The Monday Quiz Returns.

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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Yes, the Monday Quiz returns.

No surprises there, but maybe one or two in the questions.

Let’s see how you do this week. 

If you get stuck the answers are, as usual, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down below  –  but please NO cheating!

Enjoy, and good luck!

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Q.  1:  What handicap did the composer Beethoven have?

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Q.  2:  According to legend, who rewarded a man for his loyalty by giving him  the secret recipe for Drambuie?

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Q.  3:  Which two semaphoric letters are found on the famous anti war peace symbol from the 1960’s ?

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Q.  4:  In which movie would you find a robot called ‘Gort’? 

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Q.  5:  What name did the Vikings give to Newfoundland?

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Q.  6:  What do all of the following have (or don’t have) in common? 

Galileo, Jesse James, Jerry Garcia, Dustin Hoffman, James Doohan, Frodo Baggins,  Tony Iommi, Telly Savalas, Boris Yelzin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Daryl Hannah and Gary Burghoff (‘Radar’ O’Reilly from M*A*S*H)

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Q.  7:  In literature, King Richard III was desperate and willing to pay a high price for what?

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Q.  8:  Which fruit is a port city in the Democratic Republic of the Congo? 

    a) Orange

    b) Banana

    c) Ugli

    d) Guava

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Q.  9:  In China in 1989 in which Beijing Square were the protests against the government crushed by tanks?

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Q. 10:  What is the name of the race of giants mentioned in the Bible who lived in Canaan?

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Q. 11:  “I coulda had class, I coulda been somebody, I coulda been a contender”. What famous actor said the words and in which famous movie?

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Q. 12:  Who was the first WBC heavyweight boxing champion in 1978?

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Q. 13:  What is the name of the current German Chancellor?

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Q. 14:  Put the following in the correct order starting with the fastest and ending with the slowest:

 Human, Nimitz class aircraft carrier, Grizzly bear, A common pig, Cheetah, Japanese ‘bullet’ train, Ostrich, Peregrin falcon. 

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Q. 15:  Which new country was formed in 1971 at the end of the Pakistan / India conflict?

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Q. 16:  Who played ‘Lucy Ewing’ in the hit TV Series ‘Dallas’ and what was her rather unkind nickname?

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Q. 17:  What was the name of the French underground movement that fought against the Germans in World War II?

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Q. 18:  Name the capital and the largest city in New Zealand (a point for each).

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Q. 19:  In the ‘Bond’ movies what were the codenames for James Bond’s boss and the person responsible for the gadgets he used? 

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Q. 20:  What ‘o’clock’ is mentioned in the Bangles hit song ‘Manic Monday’?

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ANSWERS

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Q.  1:  What handicap did the composer Beethoven have?

A.  1:  He was hearing impaired.

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Q.  2:  According to legend, who rewarded a man for his loyalty by giving him  the secret recipe for Drambuie?

A.  2:  Bonnie Prince Charlie.

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Q.  3:  Which two semaphoric letters are found on the famous anti war peace symbol from the 1960’s ?

A.  3:  N and D for Nuclear Disarmament.

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Q.  4:  In which movie would you find a robot called ‘Gort’? 

A.  4:  The Day The Earth Stood Still.

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Q.  5:  What name did the Vikings give to Newfoundland?

A.  5:  Vinland.

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Q.  6:  What do all of the following have (or don’t have) in common? 

 Galileo, Jesse James, Jerry Garcia, Dustin Hoffman, James Doohan, Frodo Baggins,  Tony Iommi, Telly Savalas, Boris Yelzin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Daryl Hannah and Gary Burghoff (‘Radar’ O’Reilly from M*A*S*H)

A.  6:  They are/were all missing a finger or fingers.

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Q.  7:  In literature, King Richard III was desperate and willing to pay a high price for what?

A.  7:  “A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse.”

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Q.  8:  Which fruit is a port city in the Democratic Republic of the Congo? 

    a) Orange

    b) Banana

    c) Ugli

    d) Guava

A.  8:  b) Banana

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Q.  9:  In China in 1989 in which Beijing Square were the protests against the government crushed by tanks?

A.  9:  Tiananmen Square.

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Q. 10:  What is the name of the race of giants mentioned in the Bible who lived in Canaan?

A. 10:  Nephilim.

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Q. 11:  “I coulda had class, I coulda been somebody, I coulda been a contender”. What famous actor said the words and in which famous movie?

A. 11:  Marlon Brando in ‘On the Waterfront’.

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Q. 12:  Who was the first WBC heavyweight boxing champion in 1978?

A. 12:  Ken Norton.

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Q. 13:  What is the name of the current German Chancellor?

A. 13:  Angela Merkel.

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Q. 14:  Put the following in the correct order starting with the fastest and ending with the slowest:

 Human, Nimitz class aircraft carrier, Grizzly bear, A common pig, Cheetah, Japanese ‘bullet’ train, Ostrich, Peregrin falcon. 

A. 14:  The correct order, fastest to slowest, is:

    1) Japanese ‘bullet’ train (361 mph);  2) Peregrin falcon (200 mph); 3) Cheetah (70 mph); 4) Ostrich (40 mph); 5) Nimitz class aircraft carrier (34.5 plus mph); 6) grizzly bear (30 mph); 7. Human (28 mph); 8. Common pig  (11 mph)

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Q. 15:  Which new country was formed in 1971 at the end of the Pakistan / India conflict?

A. 15:  Bangladesh.

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Q. 16:  Who played ‘Lucy Ewing’ in the hit TV Series ‘Dallas’ and what was her rather unkind nickname?

A. 16:  ‘Lucy Ewing’ was played by Charlene Tilton and her nickname because of her lack of height was the ‘Poison Dwarf’

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Q. 17:  What was the name of the French underground movement that fought against the Germans in World War II?

A. 17:  The Maquis (If you are nice you can also claim a point for ‘French Resistance’)

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Q. 18:  Name the capital and the largest city in New Zealand (a point for each).

A. 18:  Wellington is the capital; Auckland is the largest city.

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Q. 19:  In the ‘Bond’ movies what were the codenames for James Bond’s boss and the person responsible for the gadgets he used? 

A. 19:  They were known as ‘M’ and ‘Q’.

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Q. 20:  What ‘o’clock’ is mentioned in the Bangles hit song ‘Manic Monday’?

A. 20:  6 o’clock.

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May The Fourth Be With You – And This Time I Mean It!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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I remember on this day last year starting out with great intentions of doing a Star Wars based post in tribute the day that has become known to many as ‘Star Wars Day’ because of the pun on the memorable phrase coined in the movie series “May the force be with you”.

Unfortunately I failed miserably last year because the post ended up as one about a guy who had built himself a really cool looking laser gun based on the phasers from Star Trek, not Star Wars. (Here’s the link if you missed it –  click here)

So time to make amends.

Taken together the Star Wars series of movies has to be one of the most watched and highest grossing ever in the history of the cinema, if not THE greatest. The original 1977 movie itself has been estimated to have taken $2,710,800,000 in today’s inflation adjusted terms.

On top of that it has spawned a plethora of merchandising material from t-shirts to robots to gadgets to almost everything that could be seen in the movies themselves, and then some!

Top of everyone’s list has to be a lightsabre – I have never met anyone who has seen Star Wars who didn’t want to be the proud owner of a light sabre, including me.

From the first time you saw the flash of light and heard that ‘hummm’, way back in 1977, in Obi-Wan Kenobi’s bungalow, even though you didn’t really know what it was, you still knew you wanted one – needed one!

Well for a bit north of $100 now you can own one, the Star Wars Force FX Lightsaber! It has the light, it has the sound, and it looks the part – well almost.

From the sublime, however, we also have the ridiculous.

Somewhere out there is that great Universe you just know that at least one moron has subjected their poor dog to the indignity of a Star Wars suit. Poor mutt, even the look on its face says it all.

And there are lots of other stuff in between, including these

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Finally, an interesting little piece of trivia that would just as easily have taken its place in one of my ‘Did you know factoids’. 

Star Wars fans were not the first to introduce the line “May the fourth be with you”. When the recently deceased Margaret Thatcher was elected Britain’s first female Prime Minister on May 4, 1979, her party placed an advertisement in The London Evening News that said “May the Fourth Be with You, Maggie. Congratulations.” This reading of the line has also been recorded in the UK Parliament’s Hansard.

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Things Your Grand-kids Will Probably Never Know

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

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We all happen to be living during a time when there are great advances and changes being made in the way we live our lives. Some of them are to our benefit, other not so much so.

Politically and financially the world is in turmoil. There is an accelerating and inevitable shift of power and influence towards the east, with former great powers like Britain and America declining in their influence and their economic might.

Perhaps that is a natural phenomenon, after all as they say “every dog has its day”, but I happen to believe that a lot of it is due to stupidity and mismanagement allied with a self-defeating philosophy that the west somehow has a duty to police the world and to create nanny states for its citizens where they will neither have to work nor want.

Technologically there have also been many changes and many more to come. During the past twenty years with the advent and growth of the internet everything has changed, from the way we interact socially, to how and where we work, and how we manage our affairs whether that be banking, shopping or whatever.

What a lot of these changes mean is that future generations will have no idea of how our lives used to be. Already many of us who have lived through the changes have forgotten how we used to have to do things. What would it be like trying to explain the ‘old days’ to a generation with absolutely no point of reference to the world we were born into?

To remind you of how it used to be here is a list of some of things we have known and lost, consigned to the rubbish bin of history. Feel free to add your own items to this list of things that your grand-kids will probably never know.

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Libraries as a place to get books rather than a place to use the internet.

Dewey Decimal System

Finding books in a card catalog at the library.

A physical dictionary — either for spelling or definitions.

Reference books such as phone books, encyclopaedias

Finding out information from an encyclopedia.

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Having to manually unlock a car door.

Looking out the window during a long drive.

Using a road atlas to get from A to B.

Getting lost in a world without GPS.

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Being able to add and subtract without a calculator

Long division and multiplication

Trig tables and log tables.

Slide rules

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House phones

Phone books and Yellow Pages.

Rotary-dial telephones.

Pay phones.

Phones with actual bells in them.

Answering machines.

Fax machines.

Not knowing who was calling you on the phone.

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Super-8 movies and cine film of all kinds.

Betamax tapes.

Video tapes and renting movies

Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something.

Laserdiscs.

8-track cartridges.

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Casette Tapes

Vinyl records. Even today’s DJs are going laptop or CD.

CDs and DVDs

Playing music on an audio tape using a personal stereo.

Taping songs off the radio

A Walkman.

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Rotary tuners that scanned the radio dial and hearing static between stations as you went through the ether.

Shortwave radio.

CB radios.

Rotary dial televisions with no remote control. You know, the ones where the kids were the remote control.

Waiting for the television-network premiere to watch a movie after its run at the theater.

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DOS.

The buzz of a dot-matrix printer

5- and 3-inch floppies, Zip Discs and countless other forms of data storage.

Booting your computer off of a floppy disk.

Tweaking the volume setting on your tape deck to get a computer game to load, and waiting ages for it to actually do it.

Counting in kilobytes.

Joysticks.

Having to delete something to make room on your hard drive.

Waiting several minutes (or even hours!) to download something.

When a ‘geek’ and a ‘nerd’ were one and the same.

NCSA Mosaic.

Netscape

Alta Vista

Being able to get a domain name consisting of real words.

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Cash.

Writing a check.

Doing bank business only when the bank is open.

Shopping only during the day, Monday to Saturday.

Being able to buy something in Walmart that isn’t made in China

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Privacy.

Being able to take a drive or walk down the street without being surveilled on numerous cameras

Not knowing exactly what all of your friends are doing and thinking at every moment.

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Carrying on a correspondence with real letters, especially the handwritten kind.

Neat handwriting.

Spelling

Grammar

The fact that words generally don’t have num8er5 in them.

Typewriters.

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Putting film in your camera

Sending that film away to be processed.

Having physical prints of photographs come back to you.

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Vacuum cleaners with bags in them.

Ashtrays

Roller skates, as opposed to blades.

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You’re Too Stupid To Own A Computer

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

 

“If the automobile had followed the same development as the computer,
a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100,
get a million miles per gallon,
and explode once a year killing everyone inside.”

Robert Cringel

I have been involved with computers for many years. I remember using mainframe machines with data inputted on punch cards and bits of flimsy tape, and the machines, which in those days had no monitors, they were just glorified teletype printers, chugging (and I mean chugging) out the results that would have meant absolutely nothing to the uninitiated.

In the grand scheme of things all that wasn’t really so long ago, and at the time it was cutting edge technology and terribly exciting, although now it seems so archaic.

In those days you didn’t quite have to be a nerd or a geek (but it helped) although you did have to have a certain level of education and understanding of mathematics and computer science to be able to make the machines do what you wanted them to do. Or try to, they were a bit temperamental. These machines were also horribly expensive and were to be found only in universities and larger companies, thus, whilst people did get themselves into tangles now and again, there was usually someone on hand to help out.

Then along came the personal computer revolution, which we are now well and truly in the midst of, and which has changed the world forever.

Thousands of new companies were spawned out of this revolution, hardware manufacturers, software manufacturers, various support and service industries. People were churning out all sorts of stuff, a lot of it rubbish, some of it good, but all of it difficult for the beginner to use. Before the advent of GUI personal computers were not user friendly at all. Therefore at some stage in the proceedings those who bought them would get stuck or something would go wrong.

Thus were born the infamous computer “help lines”.

I have highlighted these before in a couple of earlier blog posts “Computer Company Help Lines”  and “Cancel The Account”.

Here are a couple more non video examples that I hope you will also enjoy.

Right Click

Tech Support: “I need you to right-click on the Open Desktop.”

Customer: “Ok.”

Tech Support: “Did you get a pop-up menu?”

Customer: “No.”

Tech Support: “Ok. Right click again. Do you see a pop-up menu?”

Customer: “No.”

Tech Support: “Ok, sir. Can you tell me what you have done up until this point?”

Customer: “Sure, you told me to write ‘click’ and I wrote ‘click’.”

(At this point I had to put the caller on hold to tell the rest of the tech support staff what had happened. I couldn’t, however, stop from giggling when I got back to the call.)

Tech Support: “Ok, did you type ‘click’ with the keyboard?”

Customer: “I have done something dumb, right?”
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Blank Screen

Allegedly this is the transcript of a recorded conversation between a caller and a computer helpline. It’s a few years old now, but still amusing.

 

Tech Support:   May I help you?

Customer:   Yes, I’m having trouble with WordPerfect.

 

Tech Support:   What sort of trouble?

Customer:   Well, I was just typing along, and all of a sudden the words went away.

 

Tech Support:   Went away?

Customer:   They disappeared.

 

Tech Support:   Hmmm. So what does your screen look like now?

Customer:    Nothing.

 

Tech Support:   Nothing?

Customer:   It’s blank. It won’t accept anything when I type.

 

Tech Support:   Are you still in WordPerfect, or did you get out?

Customer:   How do I tell?

 

Tech Support:   Can you see the C prompt on the screen?

Customer:   What’s a sea prompt?

 

Tech Support:   Never mind. Can you move the cursor around on the screen?

Customer:   There isn’t any cursor. I told you, it won’t accept anything I type.

 

Tech Support:   Does your monitor have a power indicator?

Customer:   What’s a monitor?

 

Tech Support:   It’s the thing with the screen on it that looks like a TV. Does it have a little light that tells you when it’s on?

Customer:   I don’t know.

 

Tech Support:   Well, look round the back of the monitor and find where the power cord goes into it. Can you see that?

Customer:   …yes, I think so.

 

Tech Support:   Great! Follow the cord to the plug, and tell me if it’s plugged into the wall.

Customer:   …yes, it is.

 

Tech Support:   When you were behind the monitor, did you notice that there were two cables plugged into the back, not just one?

Customer:    No.

 

Tech Support:   Well, there are. I need you to look back there again and find the other cable.

Customer:   …OK, here it is.

 

Tech Support:   Follow it for me, and tell me if it’s plugged securely into the back of your computer.

Customer:   I can’t reach.

 

Tech Support:   Uh huh. Well, can you see if it is?

Customer:    No.

 

Tech Support:  Even if you maybe put your knee on something and lean way over?

Customer:   Oh, it’s not because I don’t have the right angle, it’s because it’s dark.

 

Tech Support:   Dark?

Customer:    Yes. The office lights are off, and the only light I have is coming in from the window.

 

Tech Support:   Well, turn the office lights on then.

Customer:   I can’t.

 

Tech Support:   No? Why not?

Customer:    Because there’s a power outage.

 

Tech Support:   A power… a power outage? Aha! OK, we’ve got you licked now. Do you still have the boxes and manuals and packing stuff your computer came in?

Customer:   Well, yes, I keep them in the closet.

 

Tech Support:   Good! Go get them, and unplug your system and pack it up just like it was when you got it. Then take it back to the store that you bought it from.

Customer:   Really? Is it that bad?

 

Tech Support:   Yes, I’m afraid it is.

Customer:   Well, alright then, I suppose. What do I tell them?

 

Tech Support:   Tell them you’re too stupid to own a computer.

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Computer user