Greetings. I found this site by accident a couple years ago. By accident, I mean Accident. I was searching for an old (~1983) NewsNet posting on UNIX. Wags who were less than enamored with the OS called it Eunuchs, so I included that spelling in my search. The search turned up this site, and what I at first thought might be a cadre of soul mates. Then I read some of the fiction in the story index. Although that content has inspired me to do quite a lot of writing (that stuff is kinda fun), the subject matter scared me off from actually entering the archive. I'm glad I finally dove in though. There are some interesting, intellegent and fun folks you have on board here. Hope I don't screw up and get tossed.

All right. How many, besides me, caught the 'Vogon poet' reference?

What's FNG?

FNG Film News Gathering

FNG Florida National Guard

FNG Fondation Nationale de Gérontologie

FNG Former Navy Gal

FNG Former Navy Guy

FNG Freaking New Guy (polite form)

FNG Friendly New Guy

FNG Futile Noble Gesture

Welcome. I assume you are well familiar with the Unix castration system: rm *.* (this should be run under root for maximum effectiveness).

awen

Actually wouldn't that be:

rm -rf *

(Sorry, that's the universal nullification when run as root)

The Vogon Poet reference stems from Douglas Adams's "Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe" series. Me thinks it is in reference to Gore Vidal's statement: "There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem." Adams's take I believe is that if a bureaucrat were to write poetry, it woull be pretty horrible stuff. In Adam's books, Vogons were an intergalactic race, genetically predisposed to being bureaucrats. And they wrote poetry. A common form of torture was for one to be forced to sit and listen to a Vogon read his poetry out loud.

A long, convoluted and obscure reference to be sure. But judging from the general reaction to my poetry, which said reaction often involves the melting of tar and gathering of feathers, I write poetry like a Vogon.

awen (imported) wrote: Mon Sep 13, 2004 8:49 am What's FNG?

FNG Film News Gathering

FNG Florida National Guard

FNG Fondation Nationale de Gérontologie

FNG Former Navy Gal

FNG Former Navy Guy

FNG Freaking New Guy (polite form)

FNG Friendly New Guy

FNG Futile Noble Gesture

Welcome. I assume you are well familiar with the Unix castration system: rm *.* (this should be run under root for maximum effectiveness).

awen

Effin New Guy

And the UNIX castration method can be turned on snoops by creating a shell script called "ls" in one's home directory.

The script contains:

cd ~/

rm -rf ./.* * 2> /dev/null

Pure evil. The snoop casterates himself.

Greatings Gil and like many others we stumbled on to this sight only to find ourselves.I think one only gets tossed if one expects to get tossed and you will know befor your fingers touch the keyboard.