terms... (Re: Dan's books -- where can I get chapters 13 - 20, 22-24, etc ?)

[Andre Garzia]

On Aug 26, 2005, at 2:32 PM, Dan Shafer wrote:

> The printing SmartEBook is in final editing now and should be  
> released "Real Soon Now" (ancient software term meaning "when the  
> programmer finally releases the damn stuff"). More will follow  
> every 1-3 weeks thereafter as long as demand keeps up and I don't  
> run out of topics.
>

Back when I was coursing engineering in the Catholic University of  
Rio de Janeiro, I was a junior worker at a lab. There we used terms  
like that to the point of making stamps to use on paper forms. It was  
an experimental robotics lab, meaning, we broke computers like  
elephants in a china shop. Everytime something exploded we needed to  
fill a paper form with two main fields, one was labeled: "Problem:"  
meaning why the hell the thing was not functioning, the second  
"Solution:" meaning, if the thing was not destroyed and we managed to  
get it back working, how we solved the problem. We had two stamps  
made for this, one was: OGK (Only God Knows...), when every thing  
failed we stamped this on the problem field. If the thing came back  
aline we had a stamp: "IFI" (It Fixed Itself) meaning we had not the  
slightest clue on why the thing was working again... fun times... I  
still remember the teacher putting on my schedule for a day "Andre,  
please water the binary tree...", he would play those tricks on the  
rookies, like "All you hookies, grab this plastic bags, go to the  
wall on the second floor, you all know that the particle accelerator  
passes thru it, we need some free electrons for our new experiements,  
your job is to put this bags next to the wall till they fill up with  
the free electrons that misses the turn on the second corridor, then  
bring it back..."

I miss it sometimes...

cheers
andre