One I heard
recently was, how is Ronald Readgan like Pascal programming? They both
use a semicolon.") He does two weekly radio spots, one heard in the San
Francisco Bay area and the other in New Your, and he is publishing his
own Binary Bible... Several European firms have booked him, including
the Vatican, though the boss won't be there... And he's running for
president on the Technocrat ticket... "We're neither left nor right," he
explains... "We're light... Our motto is, Lighten up!"
After intermission, Jeffrey Armstrong addresses the group as himself,
something he doesn't do with the corporate crowd... He discusses his
desire to intergrate the linear thinking of the technological age with
the cyclical thinking of the agricultural age, leads an esoteric
discussion of Boolean algebra, and recites poetry... But it's Saint
$ilicon who sends them out the door, warning folks to watch for the
signs of PCness envy, the fear that the other guy's system packs more
RAM: than yours, but ending with the promise of Nerrdvana and words that
restoreth the scrool: "there's no need to abandon hope, all ye who press
Enter; in the end everything will be right justified."
.------------.
/ I C E-van|[0]\
| _ |_ice\ Cheers,
~ ~=-(@)------(@)-=/ I C E-man
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... ÜßÜßÜÜßÜßÜÜßÜßÜ ‹ DRi¥K tì màkˆ éÂhÉ© pˆ•plä ¡Nt‰R‰StiïG. ßÜßÜßßÜßÜßßÜßÜ
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* Origin: Afraid of the competition? We ARE the Competition! (3:633/104)
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