Showing results for Things I've written that have amused other people - The Old New Thing

A customer asked for advice on how to accomplish something, the details of which are not important, except to say that what they were trying to do was far more complicated than the twenty-word summary would suggest. And I wasn't convinced that it was a good idea, sort of like asking for advice on how to catch a baseball in your teeth or pick all t...

On an internal discussion group, somebody decided to quote one of my blog entries. Jim Medding was amused by my response: Bloggers are just idiots with a Web site. (My blog was dug up in order to refute a claim, even though the blog entry applied to a situation different from the one under discussion.)

A question was sent to an internal discussion list for users of the XYZ tool: From: Q To: XYZ Users The GHI function in the JKL tool doesn't work for me. «description of problem deleted» I responded with this message: To: Q, XYZ Users The JKL tool is not part of XYZ. You should contact the author of the JKL tool. The reason wh...

Somebody posted a time-saving tip and concluded with "You'll save yourself at least 5 minutes per year." I jokingly wrote back, "I already do XYZ which does this automatically, and besides, saving 5 minutes per year isn't much anyway. I spend that much time picking my nose." The response: "Yeah, but now you can do both nostrils."

I occasionally post things I've written that have amused other people, but today I'm going to share something Betsy Aoki wrote that amused me. On one of our internal mailing lists, somebody wondered why we don't use email spam filters to attack comment spam and trackback spam. My point was that the goal of email spam is very different from the goa...

A customer who is writing some sort of code library wants to know how they should implement a function that determines whether a file exists. The usual way of doing this is by calling , but what they've found is that sometimes will report that a file exists, but when they get around to accessing the file, they get the error . The lesser questi...

One of my colleagues pointed out that my web site is listed in the references section of this whitepaper. It scares me that I'm being used as formal documentation because that is explicitly what this web site isn't. I wrote back, I really need to put a disclaimer on my web site. FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY Remember, this is a blog. The op...

In an internal discussion of the women blogger conference known as BlogHer, somebody asked, "Why isn't there a BlogHim?" I replied, Isn't that the plural of the word "blog" in Hebrew? This got quite an amused response from the Hebrew-speaking (or at least vaguely Hebrew-aware) members of the mailing list. Not bad for having studied Hebrew for a...

Go figure.

I can't believe he saves this stuff.