Bag of Beans

This is a humorous text-adventure version of Pong.

Excellent, the left paddle has needed a leader like you for a long time. With your help, we may just be able to destroy the evil enemy that is the left paddle.

• Link (via Neatorama)

This is quite a funny abuse of the English language.

It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate.

I was furling my wieldy umbrella for the coat check when I saw her standing alone in a corner. She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array. Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled, and she moved in a gainly way.

• Link (via reddit)

Here’s a very funny and entertaining piece of animation.

• Link (via UNEASYsilence)

• Link [xkcd.com]

An aide for a Montana congressman was fired for trying to solicit hackers from attrition.org to boost his college GPA. The hackers merely led him on through a series of hilarious emails, including some asking him to take pictures of squirrels.

From: Todd Shriber (nascar24_08530@yahoo.com)
To: lyger@attrition.org
Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2006 12:58:29 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Question for you or other Attrition members

Lyger - I came across Attrition.org for the first
time. I enjoyed the site though I am not an expert
with computers. That brings me to my next point: I
need to urgently make contact with a hacker that would
be interested in doing a one-time job for me. The pay
would be good. I'm not sure what exactly the job would
entail with respect to computer jargon, but I can go
into rough detail upon making contact with a
candidate. Thanks for your help.

• Link (via Boing Boing)
• The entire email exchange is posted here on attrition.org.

Do any of these sound like your company? Ouch.

Our appeal for corporate Scrooges—tales of office parties canceled, miserly bonuses, and pathetic gifts—generated a generous response. Nearly 200 Slate readers wrote in, providing enough fodder for several episodes of The Office. We heard from employees of car dealerships, doctors, and small law firms, but also from blue workers at blue chips, including Burberry, Dow Jones, Goldman Sachs, Disney, Wells Fargo, and Wal-Mart.

• Link (via Slashdot)

A funny, yet strangely beautiful, office prank.

That’s right. My team and I tin foiled a fellow designer’s cubicle. So here’s the background: a fellow designer left for vacation this past week. He intends to return the Tuesday after Christmas. What he doesn’t even know yet is that my boss, fellow designer and myself used over 500 square feet of tin foil and wrapped up EVERYTHING in his cube!

• Link (via Digg)
• Photoset on flickr

This clip of Star Wars in silent movie format really cracked me up. Very well done.

• Link (via Digg)

• Link [xkcd.com]

Related:

• Verizon Doesn’t Know Dollars From Cents

This is a disturbingly funny call between George Vaccaro and Verizon, trying to teach them basic math.

From Slashdot:

Blogger George Vaccaro recently had a problem with his Verizon based on an unfortunate miscommunication of currency. The crux of the matter was that he was quoted .002 cents per kilobyte for data during a trip to Canada but was charged .002 dollars. Normally this would have been an easy fix, however several humorous calls later the Verizon reps still were unable to discern the difference between the two rates. You really have to hear it to believe it. Kudos George, you have the patience of a saint.

• George’s blog
• YouTube audio link
• Digg post

From The Daily WTF, here is another amusing tale of developer woe, huge piles of money flushed down the tubes, and clueless management.

The Peter Devil wasn’t very good at delivering bad news. He also wasn’t very good at delivering good news, neutral news, making decisions, motivating employees, or, just about anything else that a CTO is supposed to do. But — bad news — it just wasn’t his thing. He notified, via email, a team of over fifty employees that they’d be jobless in two weeks Unfortunately, the Vancouver office will be disbanded on August 23; we’ll need everyone to pull together and make an extra effort to finish up the Integration Project and transition the remaining work to us here in Toronto.

• Link

This is a funny take on Hollywood’s portrayal of computer programming.

Following up our article: Top 20 Hackers in Film History and Vibrant’s Top 10 Servers in the movies, I felt obligated to dispel some of the notions about programming that these movies endorse. I understand that Hollywood needs to dress things up to make them more entertaining, but in the case of programmers, code, and hackers they’ve done more than dress things up - they’ve morphed a little stuffed teddy bear into a cybernetic polar bear covered in christmas lights and phosphorescent hieroglyphics with a fog machine pumping rainbow smoke out of his ass. In other words, they’ve layered a ridiculous amount of extravagance on top of something that in reality is very grounded.

• Link (via reddit)

This is a hilarious computer science joke.

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.”

• Link (via reddit)

This a funny post comparing the personalities of different programming languages.

BASIC - The horny divorcee that lives next door. Her specialty is seducing young boys and it seems she is always readily available for them. She teaches them many amazing things, or at least they seem amazing because it is their) first experience. She is not that young herself, but because she was their first lover the boys always remember her fondly. Her cooking and sewing skills are mediocre, but largely irrelevant, it’s the frolicking that the boys like. The opinion that adults have of Mrs. BASIC is varied. Shockingly, some fathers actually introduce their own sons to this immoral woman! But generally the more righteous adults try to correct the badly influenced young men by introducing them to well behaved women like Miss Pascal.

• Link (via Digg)

The Daily WTF has some more short examples of hilariously bad or entertaining code.

Nikita Zhuk thought there might be a deeper, more fundamental lack of understanding when she came across this question posted on Experts Exchange …

hi all,

IntTemp = Int((255 * Rnd()) + 1)

I used above ASP.NET code. Problem is in ” Rnd() “
Rnd() value is changing everytime.

What is the alternative for Rnd()?
OR How will stop Rnd() value changes at everytime?

• Link

Leah Culver funded the purchase of a new Macbook Pro by selling ad space on the cover for $150 per square inch. The ads were then laser etched at her workplace.

• Link (via MAKE: Blog)
• Cool video of the laser etching process
• Backstory

Related:

• How to make $1M in 4 months

This is an absolutely hilarious post on the Dilbert blog.

If you ask me, the most obscene letter in the alphabet is the asterisk. It appears in almost every naughty word you see in print, from f*ck to p*ss to m*th*rf*ck*ng c*cks*ck*r. You can’t even pronounce the word “asterisk” without saying *ss. That smutty little character is attracted to obscenity like flies to sh*t.

• Link (via reddit)

This is a funny parody of an outdoor survival guide for programmers.

WHEN STEVE DUMB STUMBLED ACROSS THE SPAGHETTI of a legacy code library sunk into the muck in the labyrinthine of Upper Management Cost Saving Schemes, the unease he had felt since becoming lost in the Corporate wilderness turned to terror. “I’m going to die here.” he remembers thinking. Alone and cold. Dumb was catapulting into the third and most dangerous stage of the phenomenon psychologists call “Refactoring shock,” the confusion and fear that humans feel when they become lost in code.

• Link (via reddit)

Check out this gorgeous reproduction of Minesweeper using PixelBlocks.

Completion of the minesweeper sub-project. 38,240 pixelblocks and over 6 feet tall. Bigger than the window!

• PixelProject set on flickr (via MAKE: Blog)

Check out these photo galleries of frighteningly bad home improvement projects.

• Gallery 1
• Gallery 2
• (via Boing Boing)