I found the most hilarious spam comment on one of my blogs this morning. Check it out:

HELP! I’m currently being held prisoner by the Russian mafia and being forced to post spam comments on blogs! If you don’t approve this they will kill me. They’re coming back now. Please send help!

The just cracked me up What’s been your best spam comment of the year?

photo credit: ehpien

We haven’t had a joke here for some time, so here’s one that some techies may be familiar with:

Tech: Computer Services Orange County this is so-and-so speaking. May I have your username please?

Female Customer: Yes I want to speak to the person in charge immediately!

Tech: Speaking. What can I do for you?

Female Customer: I want to complain about the pornographic bookmarks your company put in my web browser!

Tech: We didn’t put any pornographic bookmarks in your web browser.

Female Customer: Oh yes you did! I’m looking at them right now!

(Tech remembers the Netscape history list and grins to himself)

Tech: Where exactly are these “bookmarks” located?

Female Customer: In Netscape!

Tech: And where exactly in Netscape would that be?

Female: In that little list that comes down when you click the little down arrow!

Tech: The one right above the Net Search button?

Female Customer: Yes that one!

Tech: Miss, that’s the Netscape history list. Netscape keeps the past ten links you typed in that box. The only way to put an address in that box is for someone to physically sit at your computer and type in a web address.

Female Customer: Well I certainly didn’t type in those X rated web addresses!

Tech: Well somebody did. Who else has access to your computer, and uses the Internet?

Female Customer: Just me and my husband!

(Several seconds of silence pass … Hey! I wasn’t going to say it!)

Female Customer: …….. oh …………. OOOH! … Thank you.

(She quickly hung up)

*chuckle* funny huh?

It’s from Geek & Poke, a great cartoon site I’ve bookmarked for further perusal. There seem to be some good cartoons there, so if there’s anything good, I’ll be sure to let you know.

I always think it’s great that you can find all sorts of fun and game on the web, although there are also some less desirable things like malware sites and other trying to sell you the best weight loss pills money can buy. But, there are always good things around that can help offset this hassle. Enjoy the cartoons.

“Oughta Know Inbound Marketing”

By HubSpot’s Rebecca Corliss

If I make one more call
I might go punch a wall.
No one understands
That this doesn’t work.

They hang up cause I’m a creep.
The mail I send they don’t read.
They always find a way to
Ignore me.
I’m interrupting their lives
So they threaten me with knives.
I didn’t think that marketing was like torture.

Cause the calls, direct mail
TV ads, they all fail.
And they aren’t getting me anywhere. They don’t work.
No!
And every time I try to sell
‘Didja know that I’m told I should go to hell?
Then I cry. Then I cry.
And you wonder why.

I want leads
To come to me.
Fix our SEO
Get some inbound links.
RSS
Let’s get blogging.
Why don’t we just use inbound marketing?
You. You. You. Oughta know.

Get my page rank up.
Tag my content.
Fix my landing page.
Let them come to me.

Now I can blog I can tweet
Publish things you will read.
Won’t have to bug you in the middle of dinner.
Google me organically
Search results one two and three.
You need my products? Uh huh. Yeah you’ll find me.

Cause the calls, direct mail
TV ads, they all failed.
And they weren’t getting me anywhere. They don’t work.
No!
And every time I tried to sell
‘Didja know I was told I should go to hell.
Then I cried. Then I cried.
And you wondered why.

Now my leads
They come to me
Fixed our SEO
Got some inbound links
RSS
Now we’re blogging
Thank god now we use inbound marketing.
You. You. You. Oughta know.

Looks like too many people have stopped playing with online trading and started playing with image manipulation instead

At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the

computer industry with the auto industry and stated, “If GM had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon.”

In response to Bill’s comments, General Motors issued a press release stating, “If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.

2. Every time they painted new lines on the road, you would have to buy a new car.

3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull ove r to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue.

For some reason you would simply accept this.

4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.

5. Only one person at a time could use the car unless you bought “CarNT,” but then you would have to buy more seats.

6. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive — but it would only run on five percent of the roads.

7. The oil, water temperature and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single “general protect ion fault” warning light.

8. The airbag system would ask, “Are you sure?” before deploying.

9. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the antenna.

10. GM would require all car buyers to also purchase a deluxe set of Rand McNally Road maps (now a GM subsidiary), even though they neither need nor want them. Attempting to delete this option would immediately cause the car’s performance to diminish by 50 percent or more. Moreover, GM would become a target for investigation by the Justice Department.

11. Every time GM introduced a new car, car buyers would have to learn to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

12. You’d have to press the “start” button to turn the engine off.

1. Download a piece of Web authoring software – 20 minutes.

2. Think about what you want to write on your Web page – 6 weeks.

3. Download the same piece of Web authoring software, because they have released 3 new versions since the first time you downloaded it – 20 minutes.

4. Decide to just steal some images and awards to put on your site – 1 minute.

5. Visit sites to find images and awards, find 5 of them that you like – 4 days.

6. Run setup of your Web authoring software. After it fails, download it again – 25 minutes.

7. Run setup again, boot the software, click all toolbar buttons to see what they do – 15 minutes.

8. View the source of others’ pages, steal some, change a few words here and there – 4 hours.

9. Preview your Web page using the Web Authoring software – 1 minute.

10. Try to horizontally line up two related images – 6 hours.

11. Remove one of the images – 10 seconds.

12. Set the text’s font color to the same color as your background, wonder why all your text is gone – 4 hours.

13. Download a counter from your ISP – 4 minutes.

14. Try to figure out why your counter reads “You are visitor number -16.3 E10″ – 3 hours.

15. Put 4 blank lines between two lines of text – 8 hours.

16. Fine-tune the text, then prepare to load your Web page on your ISP – 40 minutes.

17. Accidentally delete your complete web page – 1 second.

18. Recreate your web page – 2 days.

19. Try to figure out how to load your Web page onto your ISP’s server – 3 weeks.

20. Call a patient friend to find out about FTP – 30 minutes.

21. Download FTP software – 10 minutes.

22. Call your friend again – 15 minutes.

23. Upload your web page to your ISP’s server – 10 minutes.

24. Connect to your site on the web – 1 minute.

25. Repeat any and all of the previous steps – eternity.

In the beginning, God created the bit. And the bit was a zero; nothing.

On the first day, He toggled the 0 to 1, and the Universe was. (In those days, bootstrap loaders were simple, and “active low” signals didn’t yet exist.)

On the second day, God’s boss wanted a demo, and tried to read the bit. This being volatile memory, the bit reverted to a 0. And the universe wasn’t. God learned the importance of backups and memory refresh, and spent the rest of the day ( and his first all-nighter ) reconstructing the universe.

On the third day, the bit cried “Oh, Lord! If you exist, give me a sign!” And God created rev 2.0 of the bit, even better than the original prototype. Those in Universe Marketing immediately realized the the “new and improved” wouldn’t do justice to such a grand and glorious creation. And so it was dubbed the Most Significant Bit, or the Sign bit. Many bits followed, but only one was so honored.

On the fourth day, God created a simple ALU with ‘add’ and ‘logical shift’ instructions. And the original bit discovered that by performing a single shift instruction, it could become the Most Significant Bit. And God realized the importance of computer security.

On the fifth day, God created the first mid-life kicker, rev 2.0 of the ALU, with wonderful features, and said “Screw that add and shift stuff. Go forth and multiply.” And God saw that it was good.

On the sixth day, God got a bit overconfident, and invented pipelines, register hazards, optimizing compilers, crosstalk, restartable instructions, microinterrupts, race conditions, and propagation delays. Historians have used this to convincingly argue that the sixth day must have been a Monday.

On the seventh day, an engineering change introduced Windows into the Universe, and it hasn’t worked right since.

(sung to the tune of ‘Help!’ with apologies to Lennon/McCartney)

When I was younger and quite desperate for pay, I worked the help desk for eight hours every day. End users called me up to tell me what was wrong, And now I find, it fried my mind, I worked “the desk” too long.

“Help me if you can, my system’s down! And a reboot didn’t bring it back ’round! Should it make that awful grinding sound? Help desk pleeeeeease, please help me!”

And now my work has changed in oh so many ways, I wrangle data; I’m an MCDBA. But now and then the help desk sneaks into my dreams, I’m taking calls, I’m up the walls, I wake up with a scream.

“Help me if you can my system’s down! I read virus-laden e-mails by the pound! All my data’s one big steaming mound! Help desk PLEEEEASE, PLEASE HELP ME!”

When I was younger and quite desperate for pay, I worked the help desk for eight hours every day. But now I wish that I could travel back in time, I wouldn’t cry, if only I could leave that desk behind.

“Help me if you can my system’s down! Spilled my coffee, now my hard drive’s full of grounds! Lost my pictures filled with women bound! HELP DESK PLEEEEEEASE, PLEASE HELP ME! HELP ME! HELP ME! Oooooooo….”

Once upon a time, in an absolute monarchy not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. “What do you think this is?”

One advisor, an electrical engineer, answered first. “It is a toaster.”

The king asked, “How would you design an embedded computer for it?”

The engineer replied, “Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Wait ’til next week, and I’ll show you a working prototype.”

The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, “Toasters don’t just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don’t look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years.

“With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet classes.

“The ham-and-cheese omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, ‘Cook yourself.’ The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs.

“Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don’t want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too.

“We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Would-be diners won’t buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it, and the message ‘Booting UNIX v.8.3′ appears on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook.

“Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel 80586 with 16MB of memory, a 1.2GB hard disk, and a SuperVGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a four-bit microcontroller).”

The king wisely had the computer scientist beheaded, and the kingdom lived happily ever after.