[geeks] Big Blue Smoke

[Dave McGuire]

On April 12, Sridhar the POWERful wrote:
> > > > what do you both mean by "our sridhar"?  how many of them are there?  :)
> > >
> > > At least in the hundreds of thousands.
> >
> > But how many have their own G5?
> 
> I bet I'm the only one.

  I'm reminded of two good stories from my past.  I will share them in
hopes that the stories amuse you as much as the events amused me.

  About 14 years ago I worked on a project that merged a big database
with desktop publishing (Clipper and Ventura Publisher)...it produced
the annual National Forensic Services Directory, a big fat book with
listings of contact information for experts in every field you can
imagine.  It's primarily intended as a lawyer's reference in the event
they need to consult an expert on a case.  The database was an elegant
design...a table of experts, a table of specialties, a cross reference
between the two (an expert can have any number of specialties), and
about a dozen others.  This was no casual project...there were some
45,000 specialties and 50,000 names in this book, pretty big for a
PeeCee (286/16 was top-of-the-line at the time), and the output
requirements were a typographer's nightmare.  But I enjoy both
databases and DTP, so I had a lot of fun on that project.

  Anyway...we were debugging things with the first import of real data,
and found some weirdnesses with a name that we were sure could only be
one person: "Gupta, Ashwani K."

  We were wrong...the database was fine, the code was fine.  There were
thirteen Ashwani K. Guptas...all different people.

  -----

  The setting: Digex, spring of 1993, 5:00am at the end of a ~20 hour
day.  Geoff Adams and I were working on porting Kerberos4 to SunOS4,
and we both get really silly when we're tired.  He was attending the
University of Maryland at the time, for Electrical Engineering.  We
were chatting about the number of students in the engineering program
there who were of oriental descent, and the fact that, by American
English standards, their names just simply didn't contain enough
consonants.  Geoff said "here, I bet I can just slam on the keyboard
at random, and generate a name for one of these guys."  He typed
"finger @eng.umd.edu", back-arrowed to the "@", closed his eyes, and
pounded on the keyboard at the same time with both hands.  The
resulting string was "qing".  He hit <cr>.

  There were four of them.

      -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire              "Hush and eat your vegetables, young lady!"
St. Petersburg, FL                          - Mr. Bill