Science for SEO: funny story

January 30, 2009

TGIF - wicked!

Hi all, welcome to another TGIF post. I hope that you have had a chilled out week and that you have enjoyed working and got time to have a bit of fun, if your work isn't also your source of fun. This week I have been experiencing Sydney for the 1st time and mostly working unfortunately but I also made it to the beach and swam in the pool enough times to balance all that out :)

It was pointed out to me that this post is basically "what I wasted time on this week" - fair point.

Without further ado...

Stuff I liked this week:

The list of top 10 complaint letters courtesy of The Telegraph.

Levitated have some super cool pictures of abstract things which I really like (fractals and stuff).

The 100m long picture depicting people walking on Warschauer strasse railroad bridge - shot over 20 days.

Quotes:

"When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind". (Lord Kelvin) [but I don't agree :)]

"Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration". (S.Kelly-Bootle)

"It's hard enough to find an error in your code when you're looking for it; it's even harder when you've assumed your code is error-free".( S Mconnell)

"As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications". (D. Parnas)

Facts:

Every second around 100 lightning bolts strike the Earth.

Every year lightning kills 1000 people.

If you could drive your car straight up you would arrive in space in just over an hour.

On the day that Alexander Graham Bell was buried the entire US telephone system was shut down for 1 minute in tribute.

The only letter not appearing on the Periodic Table is the letter “J”.

The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.

Presenting the "Round orbita mouse" - it's all round, it's wireless, it spins around...

October 24, 2008

TGIF - at long last.

Welcome...you survived yet another week, and you're now on the home run...the weekend hits soon.

As every friday here at SFS, we'll treat ourselves to some fun stuff - here goes:

The huge printing presses of a major Chicago newspaper began malfunctioning on the Saturday before Christmas, putting all the revenue for advertising that was to appear in the Sunday paper in jeopardy. None of the technicians could track down the problem. Finally, a frantic call was made to the retired printer who had worked with these presses for over 40 years. "We'll pay anything; just come in and fix them," he was told.

When he arrived, he walked around for a few minutes, surveying the presses; then he approached one of the control panels and opened it. He removed a dime from his pocket, turned a screw 1/4 of a turn, and said, "The presses will now work correctly." After being profusely thanked, he was told to submit a bill for his work.

The bill arrived a few days later, for $10,000.00! Not wanting to pay such a huge amount for so little work, the printer was told to please itemize his charges, with the hope that he would reduce the amount once he had to identify his services. The revised bill arrived: $1.00 for turning the screw; $9,999.00 for knowing which screw to turn.

Commentary: most debugging problems are fixed easily; identifying the location of the problem is hard.

It is...it drives me mad. Luckily I have some clever friends to help out :)

Our usual...this brings to mind the mess that is Vista:

"If you can't make it good, at least make it look good".

....aw...Bill....