Alex Papadimoulis

Originally posted by "jjeff1"...

Marten van Wezel notes, "seems like it isn't quite 'Always Coca Cola' on Piccadilly Square in London." Zoom!

"About two years ago," Simon writes, "I worked for a small telecommunications company. Turnover was fairly high, leaving not much consistency in the way applications were developed."

"This note came along with my home piano course book," Nela mentioned, "I bet Mac users will appreciate the thoughtfulness."

It's time once again to announce a new locale branch: The Daily WTF: Edition Française at fr.TheDailyWTF.com.

A few years ago, Rob Bateman worked as a programming lecturer at Bourenmouth University. Like many instructors, Rob put his notes, assignments, and resources on his webpage, available for all to see. It wasn't anything particularly interesting or exciting, mostly just stuff like this...

In April of 2004, Cleveland, OH became much more awesome. You see, that was the opening day of Notacon, the annual un-conference conference centered around technology, philosophy, and creativity. This year's event - Notacon 5 - will run April 4th thru 6th, and I have the honor of being one of the speakers.

The Green Email George Baker observed, "Some people take this 'green computing' thing way too seriously."

Thomas Nordlander writes: "The Swedish Church of Scientology's scary personality test contains some pretty awesome JavaScript validation. Consider the ingenious way that they make sure they are dealing with numbers."

Originally posted by "snoofle" ...

"It should be pretty simp--" David M cut himself off. He learned his lesson. Nothing at his new job was Pretty Simple.

When Chris walked off the platform with a computer science degree in hand, he knew one thing for sure: He'd have to start all over again in the business world. And with a dizzying smorgasbord of technologies and a whole world of concepts never broached in school, Chris knew he'd need guidance from a mentor.

"Browsing an archived article at the Herald Sun," writes Ben, "I saw a box labeled 'Also in Opinion' with the single entry WARNING WARNING - DO NOT ADD STORIES TO THIS SECTION. This is what came up when I clicked on it."

The early 1970's sure were fun. Of course, I'm not quite old enough to know that first hand – and, based on the last reader survey, neither are most of you – but, longtime reader and contributor G.R.G. certainly remembers. You see, by that time, computers were starting to become a novelty.

Avoiding MUMPS from Joe

In the Stargate SG-1 universe, The Replicators are an incredibly formidable AI race. Made up of small, interchangeable blocks that communicate through subspace across the galaxy, replicators can form into just about anything, from crazy little spider robots to androids to entire fricken spaceships. Worse still, the replicators consume virtually everything in their path to create more replicators, and adapt to and integrate any technology they come across. Oh yes, they make the Borg seem like kittens.

The value of Pi is not as 3.14159265…ish as many of us would like to believe. Legislators in Indiana once declared Pi as 3.2, 4, and 3.23. Staunch biblical mathematicians insist that it's 3. The whole thing is a mess: everyone just has to have their very own Pi.

When the H.R. director calls to rhetorically ask “can you come to my office for a chat… right now,” the conversation that follows rarely goes well. When one gets that call, goes to the office, and then finds two uniformed officers waiting, that conversation almost certainly never goes well. It sure didn’t for Steve.

"It's not every day that you come across a hand-coded, table based parser," writes Joel Davis. "That's pretty hardcore. I figured it must have been needed for checking if millions of strings were uints in some super-important inner-loop. Obviously, there had to be a reason to avoid 'strtol', 'atoi' or even 'isdigit'..."

Originally posted by "snoofle" ...

In addition to his normal statement from Fidelity, Ed has been receiving this every month...

It's Share Your Bizarre Email day! Here's three to get started...

Pop quiz, hot shot. There are seven different true/false flags. You have only a single integer to represent them. What do you do? What do you do?

Daryl pulled this out of a fortune cookie at a Chinese restaurant recently...

"It should be pretty simple," David M naïvely stated, "just look in the Agent_ProductLines table, right?"

When Russ started at InsuraCorp (as I'll call it), one thing was immediately apparent: There were two classes of programmers. The "rock stars," who were recruited from top universities and given first-class accommodations, like windowed offices with brand new computers and dual 21-inch LCD monitors; and the "dinosaurs," who were cramped in dimly lit cubicles each about the size of a refrigerator box. The dinosaurs were lucky if they had a fully working keyboard for their Windows 98 workstations.

"The laptops that we got at work come with the latest in state-of-the-art security," writes B. N., "unfortunately, getting the Fingerprint Recognition set up is a bit, well, challenging..."

"My company has a historical division between the IT Department and the Web Department," writes D. S. Black. "The IT Department does all the normal 'IT' stuff, while the Web folks mostly do non-technical like designing websites, creating simple databases, and configuring web servers. As a result, we've had a few web administrators who haven't quite been All There when it comes to things like reusable libraries, sensible documentation, and database design."