blog.shrub

Did you hear Bob Dylan is releasing an album of Sarah McLachlan covers? It’s called Mumbling Towards Ecstasy.

One of my favourite mixed metaphors—which I had somehow internally misattributed to David Johnston—was this one, from University of Waterloo registrar Ken Lavigne:

Admissions is a crap shoot, and this year we won in spades

This week, Peter Lewis of Fortune may have topped it:

Apple is making applesauce out of the old canard that Macs are a lot more expensive than Windows computers.

What kind of applesauce do you get from a canard, anyway?

lyle writes:

I heard and saw a lot of funny things yesterday… One of my favorite moments was when a carnie, upon seeing my camera, yelled to me, ” do you work for National Geographic or The Rolling Stones?” The Rolling Stones. Yes, I am walking around the Indiana State Fair, shooting pictures…because I work for the Rolling Stones.

Funny things you can do with the unix command line and linux sex positions.

Rich: Oh… another thing… what memory does the Macbook take? I was thinking about getting a single 512mb memory card (simm… dimm… whatever they’re
called these days)

Paul: DDR2 PC2-5300 667 MHz wooha.

Rich: I’m guessing ‘wooha’ isn’t a technical spec. :-) But with all the Korean OEMs you can never tell.

The Daily WTF is a great source for humorous (and sometimes unbelievable) technical blunders.

About six years ago (before PEAR and such), I wrote a simple OO wrapper around PHP’s mail() function. I haven’t really touched the code, but I did slap a CC license on it last year.

Today, I got this email:

From: DANIEL CROWE <danielcrowe01@yahoo.com>
Date: June 29, 2006 8:05:59 am PDT
To: ######@paulschreiber.com
Subject: PHP MAILER SCRIPT: BY PASS SPAM FILTERS

Hello Paul Schreiber,

I saw your name in phpclasses.org forum. I Humbly want
to know if you can write a php mailer script that can
send bulk mails and bypass spam filters. This is
needed to send bulk mails and delivers directly into
recipents inbox directly.

Do contact me back to danielcrowe01@yahoo.com.

Hope to read from you soon.

Daniel

I’m not sure how to answer this one. As Mark-Jason Dominus explains:

Some questions are logically nonsensical because the querent thinks they know more than they do. A lot of these have the form “How do I use X to accomplish Y?” There’s nothing wrong with this, except that sometimes X is a chocolate-covered banana and Y is the integration of European currency systems.

amusing, likely apocryphal compilation of errors and malapropisms on student essays.

Such a brilliant performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner:

But, listen, let’s review the rules. Here’s how it works: the president makes decisions. He’s the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put ‘em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know - fiction!

Because really, what incentive do these people have to answer your questions, after all? I mean, nothing satisfies you. Everybody asks for personnel changes. So the White House has personnel changes. Then you write, “Oh, they’re just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” First of all, that is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg!

so some guy got people to donate money so he could buy a G5 and blew up his G4. too funny.