"The fridge-freezer attacks! Barney the purple dinosaur hits!
The grand piano misses! You feel faint. The quantum physicist hits!
You die!"
"You're not dependent on the DART. I've got the car in with me."
-- Stephen Jacob
"Yes I am. I like the smell."
-- Nick Murtagh
"Wouldn't it be cool if there were tokens you could use in any shop?"
-- Unknown
* falconr has asked for new leatherworking tools and a fluid bed coffee roaster and light table for slides/negatives. she'll end up with a book gift certificate :) <sj> Fluid bed coffee roaster? Gosh, sounds hi-tech. Do you roast coffee for NASA? |
"/me wombles back to trying to untangle someone else's html that
rather resembles a blind madwoman's attempt to knit socks while handcuffed
to a kangaroo"
-- Sandy Turner, 42: The List, 25 November 2000
"Oooooh, I want Terk the Gorilla!"
-- IRL Zaphod
"Stop, we have no bananas!"
-- antodaman, AOL Instant Messenger
"I really don't like Biochemistry. It hurt my toe!"
-- Stephen Jacob, on the evils of Voet, Voet & Pratt
"wow, it's less than a quid for the extra 3 inches?"
-- John McAree (IRL Zaphod)
"Now *that* is the quote of the week."
-- Richard Bannister (bannisrf)
"Why are you fondling that thing, Ros?"
-- Stephen
[a few moments pass]
"It's like mine, except mine's bigger and it has two of those things."
-- John
(In an electronics store in Union City, CA)
"Do you get the comedy channel?"
-- George
"Only in the bedroom."
-- Dennis
"The European Union president, who's French at the moment..."
-- A newsreader on ITN News [Does he change his nationality often...?]
"The more ridiculous the association, the better you'll remember it.
That's also the principle Unix is based on."
-- Dr. Mícheal Mac an Airchinnigh, Guest lecture on
Artificial Life, The Universe and Everything
"Martin, give me a woody!"
-- anonymous
"I read it when I popped upstairs to flush the buffers."
-- sj, about reading a 42 list e-mail when going to submit his processed RC5 blocks
and download new ones (see distributed.net for details) on two machines
"he nibbles my ip" -- SunBug, re her cat, Q, on #UserFriendly
"lip" -- SunBug
"Nibbles your IP???" -- Llarian
"you know you're a geek when...." -- Llarian
"mm... 24.115.104.193 *CHOMP*" -- Error_404
"Worf: A mobile booth babe gave me candy!"
-- nome, DALnet #afd, re Linux World
"Right there on the conference floor?!?"
-- Worf
"No, not my shitlist. That'd mean I'd have to shit on you. My hitlist, which
means I have to hit on you! ... Oh god! What did I just say?"
-- John McKenna
"Please replace or upgrade your higher ups and try again. :-)"
-- Mikko Hänninen, about inflexible bosses, Mutt Users Mailing List
"Damn those Yellow Pages!"
-- John McAree commenting on the recent bundling of a
free Indigo CD with every copy of the Golden Pages in Dublin
"Didn't the FTC recently judge that it was in violation of federal
anti-trust regs to put a Starbucks inside a Starbucks...."
-- 'crummy eggplant', UF Cartoon Comments System, 13 September 2000
"Oh, I thought you said Calvin Klein brains!"
-- John McKenna, about my glasses
"I met the Jacob bots at LinuxWorld."
-- Dr. Padraig O'Briain (father of Alice Conrad)
"you're going to the airport in a sleeping bag?"
-- Ben
"yep ... it's got 3 wheels ... and a v.8"
-- sj
"how much hp?" -- Ben
"65536" -- sj
"ok, how much mana? ;)" -- Ben
"17?" -- sj
"I don't have an IQ. I never got done! Hah!"
-- Dr Mícheal Mac an Airchinnigh, 8/2/1999
"What fish jokes?"
-- Stephen Jacob, at a UFie gettogether (huh?)
"That's why I've got pastiche.org and charlesmiller.net,
and used to have frequent.cx, but I stopped paying for it."
-- Charles Miller (Carlton on DALnet) on the annoying
Australian domain registration restrictions
(much like the terrible Irish ones)
"Chicken Chardonay" -- Sandrine Turner
"What's Chicken Chardonay?" -- Stephen Jacob
"Sounds sexy!" -- Eric Nielsen
"It's the bigest one in the kingdom or something. I want
to see how long it takes to unicycle across (not counting the
time it takes me to learn how to unicycle)."
-- mackers, 42: The List
"I can't imagine any of you writing down the wrong intersection.
It's ok for me to do it since I haven't got a clue what I'm doing anyway."
"You see, I used to do that, but then I gradumacated."
-- Dave Lieberman (Zaphod, sfbay-ufies) on edumacation
"We use the compiler to get rid of syntax errors."
-- Carol O'Sullivan, 2BA3 (Systems Programming)
"Black headed gull and Herring gull are sub-classes of Gulls, but the
relationship between them is strictly vertical."
-- Fred Cummins, CS1.1 Lecturer, UCD, explaining class hierarcy with
relation to Object-Orientated Programming (20th January, 2000)
"Speaking of butter, PG&E owe me 3 packets of waffles, the bastards."
-- Stephen Jacob (me), defying explanation
"Am I just making this up as I go along?"
-- Hugh Gibbons, explaining QuickSort
"Nothing happens when you click on my button."
-- Carol O'Sullivan, TCD CS lecturer
"Which bit do I pull off?"
-- John McKenna, Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco
"I'm not stubborn!"
-- Peter Lonergan, Eircom Multimedia
"Now. I really need to bank now."
-- John McAree
"For a bank?"
-- Maghnus O'Kane
"Yes."
-- John
"Is that cockney rhyming slang?"
-- Maghnus
"No."
-- John
"I agree with the sweet and sour chicken."
-- Stephen Jacob, about what to order from the chinese takeaway
"Buy a daffodil and support cancer."
-- A woman trying to sell a daffodil on daffodil day,
intending to say "support cancer research"
"Everybody is a philosopher, but most of us have proper jobs."
-- Kevin Warwick, NetSoc talk, 5-Apr-2000
"I don't know what it is about the word Warwick, but it always reminds me of Marmite."
-- David McNamara (mackers), at a NetSoc talk given by Kevin Warwick, 5-Apr-2000
"You'll definitely be getting triple integrals in the exam,
so you should take a passionate, if not violent, interest in this."
-- Trevor West, 2E1: Maths 3, TCD 2nd year Engineering
"...create a network socket, destroy a network sausage
... sausage ... er ...socket..."
-- Carol O'Sullivan (TCD CS) listing some of the more unusual
bits of functionality in the Win32 API
"Trigonometry is actually quite old."
-- Hugh Gibbons, 2BA2 (1999-2000)
"When you create an integer, all you are doing is making an integer-shaped container."
-- Fred Cummins, CS1.1 Lecturer, UCD, explaining the difference
between basic data types and objects (20th January 2000)
... and getting it totally wrong
"Let's do it with the lights off then."
-- Carol O'Sullivan having trouble with the lighting levels in
H5 (lecture theatre), Hamilton Building, TCD
"Architects tend to get nervous when they start dealing with gravity and people falling down and things."
-- Peter Flynn, Engineer
"oh fuck...who do we work for again?"
-- Peter Lonergan
"to quote Richard Nixon"
-- David O'Callaghan
"To the faxmobile, ISDN boy! There's crime to be fought and phone lines to be installed!"
-- Stephen Jacob (me), upon seeing an Eircom van
scream around the corner of Andrews Lane
"i have worms"
-- David O'Callaghan (who continued to clarify that he
was talking about the computer game)
"thunk - the noise data makes as it hits the accumulator"
-- Sandrine Turner (azhreia), DALnet #afd
"This is the this pointer, but I won't go into it now I'll just give you some pointers."
-- Carol O'Sullivan, trying not to obscure the issue at hand
"infrared my ass... try radio :)"
-- Brian E. Smith (Morpher), on DALnet, talking about how
mp3s get from his computer to his HiFi
"her name is aedin...i'm just seeing her at the moment..." -- Peter Lonergan
"for how long?" -- Alice Conrad
"about 2 weeks" -- Peter
"is that a time limit?" -- David O'Callaghan
"lol ... i've been seeing her 2 weeks" -- Peter
"until she gets destroyed by the Y2k virus ... or pat kenny" -- David
"evil man" -- Alice
"android" -- David
"Dial-up networking could not connect. You need to negotiate a new control panel."
-- a luser, attempting to report an error message to tech support
"As engineers, you'll spend a lot of time dealing with crazy people."
-- Peter Flynn, Engineer, guest speaker for a TCD 2nd year Engineering class
"Richard, you get the perfect balance between rude and obnoxious."
-- Peter Lonergan, Indigo/Eircom.net Helpdesk, to Richard Bannister, another tech
"Windows has detected the following porn....er, ports..."
-- An AOL (L)user talking to tech support
"There are no errors in Geophysics."
-- Brian O'Reilly, DIAS Geophysics
"502 Holy DNS batman, you aren't on my list! (Diablo)"
-- newspeer.te.net:119
"I just like the sausage picture."
-- David O'Callaghan, about the eXistenZ movie poster
"Hello, I'm a mouse. I'd like handler number four please."
-- Dr. Steven Collins, 1BA3: Intro. to Computing (1999), regarding interrupts
"Sorry I thought you were a guy ... nothing wrong with it just startled is all."
-- Eric Tannehill to Alice Conrad
"I know it's hard to imagine electrons interacting, but really they're just like the elephants."
-- Dr. Peter Cullen, 2BA5, 1999
"What's the name of that woman? The one I've never heard of."
-- Dr. Timothy Murphy, Maths 061, 14th October 1999
"Oh! Britney Spears."
-- Dermot Frost
"I propose a spot prize ... would like to offer a small spot prize ... 8 lyons minstrels.
That's quite generous. 5 is a car... ok 40 lyons minstrels..."
-- Colm O'Dúnlaing, 1BA1: Maths, 1999
"erk. exploreer just crashed. and my widgets have gone funny"
-- David O'Callaghan, 30/3/1999
"I also like beautiful men."
-- John McAree, watching Blade and not being careful about clarifying
the fact that he was pretending to be Stephen Dorf
"If all the world had Jelly Babies, perhaps all humanity could live in peace and tranquility,
treating all as brothers, and leading in a new enlightened era of progress."
"Or we could bite off each others heads without ramifications."
-- David O'Callaghan, 21/4/99, AOL Instant Messenger
"Die, evil submarines!"
-- Alan Jacob, messing with a Palm IIIx at the Windows World '99 exhibition
"Argh! I hate Office 2000! Try to type your name and feckin' animals pop up
all over the place asking you if you want to make a web page!"
"The road to hell is paved with handouts."
-- Dr. Colm O'Dúnlaing (1BA1: Maths), 1999
"The whole idea about AI is that you don't know what you're doing."
-- Mike Brady (3BA2: Artificial Intelligence)
... and it took a great deal of effort to stop myself
quoting that back to him on the exam paper! :)
"Is that your nose, Michael, or a sound file?"
-- Eoin Stronge, Indigo Helpdesk
"Aristotle invented Prolog and Smalltalk."
-- Mícheal Mac an Airchinnigh, ur... sure he did...
"I'm doing other things, and w95 wanted a 30meg swap file,
and my link sucks pumpkins through chickens..."
-- batty on DALnet, explaining why he'd had to close Netscape
"I know the chances are most of you aren't fluent in greek."
-- Dr Mícheal Mac an Airchinnigh, an understatement on a par with
"It's not entirely trivial..." from Dr. Colm O'Dúnlaing on the proof of Taylor's Theorem
"I won't see you again until... oh, gosh, 1999! By then, most of you will be dead!"
-- Dr. Mícheal Mac an Airchinnigh, 2BA6: Computers & Society,
to his 2nd year Computer Science class
"I'd argue that binary search trees are actually easier than linked lists because there's less difficulty."
-- Dr. Hugh Gibbons' impeccable logic
"British experts have calculated, you see, that you are as likely to win the British
lottery by not buying a ticket as by buying a ticket."
-- Dr. Hugh Gibbons, 2BA2: Programming Techniques, on statistics
"If you leave the name of the person on the program, that's copying. If you go to the
trouble of removing it, you see, we might call that cooperation."
-- Dr. Hugh Gibbons, 2BA2: Programming Techniques
"There's no such thing as democracy. Don't fool yourself."
-- Dr. Mícheal Mac an Airchinnigh, 2BA6: Computers & Society
"This one with a left subtree... and this one with a right subtree... they're actually
completely different, even though they're identical."
-- Dr. Hugh Gibbons, 2BA2: Programming Techniques, on the obvious subtleties of Binary Search Trees
"A million to one... That's the odds the bookies would offer you on Elvis landing
in a spaceship in the middle of the F.A. Cup final."
-- Dr. Hugh Gibbons, 2BA2: Programming Techniques
"Don't be offended by me. I mean, I'm just normal."
-- Dr. Mícheal Mac an Airchinnigh, 2BA6: Computers & Society
"No, I never studied in Trinity, thank God! If I had, I could have had me as
a lecturer, and that would have been disastrous!"
-- Dr. Anthony Quinn, 2BA5: Digital Electronics
"We're doomed. I really mean this. We're doomed! Of course,
I don't include myself in that. I mean you."
-- Dr. Mícheal Mac an Airchinnigh, 2BA6: Computers & Society,
to the class on our future as Computer Scientists
"Unlike other armies, this guy seems to have brought with him all sorts
of scientists, mathematicians, and other perverts."
-- Dr. Mícheal Mac an Airchinnigh, 2BA6: Computers & Society, on Napoleon's "holiday" in Egypt
"...then you were classified as a murderer, or a thief, or a lecturer.
There are all kinds of criminal classes."
-- Dr. Mícheal Mac an Airchinnigh, 2BA6: Computers & Society, on ancient greek classification of people
"I do not propose to tell anyone the truth about anything; historical or otherwise."
-- Dr. Mícheal Mac an Airchinnigh, 2BA6: Computers & Society
"If you install the Build on top of any previous One you first have
to erase the universe with the following command: ..."
-- SiG Computer Visual Eiffel Readme file
"You could stick your grandmother in there and it wouldn't make any difference."
-- Dr. Anthony Quinn, Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, about the ideal
resistor and inductor branch of the
(seeing as the capacitor gives very low impedance at HF; obviously =)
"For example, you might have a class of people, and below that you might have a class of students."
-- Dr. Kenneth Dawson-Howe (2BA3: Systems Programming)
"The Portuguese have had a very strong history of rotations on spheres"
-- Dr. Nigel Buttimore (2BA1: Mathematics), referring to Rodrigues' discovery of
the position of Euler's Point in 1840, and the Portuguese sea-going history
"If you're coming off coke, you might find white wine a bit dry"
-- Brian Jacob to Alan Jacob, using slightly unfortunate wording,
making an observation on historesis of the palette
"You might like to look at Penguin's book on chaos... uh, that is the publishers, not the animal"
-- Dr. Nigel Buttimore (2BA1: Mathematics)
"Actually, there's lots of interesting things that you can do with a GAL"
-- Dr. Andrew Butterfield (2BA4: Computer Architecture I) on the
myriad uses of a type of programmable logic device
"You can ignore the bit at the top that tells you to hand the solutions in to the
Microelectronics Department by the 8th of January, 1995 because it's impossible.
Also, the Department of Microelectronics no longer exists."
-- Dr. Peter Cullen, 2BA5, Friday 8th November, 1996, on a
sheet of questions he had just handed out
"So, if you add two things, it's even?"
-- Erich Barnstedt, losing track of the basic
odd + odd = even, even + even = even,
and odd + even = odd, in a maths lecture
"If it's Biology, it bites; If it's Chemistry, it blows up, and if it's Physics, it doesn't work"
-- Mr. Alan Monnelly, teacher at
Newpark School, Blackrock, Co. Dublin, on
how to tell the sciences apart
"Basically, this is what electrons and protons would do if they were left alone"
-- Erich Barnstedt, referring to diffusion currents in semiconductors (2BA5)
"Gravity is not important to the operation of semiconductor devices except in a trivial way
in that, if we didn't have it, our computers might float out into space"
-- Dr. Peter Cullen, 2BA5
"I'm part of the Artificial Intelligence Project..."
"I hope your attendance is as good today as it is for the rest of the year"
-- Dr. Hugh Gibbons, 2BA2
"This meat is cooked to perfection! It comes right off the gristle!"
-- Stephen Jacob (me), a compliment unappreciated by my mother
"I've seen smaller dish washers"
-- Jonathan Dukes, about a colour printer in TCD.ie
"What's the geological history of curry?"
-- Jonathan Dukes... and I think he meant Kerry!
"There's more to talking than listening"
-- Jonathan Dukes, meaning to say that there's
more to a conversation than talking
"We should have a sort of initiation for new first year computer
scientists
where we throw them into a skip full of old computer
parts"
-- Jonathan Dukes, about to be 2nd year Computer Scientist
"What's a video card?"
-- Erich Barnstedt, Computer Scientist
"We regret to inform you that the 9 o'clock and 9:45 showings of Independance Day are now
fully booked out. We apologise for any convenience"
-- announcement in Virgin Cinemas, Dublin, 12th August 1996
"Would the representative from Mars please come to the manager's desk"
-- announcement in a Dublin supermarket, 7th August 1996
[Ed.: and I thought they only found microbes...]
"I'm so relaxed, I'm vertical!"
-- Barry Hughes
"Students must remain quiet at all times while working in the computer labs as it is disruptive to others."
-- Notice on board in Hamilton PC Lab (courtesy of ISS)
"What's on Friday?"
-- Alan Jacob
"Um... it's my birthday..."
"But you had one of those last year!"
-- Alan Jacob
"You can identify a hedgehog at 65 miles per hour?"
-- Stephen Jacob to Erich Barnstedt
"Fast hedgehog"
-- Alan Jacob
"worf, your ping response defies causality. But I don't mind ;)"
-- Paul Missman (bits^) on DALnet remarking on a negative
time ping response from myself
"Supervisor mood" ...
"The difference between trap and jsr is that trap
calls an exception handler instead of a submarine"
-- Stephen Jacob, me, JF CS, getting tongue-tied
while talking about the S-bit of the 68000
CPU and trap handling, the
morning of the assembly exam
"When someone asks me for a random number, I say 2 -- always"
"Windows for Roadworks 3.11"
-- Stephen Jacob, me (they made me do it!), JF CS
"http://www.windows95.con/"
-- Jonathan Dukes, JF CS
"How this happens ... you don't have to worry about, unless you're God or something"
-- Vinny Cahill (1BA2: Introduction to Programming) on the encapsulated
implementation details of an object-based cat
"Sunlight is the enemy of study ... Find yourself a gloomy corner ... preferably a basement with no windows"
-- Dr. Colm O'Dúnlaing (1BA1: Maths)
"Fuck! ... Who extended my pencil?!?"
-- Jonathan Dukes, JF CS