Hot Guids In Your Area

One of my colleagues showed me this nerdy website https://secretgeek.net/hotGuids/index.htm

It’s a parody of those “Hot or Not” style websites that were popular years ago. It shows you a GUID and you have to select if you find it “hot” or “not”.

A GUID is a globally unique identifier

It looks something like this:

{63ef87e8-8909-2540-f5c4-3f8777c64ab5}

GUIDs are perfect as a randomly generated identification number since the probability of duplicates is very negligable.

Due to that trait, I would have thought the features of the website such as “Popular Guids – Guids with more than 1 hot vote” wouldn’t actually be implemented because the chance of showing you a GUID that was shown to 2 people would be basically impossible – so that’s part of the joke.

More humorous than that is this:

Single women in your area who are interested in this guid:
There are no single women in your area who are interested in this or any other guid.

Then there’s purchase options like an adoption certificate or a t-shirt, although I don’t think you can actually purchase them, but I’m sure they would sell a few if you could.

“I was wearing a t-shirt of my favorite guid
when a girl approached me and told me it was also
her favorite guid. We are now married and have
several children.”
target customer

Maybe that quote contradicts the other joke… or maybe there was only ever one single woman who was interested in a particular GUID. Or maybe the (fictional) reviewer was joking.

In case the website is removed from the internet, here it is in all its glory.

Bad Rules

I’ve written blogs discussing incentives, and will probably write more in the future. One of my classic stories was how a Test Manager stated she was judging Testers if they run 10 Test Cases a day. Some people just ran 10 then chilled out for the rest of the day even though they would have normally done more work than this. Others tried to run as many as they could, but they ignored the harder Test Cases and ones that depend on 3rd parties. So:

A) it looked like we were nearly complete because the number of remaining test cases were low, but this last batch took ages to run so was very misleading.

B) We discovered that 3rd Party API/Test Systems were down at the last minute.

So this incentive actually helped delay our releases.

I’ve been watching a lot of Andrew Platt’s videos recently. He has many channels but this one he just reads stories from Reddit. It’s basically very low-value and easy YouTube content to make 😀

The stories he did on Rules made me laugh. It’s a similar concept to incentives; you are trying to change people’s behaviour by rewards/punishments, but if they aren’t well-thought out, then they backfire.

Here’s a few notes on my favourite punishments from the video:

If you’re a minute late that’s half a point, if you’re up to 4 hours late that’s half a point. So if you are gonna be late, may as well delay more.

Death penalty for stealing sheep. Welshmen caught stealing sheep would claim to be making love to them because the penalty for bestiality was lower.

Day care started charging a small fine for parents who picked their children late. This caused more late pick-ups. Could be that parents didn’t feel as guilty because it didn’t seem as much of an inconvenience. Also, it’s cheap childcare.

Bus drivers got banned from wearing shorts – so they all wore skirts instead.

Cobras were killed for a bounty in order to reduce the population. Enterprising people bred cobras to cash-in the bounty. When the reward system was scrapped, the cobras were set free, increasing the cobra population.

“Dry Counties” banned drinking. People would drive further away to drink, causing an increase in drunk driving.

Mandatory to drop heating temperatures to save on electricity. People brought their own heaters which increased electric use.

“Clean Desk” Policy caused people to put all their paperwork in an envelope and place it in the Internal Mail. It would arrive on their desks the next morning.

Dominos deliver pizza within 30 mins or it will be free. This increased car crashes as the drivers would drive recklessly to get there on time.

Only giving smokers breaktime; rewarding smokers.

Unnecessary Printing

Several years ago, my Grandad decided to try learn how to use a computer and experience the internet. He went all-in and bought a printer as well.

One time, I went around to his house and he said he had problems with his computer. Anything that resembled any kind of error, he seemed to panic.

I can’t even remember what his problem was exactly, probably something like OneDrive failing to sign-in. When I followed him into his computer room, he picked up a stack of papers and handed them to me. I looked at them and he had printed out the errors!

I thought it was hilarious. I told some of my colleagues about it and it became and inside-joke, so if one of us has an error we would tell each other to print it out so we can help resolve it.

A few months back, I saw Wes Bos tweet this and it made me laugh because I felt it was something my Grandad would have done.

8 years ago my printer printed the print settings dialog pic.twitter.com/5ZyY3fXbhm
— Wes Bos (@wesbos) February 1, 2022

Nerd Christmas

Joke

Several years ago, I invented a nerd joke and always recall it each Christmas.

Q: Who brings presents to Database Administrators?
A:Santa Where-Claus

Nerd Code

No idea where this picture came from, but I found it whilst looking through my pictures folder.

Nerd Christmas Tree

I found this in my chat history. It was a conversation between two software developers in the office which I overheard, then shared with other colleagues:

James: “Did you get your Christmas tree?”

Dave: “yes”

James: “Can you program it?”

I didn’t expect Dave to actually respond “Yes” then start talking about looping over the lights. It seems that programmable Christmas trees are a thing. I suppose it’s obviously a possibility to hook up some lights to an Arduino/Raspberry Pi etc.
It looks underwhelming to what I thought it would be.

Privacy Cookies

When you visit a website and have to consent to cookies, the user experience is often confusing. The wording, or the appearance of controls look like they are designed to mislead.

Sometimes when you see options and they look disabled by default, I wonder if I am misunderstanding what the dialog represents. So even when you close the dialog, have you really consented?

Additionally, how do I really know that my options have been saved and used correctly? Unless I see an advert for something I looked at on a particular website, I am oblivious to what a website stored about me, or sent on to their many partners.

Someone has made a short “game” which illustrates how bad these consent dialogs are.

https://cookieconsentspeed.run/

Shoes

Years ago, a manager had accidentally posted a link in the Discussion section of a Bug report. So they had a comment discussing a possible root cause, but then all of a sudden, had a link to a shoe website.

It looks like it may be a side effect of “Bug 512: Unable to edit a document”. It’s difficult https://www.startriteshoes.com/ to tell from the video though.

We thought it was hilarious, especially because (for whatever reason) you couldn’t edit or delete comments. Even if they realised their mistake, it is permanently on the system, unless they told an admin to specifically delete it. It’s become a bit of an inside joke, and we often reminisce about it.

It was also very pleasing when we once got an email on the topic of shoes:

*** On Behalf of Security ***
A package arrived this morning without a name/surname so it has been opened.
It appears to be a personal order for a pair of Disney branded shoes – unless this is to form part of the company dress code?
Package will be with Security over in the main building – ready for collection.

I love how security have thrown in some banter. He probably got annoyed about the amount of personal deliveries he had to sign for.