Nerd Humor

There are number of RFCs published on April 1 that are quite amusing:

http://www.wyae.de/docs/joke-rfcs.php

In particular, look at 1139 (A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers) and 2795 (The Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite (IMPS)).

Angry Letter

Ok, This is one of the best insults I’ve ever seen. I stumbled across this scan below on usenet one day (Click the thumbnail to see the scan full-size).

Joke

A priest was delivering a sermon entitled “Stand Still and let the good Lord Fight your battles”, on the topic of not fighting but letting God vanquish evil himself. As he was delivering the sermon, a gust of wind lifted his garment and the congregation noticed he was carrying a gun.

After the service a congregant asked him, “I understood your sermon, but aren’t you contradicting yourself by carrying a gun? You did say you are supposed to let the Lord fight your battles for you?”

“I did say that, yes,” said the priest. “The gun is just to hold them off until the Lord gets here”.

Sailing

“I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky. And all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by.” —John Masefield

I was going to sailing this morning, but it didn’t happen–I was too lazy. I’m shooting for Friday now. I work in the morning, and then I can go straight to the water and sail from about 1:00 to sunset. I saw Andy this morning–he says he’ll be there to laugh at me. It probably will be pretty funny, I haven’t been out in a while.

I’ve been thinking lately, and the only moments I’ve been really happy over the past 4-5 years have been sailing. I bought a book of sailing quotes the other day (that’s where the above came from, you may also have heard it from Star Trek V). There really is something about sailing that can’t be explained…

When you’re sailing…it just seems like everything melts away…you’re only 20 minutes from shore, but everything there seems infinitely far away. Nothing on shore (work, school, whatever) can bother you while you’re out on the water. There’s you, the boat, the water, and God. I could swear God has a stronger presence on the water than on land. That’s probably due to the absence of distractions out there.

I think the best thing is when you go out in a storm, and it’s kind of nerve-wracking, and you’re putting all your effort into not capsizing. It’s kind of scary, but it’s great. And then the storm settles down and there’s still plenty of wind, but it’s not scary anymore, and you realize you’re still alive and the rest of the world just seems so trivial in comparison to what you’re doing right then. It’s purifying.

Tides

Tides came up at work, and we were trying to figure out what the tide numbers were relative to. You would think this would have been easy…but it took a lot of searching to find.

So…

Tides are given in feet above (sometimes below) chart datum. Chart datum is defined (in the United States) by Mean Lower Low Water (MLLW). MLLW is “The average of the lower low water height of each tidal day observed over the National Tidal Datum Epoch” (http://www.baysail.com/tide_terms/gloss_m.html). Lower low water is the lower of the two low tides (or single low tide) in a day. The National Tidal Date Epoch is 19 years, and currently is the period from 1983-2001 (http://co-ops.nos.noaa.gov/datum_update.shtml). I’m mainly posting this just to remind myself since I spent so much time figuring it out.

Quotes

How can you get bored when you have firearms? —Dan Dameron

That’s a bag Matt, it’s not your cape. —Brian McNally, co-worker

Because you’re a f***ing moron, that’s why!!! —Miles Crawford, former co-worker and all-around nice guy

I just don’t want to crush my hair… —James Malone, co-worker

Quotes

And then you will see that…I’m not lying. —My physics 228 professor, assuring us that the next part of this long proof (well, it wasn’t a proof per se) would cause what we had just done to make sense.

General Lucifer leads the army of fallen angels…General Christ leads God’s army. —My English professor, on Paradise Lost.

Building sa-exim on openbsd

If you’re getting

"Makefile", line 62: Need an operator

when trying to build sa-exim 4.2 on openbsd, do the following two things:

1. Edit the Makefile, on line 59:

@bash -c 'sed "//,$$ d" < [blah blah]'

Change bash to sh. You can use ":set number" in vi to see line numbers.

2. Use gmake instead of make.