Now that’s what I call well-trained [via DCP]

I’m slowly catching up on some older posts on Funtasticus and Demonicious and came across these that I thoroughly enjoyed and think you will too [via Demonicious]

Following questions and answers were collated from last year’s GCSE exams.

Geography

Q: Name the four seasons.
A: Salt, pepper, mustard and vinegar.

Q: Explain one of the processes by which water can be made safe to drink.
A: Flirtation makes water safe to drink because it removes large pollutants like grit, sand, dead sheep and canoeists.

Q: How is dew formed?
A: The sun shines down on the leaves and makes them perspire.

Q: What is a planet?
A: A body of earth surrounded by sky.

Q: What causes the tides in the oceans?
A: The tides are a fight between the Earth and the Moon. All water tends to flow towards the moon, because there is no water on the moon, and nature abhors a vacuum. I forget where the sun joins in this fight.

 

Sociology

Q: What guarantees may a mortgage company insist on?
A: If you are buying a house, they will insist you are well endowed.

Q: In a democratic society, how important are elections?
A: Very important. Sex can only happen when a male gets an election.

Q: What are steroids?
A: Things for keeping carpets still on the stairs.

Biology

Q: What happens to your body as you age?
A: When you get old, so do your bowels and you get intercontinental.

Q: What happens to a boy when he reaches puberty?
A: He says goodbye to his boyhood and looks forward to his adultery.

Q: Name a major disease associated with cigarettes.
A: Premature death.

Q: What is artificial insemination?
A: When the farmer does it to the bull instead of the cow.

Q: How can you delay milk turning sour?
A: Keep it in the cow.

Q: How are the main parts of the body categorised? (e.g. abdomen.)
A: The body is consisted into three parts – the brainium, the borax and the abdominal cavity. The branium contains the brain, the borax contains the heart and lungs, and the abdominal cavity contains the five bowels, A, E, I, O and U.

Q: What is the Fibula?
A: A small lie.

Q: What does *varicose- mean?
A: Nearby.

Q: What is the most common form of birth control?
A: Most people prevent contraception by wearing a condominium.

Q: Give the meaning of the term *Caesarean Section.-
A: The caesarean section is a district in Rome.

Q: What is a seizure?
A: A Roman emperor.

Q: What is a terminal illness?
A: When you are sick at the airport

Q: Give an example of a fungus. What is a characteristic feature?
A: Mushrooms. They always grow in damp places and so they look like umbrellas.

English

Q: Use the word *judicious- in a sentence to show you understand its meaning.
A: Hands that judicious can be soft as your face.

Q: What does the word *benign- mean?
A: Benign is what you will be after you be eight.

Technology

Q: What is a turbine?
A: Something an Arab wears on his head.

Religious Education

Q: What is a Hindu?
A: It lays eggs.

The power of word of mouth is nothing new, but it still amazes me at how effective it is. And with social networking tools like Twitter, Facebook, blogs and forums, word spreads around like wildfire. And I’m not talking about the flaming that happens in some forums or blog post comment sections!

Case in point, my blog post about money wasted on the IEC website. A close friend mentioned this issue and the petition I setup to a friend of theirs who knows someone at News24. What happens a little later is a reporter from News24 does a little digging and browsing around various blogs, forums and the like and voila, this morning a news article on News24.com about the buzz about the web regarding the IEC website.

And through word of mouth I got my 15 minutes of fame. But more importantly an issue has not only been highlighted by those in the know but the broader public has been made aware of it. Let’s see now if any action is taken.

Was just sent this – do you use this method in your company for code reviews? [via BG]

The simple answer, after 3 days, is yes you can! (almost sounds like a political slogan)

Let me start from the beginning. Some time last week our desktop PC at home started crashing for no apparent reason, and intermittently, sometimes on its own, sometimes after certain programs. There was no clear way to replicate the problem. Now the machine has been stable for the last, almost 8 months, no hardware changes. The setup:

• Intel Core2Duo 2.3GHz CPU
• Gigabyte GA-G33M-DS2R/S2 motherboard
• Samsung DVD RW
• Western Digital 250GB drive
• Gigabyte GeForce 8600GT 512MB video card
• 6GB physical RAM

All smoothly running Windows XP, until recently. I even booted with a disk with MEM86 to check all the RAM to make sure none of the chips were faulty – test ran through in a few hours with no faults. I even ran scan and repair on the drive to check for possible bad sectors on the drive – nothing, clean as a whistle.

Oh well, I thought to myself, time for a clean install and rebuild. No worries, backup my data to another machine, pop the Windows XP bootable install disk in the ROM drive and boot up. Follow the prompts, repartition the drive, reformat the partition and begin the install. 

Plain sailing you’d think, nope. About 60-odd percent of the way into copying files from the disk to the hard drive the screen goes all funny and between the lines I can make out it cannot find a specifc file. I let it retry, to no avail. So I give in and let it skip it. It carries merrily along only to find more files it can’t find. WTF? I even took the disc put it in another machine and scanned the contents as well as the CAB files for the alleged files it couldn’t find – they were there!

Mmmm I thought to myself, what now? Okay Windows XP SP2 has been out for a long time now and maybe the built in drivers didn’t recognize some of my hardware. Let me download nLite quickly and make a slip-streamed bootable install disk with SP3 (it should have latest drivers to pick up my hardware). 

Right, disk created, popped it in and rebooted. Went through the same process again and round about the same place, same errors again – cannot find drivers and other files.  I’m at my wits end now, so I power down the machine, unplug all the peripheral devices, whoopdeedoo, one video card. Reboot, go into the BIOS and disable all that I can, onboard LAN, firewire port, USB, etc. Back to basics, follow the above procedure again. Only to find the same problems. The one or two times it DOES manage to get past the file copying and into the actual install it blue-screens at random places or hangs at the famous 34 minute mark while detecting devices and installing drivers. 

Maybe it’s the SATA drive – I rip it out and replace it with an old 40GB IDE drive and try to install again. Same problems! Arrrgghhh! 

Give up, leave it for a day or so.

Another day, a few more bright ideas. I take my drive, pop it in another machine – completely different hardware and try to install from there. Whoa, it works, smoothly – all the way to the end where I can log in and see my desktop!

Note: this is the WRONG way to try and install your system on different hardware to the system it will be running in.

So I take the drive out and put it back in my machine – no luck, crashes after I log in. Okay, I expected that. So I thought maybe it’s my ROM drive acting up? So I replace mine with one from the other machine. No joy, same problems as above.

And this, ladies and gentleman, is where I get to the title of my post. All this time, I’d been trying to install Windows XP with 6GB of physical RAM installed. Apart from pulling out the actual CPU, the only other thing I’ve not pulled out is the RAM. But MEM86 ran through all tests without any hiccups? Just try it, damnit!

So I pulled out 2 of the 6GB and tried again. No luck, same problems. Come on! So I pulled the rest out, leaving only a single 2GB RAM module. This has got to work, right?

And here I am, typing away at this post on my laptop, while looking at the finally installed Windows XP on my desktop machine with the default Windows desktop staring back at me!

So, take it from me, save yourself a few hours/days of frustration at swapping hardware, turning off features and functions, swapping drives and disks, and take out the extra RAM before you do a clean install of Windows XP!

Oh and before I get flamed in the comments as to why I’m not using Linux or Vista (puke) it’s because as of now it’s the only operating system that I can use all the software my wife and I want to/need to/know how to use. I might take the old 40GB and put it in to install Windows 7 which I got recently. I was almost at a point of installing Windows 7 instead, but didn’t since it’s only still in beta and will expire in August.

Hope my experience can help someone out with the same problem.

I just recieved this email in my inbox – I can’t believe my lucky stars,it must be true:

Get Back To Me For More Details.

We wish to notify you again that you were listed as an heir to the total sum of Ten Million Six Hundred Thousand British pounds in the codicil and last testament of the deceased. Name now withheld since this is our second letter to you. We contacted you because you bear the surname identity and therefore can present you as the heir to the inheritance.

We therefore reckoned that you could receive these funds as you are qualified by your name identity. All the legal papers will be processed in your acceptance. In your acceptance of this deal, we request that you kindly forward to us your letter of acceptance; your current telephone and fax numbers and a forwarding address to enable us file necessary documents at our high court probate division for the release of this sum of money.

Please contact me via my private email so that we can get this done immediately.

Kind regards,
John McGowan Jr.

It still amazes me that there are gullible people out there that fall for these scams. Not that I got the alleged, first email, but clever that they left out the surname, since I’d been notified before.