HUMOR Digest - 23 Dec 1997 to 24 Dec 1997
There are 5 messages totalling 237 lines in this issue.

Topics of the day:

  1. Men at Work
  2. C Monkey, C Monkey C++
  3. <No subject given>
  4. SANTA CLAUS: An Engineer's Perspective
  5. Top 20 Replies by Computer Programmers when their Programs Don't Work

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Date:    Tue, 23 Dec 1997 03:46:30 -0500
From:    Jim Moore Jr <jimjr@PIPELINE.COM>
Subject: Men at Work

*   The efficiency expert concluded his lecture with a note of
  caution. "You might not want to try these techniques at home."
    "Why not ?" asked someone from the back of the room.
    "Well...  I watched my wife's routine at breakfast for years.
  She made lots of trips between the refrigerator, stove, table
  & cabinets, often carrying a single item." the expert explained.
  "I suggested how she might improve the quality of service."
    "And did it work ?" the audience member persisted.
    "Well... actually yes.  It used to take her 25 minutes to fix
  me breakfast.  Now, I do it in eighteen."
                                - - - - -

* Man to auto salesman" "My trade-in is the '95 you went into such
  ecstasies about when you were selling it to me."
                                - - - - -

*   Responding to an ad for Bible salesmen, a man arrived for his
  interview and said "I w-w-want to s-s-sell B-B-Bibles."
    Naturally, the interviewer was doubtful, but hired the man
  based on his references.
    To everyone's astonishment, the fellow shortly had the best
  sales record in the office.  A meeting was called of all of the
  salesmen where he was to explain his technique.
    "It's easy.  I just go to the d-d-door and say 'W-w-would you
  like to b-b-buy a B-B-B-Bible, or I c-c-could c-c-c-come in and
  read it t-t-t-to you."
                                - - - - -

*   Jake and Mike, two second story men, were comparing notes on
  their recent success of burglaries in Columbia Maryland.
    "Didja get anything good on that last heist ?" Jake asked.
    "Nuttin' at all." Mike admitted.  "Turns out the guy was a
  Yuppie lawyer."
    "Jeez !  Of all the breaks." Jake replied. "Didja lose much ?"


www.geocities.com/BourbonStreet/6293

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Date:    Sun, 14 Dec 1997 09:38:00 -0600
From:    Randall Woodman <randall.woodman@LUNATIC.COM>
Subject: C Monkey, C Monkey C++

..om: Daniel Chenault <danich@MICROSOFT.com>

A tourist walks into a pet shop in Silicon Valley,
and is browsing round the cages on display. While
he's there, another customer walks in and says to
the shopkeeper, "I'll have a C monkey, please".

The shopkeeper nods, goes over to a cage at the
side of the shop and takes out a monkey. He fits
a collar and leash and hands it to the customer,
saying "That'll be $5,000". The customer pays and
walks out with his monkey.

Startled, the tourist goes over to the shopkeeper
and says, "That was a very expensive monkey--most
of them are only a few hundred dollars. Why did
it cost so much?"

"Oh", says the shopkeeper, "that monkey can program
in C with very fast, tight code, no bugs, well
worth the money."

The tourist starts to look at the monkeys in the cage.
He says to the shopkeeper, "That one's even more
expensive, $10,000! What does it do?"

"Oh", says the shopkeeper, "that one's a C++ monkey;
it can manage object-oriented programming, Visual C++,
even some Java, all the really useful stuff."

The tourist looks round for a little longer and sees
a third monkey in a cage on its own. The price tag
round its neck says $50,000. He gasps to the shopkeeper,
"That one costs more than all the others put together!
What on earth does it do?"

"Well," says the shopkeeper,
"I don't know if it does anything,
but it says it's a Consultant."


---
A C+ would  + all the C it could + if a C+ could+ C.

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Date:    Tue, 23 Dec 1997 15:45:57 -0500
From:    Persson Mattias <mattias.persson@AROSNET.SE>
Subject: <No subject given>

MERRY CHRISTMAS. Happy chanucka for you jews. And to those who dont
celebrate christmas, have a plessant wednesday

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Date:    Tue, 23 Dec 1997 19:01:18 EST
From:    SueS7 <SueS7@AOL.COM>
Subject: SANTA CLAUS: An Engineer's Perspective

SANTA CLAUS: An Engineer's Perspective

  I. There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in
     the world.  However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim,
     Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist religions, this reduces the workload for
     Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the
     Population Reference Bureau).  At an average (census) rate of 3.5
     children per house hold, hat comes to 108 million homes, presuming
     that there is at least one good child in each.

 II. Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the
     different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he
     travels east to west (which seems logical).  This works out to 967.7
     visits per second.  This is to say that for each Christian household
     with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the
     sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute
     the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been
     left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get on
     to the next house.

     (That's really why it's pointless to stay up and watch for him...)

     Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed
     around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will
     accept for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking
     about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles,
     not counting bathroom stops or breaks.  This means Santa's sleigh is
     moving at 650 miles per second 3,000 times the speed of sound.  For
     purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses
     space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional
     reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.

III. The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming
     that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized Lego set (two
     pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting
     Santa himself.  On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more
     than 300 pounds.  Even granting that the "flying" reindeer could pull
     ten times the normal amount, the job can't be done with eight or even
     nine of them

    Santa would need 360,000 of them.  This increases the payload, not
    counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly
    seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the
    monarch).

IV. 600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second crates enormous air
    resistance --- this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion
    as a spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere.  The lead pair
    of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per
    second each.  In short they would burst into flames almost
    instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating
    deafening sonic booms in their wake.  The entire reindeer team would
    be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the
    time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip.  Not that it matters,
    however, since Santa, as a result of accellerating from a dead
    stop to 650 m.p.s. in .001 seconds, would be subjected to centrifugal
    forces of 17,500 g's.  A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim)
    would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force,
    instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering
    blob of pink goo.

V.  Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.

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Date:    Tue, 23 Dec 1997 21:14:27 -0800
From:    Don Chesnel <dches@CONCENTRIC.NET>
Subject: Top 20 Replies by Computer Programmers when their Programs Don't Work

20. "That's weird."
19. "It's never done that before."
18. "It worked yesterday."
17. "How is that possible?"
16. "It must be a hardware problem."
15. "What did you type in wrong that made it crash."
14. "There is something wrong with your data."
13. "I haven't touched that module for a month."
12. "You must have the wrong version."
11. "It's just a coincidence."
10. "I can't test everything!"
 9. "THIS can't be the source of THAT!"
 8. "It works, but it hasn't been officially tested."
 7. "Somebody has changed my code."
 6. "Are you sure you don't have a virus in your system?"
 5. "Even though it doesn't work, how does it FEEL?"
 4. "You can't use THAT version on YOUR system."
 3. "Why do you want to do it that way?"
 2. "Where were you when this program blew up?"
 And the number one comment was:
 1. "I thought sure I fixed that!"

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End of HUMOR Digest - 23 Dec 1997 to 24 Dec 1997
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