20 January 2007

The Smell of Conspiracy Theories in the Morning

Lovely:


The truth can now be told. We have a nine-floor complex beneath Devil's Tower in Wyoming, Dick Cheney's home state. We employee three-hundred Oompa Lumpas, ostensibly here on student visas, to read through the 6,000 page OOXML specification. They then input their concerns into a massively parallel computer, based on the old Deep Blue chess computer that beat Gary Kasparov. The computer takes the objections, formats them into English, inserting random literary quotes from The Modern Library of the World's Best Books, and then posts them in blogs and press articles. The computer can express these objections in the form of sonnets, haikus, or even as crude limerick. Every year on January 14th (Thomas J. Watson's Birthday) at 3:14am the Oompa Lumpas come to the surface, smear their bodies with blue paint, dance around a bonfire, howl at the moon and entreat the gods to vanquish their foes, mainly Microsoft, who canceled their favorite application, Microsoft Bob. Rob Weir doesn't really exist. He is just a subroutine. As they say, "On the internet, nobody knows your are a subroutine processing data input by Oompa-Loompas working for IBM underground in Wyoming"

But is it just coincidence that the time quoted in this extract - 3.14 - happens to be precisely the Köchel number of the Flute Concerto by Mozart that is almost certainly the lost Oboe concerto written for Ferlendis? I don't think so....

2 comments:

Rob Weir said...

A new blog post by Solveig Haugland, author of the "OpenOffice.org 2 Guidebook". What is this? A picture of our Devil's Mountain hideout? We've been found out I tell you.

Glyn Moody said...

It's OK: Solveig is one of us. If you look carefully at the section in "OpenOffice.org 2 Guidebook" about macros, you'll see that the keyboard shortcuts are actually secret handshakes.

The picture you refer to is in fact of the decoy hideout, identical in every respect to the real one, except that it's located in Tuva.