I have had a band of virtual friends for a little more than a year now, and this week marked the second anniversary of that group: The Scribblers' Den in the Steampunk Empire . Today we are holding another 24 hour party spanning the world East to West, starting with sunrise in Australia and ending at sundown in Haiti, why not join us and see what you are inspired to create? Last years party gave birth to the idea of The Denizens of Steam anthology through a flash fiction competition we held during the party. This year we are celebrating two years of joyous companionship and to that end I will be revealing the cover our second anthology The Den of Antiquity! This book is bursting with short stories rather than flash fiction and is sculpted rather than being an instinctive creation. But before I reveal the wonderful cover designed by Bryce Raffle, I thought I'd send my roving reporter, Antigone Nix, out into the Steampunk Empire to track dow a few of the members of the Scrib...
This may be more a story of keeping something from going wrong, but hope you will find it amusing. Back in graduate school, I worked on an automated telescope before "automated telescopes" were really a common thing. All the commands were six-letters long. Sometimes six-letter commands can be pretty cryptic. However, my graduate advisor used to like to log in (often late at night) and see how the telescope was doing. Even if it was working, if he encountered a command he didn't know, he would sometimes try it out just to see what it did. Sometimes this would crash the telescope resulting in a late night phone call for me or the other student in the office to come fix the telescope. (My graduate advisor lived about 300 miles away in a different city!)
ReplyDeleteSo, my office mate and I hatched a plan. We created a command called "slfdst" (short for self destruct). It produced a little countdown on the screen and then the message: "Congratulations, you've just destroyed the telescope."
We then merrily left it there. About three weeks later, I get a phone call at 11pm from my graduate advisor. "That's not very funny, Dave." And he hung up. I knew exactly what he'd tried to do, but he never called again after trying commands he didn't know!
My email is dsummers[at]zianet[dot]com (just replace the bracketed words with the appropriate symbol!)