Continuing with today’s theme of comics, here’s an interesting collision of ideas: Garfield and the movie Jacob’s Ladder:
By the bye, I found the trailer for Jacob’s Ladder on YouTube:
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Author: Joey deVilla
Regular Expressions to the Rescue!
“Whenever I learn a new skill,” writes Randall Munroe, author and artist behind the incredibly nerdy webcomic xkcd, “I concoct elaborate scenarios where it lets me save the day.” In his latest comic, he illustrates this:
Click the comic to see it on its original page.
(Nerd alert: in order to get the joke in the comic, you need to know what regular expressions are. They’re strings of characters — called “strings” for short — that describe or match a given set of strings, according to rules. Think of them as being similar to the “search and replace” function in your favourite word processor, but on steroids.)
HTTP and Computational Complexity to the Rescue!
Back in 2003, I started dating a woman whom I thought was a webmaster and a computer science graduate. A reader of this blog recognized this woman by her description and email me a warning, saying that she wasn’t who she said she was — she was in fact a con artist and identity thief. She used enough jargon to seem convincing as a webmaster and programmer (not to just me, but a number of nerds), but I managed to catch her when she was unable to explain the difference between HTTP GET and HTTP POST and when I tricked her into lying that she proved that P = NP. The whole story is here in an old entry of mine, titled The Girl Who Cried Webmaster.
Radio Shack TRS-80 Nerds to the Rescue!
When writing about computer skills saving the day, I remembered that Radio Shack made a couple of superhero comics in which Superman got an assist from some young nerds equipped with the Radio Shack TRS-80 computer, a staple of young nerds back in the early 1980s:
A little Googling landed me at X-Y-Z-Cosmonaut’s CosmoBlog, where he not only features the covers of these cheesy classics, he’s also giving away the comics!
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Argue Like a Creationist
[via Reddit] Here’s a gem from the now-defunct webcomic Thank God for Atheism!, which very nicely summarizes creationist debating technique:
Click the comic to see it on its original page.
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Job Opportunities at Tucows [Updated]
UPDATE: I’ve added an opening for a MySQL Sysadmin position.
Are you a techie based in the Accordion City area and looking for a job at a great place to work? Tucows needs to fill a couple of positions. First, we need a Customer Service Representative:
Click the picture to more information about the Customer Service Representative position.
We also need a Technical Support Analyst:
Click the picture to more information about the Technical Support Analyst position.
Finally, for those of you into databases, we need a MySQL sysadmin:
Click the picture to more information about the MySQL Sysadmin position.
More details are in the Tucows Blog.
The types of jobs that get outsourced are those that management thinks are the type in which people are interchangeable and for which there are set procedures or routines from which you don’t deviate. I don’t worry that my job will be outsourced to India because my line of work — technical evangelist — is relatively outsourcing-proof.
As a tech evangelist based in North America, I’m required to be a good communicator in the English language. Hence posters like the one shown below give me a feeling of comfort:
Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
The line “There are two class: first class and no class” cracks me up.
Carson T. Foster, Karaoke host with the most and one of Accordion City’s more colourful characters, pointed out in a comment that the Gypsy Co-op Restaurant (a.k.a. “Gypsy and The Hooch”) has closed its doors. Here are the stories I’ve been able to find online:
- Farewell to the Gypsy Co-op (Toronto Star). This article provides a description of the scene at the restaurant and why it closed (the owners can’t afford to keep it running).
- Famed Queen West Restaurant Shuts Down (National Post). This article talks about the Gypsy’s popularity with visiting celebrities.
More commentary (and if I can dig them up, photos) later.
FOX News may appear to be run by petulant children, but they’re quick petulant children. Even I had to chuckle at this:
Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.