Humor 4/26/98: "Lingo" & My New Email Address

Hey,

Before I go on, please notice that I have a new email address.
Actually, I have several. From now on, please send all your emails to
me at: joshli@post.harvard.edu. This is a permanenet forwarding email
address. I plan to get rid of my GIS account soon because I now have
free Internet access through www.tritium.net. (You may want to check
this out for yourself. You get free Internet access in exchange for
seeing ads at the bottom of your screen. Just to let you know, in the
future you will get emails from me from various email addresses:
joshli@tritium.net, joshli@yahoo.com, etc. However, no matter where you
get emails from me, please email me at: joshli@post.harvard.edu.

In response to last week's thought provoking question, 3 people wanted
to be dazzlingly clever and 1 person wanted to be angelically good. Out
of the three choices, I would probably want to be angelically good.

This week's question comes from the book, "201 Great Questions".
Question #23: "Someone has just offered you $50,000 to free-fall to the
ground from a helicopter 300 feet in the air. All the details of this
fall have been carefully worked out by experts. On the ground will be a
huge airbag used by professional stuntmen to break their fall.
Providing that you jump right and hit the bag, you will be safe. Will
you do this jump?"

This week's humor comes from Dave Shim, followed by a Chicken Soup
story. Enjoy!

-Josh.
____________________________________________

You can't be cool if you're using outdated lingo. Here's the latest
from the corporate and Silicon Valley jungles. Try to incorporate one
new word into your vocabulary each and every day. The world will be a
better place.

(Some from "Jargon Watch" by Gareth Branwyn "a dictionary for the
jitterati")

404: Someone who's clueless. "Don't bother asking him; he's 404."
Derived from the WWW error message "404 Not Found", meaning the
requested document couldn't be located.

alpha geek: The most knowledgeable, technically proficient person in an
office or work group.

assmosis: The process by which some people seem to absorb success and
advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard.

Batmobiling: putting up emotional shields. Refers to the retracting
armor that covers the Batmobile as in, "she started talking
marriage and he started batmobiling."

beepilepsy: The brief seizure people sometimes have when their beeper
goes off (especially in vibrator mode). Characterized
by physical spasms, goofy facial expressions and interruption of speech
in mid-sentence.

betamaxed: when a technology is overtaken in the market by inferior,
but better marketed competition as in, "Microsoft
'betamaxed' Apple right out of the market."

blamestorming: Sitting around in a group discussing why a deadline was
missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.

blowing your buffer: losing your train of thought.

body nazis: Hard-core exercise and weight-lifting fanatics who look
down on anyone who doesn't work out obsessively..

chainsaw consultant: An outside expert brought in to reduce the
employee headcount, leaving the top brass with clean hands.

chips and salsa: Chips = hardware, salsa = software. "Well, first we
gotta figure out if the problem's in your chips or your
salsa."

cobweb: a WWW site that never changes.

cube farm: An office filled with cubicles.

dancing baloney: Little animated GIFs and other Web F/X that are
useless and serve simply to impress clients. "This page is kinda dull.
Maybe a little dancing baloney will help."

depotphobia: Fear associated with entering a Home Depot because of how
much money one might spend. Electronic geeks
experience Shackophobia.

ego surfing: Scanning the Net, databases, print media and so on,
looking for references to one's own name.

Elvis year: the peak year of popularity as in '1993 was Barney the
dinosaur's Elvis year.'

facetime, F2F, RL: time spent with real, live human beings.

flight risk: Used to describe employees who are suspected of planning
to leave a company or department soon.

generica: Features of the American landscape that are exactly the same
no matter where one is (fast food joints, strip malls,
sub-divisions). "We wereso lost in generica, I actually forgot what
city we were in."

going postal: Euphemism for being totally stressed out, for losing it.
Makes reference to the unfortunate track record of postal
employees who have snapped and gone on shooting rampages.

GOOD job: A "Get-Out-Of-Debt" job. A well-paying job people take in
order to pay off their debts, one that they will quit as soon as they
are solvent again.

high dome: egghead, scientist, PhD

idea hamsters: People who always seem to have their idea generators
running.

irritainment: Entertainment and media spectacles that are annoying, but
you find yourself unable to stop watching them. The
O.J. trials were a prime example.

keyboard plaque: The disgusting buildup of dirt and crud found on
computer keyboards.

meatspace: the physical world (as opposed to the virtual) also "carbon
community"

midair passenger exchange: Grim air-traffic-controller-speak for a
head-on collision. Midair passenger exchanges are quickly
followed by "aluminum rain."

mouse potato: The online, wired generation's answer to the couch
potato.

ohnosecond: That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that
you've just made a big mistake.

PEBCAK: Tech support shorthand for "Problem Exists Between Chair and
Keyboard." (Techies are a frustrated, often arrogant lot. They've
submitted numerous acronyms and terms that poke fun at the clueless
users who call them up with frighteningly stupid questions. Another
variation on the above is

ID10T: "This guy has an ID-Ten-T on his system."

percussive maintenance: The fine art of whacking the crap out of an
electronic device to get it to work again.

Perot: To quit unexpectedly, as in "My cellular phone just perot'ed."

prairie dogging: When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cube
farm, and people's heads pop up over the walls to see what's going on.

salmon day: swimming upstream all day to get screwed in the end.

seagull manager: A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, sh-ts
over everything and then leaves.

siliwood: the coming convergence of movies, interactive TV and
computers also "hollywired."

SITCOMs: What yuppies turn into when they have children and one of them
stops working to stay home with the kids. Stands for Single Income, Two
Children, Oppressive Mortgage.

square-headed girlfriend: Another word for a computer. The victim of a
square-headed girlfriend is a "computer widow."

squirt the bird: To transmit a signal to a satellite.

starter marriage: A short-lived first marriage that ends in divorce
with no kids, no property and no regrets.

stress puppy: A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and
whiny.

swiped out: An ATM or credit card that has been rendered useless
because magnetic strip is worn away from extensive use.

telephone number salary: A salary (or project budget) that has seven
digits.

tourists: People who take training classes just to get a vacation from
their jobs. "We had three serious students in the
class; the rest were just tourists."

treeware: Hacker slang for documentation or other printed material.

umfriend: A sexual relation of dubious standing. "This is uh.. Dale,
my...um...friend..."

uninstalled: Euphemism for being fired. Heard on the voicemail of a
vicepresident at a downsizing computer firm: "You have
reached the number of an uninstalled vice president. Please dial our
main number and ask the operator for assistance. " See also Decruitment.

Vulcan nerve pinch: The taxing hand position required to reach all of
the appropriate keys for certain commands. For instance,
the warm re-boot for a Mac II computer involves simultaneously pressing
the Control key, the Command key, the Return key and the Power On key.

world wide wait: WWW.

Xerox subsidy: Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one's
workplace.

yuppie food stamps: The ubiquitous $20 bills spewed out of ATMs
everywhere. Often used when trying to split the bill after a
meal: "We all owe $8 each, but all anybody's got is yuppie food stamps."

"Logic merely enables one to be wrong with authority."
____________________________________

The Power Of Determination

The little country schoolhouse was heated by an
old-fashioned,
pot-bellied stove. A little boy had the job of coming to
school early
each day to start the fire and warm the room before his
teacher and
his classmates arrived.
One morning they arrived to find the schoolhouse
engulfed in
flames. They dragged the unconscious little boy out of the
flaming
building more dead than alive. He had major burns over the
lower
half of his body and was taken to the nearby county
hospital.
From his bed the dreadfully burned, semi-conscious
little boy
faintly heard the doctor talking to his mother. The doctor
told his
mother that her son would surely die - which was for the
best, really
- for the terrible fire had devastated the lower half of his
body.
But the brave boy didn't want to die. He made up his
mind
that he would survive. Somehow, to the amazement of the
physician,
he did survive. When the mortal danger was past, he again
heard
the doctor and his mother speaking quietly. The mother was
told that
since the fire had destroyed so much flesh in the lower part
of his
body, it would almost be better if he had died, since he was
doomed
to be a lifetime cripple with no use at all of his lower
limbs.
Once more the brave boy made up his mind. He would not
be a
cripple. He would walk. But unfortunately from the waist
down, he
had no motor ability. His thin legs just dangled there, all
but
lifeless.
Ultimately he was released from the hospital. Every day
his
mother would massage his little legs, but there was no
feeling,
no control, nothing. Yet his determination that he would
walk was
as strong as ever.
When he wasn't in bed, he was confined to a wheelchair.
One
sunny day his mother wheeled him out into the yard to get
some
fresh air. This day, instead of sitting there, he threw
himself from
the chair. He pulled himself across the grass, dragging his
legs
behind him.
He worked his way to the white picket fence bordering
their
lot. With great effort, he raised himself up on the fence.
Then,
stake by stake, he began dragging himself along the fence,
resolved
that he would walk. He started to do this every day until he
wore a
smooth path all around the yard beside the fence. There was
nothing
he wanted more than to develop life in those legs.
Ultimately through his daily massages, his iron
persistence
and his resolute determination, he did develop the ability
to stand
up, then to walk haltingly, then to walk by himself - and
then -
to run.
He began to walk to school, then to run to school, to
run for
the sheer joy of running. Later in college he made the track
team.
Still later in Madison Square Garden this young man who
was
not expected to survive, who would surely never walk, who
could
never hope to run - this determined young man, Dr. Glenn
Cunningham,
ran the world's fastest mile!

By Burt Dubin
from Chicken Soup for the Soul
Copyright 1993 by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor
Hansen