Not necessarily sucky just...wha?

[Seshat]

Now if we could only find a way to squeeze 34 days into September....

Steal them from February. That's what Julius and Augustus (July and August) Ceasar did.

It's also why SEPTember is no longer the seventh month, OCTober no longer the eighth, ditto NOV and DEC.

[DGoddessChardonnay]

Last week I was in the superstore from hell, waiting in line at the pharmacy. The woman in front of me in line and I passed several minutes complaining about the Christmas music blaring from the overhead. Can't we get through one holiday at a time, please?

I heard the opposite complaint on the radio the other morning . . . a lady called into a local station complaining that they weren't playing Christmas music yet!!!

Too bad I didn't call in and tell them to suggest to her to pop in her favorite CD's and listen to them in private if she was that insistent. Not everyone wants to hear Christmas music in November, kthanxbye.

[wolfie]

Now if we could only find a way to squeeze 34 days into September....

But computers don't use base 7. Base 10 (because it's used by humans), and various forms of base 2 (pure binary, base 16, and base 8 as a holdover from when Sperry used it) are what you'll find.

Interesting tidbit: Some VERY early versions of Windows NT filled unused memory with a reserved value (easy to see if it had been "hit" when it shouldn't have - it would have the wrong value). Since NT was a 32 bit operating system, they chose the number 3735928559 as the reserved value for each DWORD of memory. What's so special about it? It's also 0xdEAdbEEf (capitalization based on how hexadecimal is usually done on 7-segment displays).

[sms001]

Steal them from February... OCTober no longer the eighth, ditto NOV and DEC.

lol. Learned this from the other end actually. Once I learned that 'oct' meant 'eight' I wondered why my birth month was the tenth and looked into it. Guess an ego went with the whole "god-emperor" thing.

But computers don't use base 7.

Quite aware, thanks. (About thirty years in the industry.) Although I've seen several white papers on ternary and associated systems.

Really just wanted you to know someone got your joke, and I had two other "number" months to choose from. The 27 result from November would have worked, I suppose, but wouldn't have the nuance of extending the holiday season even further.

[Estil]

Aw, c'mon - you already know why! It's to get a jump start on the annual consumer feeding frenzy collectively known as 'the holidays'. It's the same reason Christmas trees were in the stores in September. Yes, sir, retail just can't get enough of that holiday sales push. I figure inside of 20 years that the Christmas season will start in May. "Hurry hurry! Only 218 shopping days until Christmas! Buy this buy this buy this buy this buy this! Grandma got run over by a reindeer...."

And people wonder why I'm burned out on Christmas by Dec 1st. Bah f*cking humbug!

We all know it's all one big commercial racket! *whispers* It's all run by a big Eastern Syndicate you know...

[Jay 2K Winger]

We all know it's all one big commercial racket! *whispers* It's all run by a big Eastern Syndicate you know...

Slander and calumny.

It's a big Northern Syndicate. Godfather Christmas always gets his cut.

[wolfie]

Really just wanted you to know someone got your joke,

Thanks. I guess you know that there are 10 kinds of people: those who understand binary, and those who don't.

Have you seen the one about the "come from" instruction? I've seen it (years ago) posted on an office wall. As a bit of humour, someone came up with a (hypothetical) instruction that was even more borked than a goto. Of course, a while after that, when I read about constructors and destructors in C++, my first reaction was "Someone has actually implemented the ComeFrom".

[dalesys]

... the "come from" instruction?

Pairs well with the Go Near and If Maybe ... Sometimes control constructs.

[sms001]

Have you seen the one about the "come from" instruction? ....Someone has actually implemented the ComeFrom".

No I hadn't. Brief once over of wiki says python and ruby both allow it now too. Sounds like a REALLY good way to irk the person maintaining code after you though. Oddly enough, my first foray into teaching myself programming was on a PCJr.'s implementation of Basic, but I somehow managed to wrestle it into something approaching structured out of sheer OCDedness. Glad there wasn't a comefrom then.

[fireheart]

I can sort of understand the stores playing Christmas carols after the Christmas Pageant we have down here (here's a clip), but this store was playing them BEFORE that.

[Amanita]

I was in NYC over Halloween- While this pic was taken a few days after, I swear these decorations went up on Nov 1. WTF, Junior's?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/31217544@N07/10974272215/

[Kogarashi]

I was in NYC over Halloween- While this pic was taken a few days after, I swear these decorations went up on Nov 1. WTF, Junior's?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/31217544@N07/10974272215/

Good grief. Now I can kind of understand stores putting out their Christmas stock right after Halloween, so there's more time for people to purchase it. I really don't mind that part, that much.

But decorations? (And in many stores, the music.) Good grief.

[fireheart]

I swear that my former place of employment and a $2 shop NOT affilitated with each other use the same soundtrack. I wandered in there today out of curiosity and BAM! They were playing the version of "Twelve days of Christmas" I used to hear all. the. time.
I wanted to run

[Shalom]

I was in the Pursue bank the other day, and they already had the xmas music on the overhead. I asked as to the reason for this, and the teller said that there were only certain radio stations they were allowed to play, and that particular station had started the xmas music early. (When I worked for the Pharmacy Chain Named After Two Streets in Downtown Manhattan, they had a similar rule: seems they'd paid those stations enough that they were given an exclusive on pharmacy advertising. Wouldn't do to have someone shopping at the PCNATSiDM and hear an ad for the Chain of Verylarge Stores come on, would it. I wonder if Pursue has a similar deal.)

One of the advantages of working for a Hasidic-owned pharmacy is that I don't have to listen to xmas music. In fact I just bought a Hanukkah CD there.

I swear that my former place of employment and a $2 shop NOT affilitated with each other use the same soundtrack. I wandered in there today out of curiosity and BAM! They were playing the version of "Twelve days of Christmas" I used to hear all. the. time.

Probably bought the service from Muzak. I often had to call another pharmacy chain for a prescription transfer, and while on hold, heard the same music coming out of the phone as what was on my overhead speakers. (Sometimes with a half-second delay; this was before streaming audio via Internet was available, so the stuff was fed by satellite. Depending on how many jumps it had to make, you could get a bit of a lag.)

What's so special about it? It's also 0xdEAdbEEf (capitalization based on how hexadecimal is usually done on 7-segment displays).

Well I guess that when the 0x is dEAd, you have to cook you some bEEf...

[wolfie]

Well I guess that when the 0x is dEAd, you have to cook you some bEEf...

The "0x" wasn't part of the "fill" value (a hexadecimal character is a 4-bit number, so it takes 8 of them to make up a 32 bit value, and you can't show "x" on a 7-segment display). In the C programming language, "0x" is a prefix to show that a number is in hexadecimal (without it, it's assumed to be decimal) - I just entered it out of habit, since "dEAdbEEf" is a valid hexadecimal value, but not decimal - without the prefix, it would be taken for a variable name). "31" would be the day of the month on which Halloween falls, while "0x31" would be the day of the month on which Christmas falls.