This week in Geekdom – C0L|}

Greetings…

This post is the replacement for the weekly TGIF. You may still read that series at SEO Scoop where I will post it every Friday as usual. It has freed up some space for us to have a slightly geekier version here on SFS.

The Ascii emoticon in the title which served as an indentifier on TGIF is a word in l33t on TWIG (what do you mean you never noticed?!). The word represenents my week or a big web event. Oh and we get computer games to play rather than a video. And a few other things have changed…well…all of it

Without further ado…

Cult stuff:

religion of CHI: /ki:/, n.

In the mid-70s, the “Introduction to Programming” courses at CWRU were taught in Algol, and student exercises were punched on cards and run on a Univac 1108 system using a homebrew operating system named CHI. The religion had no doctrines and but one ritual: whenever the worshiper noted that a digital clock read 11:08, he or she would recite the phrase “It is 11:08; ABS, ALPHABETIC, ARCSIN, ARCCOS, ARCTAN.” The last five words were the first five functions in the appropriate chapter of the Algol manual; note the special pronunciations /obz/ and /ark´sin/ rather than the more common /ahbz/ and /ark´si:n/. Using an alarm clock to warn of 11:08’s arrival was considered harmful. [Jargon File mini rdf This week in Geekdom C0L|} ]

Please send:

DBA ION Technologies USB Key mini rdf This week in Geekdom C0L|} – a biometric flash drive that combines interactive OLED display and retractable USB connector

Elite ThinkPad W700 with discrete graphics mini rdf This week in Geekdom C0L|} – customised to the tilt (have a look, it’s cool)

Thermaltake BlacX eSATA Hard Drive USB Docking Station mini rdf This week in Geekdom C0L|} – to dock the block

BuckyBalls Magnetic Building Spheres mini rdf This week in Geekdom C0L|} – just for fun

Sennheiser HD 800 mini rdf This week in Geekdom C0L|} – headphones for the l33t

Lexeme of the week:

“We’re going clustergeeking, see you there” = “We’re meeting up online”

“They’re clustergeeks” = “Social media addicts”

Code of the week:

(UNIX)

$ PATH=pretending! /usr/ucb/which sense

no sense in pretending!

Geek Tweet of the Week:

“Got to test run a few science gadgets today … image stabilizing binoculars, and a hand held GPS guided constellation identification tool.” @jquipp mini rdf This week in Geekdom C0L|}

Time Sink of the week:

PONG was released by Atari in 1972, and is one of the very 1st arcade games. It was apparently the 1st ever commercially successful computer game and kickstarted the industry. Alan Alcorn who worked for Atari wrote the first version.