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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • An older friend of mine told me years back about an incident that happened on a university VAX running Unix. In those days, everyone was using vt100 terminals, and the disk drives weren’t all that quick. He was working on his own terminal when without warning, he got this error when trying to run a common command (e.g. ls)

    $ ls -l
    sh: ls: command not found
    

    So he went on over to the system admin’s office, where he found the sysadmin and his assistant, staring at their terminal in frozen horror. Their screen had something like:

    # rm -rf / tmp/*.log
    ^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C
    # ls -l
    sh: ls: command not found
    # stat /bin/ls
    sh: stat: command not found
    

    A few seconds after hitting return, and the rm command not finishing immediately, he realised about the errant space, and then madly hammered Ctrl-C to try to stop it. It turns out that the disk was slow enough that not everything was lost, and by careful use of the commands that hadn’t been deleted, managed to copy the executables off another server without having to reinstall the OS.













  • I love the arguments about tolerances, how “having to stare at the speedometer will make things less safe”.

    The average 17 year old is expected to be able to drive at a steady speed while dividing attention effectively and NOT staring at the speedometer, and demonstrate this skill on their driving test. So basically all the people going on about how they will “have to stare at the speedo” are saying: “Speed limits shouldn’t be enforced because I’m too incompetent to safely drive at the speed limit”. It makes me think that it would be a good idea that driving licenses really expire at their expiration date, requiring a new driving test.

    Anyone who thinks driving at the speed limit needs to stare at the speedo seriously needs some remedial training from a driving instructor.





  • Twice, and they were completely different experiences.

    First was gas at the dentists for taking 3 teeth out as my mouth was overcrowded. I was kind of asleep, I could hear people’s voices in a really trippy flanged way, and I could vaguely feel some tugging at my jaw (but no pain). The gas tasted awful.

    The second was for an operation at hospital after an accident (requiring 6.5 hours of microsurgery). It was like jumping forwards 7 hours in time, literally counting the seconds after the anaesthetic went in at night, then immediately waking up in broad daylight. It is completely unlike deep sleep (where you still are aware that time has passed).