Bits & Bytes 2.0 » silly

No Joking

chris — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 20:19:06 +0000

I was about to hit “publish” on a new post when I realized that today is April Fool’s Day, therefore making everything suspect. So that’ll wait until tomorrow.

In the meantime… I really do hate to be cranky about this, but April 1st is the Internet’s self-imposed 9/11 — over and over again, every single year. It’s awful. The painful grasping attempts at humor outnumber the clever bits by about 10,000:1, and even real news items become suspect.

I wish I had an April Fool’s firewall that would
replace all of today’s fake nonsense with this

Finding humor in IT

chris — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 18:48:50 +0000

Before becoming Conan’s replacement on the Late Show, Jimmy Fallon was best known for his turn on SNL. My favorite character of his was Nick Burns, your company computer guy. “MOVE!” he would yell with exasperation at some hapless office worker whose computer was broken:

Here’s an even funnier sketch from the dawn of history, documenting the travails of History’s First IT Professional:

Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this Monday mental health break. Back to our regularly scheduled content shortly…

Friday is Unix Timestamp 1234567890 Day!

chris — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 17:00:37 +0000

Would you like to impress a geek this week? This Friday, you can build some quick techie cred by wishing an IT worker a happy Unix Timestamp 1234567890 Day!

I know: “What?!”

The Unix time stamp calculates the number of seconds that have elapsed since midnight Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) of January 1, 1970. Using this simple string helps programmers easily perform date and time computations in their code. This Friday the 13th (spooky!) will see a very special moment in arbitrary number history: about halfway through the minute at 3:31pm PST (6:31pm EST), exactly 1,234,567,890 seconds will have passed since the beginning of UTC. It’s a totally pointless but fun little reason to celebrate, like the calendar Year 2000 but on a much smaller scale.

It’s worth noting that a new sort of Year 2000 Problem will occur on January 19, 2038, when Unix time reaches 9999999999 and runs out of digits—also known as the Year 2038 Problem. As UnixTimeStamp.com explains (with an irresistible pun):

Before this moment millions of applications will need to either adopt a new convention for time stamps or be migrated to 64-bit systems which will buy the time stamp a “bit” more time.

As with the Y2K problem, my guess is that we’ll all be fine… but things could also go horribly wrong.