Wolfram|Alpha: Systematic knowledge, immediately computable.

Saturday, May 8, 2010

It's a Small World.

Ugh! I hated that ride at Disneyland when I was a kid! My brothers and sister loved it, so I was forced to sit through it multiple times every visit. I'd rather pass a red hot branding iron through my cranium than hear that cloying tune again.

A few years back, I thought I was on an episode of the Twilight Zone when a friend asked me to troubleshoot their PC. The machine would randomly start playing that very song through the built-in speaker. It took a while to figure that one out!

Believe it or not, it was a feature of the BIOS used as a thermal warning. Certainly one of the more obscure troubleshooting issues I've ever worked (see Computer Randomly Plays Classical Music for a Microsoft Knowledge Base article that resulted from this behavior, and my blog entry One of the more interesting game problem cases I've worked on for another set of really strange symptoms).

Happily, that the Internet makes this a small world delights me. In the short time this blog has been live, we've had visitors from 53 countries spread around the world! Lots of great e-mails have been sent (please, put your thoughts in the comments: let everyone see where we agree, disagree, or where you've found help with game or other technical problems!)

As Dean Martin, the King of Cool used to say: Keep those cards and letters coming in!

2 comments:

  1. Been to Disneyland twice. Once when I was 14, and I never set foot near than dang ride. Once again when my inlaws took my oldest kid via airplane when he was about 5... except I didn't fly; My wife and I, and her brothers and their wife's drove down there, spur of the moment, to be with our kids!! how dumb is that? We drove from Seattle to LA just to be with our kids at It's a Small World Afterall!!! spent 18 hours driving, 14 hours at D-Land, and 18 driving back, and went to work the next day. Brilliant!

    ReplyDelete
  2. @thejeep:
    That's what your kids will remember. That's Great Parents material.

    ReplyDelete