I like cake! – Cakemail, Ninjas on Fire, and other Anecdotes

Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen – I like cake! – Cakemail, Ninjas on Fire, and other Anecdotes

…and the room exploded. From that point on, any time anyone in any meeting said something that was far enough off topic or sufficiently non-sequiturial, someone would declare “I LIKE CAKE!”

All off-topic email responses are now declared “Cakemail” as in, “Man, I got some Cakemail from Fred this morning. Made no sense.” I still use this to this day and it still makes me smile.

Good stuff!

Petzolds new Turing book

Petzold Book Blog – “The Annotated Turing” Hot Off the Presses!

I am reminded of a short story by John Updike starring his alter-ego, the novelist Henry Beck. Whenever Beck publishes a new novel, he receives a copy in the mail for autographing from a fan in, let’s say, Lansing Michigan. One day Beck finds himself travelling through Lansing and decides to surprise this loyal fan by visiting him at his home. The man is certainly surprised and sheepishly shows Beck a closet full of autographed first editions — not only by Beck but by every other famous American novelist, obviously being stockpiled to fund the man’s retirement.

That’s a pretty funny story! Oh, and I want that book!

The Old New Thing : Welcome to the Microsoft email culture

This was just too funny to not comment on!
We have some of the same, but since we’re only using 3 letters not many have “cool” acros. My boss has KEL, so we refer to ”The KEL factor”. For a long, long time I thought that was some sort of scientific proof, or something. Turns out it’s just her way of calculating the number of hours it takes to deliver a project. The current KEL factor is 2.5, so she takes the number of hours a developer estimates it to be and multiplies it with 2.5. That is the total amount of time that project should tak. The KEL Factor incorporates spec, testing, meetings etc. Works pretty well and has been finly tuned over the years.

Link to The Old New Thing : Welcome to the Microsoft email culture