Okay, who remembers’ back when I started this site and people were thinking, “Who’d want to scorn mounty? mounty scorner? What’s that about?” Well, eventually word got around, one way, or the other, that no one was scorning anything and the site, in fact, represented mounty’s little corner of the internets. The folks at 1&1 didn’t get that message:

In the words of some immortal bard whose name escapes me at the moment: “my official position is that I have no official position.” I did, however, stumble upon an excellent party game that has the potential to inspire your guests to new heights of vocabular genius…or drive them terminally insane, one or the other. The game is simple: given an acronym, find every and all possible meanings for said acronym. For instance, in internet slang, “FTW” is often seen and (usually) means “For The Win,” when used in such fashion as: “Lunch will be at Doc Chey’s - FTW!!!1!” That is not all “FTW” could theoretically stand for, though. It could, for instance, stand for “Fred Tickles Wallaby” or “Famous Toe Wreath.” The only rules are: 1.) no obscene/vulgar words may be used, and 2.) no word may be repeated, either verbatim or with slight modification (ie., since “tickles” was used already, no further conjugation of “tickle” may be used; however, “ticklish” may be used because it is no longer a verb). This went on for some time at lunch today while we contemplated the acronym “UVA.” “Unwanted Verbal Assault” and “Unrepentant Vicious Administrator” seemed to be the best at the table, though there were several others over half an hour of unrelenting vocal asininity.

For kicks, and to see how many shadow readers are out there, I wonder what you can come up with for the following tech-related acronyms:

1. DOA (dead on arrival - used to describe parts that do not work immediately upon receipt)
2. NIB (new in box/bag - used in auctions to indicate an unopened package)
3. IMO (in my opinion - precedes most un- or ill-informed opinions on internet discussion boards)

Suggestions may be from any topic, and it’s best that the entries not be from their parent category (though if you come up with a zinger in the computer realm don’t stop yourself). Show your handle of the English language right here!

…both the BBC the Wall Street Journal have problems creating a headline that makes sense (read the highlighted headlines):

(courtesy of Google News)

Whoever Fukuda is, he doesn’t exist yet…but he’s next in line. This is waaaay to existential for a Friday morning.

Since the days of the Caesars man has communicated in code. Nero (?) was the first that we know of to employ a simple rotation algorithm to his secret messages…and now ROT-13 is one of the most basic encryption schemes in the face of the planet. Still, independent of cryptographical studies, certain strata of society communicate employing various obfuscational techniques to render their communiques illegible to the common observer. (Yes, it took a while to come up with that statement.) Such is the case with an email chain between me, my coworker, and our boss, who has been involved in technology for quite some time. It all started with a Linux twist on everyone’s favorite video game meme: All Your Base.

Fred:

chown -R us:us ~\base

Why Fred copied everyone on what was, up until that point, a serious discussion is beyond me. Though it was getting close to the end of the day, and I guess he needed to unwind. So I replied with another favorite:

mounty:

b{2}|^bb

What Regex Shakespeare has to do with anything, I don’t really know. My boss, though, was not to be outdone:

boss:

Program Career_Change;
Uses System, Crt, Unmitigated_Gall;

Var
    Apologies : Integer;
{*******************************************}
Procedure Update_Resume;
Begin
    Get_out_Paper;
    Get_out_Crayon;
    Make_up_Stuff;
End;
{*******************************************}
Procedure Say_Goodbyes;
Var
    Speak : Longint;
Begin
    For Speak := 1 to 40 do
        Begin
            Writeln(’Goodbye!!!!!’);
        End;
End;
{*******************************************}
Begin

    Meet_with_the_Boss;
    Apologies := 0;
    Repeat
        Inc(Apologies);
        Writeln(’Sooorrrrieee!);
    Until Apologies = 40;
    Update_Resume;
    Say_Goodbyes;
End.

FTW. Bonus points to whoever can identify the language - It looks pre-C…kinda reminds me of Pascal, but then I never took a course in it so I’m not sure.

Oh, and finally, my apology:

<?php
    $apology = “I will not make the boss mad.”;
    for ($i=1; $i<=100; $i++) {
        echo “$i: $apology\n”;
    }
?>

I was chatting with a co-worker today and made a bleak discovery. Those who know me know that I tend to err on the cynical side, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Cynicism is simply trusting human nature/entropy to do its thing without expecting things to turn out any better. It’s a recognition that things are never so bad that they can’t get worse. It’s the cloud inside the silver lining. It is, according to a Non Sequitur cartoon I wish I could find online, why cynics outlive optimists.

So my co-worker asked me if I wasn’t more cynical than pessimistic, and that’s when it hit me - for the cynic, pessimism is the realization that you’re always right. (This is, by the way, a new original quote that will randomly appear in the above banner.) I (and others) have often said that cynics, for as much fun as they aren’t to be around, usually aren’t surprised by anything because things usually happen about as badly as they expect. To put a positive spin on it, things can only go up from here! Cynicism is past-tense: I told you things would be a mess. Pessimism is the future tense of cynicism: I can already tell things are going to be a mess.

I hope I’ve livened up your day. Remember, it is as bad as you think, if not worse, and they really are out to get you.

Ever since the dawn of civilization, man has uniquely triumphed over nature, subjecting it to the tools of his own creation to make it do what he wishes. One modern miracle stands as a testament to man’s unrelenting pursuit of mastery over nature: Spam (be sure to turn your speakers on before clicking).
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I had something stellar I was going to blog. I thought to myself at work this afternoon, “Man, wait until the internet gets this. They’ll love it!” But as usually happens with such flashes of genius, the mundane got in between genius imagined and genius fulfilled. Things like waiting for a clean XP SP2 install to finish; ordering a washer and dryer for the apartment (my usual laundromat is under the mistaken impression that less washer capacity that costs more and takes longer is an improvement, and in the same vein they just changed the one quarter’s worth of dry time from 15 minutes to 10 minutes); making iced tea (not sweet tea, per se, though it’s got enough sugar to work…in the Mount family tradition I add puckering amounts of lemon juice); preparing for a Greenville Chorale audition tomorrow…those kinds of things. Things like trying to explain to an Atlanta security consultant that we haven’t actually gotten around to installing their 30-day trial after 25 days. Or better yet, drawing a complete blank when he said his company name, trying not to sound like a blithering idiot while I frantically hunt internal documentation just to find out what his product is actually supposed to do. (See what 10 days of vacation does to someone??) Things like wondering why being pulled onto a support call and logging into one website suddenly means that I now have to watch a training video about Secretary’s Day, enforced by, of all departments, the safety crew. (I can see it now - April 23rd of next year rolls around and I walk into work to find that all the “administrative assistants,” or whatever the politically correct term is nowadays, have armed themselves with assault rifles, flash grenades, and flak jackets. Then I’ll wish I had watched the safety coordinator’s video on Secretary’s Day. To paraphrase Bill Cosby, “When your secretary comes in, she is going to shoot you in the face with a bazooka!” Those who have not seen Bill Cosby: Himself may leave the room now. Thank you.)
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Launching hamsters: meh.
Launching hamsters to Die Valkerie: radness.

http://www.cartoonnetwork.com/games/action/knd/hamsters/ - doesn’t seem to work in Firefox, probably because they used some proprietary IE method of rendering flash objects. I’ll forgive them that fault because this is so stupidly addictive. What kind of combined distance can you get?

Some Friday afternoons are frantic - trying to get things done before the day ends. Others are…um…not. I’ll leave it as an exercise in imaginative thinking to decide which today fell under, for me at least. It led me back to a stray thought that’s been banging around my head for a while. I shall start my discourse in true mathematician style:
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I don’t want to sound like those other bloggers - “Man, life has been so busy I just haven’t had a chance to write! Ha ha!” I said to myself, “mounty, don’t you dare complain about how stinkin’ busy you are, because 1.) no one probably really cares [that’s the cynic in me] and 2.) everyone else is busy too, and you moaning about it will only make them feel worse.” I really like one of the door signs on the hall: “There will be a $5 charge for whining.” I need that on my monitor, I think.
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This morning at work I was talking with my “cubicle” mates about the opera. (BTW, the Rigoletto was fantastic. Todd Thomas and Megan Monaghan represented Philly well, and they both have cannons for voices. Wow. I had great seats, too - aisle 4 left, H7 is where I ended up, which is basically front and center. Yeah, it was great.) I pointed out that in operatic literature, for the most part, the voice parts seemed to be character references. When’s the last time you saw an evil tenor? A pure-at-heart bass/baritone? A chaste alto or mezzo? A living soprano? All the operas at BJU so far:
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I made my boss angry at work today. Around 4:30 I couldn’t stay awake any longer, so I brewed myself what turned into one of the best cups of coffee I’ve had in a long while. (It was Ethiopian Sidamo from Starbucks, for those interested.) Trouble was, my boss smelled it and came running with his mug. Oops - only made one cup. I ended up taking a 3/4 mug and giving him some “flavoring” for tomorrow’s cup. I guess it’s like one of those sourdough bread things - always have a bit of starter at the bottom of the bowl before putting new stuff in.
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Not Greenville - they never will be. The Day of Prayer was canceled on the off-chance that perhaps it might be bad tomorrow morning. The thought was that town students would look out the window as they rolled over in bed and went back to sleep, because let’s face it - when snow or ice is in the forecast, better safe than sorry, right? I mean, suppose you make it the harrowing quarter mile to school…now imagine having to stay there a whole twenty minutes more because of congestion caused by worried drivers, panicking at the sight of a single drop of cold (never mind freezing) precipitation! The horrors! I saw a bumper sticker on a town student’s car: “I don’t care how you do things up North!” Obviously, or you might actually prepare for winter weather (which does not include buying milk and bread).
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This is me, come December 1 through whenever exams start. Click for the full thing.

On another note, happy December 1. It’s currently 70 degrees outside. O_o

Random thoughts from one who got up waaaaaay too early this morning:

1. I found a BBC TV series called “MI-5″ (”Spooks” over there). Kinda like CSI with British accents, and fairly clean for European TV. The first episode dealt with this South Florida lady who went over to England and was doing all sorts of bombings at abortion clinics. I had to watch the scene three times where she first speaks, because I swore it was just jibberish. Strange how I got used to the British accents but couldn’t make heads or tails of a (fake?) southern accent.
2. Today’s Scare of the Week goes to John Warren. John bummed a ride off me to the airport at 5 this morning. (I owed him half a dozen favors.) I got up at 4:45a, so I wasn’t completely alive at the time. As I’m exiting I-85 to pull into GSP, John exclaims, “Greenville/Spartanburg?” I thought he was confused about the “Spartanburg” part; he was actually confused about the whole thing. He looks at me and says, “No, man - we’re going to Charlotte.” Now, quick geography lesson. GSP is less than 15 miles from BJU, and at a leisurely pace it takes about fifteen minutes to get there. CLT is 95 miles from BJU, and at break-neck speeds takes a smidge over an hour to get there. So when he started adamantly insisting that he was flying out of Charlotte, not Greenville, I started worrying. We pulled into the departures section at GSP while he ran in to check. Thankfully I was right - he was leaving from GSP. We could have made his 7:00a flight if he had been going from CLT (at that point it was 5:15a), but it would have been tight. Thanks, John.
3. After returning, I was running on 1/5 gallon of gas, so I stopped at one of the three gas stations next to campus. HAVE YOU PEOPLE NEVER HEARD OF 24-HOUR GAS STATIONS??? Turn the pumps to credit card only, make your customers pay first, and you can leave the stupid things on all night.
4. I finally did get gas, and since I was up so early I was starting to get hungry. Usually I can get up late enough so that I start getting really hungry around lunchtime. Not today. Though this fair city has never heard of 24-hour gas pumps, they have heard of 24-hour fast food drive-through, so it was off to Jack in the Box to spend my taxicab payment on breakfast. I noticed they now have this self-swipe card reader on the drive through. I ask you - how on earth is that better service? There’s no indication on the card reader of which way to swipe the mag stripe, so you just have to try a few times until you get it right. And once you get it facing right, there’s no guarantee it’ll take on the first or even second swipe. Both I and the guy in front of me had to swipe multiple times before it worked. Doesn’t save us lazy customers anything; in fact it makes us work more for our fast food. The server at the window has to babysit customers as they swipe, so it’s not saving them any time. And ultimately everyone leaves the place more frustrated. Some help that is.

I’m done now. Time to go back to sleep.

It occurs to me that the IT profession is necessarily self-endangering. If you work hard enough, you end up solving all the outstanding issues or finishing all your projects, which puts you out of work. (Ultimately we know that most IT [and even non-IT] innovations come not from the imagination but from sheer laziness and the desire to accomplish more work with less effort. At that rate, eventually we will have automated ourselves out of jobs.) However, if you don’t work hard, someone else who does work hard will upstage you, and you’ll be out of a job. Either way, you lose. The really ironic part of it all is this: as much as IT support people the world over gripe about “users*” (c’mon, admit it - we all do it from time to time, for good or ill; and most of the time they’re calling about something we didn’t do right the first time, anyway), they are our job security. If not for their unique and invaluable ability to find all the flaws in our initial hardware/software setup, we would be out of jobs pretty fast. Funny, huh?

*they go by a variety of acronyms and code phrases: ID 10-T errors (self-explanatory if you look at it long enough) and the word “picnic” (problem in chair, not in computer; example: “What’s the problem? I don’t really know…but it’ll be a picnic to solve.”) are my personal favorites. They’re also the mildest. Start lurking in large computer forums and you’ll find a few less flattering ones with more colorful, metaphorical language.

Aaron Dickey, of Digital Equinox fame, recently sprouted his own blog, imaginatively called Digital Equinox - Blog. And I would like to state for the record that the words “digital” and “rhythm” are really hard words to type quickly. Finally, the obligatory link to BJBloggers.

I need a backpack like this.

My roommate and I are having one of our deep philosophical conversations (we’re both in bed with our laptops…well, he’s with his and I’m with “mine”). I just came up with the most memorable quote of the night:
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I’ve got one more addition for you folks - Matthew Sims (et al) run Under Sovereign Grace, a blog on some spiritual topics - from my perusings it kinda looked like an online blog-commentary. (Not a commentary on blogs, but a commentary in blog format.) You should check it out at the list.
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