A few years ago, the gas station near Microsoft’s main campus (the one which had been run by my colleague in a previous stage of his career) appeared to have suffered some problems with the LCD unit on one of its pumps. Instead of “Please insert card”, it said “@leace incebd cabd“. As a geek, I quickly determined that bit 4 got wiped out in the ASCII codes for the characters in the message. Undaunted, I set about going through the usual steps for purchasing gasoline, though it took a little longer than normal because I first had to decode the corrupted strings. And then after I thought I had finished all the necessary preliminaries, the panel said, “Begin Feeling”.
January 3rd, 2011
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Begin feeling
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Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.
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