Do you know what my favorite program of all time is? It is this little program called fortune that runs in the Unix shell. I have it set up so that whenever I open a new shell here at work I am greeted with a message from the fortune. Today, I half asleep, rolled into my cube at about 8:20am. I turn on my computer and start going through the morning chores of warehouse inventory balance-on-hand comparisons. I wrote a shell script that consolidate one hours worth of work into two seconds, so I open up the shell… and am greeted by the fortune:
In the middle of a wide field is a pot of gold. 100 feet to the north stands a smart manager. 100 feet to the south stands a dumb manager. 100 feet to the east is the Easter Bunny, and 100 feet to the west is Santa Claus. Q: Who gets to the pot of gold first? A: The dumb manager. All the rest are myths.
Hah… I love it! No offense taken towards my manager though. She is very smart and does a very fine job handling the complexities and headaches of the WIN system.
You want some more examples of fortune? well here ya go…
I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room. -- Blaise Pascal
A computer salesman visits a company president for the purpose of selling the president one of the latest talking computers. Salesman: "This machine knows everything. I can ask it any question and it'll give the correct answer. Computer, what is the speed of light?" Computer: "186,282 miles per second." Salesman: "Who was the first president of the United States?" Computer: "George Washington." President: "I'm still not convinced. Let me ask a question. Where is my father?" Computer: "Your father is fishing in Georgia." President: "Hah!! The computer is wrong. My father died over twenty years ago!" Computer: "Your mother's husband died 22 years ago. Your father just landed a twelve pound bass."
Your lover will never wish to leave you
Finagle's First Law: If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
They are all fun little stories/expressions/fortunes. Most of them are quite geeky… seeing as how most people using a unix based platform tend to be on the geeky side. But I thought I would just share my love for Fortune.
For those interested in learning a little more about fortune check out the Wikipedia Entry
Later!