ProgProg

Here’s an interesting company: Alibila (French). The company basically sells a service where you tell them an alibi you need, and they will provide you with phone calls, hotel bills, etc to corroborate your story.

Which gives me an idea that is too good to pass up:

So an Alibila employee and a random person are chatting on a plane.

RP: So, what is your line of work?
AE: Oh, I’m a professional liar.
RP: Excuse me?
AE: Well, I work for a company that arranges alibis for people who need magnifique excuse for their partner when they, you know, do ze hanky panky. So they tell me what their lie is and I help them get evidence for it.
RP: Oh I get it. So you either lie to people or help them lie to others all the time, yes?
AE: Yes I do, that’s my career.
RP: Well, we have a term for that in English. Next time people ask what you do, just tell them you’re in Marketing.

PS: This post is my bizarre way of congratulating my sis, who starts her marketing master’s at Northwestern’s Medill School this month. Go sis!

Google’s custom homepage now has a theme feature. One of them, “Sweet Dreams”, is pretty nifty in that it has a picture of the sky that changes according to your local time. So at noon, the sun is in the middle of the page and the background is bright blue, while at dusk you see sunset colors, etc.

But I had no idea of the level of detail until I saw this little easter egg while working early in the morning:

Now I’m no astronomy buff, but I am pretty damn sure there’s no constellation that’s shaped like the Pi symbol. So I checked my system clock and sure enough, it’s 03:15¹.

That’s really cool in my book. Because I know someone at Google went “Hey, wouldn’t it kick ass if we showed a constellation in a Pi shape at 03:14?”, and then went ahead and did it. Now I wonder what other easter eggs this theme has in store.

Non-geeks read articles about the free gourmet food and start gushing about how great a place Google is, but to me the best part of getting to work at Google is the company you’ll get to keep².

Oh, and finally, since I rarely “pimp my desktop”, I’ll take this chance to point out how cool I run my HDDs

¹ Yes the pedants will point out that Pi time is 03:14 but my Google homepage doesn’t refresh every minute, ok?

² No bonus points for getting the obvious double meaning.

My best friend requested a non-techie post, so I shall take this chance to oblige her.

Coming from Wired by means of Slashdot (check out the entries—while very slashdot-meme-centric, they’re hilarious!)

Quick background: Ernest Hemingway declared his six word short story “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” his greatest work. The link to Wired above has 6-worded attempts from various famous people, and the link to Slashdot adds the /.s’ unique take on it.

Here’s some of mine¹:

• from the meta department: “Six words? Say it ain’t so!”

• from the web developer department: “Internet Explorer Seven. Better late than…”

• from the dis-illusioned millionaire dept: “Fairytale wedding, no prenuptial agreement, screwed”

• from the distro wars dept: “Apt-get: because emerge isn’t yummy”

• from the politically incorrect department: “Hermaphrodites. Are they man, woman, or…”

I leave you with Eric Cartman’s “Screw you guys, I’m going home”.

¹ I used contractions. So sue me.