Milestone

[liv]

Today I lost my Punvezna'f Tnzr virginity. Lots of other exciting things happened too which I will write about later.

Comments

[rho]

Five google searches! Five! That's how many it took before I had any idea what you were talking about. (Though I could probably have done it in two, if I'd been trying to minimise the number of searches.)

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

You're evidently insufficiently techy. ;^b <cut>, <paste>, M-x rot13-other-window and I was there. :o)

[rho]

Oh, the rot13ing was only one of the searches (and one of the ones I could have easily cut out at that). The others were because I'd never heard of the thing in question, even after decoding it.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Oh, I didn't bother to actually find out what it was about.

It's like the one about the physicist, chemist and mathematician at a science conference. The first night, the physicist wakes up to see a fire in his bin. He looks around, sees a fire extinguisher, does a bit of mental mechanics to work out exactly the angle he should squirt from to put the fire out, then does so, puts the fire out, and goes back to sleep.

The next night, the chemist wakes up to see a fire in his bin. He grabs his bag, opens it to reveal a rack of chemical samples, and quickly mixes them together to create something he pours on the fire to put it out, then goes back to sleep.

The third night, the mathematician wakes up to see a fire in his bin. He looks around in a panic, then sees the fire extinguisher and goes back to sleep, happy in the knowledge that a solution exists.

:o)

[liv]

Well, I don't think it took rho five searches simply to translate the enciphered phrase! And knowing what I'm alluding to (even the plaintext doesn't give the actual name) isn't really a techy thing, it's a certain style of geekiness. That said, I do like that joke.

[liv]

I would hesitate to describe rho as insufficiently techy, you know. And decoding the phrase wasn't hard, especially as I mentioned how it was encrypted in a fairly obvious way. Using Google to rot-13 isn't significantly slower than using desktop software, especially if you don't happen to know the command off-hand.

[liv]

Ah well, the thing is, I've been hearing this thing alluded to in extremely cryptic comments for most of the last decade, which is why I'm very excited that I've finally experienced it myself and have at least a vague idea what all those cryptic comments were about. I'm glad that Google does in fact know about it, mind you. It would be scary if it were really that close-guarded a secret.