Category: Humor

To be honest, math works the same way all year ’round. At least, it’s supposed to.

“My Stack Exchange Inbox is Less Than Empty” declared
Mike V.

“I guess this happens when you read a notification twice!”

Adam R.
discovered a new kind of mathematical quantity in use:
“I was updating my billing address on a certain website, and this was the default value they filled in for my phone number. “Hmm, that’s odd,” I thought. Then I figured it out: they decided to take my phone number, written out as XXX-YYY-ZZZZ and eval()’ed that as a mathematical expression. The final result of that subtraction with my phone number was, in fact, -439.
”

“Counting is hard” announces
KT.

“If mathematically no one reacted, how did they react?”

“Unicode this!” challenged
Michael R.

“Kızılelma is the new Kızılelma”

Reinier B.
would like us to count the ways.
“This piece of text on the LEGO Studio download page changes
dynamically, which works OK-ish. But leave the page open for
an hour or so and more and more “undefined” strings get inserted.”

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How many times does it take to make something a tradition? Well, this is our third installment of Christmas in the Server Room, which seems pretty traditional at this point. Someday we’ll run out of Christmas movies that I’ve watched, and then I’ll need to start watching them intentionally. I’m dreading having to sit through some adaptation of the Christmas Shoes or whatever.

In any case, we’re going to rate Christmas movies on their accuracy of representing the experience of IT workers. One 💾 grants it the realism of that movie where Adam Sandler fights Pac-Man, while 💾💾💾💾💾 tells us that it’s as realistic as an instructional video about the Turbo-Encabulator.

Home Alone

A Rube-Goldberg-quality series of misunderstandings and coincidences lead to bratty child Kevin being left… home alone through the holidays, defending his home from burglars, using a series of improvised, Rube-Golberg-quality booby traps, that escalate to cartoonish violence. The important lesson, however, is that the true meaning of Christmas is family.

Like most cybersecurity teams, Kevin is under-resourced, defending an incredibly vulnerable system from attackers. His MacGyvered together collection of countermeasures all work, in the film, but none of them actually address the true vulnerabilities and could all be easily bypassed by a competent attacker.

Kevin’s traps are very much temporary solutions. But when temporary solutions become permanent, awful things can happen.

Rating: 💾💾

Santa Claus

This one will be familiar to any MST3k fans. Santa Claus runs a North Pole factory on child labor and whimsical inventions. Oh, also, his North Pole factory is in space. On Christmas Eve, as he tours the world to reward good boys and girls, Satan sends a demon to tempt children into mild naughtiness. Once again, the true meaning of Christmas is being with those you love, unless you’re one of the children in Santa’s workshop. Those kids are working on Christmas.

When things get truly dire for Santa, the children junior engineers staffing his workshop recognize that they can’t manage the problem, so they fetch Merlin, the original greybeard. Yes, Merlin works for Santa, which implies that Santa and King Arthur may have met, and honestly, I’d rather watch that team-up movie. In any case, “terrified juniors clinging to a senior” is actually not very realistic. These days, the kids would just ask ChatGPT what to do, and end up putting glue on pizza.

Rating: 💾

Violent Night

What happens when we combine Santa Claus with Home Alone? We get the ultimate Santa-does-a-Die-Hard movie, Violent Night. Beverly D’Angelo plays Dick Cheney, an evil matriarch who runs a private military contractor and has stolen millions from US military operations abroad. Even more evil criminals take her family hostage to steal those millions. How are the criminals more evil than Dick Cheney? They’re not only thieves, they also hate Christmas!

The family is all horrible people, except for Trudy, the young girl who has been good all year and still believes in Santa Claus. And that means Santa is coming to town. With grenades and sledge hammers and machine guns. The movie also features one of the “best” uses of “Santa uses Christmas magic to go up the chimney” at the end.

The entire villain plan is built around breaking into a super-protected electronic safe, and without spoiling too much, there’s a twist in the film where someone has already broken into the safe, which makes one wonder how stupid the villains are (pretty stupid, actually). Also, while I understand the need for narrative convenience (and the Die Hard reference), the idea that the encrypted radios used by the evil villains, and the walkie talkie toy Trudy has to talk to Santa can actually operate on the same bands is… a bit of a stretch. RF bands and allocations and where and when you can use encryption is a whole thing.

Rating: 💾💾

Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis – Tom Waits

A sex worker in Minneapolis sends a Christmas card to Charlie, presumably a former client or supervisor of hers, updating him on her life. With each verse her life seems to be getting better- until the final verse, which reveals it’s all been a charade and she needs help. Like most Tom Waits songs, it’s the story of the kind of person who is pushed to the fringes of society, tragic but hopeful, and loaded with empathy.

I’ve recently been doing a job search of my own, and part of that has been “what dates did you work at $place?” and “give us some references?” and I realized that I’m terrible about keeping tabs on these kinds of things. The idea that I could send a Christmas card to a former client from years ago is absurd. Then again, how do we even know these cards get to Charlie? We just know that she wrote them, not that Charlie got them.

Rating: 🫦🫦🫦

I Am the Antichrist – The Dream Eaters

Two songs this year? Are there even any rules anymore? The lord of the damned has a poppy intro track. I suppose this shouldn’t go on a Christmas list, because it likely belongs at the antipodal part of the year. Y’know. Being the Antichrist and all.

Rating: 🪩🪩🪩🪩🪩

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

An aging Captain Kirk is haunted by a mistake of his past: Khan Noonien Singh is back for revenge. This “Horatio Hornblower in Space” riff on Trek is packed with themes: revenge, sacrifice, the frightening power of technology, and an object lesson on why you shouldn’t put things in your ears. It also proves that the best, most exciting space battles aren’t swooping, wooshing, pew pew pews, but tense games of cat-and-mouse.

As for its Christmas connections? What greater gift can Spock give to his crew but himself? His ultimate sacrifice is what ties the movie together, and of course, it means we got this incredible Christmas ornament out of it. Of all the Christmas spirits I have ever known, his was the most human.

The whole prefix-code thing is a pretty incredible security blunder. A remote back door into any Starfleet vessel, guarded only by a 5 digit code? A 5 digit code that’s stored in a database on every other starship? So if an enemy captures one vessel, they can thwart the entire fleet unless everyone updates their prefix code? That’s a terribly security posture! And incredibly realistic! That is likely what the future will look like. So I guess that’s a credible security blunder, if we’re being pedantic.

I bet they store the passwords in plain text too!

Rating: 💾💾💾💾💾

The holiday season is an opportunity for employers to show their appreciation for their staff. Lavish parties, extra time off, whatever. Even some of the worst employers I’ve had could put together a decent Christmas party.

But that doesn’t mean they all go right.

For example, Mike S worked for one of those early music streaming startups. One year, the company booked a Russian restaurant in the neighborhood for the party. The restaurant was a gigantic space, with a ground level and a balcony level, but the company was only 70 people, so the company perhaps overbought for the party. Everyone stuffed themselves on appetizers and when the main course came out, it ended up as extremely fishy smelling leftovers in the office kitchen.

Two years later, they booked a party at the same place. But lessons were learned: they only booked the balcony. This meant the ground floor was free for someone else to book, and someone else did. Another party booked the ground floor, and they booked an extremely loud Russian pop band to play it.

The band was deafening and took absolutely no breaks. And while the previous time, everyone stuffed themselves on appetizers, this time there were barely any. But there also wasn’t much main course coming out either. By 10PM, Mike was starving and deaf, so he left. At about 10:15, the food came out. But by then, most of the staff had left, which meant once again, the office kitchen got stuffed with very fishy smelling leftovers.

There was not a third Russian party.

Rachel went to her partner’s holiday party. This large tech company was notorious for spending loads of money on the party, and they certainly booked a fairly amazing venue for it. But there was confusion with the catering order; while the company shelled out for a full buffet, the caterer decided to only provide finger foods, circulated through the party by waiters carrying plates. By 9PM, the employees had figured out where the kitchen was and were lying in ambush for the waiters. The small plates of chicken tenders and crab rangoons and spring rolls never made it more than two or three steps out of the kitchen before they were picked clean.

At least the company learned that lesson and stopped using that caterer. Though I think some of the wait staff may have been permanently traumatized by the corporate party version of The Most Dangerous Game.

But you know, not everything is about holiday parties, or days off. Companies have plenty of other ways to make their staff happy. Little benefits and perks can go a long way. Just take a page from Doug B‘s company, which put this sign on the badge reader:

Christmas will be a casual dress day.

I hear Doug’s co-worker Bob Cratchit is going through some rough times.