funny signs

YouTube Transcription FAIL

January 30, 2012

YouTube’s new, experimental automatic audio transcription still needs a lot of work. It seems to have particular difficulty with non-American accents, or with people speaking quickly – which describes most Joyent engineers! I’m sure it will improve, probably quickly, but we should keep for posterity the bizarre yet poetic discourse of a Brendan Gregg technical presentation [...]

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Photo in Need of a Caption

October 1, 2011

Suggestions so far: “If you thought the latency from yelling at disks was bad, wait until you see what happens when I take this to them” “Suddenly, @brendangregg just got an uncontrollable urge to scream at the Oracle banner.” @brendangregg “nth-level hardware / software ORA-fice engineering, a la Brendan ‘Speak softly and carry a large [...]

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Fine with That

July 4, 2011
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Geek Humor

October 1, 2010

Storagetek’s Broomfield, CO, headquarters was abundantly decorated with artwork. After Sun acquired the company, everyone moved to Sun’s BRM campus, and eventually the Storagetek building was closed down. The artwork appeared overnight in the BRM offices. I don’t know who decided where to put it all, but our floor (engineering) got lots of photographs of [...]

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Video Romance

September 22, 2010

I love it when unplanned juxtapositions cause unintentional humor. This “sequence” occurred during yesterday’s Oracle TechNet taping of an interview on DTrace between Brendan Gregg and Rick Ramsey. NB: I have no idea what the cameraman in the background was actually laughing about, it seems to have been an inside joke with the camerawoman behind [...]

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Geek Humor

July 26, 2010

I don’t know who drew this gem. It’s been on a whiteboard at Sun’s Menlo Park campus for quite a while, but soon will be no longer…

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“I Worry…”

July 24, 2010

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco

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“Drink Your Coffee…”

January 31, 2010

I’m not attached to many objects; I’ve moved too much and had to leave behind too many things to want to invest emotionally in anything other than people. But there a few items do have particular sentimental value. The cup above has a history: my friend Sue inherited it after the unexpected death of her [...]

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Geek Humor

September 16, 2009

At Sun we have lots of whiteboard walls where people can (well, could, theoretically) scribble down brilliant ideas while they’re discussing deep technological issues over coffee. What they mostly get used for is trenchant corporate humor, as above (note that the “Clothing Optional Teaming Area” has been so named for a very long time). Recently, [...]

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Kiwi Coffee Billboard

July 7, 2009

Billboard in Wellington, New Zealand, which prides itself (rightfully enough) on its coffee.

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This One’s for @Shamu

July 7, 2009

On the beach at Opotiki, New Zealand’s Bay of Plenty. Whale Island on the horizon.

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Brazilian Condom Brands

June 26, 2009

The one on the right is grape flavored. The middle one is tutti-frutti flavored.

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Hurry Up!

June 23, 2009

Yesterday we were in Santa Cruz do Sul, RS, Brazil, for a student conference on OpenSolaris. We had some time in the afternoon to sight-see (then were working again from 6-10 pm), including a walk to the cathedral. Along the way we were highly amused by this animated crossing signal, which Jogo told us was [...]

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Sysadmin to Go

June 5, 2009

^ Clay Baenziger of the Front Range OpenSolaris User Group poses as a “sysadmin to go”. In conjunction with CommunityOne, we held a boot camp for OpenSolaris User Group leaders, bringing representatives in from around the world to share knowledge on how to create, grow, and support their groups. We started off the morning with [...]

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Unkind Cuts

June 5, 2009

A prominent part of the CommunityOne/JavaOne decor was large photos like this, including a painted mural featuring James Gosling at a diner. I didn’t recognize most of the people, but was amused to see a familiar face at the registration booths. Didn’t realize til I looked at the photo today that they’d placed Simon Phipps [...]

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I Feel Like Someone’s Watching Me

May 5, 2009

Looked up from a spreadsheet just now, and saw this ^

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It’s Owl Time Again!

April 6, 2009

It’s spring again (although, as you can see, it’s been snowing) and that means baby owls on the BRM campus. Last year’s owl movie

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LOLcat: Thiz MY Nose

January 15, 2009

alternative caption: Did you get that bogey yet? Ruth & Harley. It wasn’t hard to get this picture: Harley puts her paw on Ruth’s nose every time Ruth picks her up. No idea why.

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The Italian Adam

January 11, 2009

This week I was in Grenoble, France, filming for Sun. Enrico drove over from Lecco to join me on Friday, and we spent the weekend there together. It was too cold to do much roaming around outside, so we went to Grenoble’s fine arts museum, which features a small but impressive collection of paintings, arranged [...]

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Not Returnable

December 8, 2008

Daffy’s, NYC

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