Here’s an action shot of it connecting to Pyffle HQ:

It’s connected to UUHECNET via UUCP and will form an integral part of our upcoming project, The Unix Farm – more details on this will be available later.

Back in the dawn of the GSM age, a bunch of wise men defined a standard with which to write telephone numbers in a universally portable way and named it MSISDN, commonly understood to mean “Mobile Subscriber Integrated Services Digital Network Number”.

Basically, it is a way of representing a phone number in a global way, which can be dialled directly on any GSM handset, and looks like this:

+35892005566

Breaking that down we get the + to indicate that this is an MSISDN number and then:

• 358 = country code for finland
• 9 = Helsinki
• 2005566 = the number

It’s a great little system, and works everywhere. Well it does until retards like one of my old bosses gets their hands on it, and decides to helpfully embed some useless extra zeroes in it for fuck knows what reason, turning his mobile number from 07928 5550011 into:

+44 (0) 7928 5550011

End result? Much borkedness. This will not work ANYWHERE, as the devices try to add the zero into the number dialled, and obviously get a “Number doesn’t exist” error. God damn idiots.

PS: If you want to see REALLY fucked up numbers, look no further than France. They seem enamored with the concept of sprinkling random punctuation marks all over their phone numbers, viz:

(0033)3.21.32.46.09 (This is a restaurant called Esperanza in Wimereux)

WTF?

• الكلب
• الكذاب
• الطاغية
• القاتل
• الخائن

Hosni ibn ash-Sharamutah Mubarak

My initial reaction was “bullshit, I bet you it’s just another of of these slightly nuanced terms like Lagom in Swedish.

It wasn’t, check out this madness of a definition:“STAM: Adverb. Just, only, merely; mere; undefined, casual; simple, not special”

Whilst some of these at first glance seem related, some are positively contradictory or totally unrelated. This word kicks ass, it’s one of those that’ll make even an experienced foreign speaker cry in confusion for hours – thus I have decided to learn Hebrew.

Ralph Wiggum has decided to become a pharmacist

So after producing copious amounts of documentation, including a “Methrotrexate Log Book”, I proceded to wait for about 2 hours.

This is the result – they couldn’t even be arsed to put chemotherapy drugs in a box. No, they just put them in a paper bag that might look like sweeties to some dumb 4 year old.

Now I’m not one of these safety nuts (I regularly do 120 MPH on the M6 or whatever) and enjoy my share of drinking and clubbing.

But this is just retarded.

;---------------------------------------------------------------------
;
;  FUNCTION Monkey: BOOLEAN;
;
         TST      MonkeyLives                ;IS THE MONKEY ACTIVE ?
         SGE      4(SP)                      ;YES IF >= ZERO
         NEG.B    4(SP)                      ;CONVERT TO PASCAL BOOLEAN
         RTS

         .SEG 'SegPrint'
         .PROC Stretch2x

Pure genius.