[humorix] Quickies Straight From Dave's Twisted Mind

[James Baughn <jbaughn@ldd.net>]

Quickies Straight From Dave's Twisted Mind
Dave Finton, surazal@nerp.net
February 24, 2000

Editor's Note:

Dave Finton has sent in another round of Quickies.  Since
both of our regular readers (hi Bob and Eric!) actually
like Dave's columns, we decided to run it even though we
still have lingering doubts about his sanity.

* Dave Declares War on Meta-Humor

David Finton, intrepid Humorix reporter, has declared war
on the scourge of the internet known as meta-humor, whereby
a joke will make fun of itself within itself.  "These
meta-jokes are going too far, and will cause some serious
imbalances in the space-time continuum," said Dave to
reporters at a press conference.  "All too often, humorists
will refer to themselves in the third person or even
pretend they're being interviewed at imaginary press
conferences just for convenience's sake.  These  so-called
meta-humorists often work out of their basements smoking
entire packs of cigarettes at a time while putting off
critical tasks that need to be done, like laundry!

"These meta-humorists can be sneaky, too.  Often times
they'll try to get a good chuckle through self-depracating
humor.  Watch out for these people; they are a menace to
society!"

James Baughn, creator of the Humorix website, has pushed
Congress into passing the It's For The Children and Dave
Quit Stealing My Jokes Act.  This bill, if enacted into
law, might be the only thing to get Dave to finally shut
up.

"Make no bones about it," said Dave.  "The first thing I
will do is publish an article on Humorix on this matter. 
No meta-humorist will be safe from the clutches of my Giant
Death Ray(tm).

[Just for your information, it is official Humorix policy
to never employ silly editor's notes as a cheap attept at
meta-meta-humor. -- The Editor]

* Microsoft releases MS BackPedal 3.1

In conjunction with the release of Windows 2000 and the the
nearing conclusion to the Justice Department Antitrust
trial, Microsoft has responded to the growing market need
for back-pedaling by releasing Microsoft BackPedal(R), a
software package designed to detract statements made by
overworked CEO's and overzealous marketing droids.

"We released this product to address the growing needs of
our biggest customer, namely ourselves," said Steve
Ballmer.  "When Bill Gates made those, um, silly comments
about open-sourcing our flagship product, well we had to
embrace and extend the concept of trying to rewrite
history."

So far the BackPedal product has shown amazing success. 
Already Microsoft has rewritten many of its own
misstatements.  "640K ought to be enough for anybody" has
already been converted to "You might be able to run
Solitaire on 640 Megabytes of RAM with Windows NT on a good
day" and "This court trial will have no impact on how we do
business" has been rewritten as "We've split our operations
up into 5 completely autonomous units, just in case".

The software is not without its bugs, however.  An
automatic e-mail form sent to bug-submitters for the
Windows 2000 beta program that was supposed to read "Thank
you for testing our beta product.  While we are certain our
product may contain a few flaws, we hope that your
experience with our software has improved your life"
instead read "This piece of crap already has 65,000 known
bugs and you want to tell us about another one?  We might
look at your bug submission, but by the time we do your
descendents may already have evolved into more advanced
life forms such as bacteria, loser.  Go use a real
operating system; see what we care!"

"Whoops," replied Ballmer when notified of this.  "Looks
like an upgrade is already in the works.  Cha-ching!"

* EFNet Reaches 7th Straight Year of Nonfunctionality

IRC users across the world celebrated the 7th anniversity
of the last known time EFNet, a network of Internet Relay
Chat servers across the internet, was actually
operational.  The nonfunctionality of EFNet and IRC in
general has become a mainstay in many internet users'
lives.

Jim Smith, system administrator in charge of one such IRC
server, lovingly patted the machine in the back corner of
the server farm room.  "This machine hasn't even been
turned on in 4 years.  Does that stop anybody from trying
to connect to it during netsplits and heavily lagged
periods of time?  Nope!  Boy, are these IRC users dumb! 
We've got three of these  babies, and none of them have
been working properly in the past decade or  so.  Just for
fun we turn one on and hook it up to the network for a
while, but when, say, a thousand lusers connect to it in
the vain hope an  IRC server is actually running, we pull
the plug just for the hell of it!"

EFNet was once the main vehicle of communications in the
early years of the internet but is now mainly used either
for SPAM purposes or for transmitting messages to IRC users
that a netsplit has occurred.

When one IRC user was asked why he just didn't go to
another IRC network, he replied "No way d00d!  This is
where all my l33t friends are!  Well it's either there or
on AOL Instant Messenger...".  AOL is in fact the only
other internet service that has broken EFNet's record by
being non-operational since the very beginning when the
power switch was first turned on in Steve Case's garage
back in the 18th century B.C.

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