friday funnies - 18/03/05

A man walking along a beach was deep in prayer. Suddenly the sky clouded
above his head and, in a booming voice, the Lord said: "Because you have
TRIED to be faithful to me in all ways, I will grant you one wish." The
man said: "Build a bridge to Hawaii so I can drive over anytime I want."

The Lord replied: "Your request is very materialistic. Think of the
enormous challenges for that kind of undertaking. The supports required
to
reach the bottom of the Pacific! The concrete and steel it would take!
It will nearly exhaust several natural resources. I can do it, but it is
hard
for me to justify your desire for worldly things. Take a little more
time
and think of something that would honour and glorify me."

The man thought about it for a long time. Finally he said: "Lord, I wish
that I could understand my wife. I want to know how she feels inside,
What
she's thinking when she gives me the silent treatment, why she cries,
what
she means when she says nothing's wrong, and how I can make a woman
Truly
happy."

The Lord replied: "You want two lanes or four on that bridge?"


=============================================================


Micro was a real-time operator and a dedicated multi-user. His broadband protocol made it easy for him to interface with numerous input/output devices, even if it meant time-sharing.

One evening he arrived home just as the Sun was crashing, and had parked his Motorola 68000 in the main drive (he had missed the 5100 bus that morning), when he noticed an elegant piece of liveware admiring the daisy wheels in his garden. He though to himself, "She looks user-friendly. I'll see if she'd like an update tonight."

He browsed over to her casually, admiring the power of her twin 32 bit floating point processors, and inquired, "How are you, Honeywell?" "Yes, I am well," she responded, batting her optical fibers engagingly and smoothing her console over her curvilinear functions.

Micro settled for a straight line approximation. "I'm stand-alone tonight," he said. "How about computing a vector to my base address? I'll output a byte to eat and maybe we could get offset later on."

Mini ran a priority process for 2.6 milliseconds, then transmitted 8K, "I've been recently dumped myself and a new page is just what I need to refresh my disk packs. I'll park my machine cycle in your background and meet you inside." She walked off, leaving Micro admiring her solenoids and thinking, "Wow, what a global variable! I wonder if she'd like my firmware?"

They sat down at the process table to a top of form feed of fiche and chips and a bottle of Baudot. Mini was in conversational mode and expanded on ambiguous arguments while Micro gave occasional acknowledgements although, in reality, he was analyzing the shortest and least critical path to her entry point. He finally settled on the old line, "Would you like to see my benchmark subroutine?" but Mini was again one clock tick ahead.

Suddenly, she was up and stripping off her parity bits to reveal the full functionality of her operating system. "Let's get BASIC, you RAM" she said. Micro was loaded by this stage, but his hardware policing module had a processor of its own and was in danger of overflowing its output buffer, a hang-up that Micro had consulted his analyst about. "Core," was all he could say, as she prepared to log him off.

Micro soon recovered, however, when she went down on the DEC and opened her device files to reveal her data set ready. He accessed his fully packed root device and was about to start pushing into her CPU stack, when she attempted an escape sequence.

"No, no!" she cried. "You're not shielded!"

"Reset, baby," he replied. "I've been debugged."

"But I haven't got my current loop enabled, and I can't support child processes," she protested.

"Don't run away," he said. "I'll generate an interrupt."

"No!" she squealed. "That's too error prone and I can't abort because of my design philosophy."

But Micro was locked in by this stage and could not be turned off. Mini stopped his thrashing by introducing a voltage spike into his main supply, whereupon he fell over with a head crash and went to sleep.

"Computers!" she thought as she compiled herself. "All they ever think of is hex!"


===============================================


A frog goes into a bank and approaches the teller. He can see from
her nameplate that her name is Patricia Whack.

"Miss Whack, I'd like to get a $30,000 loan to take a holiday."

Patty looks at the frog in disbelief and asks his name. The frog
says his name is Kermit Jagger, his dad is Mick Jagger, and that it's
okay, he knows the bank manager.

Patty explains that he will need to secure the loan with some collateral.

The frog says, "Sure. I have this," and produces a tiny porcelain
elephant, about an inch tall, bright pink and perfectly formed.

Very confused, Patty explains that she'll have to consult with the
bank manager and disappears into a back office.

She finds the manager and says, "There's a frog called Kermit Jagger
out there who claims to know you and wants to borrow $30,000, and he
wants to use this as collateral."

She holds up the tiny pink elephant. "I mean, what in the world is this?"

(you're gonna love this)

(wait for it)

The bank manager looks back at her and says...

It's a knickknack, Patty Whack. Give the frog a loan. His old man's a
Rolling Stone."

(You're singing it, aren't you?)

Never take life too seriously! Come on now, you grinned, I know you did!!!



Have a lovely weekend all....

Spanner