10 October 2003
SOAP alternatives (no hygiene jokes, please). It’s so utterly depressing when people say ‘I have this tool, it works for me, therefore it’s the right solution, therefore you must use it too.’
If one solution was universally the best, wouldn’t it be ubiquitous?
While we’re at it, The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!).
Also they were liberal hippies in California who wanted to conserve (sneer). If they were Texans they wouldn’t have minded guzzling twice the number of bytes. But those Californian wimps couldn’t bear the idea of doubling the amount of storage it took for strings, and anyway, there were already all these doggone documents out there using various and DBCS character sets and who’s going to convert them all? Moi?
— Joel on Unicode
Dorkstorm: The Annihilation. Does anyone else get the feeling that a number of these could be rolled into one? And there are so many stones left unturned, so many jokes unspoken, that I can’t help but be disappointed.
Pregnant woman, lying in bed, ten to midnight, gives her husband a dig in the ribs. He says, ‘What do you want?’ She says, ‘Snails! I can’t help it, I’m pregnant.’ So off he walks to the French restaurant, picks up a dozen snails and heads back up the road. Half-way home, he sees this woman’s stopped with puncture, so he helps her fix it. In return, she asks if he’d like a lift home.
So in he gets, and she invites him back to her for a drink. One thing leads to another and he sleeps with her. Anyway, he wakes up at six in the morning with the light streaming through the window and he thinks, ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’
So he jumps out of bed, gets dressed, runs downstairs, grabs the snails and runs home. And as he gets to the driveway, he drops the whole lot on the floor, just as the front door opens and his wife shouts, ‘Where the hell have you been?’ So he looks at the snails, points at the front door and shouts, ‘Come on lads, we’re nearly home.’
— Sam Torrance in The Guardian’s Small Talk
Admit it, it’s a cracker.
Raising Víctor Vargas.