» Guilty Pleasures, part 2

Supermarket Trolley Gliding
Everyone does this. Earlier today doing the big shop for the week, I launched into a trolley glide just as someone else who, like me, is old enough to know better, launched into a trolley glide coming towards me. We didn't say anything, just nodded in mutual recognition as we glided past each other.

Brilliant.
(Sat 15th Mar 2008, 13:42, More)

» I don't understand the attraction

Communications satellites.
They go right over my head.
(Fri 16th Oct 2009, 17:53, More)

» Pubs

I used to work in a hotel...
... which had a 5-foot-tall wooden sign board of a chef holding a blackboard, that we wrote the day's specials on.

One of the guests, who had partaken of many fine local ales stumbled out of the bar, staggered and sidestepped across the lobby, and found his way to the taigh bheag blocked by this white-hatted diminutive figure.

"Gurrouw-ahwah way"

The wooden chef grinned cheerily back at him, silently announcing that today's soup had been cream of tomato and basil.

"GAHRAHTUH FUHUN WUAH"

The wooden chef flashed his winning smile, and just as silently as before proclaimed that the clams in white wine were only eight quid.

THUD. The pisshead planted one on the poor beleaguered wooden chef. What had he done to deserve this? Indecisively he swayed, his fight-or-flight reflexes stilled - curse this 28mm marine ply body! Sway, sway... and toppled forwards with his not inconsiderable 40-odd kilos, trapping his assailant underneath.

Decked by the wooden chef.

Length? Well if the base had been longer he might have stayed upright.
(Fri 6th Feb 2009, 18:57, More)

» DIY Techno-hacks

How to avoid typing in programs from books
A few years ago I had a very old DEC PDP-11/73 minicomputer dating from the early to mid 80s. It could boot off its 32MB hard disk, or from 8" floppies or RL02 disks - 10MB disk packs about the size of dustbin lids. You turn the power on, and it would display a big scrolly message indicating that it belonged to Aberdeen College of Agriculture, then a little "boot:" prompt where you typed the letter for the drive you wanted to boot off. After ten seconds or so, it would boot to DU0: which was the first hard disk partition. Great. Until the fateful day when one of the boot ROMs went phut. Arses.

Now actually booting the machine wasn't too hard - you could drop it into an octal debugger where you could program it by typing in big strings of numbers, rather like typing in programs from magazines in the early days of home computers. This got old pretty fast, though, because you needed to type in a couple of dozen four digit numbers *every time*.

"Hang on a sec", I thought, "this terminal I'm using has programmable function keys that can store sequences of keystrokes. Wonder how big a sequence it can store?"

Big enough as it turns out. So when my PDP11 was donated to a museum, along with all the manuals went a piece of paper describing which combinations of CTRL, SHIFT and function keys to press to send the magic words to boot it up.

I may have just out-geeked the whole Internet.
(Sat 22nd Aug 2009, 8:56, More)

» Family codes and rituals

Oooh, one last one...
... whenever my girlfriend or I are cooking something with mushrooms, and we take out a mushroom from the "work in progress" to taste it, you must make the Mario power-up mushroom noise.
(edit)
... and if it tastes really good, run around the kitchen singing the "bonus level" music.
(Thu 27th Nov 2008, 15:48, More)