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8:30AM
Arakaiene : <looking miserably at another company laptop destroyed
by some hyperactive hid who spilled coffee all over the keyboard> I should
stop getting hypo hey Ben?
Ben : Aren't those sort of accidents covered by insurance?
Alfred : Of course not Ben. Floods are considered an act of God.
Jessica : Don't worry Fred (that's what we all call Arakaiene around
here, it's easier to say, and far less pompous sounding) at least business
is picking up. I remember when I first came here there were only two or
three people here max.
Jennifer : Two or three? Fred doesn't count 'cos he owns the place,
and his pet horse and rabbit don't count as people, so how do you get two
or three? <snigger>
Guy In The Corner We Usually Ignore (GIT-CWUI): I'm glad there's almost
no one on line here, 'cos it makes my internet connection faster.
Arakaiene : <whispering> I capped his machine to 15K anyway
Everybody - except for guy in the corner : <laugh>
GIT-CWUI : I just hate it how everybody talks here, it's hard
to concentrate on all these na.... ture pictures.
Harold : See Fred; there's so many people here the GIT-CWUI is irritated
by it
Arakaiene : Sure there's more people here, but all you guy's do is
sit and talk, you never pay me anything. Now make yourselves useful, and
sort through some of this email I got from some of the many delightful,
charming, honest, remarkable visitors to my Logo Repository this morning.
Ben : This guy says he needs help 'cos whenever he types an <,
a > appears instead.
Roberta : Tell him he has his glasses on backwards.
Harold : This guy says he wants to know what the difference between
a heap, a stack and a pile.
Ben : My turn. A heap is a very large stack. Because it's really big
it's very easy to mess up. You can have a heap of stacks, but not a stack
of heaps. You can have a stack which tells you where your heaps are, but
then who talks to stacks anyway. Besides if you can find the stack in the
first place what's wrong with you that you can't see a pile of much larger
heaps. Which brings me to piles which is a medical condition, and therefore
clearly not computer related. For this reason it isn't a good idea to maintain
a pile of heaps, or a heap of piles for that matter.
Kyle : This guy wants to know what sectors, heads, cylinders and clusters
are in hard drives.
Alfred : That's easy. there's 1 cylinder in a hard drive. it holds
all the information on the drive, and has a small hole punched in the bottom.
You put data in the top of the cylinder, and let it pour out the bottom,
onto the bus, which drives it to the processor.
Jennifer : A sector is a spherical vector. You can have an infinite
amount of sectors in any three dimensional hard drive. Or you can compress
your hard drive, which removes redundancy, by making parts of the sectors
overlap. If too many sectors overlap they become misshaped and are then
called bad sectors. Sectors form groups called clusters. Sometimes when
you put lots of clusters in the one cylinder they become lost. Lost clusters
then attempt to form chains so they will be easier to find. Extremely long
chains of lost clusters waste hard drive space because they don't fit to
well in the cylinder.
Alfred : The number of heads in your hard drive is usually a fraction.
It is a logical representation of a physical unit, largely flawed by the
fact that an alien species would no doubt work out the number of heads
differently. To work out how many heads there are in your drive use this
formula. No_ Heads = No_ Teeth in the drives' cogs / No_ Teeth in an adult
human (28?). My Western Digital 40Mb HDD has 1.53571429 heads
Roberta : This girl just bought a CD burner and want's to know what
types of recordable disks she should use.
Arakaiene : CD's fall into two categories. pre-recorded and blanks.
Everyone knows what pre-recorded disks are. A blank disk is similar, except
that it doesn't actually explode when you throw it at somebody. Blanks
fall into a further three categories. record-once, re-writable and coasters.
Record-once disks are ones that look like small LP's. People put them on
their record player once, but soon learn from their mistakes. Re-writable
disks have a special covering on the back, so if you mislabel your disk
you can wash the pen off and write something else. Coasters usually come
repackaged in boxes labelled "Laser", "Pine", "Sirrus", "Mr - Platinum "
or "D-vision". They look just like recordable cd's but are only good for
putting under your drinks. The fact that you can use faulty burners to
convert good recordable disks into coasters, and that sometimes coasters
will actually work in somebody's burner has lead many industry experts to
believe that coasters are actually manufactured from good disks. To further
stir the conspiracy theorists is the fact that many commercial forms of
the coaster were available long before the CD format was even conceived.
Arakaiene : Now in all seriousness, has anyone written up any new logo
screens for the site.
Jessica : I think Geoff has.
Arakaiene : Where's he then?
Jessica : He doesn't wake up 'til midday silly.
Ben : I wrote three yesterday, why don't you use those.
Roberta : I don't think a crashed formula-1 car on fire, a shark with
blood dripping from its' teeth and some skydiver with a failed chute plummeting
to his death are appropriate.
Ben : Why don't you come up with something then
Roberta : You know my creative talents lie in music not graphics
Kyle : I don't think a techno remix of "hot crossed buns" counts as
talent.
9:00AM
As you can see everybody on the team works very hard to score points off each other. If only we could work as a team this site could be great. That's where we need your help. If you've written your own startup screen why no let everyone else enjoy it too. If you like something you download, write to the author and thank them for the fine effort they've put in. And when your friends come to your house and see your fab new logo screens tell them you found them at "Arakaiene's Logo Repository" (or just tell them you drew them yourself, and act like a smart _ _ _ _).