h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Is it just me or are toasters a Shrodinger's Cat experiment that you can carry out in the comfort of your own kitchen?

The toast exists at that perfect toast condition only on a quantum level, as soon as it pops out it's either warm bread or charcoal. Any toaster that does actually produce perfect toast must therefore be faulty and should be taken back to Currys.

toasters to quantum physics in 21 posts... that't got to be a record for topic drift

That makes me feel so proud.

The other macro-life quantum effect occurs with project supervisors, who exist in a state of permanent harassment, until you actually *want* to consult them - in which case the field collapses, and they tunnel into another set of dimensions.

B

Kinda like prohects themselves, which generally lurch around between success and failure but only crystalise into failure once a senior manager comes into view. PErsonnaly, I think this is a great argument for keeping senior managment out of projects until they are delivered
Workforce revolution!

Ah...now you see, your missing out on the current Senior Managment 'buzzword of the week,' which is 'proactivity.'

It roughly translates as 'Management feeling that they have to take part to justify the obscene amounts of money they earn'

Just and bear it, otherwise they'll be back to 'paradigms' again.

B

I'd give 'em a lot more leeway if they'd stop saying 'methodology' when they mean 'method'!

Ah, the good old days or 'Paradigm Shift'! Even had someone quoting 'In search of Excellence' at mee the other day. Weren't too impressed when I informed them that a large number of the companies identified as 'Excellent' has sionce gone bust!

'Money for nothign & yer chips for free'

How true!

'Chips'?

Surely it's 'chicks'? Unless that was a sideways slant at computing firms which I didn't understand .

B

For a while at college we were taught 'Software Engineering' by a man whose ability with spoken English was somewhat lacking. (We got a better teacher when we complained.) He kept pronouncing 'methodology' as 'mythology'. Mind you, with some of the 'methodologies' and the wonders they promise, maybe he wasn't so far wrong!

I would have thought, that simply by being a software engineer, his spoken English would be lacking by default.

I'm surprised he spoke the lectures and didn't just ICQ them to you all.

B

Use a blowtorch to toast your toast. A blowtorch is a very useful kitchen utensil

Caper Plip

You should be careful taking the mickey out of software engineers - there are many dangerous around here, who could just flip at any second

k

I'm a software engineer

Butr only cos it winds up my friends who are, as they would put it, 'real' engineers!


why d'ya think we use email and hootoo instead of face to face?

How to make vast quantities of toast without a blowtorch :
A676352

'Real' engineers, to an American from anywhere west of the Mississippi are train drivers.

B

Yeah, that's alright as long as you like toast with a half life of about 700 million years

Well, at least it won't get cold on your plate before you have time to eat it

It'd probably give you chronic indegestion

Not if you've had years of experience at eating _my_ cooking it won't

The course was back in the late 1980s. The only PCs around at my company, back then, were 286s running MS-DOS. The computers at college were Olivettis (can't remember the spec), and they ran MS-DOS, too. The Internet as we know it didn't exist then.

Oh, and he wasn't a software engineer, he just tried to teach the subject - not very successfully.

*Lurches topic drift back a few stages*
I think that toasters do display a quantum phenomenon, but not the one suggested above. Toaster settings are *quantized*, i.e. they move up in distinct levels, and are not allowed to exist between those levels. A piece of toast can be either white and floppy or black and smoking. At an instant when enough heat has been applied, the instantaneous transition occurs.