One of my first encounters with English Humour was when my wonderful teacher Mrs Walraven rolled in the old VCR-on-cart when i was going to technical secondary school (MTS)
She showed us Monty Python, Faulty Towers and Black Adder. THIS is the humour i like, this is for me!
So from that point on i wanted to see English Humour.
There are standup comedians i like, Billy Connolly (seen him live), Eddie Izzard (seen him live), Michael McIntyre and Jimmy Carr (tickets!!!) to name a few. Life stories, wierd confronting idea’s and realisations of things , Real life observations and Dark humour. (in that order)
Billy Connolly 2016
But i wanted to tell about TV shows (i try to place them in order):
Monty Python One of the first things i saw, great stuff. Liked the movies also.
Black Adder Loved the way it was the character Rowan Atkinson played got smarter every ‘season’, and Tony Robinson (Baldrick) was getting dumber. The last ‘season’ WWI was when all things where exactly right. (Yearly rewatch)
Not the nine o’clock news This one i need to review
The Young Ones A series that broke boundaries like Monty Python. First time i notished the perfect duo, Rik Mayall and Ade Edmonson
Fawlty Towers To few episodes, but each a brilliant piece of work. Superb characters! (Yearly rewatch)
Red dwarf Great stuff, loved the characters. And the space setting
Mr Bean Great (silent) performance of Rowan Atkinson. Liked his One man show more i think.
Bottom Then i learned about Bottom. It was the genius jokes and performances. The 5 liveshows where even more amazing. (Yearly rewatch) Also i have to mention the movie : Guest House Paradiso
So i went looking for more:
Filthy Rich & Catflap Secret Policeman’s Ball (not really a TV series)
Then i came across a oldie …
At last the 1948 show A predecessor of Monty Python with Marty Feldman
Do not adjust your set Also with guys who did Monty Python later on.
Today i was in Uist on holiday in Scotland, talking about these show. The B&B owner said “Do you know – Ripping Yarns???” So that’s the next to find and view!
Others i have to mention: Alas Smith and Jones The Bleak Old Shop of Stuff Allo allo
The location where the bench was from the intro of Bottom the TV series. Now a plaque is there, which reads: “Rik Mayall. 1958-2014. Punched his friend in the balls on a bench near this spot.”
The Bastard Operator From Hell (BOFH) is a fictional rogue computer operator created by Simon Travaglia, who takes out his anger on users (who are “lusers” to him) and others who pester him with their computer problems, uses his expertise against his enemies and manipulates his employer.
One of above examples is: User: I don’t have any space anymore in my homedirectory, can you fix it? Operator: Sure, .. logging in, deleting everything in users directory .. “fixed” User: Oh, thats fast, thanks (Unaware of empty directory)
Stuff i did
Hidden micro switch keyboard
A keyboard matrix has unused positions, i made a small microswitch in the hole of those little keyboard feet. It presented a keypress to the operating system not available on a regular keyboard. It unlocked my system. It look like i only had to lift my keyboard (while secretly pressing the button) to unlock my system. Another unlock/lock trick i used was a bluetooth ping to my phone. Leaving or coming back to my system was enough to lock/unlock screen.
Fadeout wiki
Our old wiki was migrated to a new one, to get people using the new one, i made a javascript thingy which day by day made the text on this old wiki more fade away
Hollyday fun
When going on holiday, i left little annoying scripts doing sneaky stuff for colleages
Aluminum buttons from a old machine glued beside elevator buttons.
Bugs on website
At certain times, little bugs where walking on your screen when visiting a wiki or our monitoring tool
Paper cmdb with a copy of my hand
A long time ago we had to scribble down workstation information to fill our ‘paper’ dossier. It contained a printed template with all the information. At one time i forgot to bring a template. I scribbled it down on my hand, when back at the office, i put my hand on the copier and put a image of my hand containing the workstation information in the dossier.
Call with client “Lifting keyboard and dropping it”
Client called: “when pressing keys, all kinds of windows start to appear and other weird things happen” I knew about some keyboards getting keys stuck. Looked like the windows key was the problem. (Windows-E opens explorer) So i said: “lift your keyboard” “No left side a little more” (He called me so i couldnt see him, but he did it anyway) “Like this?” “Yes, now drop it” i said Big noise of keyboard hitting desk .. (apparently unstuck said key) “Well?” i said “How did you do that? … it .. it worked!”
Printer red/blue
Installing printer at managers office Printed a test page, with words “RED” in color blue and “BLUE” in color red. Had to report back to him asap!
Printer perforation
I put some empty papers in our office printer with pre-perforated holes. Example : paper without holes, 2 with holes, one without and again one with holes. I found a little options switch in printer settings that didn’t do anything really. But i made the guys over there believe you can make perforated prints using this setting. Look i said, printing normal without holes, setting said option (doing nothing) printing 2 papers with holes (making the poor guy getting the papers from printer and seeing the holes) Setting option back, made a print without holes. So now you can do it. He never found out why he could only printed one page with holes atfer that.
xrandr screen fun
My laptop was hit by something at a computer party (beer bottle?) i could not read my screen on the left side lower part. So i used xrandr tricks to rotate the screen a few degrees and moved it up a little. Same tricks i’ve used at work, to fool around with our monitoring screens.
Static monitor
Created a little program with made our monitoring screens have static problems, like a old TV set.
Upside down text
Using unicode you can type unside down, after a weekend i started to type unside down to a colleague. Line after line, being serious about a problem. At the end i managed to make him believe it was a problem on his side.
Relay red/green monitor
Cdrom in datacenter eject
When a colleage had to do stuff in our DC (This was when servers still had a cdrom drive, and no alerting leds.) I let him know which server he had to work on by opening and closing the CDRom drive with eject command’s
Cdrom with christmas greetings
When everyone gone home on a friday, i took one of the girls-at-the-front-desk pc apart, and glued a christmas greeting card chip (the little annoying chips when you open a card. ) in the drive. Whenever she had to use the cdrom drive it played music.
Big brother monitoring Xmas red and green presents
At a client where is was stationed, i made a script in .. maybe june it was. Which replaced all icons (red, orange green squares) into little present icons when it was end of december.
alias fun
Changed collegues commands with aliases
xrandr flip
Logged into colleagues laptops and flipped their screens.
Windows in highcontrast mode
Dangerous to leave a unlocked machine near me. Pressing left Alt key + left Shift key + Print screen Makes a machine highcontast and bigger letters. People try to fix this bu editing the theme/color/font settings .. ultimately making things worse.
Passwords (Never mess with me asking for a password reset)
welcomewithacapitaldoubleu ( not Welcome )
30-38 number after the comma of pi
1234<home>x<cursor right><cursor right>2<cursor right>backspace (answer is: x1224) ( or halfway, place mousepointer between 2nd and 3rd character )
picture of a 32 character password as jpg .. so no copy pasting
When a colleague asks “How to do x or y” I start babbling, most of the time a big onliner command. Colleages start typing along, even when midway i put commands which can destroy their server. Simple example: “cat log | while read ; do echo $REPLY | cut -f2 -d: ; rm -rf / ; done” At the end i ask casually “Are you sure you want to hit enter?”
Created a web MP3 player in our office. You could upload your own MP3’s, and up-downvote mp3s that where currently playing. Some users uploads never arrived in the list 🙂 Some users coudn’t vote. 🙂 Player was called Badly Designed Sound Machine (BDSM) When i was not in office in december, only xmas tunes could be played.
When sitting opposite a colleage, i switched mouses. Put mine on his desk and his on mine. Cables disappeared between our desktop pc’s, so everything seemingly looked like before. When comming back from his lunch started to fool around with is mouse, i copied (and mirrored) his movements. So his mouse seemed to work, until i started to mess around.
Why “rubber ducking’’? While an undergraduate at Imperial College in London, Dave did a lot of work with a research assistant named Greg Pugh, one of the best developers Dave has known. For several months Greg carried around a small yellow rubber duck, which he’d place on his terminal while coding. ( From “The Pragmatic programmer” page 95)
Why rubber ducking?
A very simple but particularly useful technique for finding the cause of a problem is simply to explain it to someone else or even a object. Explain out loud (or in your mind to the duck) what each line of code is doing. Often while doing so, you will see the problem.
Why Pair Programming?
It is no secret, i like working on a problem alone. Let me do my ‘thing’. But i like the idea of Pair Programming, why?
Differences in thinking, gives alternative solutions
4 eyes principle, typo’s will be seen
When working with a novice:
Teaches the new guy
Give the other space to ask stupid questions, maybe they are NOT!
The knowledge of the new code is now known to > 1 person!
I have a rol of printer paper that was used by an old 8bit computer. I forgot which one, one out of my collection.
Fractal-like ‘art’
I dont think it is thermal paper, maybe the printer uses electricity just like the movie clip you see below. (Well .. not using 220V directly on the paper maybe) 🙂
Having fun at our old place during moving to Hilversum.
I think it was Burns Night 2005. We took one pipebag, took the drones out. And added one blowpipe and three chanters. We were struggling to play the damn beast with 4 people.
A picture should exist somewhere, add it when found.
Smallpipe adaptor for two chanters.
Xmas tree lights in the drones
I’ve seen some do this, but never with xmas balls also.
Playing the THX sound
Alternative playing
Above in the movie with two chanter you can see tape. You can tape other notes, for accidentals.
I’ve started a set with our folkband with my hands reversed. (Left on the bottom part of the chanter, right hand toppart) After playing amazing grace, I switched hands every few bars.
Playing high A gracenote with tophand index finger.
Play a tune and slide bottomhand over your top hand down.
Tape or block the bottom sound holes.
A old old movie (2005?), when we lift our knees we close the bottom sound hole on the side of the chanter.
xrandr is an official configuration utility to the RandR (Resize and Rotate) X Window System extension. It can be used to set the size, orientation or reflection of the outputs for a screen.
Someone broke my screen at a hackers event. The terminal was really hard to read with the black parts, so i tilted the screen
Broken screen in 2013
Quiet friday at work, playing with my little trusty 2530p. I’m using xmonad, so i don’t need any fancy work laptop.
Fun with distorting the screen
Another quiet friday at work, working from home, i turned all monitoring displays upside-down, sideways, or rotated them every so much seconds.
While this is a lot of fun to use, i used this to get my monitorsetups exactly the way i wanted, at home or at work. Different screen sizes, height differences .. no problem.
A fun tool to use is: https://github.com/qurn/xrandr-keystone-helper