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Surreal Experiences
Q: How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Three. One to hold the giraffe and the other one to fill the bathtub with brightly colored machine tools.
Power down
A few years ago Kenneth Gilhuijs of the NKI (The Netherlands Cancer Institute) had gotten a new monitor. Being this one of the first monitors with power save it got a lot of attention from the rest of the programmers and scientists of the ComputerLab. The power save would be initiated by the (blank) screen saver. So to test it the screen saver was set to one minute and after a final mouse movement stopwatches were started and the "countdown" initiated.
Six people in the semi-darkened room were intensely watching the monitor, 55 sec., 30 sec., 20 sec., 10 sec., 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, ZERO. And the monitor powers down, along with all monitors in the Lab. Everybody had this first second of "Did we do that?", their minds desperately trying to make sense of an impossible situation.
There had been a power failure at that very moment.
(This story is true, I was watching over his shoulder as he did it)
Plane crash
Several years ago on my first PC (8086 Lingo) I was flying a plane in Flight Simulator. The plane got into a vrille and spun down faster and faster until it finally crashed. The moment it struck the ground the PC exclaimed it last death throes: beep beep beep. And that was the end of my PC. I brought it in for repairs and the owner of the repair shop asked: "What the hell did you do to it, was it struck by lightning?".
So is virtual reality really virtual?
Cold blooded
This guy was sitting in his comfy armchair watching a Dracula movie on TV. There was this tense scene were Dracula had cornered this frightened virgin and slowly but surely approached. The virgin screaming without sound coming from her mouth. Dracula, with his fangs already exposed and breathing on her neck wrapped her into his black cape.
And at this precise moment this guy feels something dark and damp fall over him and envelope him. His blood froze in his veins. Aaarggh!!!A sheet of wallpaper had loosened from the wall and had fallen over him.
(I believe this was told as a true story on the BBC)
The one that got away
Adriaan Touw of the NKI (The Netherlands Cancer Institute) was moving his computer from the first to the second floor by elevator. Moving the cart with the computer into the elevator was a bit bumpy, so his keyboard dropped on the floor and one key loosened itself. Ofcourse it managed to drop into the small slit between the elevator floor and the door. Irretrievably lost into the elevator shaft.
Needless to say that the key that was missing was the ESCAPE key.
Communication problems
All morning we (Computerlab, Radiotherapy Dept., NKI) were interrupted, every quarter of an hour by a fax call to our normal (voice) phone. This started to irritate after the, hhm, second call. So I had the idea of storing our own fax number into the memory of our second phone. When the fax call came again I used this phone to quickly dial our fax, while Kenneth Gilhuijs 'answered' the other phone and we put the two receivers together in a 69 position, which left an air gap of about an inch. Kenneth went to our fax not really expecting anything, but to our amazement (and thanks to error correction) we got a perfect fax transmission. From this we got the phone number of the sender and 'politely' asked him to dial the correct number in future.
Until proven otherwise we still assume that this was the first audio fax transmission in the world.
Computer mouse
Rob Glastra (NKI / AvL) was called to the MegaVoltage room because a 20 inch monitor no longer worked when it was turned on in the morning. After trying the obvious remedies, he took the monitor back to his room for repairs. After opening the power supply (overview JPG 28KB) he saw some obvious scourge marks. Wondering why the power supply had burnt out he took a closer look. And to his amazement he saw something underneath that looked like ..., no it couldn't ... (close-up JPG 20KB) After removing the power supply board he found a half-burned mouse. (burned mouse JPG 27KB). It had crawled into the power supply through a tiny hole (mouse close-up JPG 27KB) and electrocuted itself.
