18 Replies to “Powering up the SDA mainframe now”

  1. SDA is run by an infinite improbability drive? I hope the system admin isn’t the two-headed Zaphod Bebblebrox…..

      1. I loved the original BBC radio series! I think of it as a combination of Monty Python and Star Wars. It had me roaring with laughter when I first heard parts of it more than 40 years ago.

        After all, it’s hard to top songs like this:

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dM-t3I5uFro

        1. In my very first job working the salt mines of tech support for a software dev tools company, we had a very strange day once; every time we picked up a call in the queue, the caller would frantically insist in being put back on hold immediately. No amount of “but what is your problem, sir” would dissuade them.

          Queue wait times were approaching an hour and all the incoming phone lines were taken. Finally someone went down to IT to see what the hell was going on.

          They’d replaced the Inoffensive Classical, Vol I-V CDs in the hold music carousel with the CDs of the BBC’s radio production of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Dozens of developers at our client sites had been happily listening to their speakerphones for over an hour.

        2. Exactly, B A! I first heard it 30+ years ago, but I wasn’t laughing, at first. More like…okay…where is this going? And then, I couldn’t stop listening; it was brilliant! When it became available on CD, my husband (a Brit, of course), had to own it. The movie didn’t do anything for me, though. Some things are better left to the imagination. (BTW, I always likened Marvin the Paranoid Android to Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh.)

          1. A lot went missing with the TV series and the recording based on it. I started watching the movie on cable one time and soon switched it off.

            I first heard the second series when the CBC ran it on Ideas, though I’m not sure if that was done as a joke or if whoever approved doing so thought it was about something else.

            A few months later, during the summer of 1981, when it seemed the whole country was on strike, regular CBC programming was suspended and filler material (including some old Ideas documentaries) was run instead. That also included THGTTG and I heard most of the first series as well.

          1. For something that didn’t interest him (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), he sure did a brilliant job! (The Brits do love that word, don’t they?)

            BTW, (and apropos of nothing), I recently re-watched “A Very British Coup.” Found it funny that The Guardian was considered right-wing. Perhaps it was, back then. I don’t recall.

          2. It is a truism that writers hate writing but enjoy having written.

            And then there’s Asimov to prove the rule.

        4. I heard the very first episode on the radio while sitting in a bath in Brighton with a nice woman on a Sunday evening with a bottle of Cinzano. We were joking around, as one does in such situations, when slowly we became absorbed by the radio program. “What on Earth is this?” we spontaneously asked each other. We met in the bath every Sunday evening for the rest of the series. That must have been the mid-seventies.

          1. I think it was originally produced in the late 1970s as I first heard about it on CBC in 1980.

      2. While I was an active shortwave listener, I used to tune in to Radio Netherlands.

        Shortwave listening is sometimes referred to as DXing. DX is radio shorthand for distance, so a DXer, in this context, is someone who listens to signals from a remote location.

        During the 1980s, RN spoofed THGTTG, and poked fun at shortwave listening, when it ran a comedy series it produced called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to DXing. It sort of followed the same format and, as I recall, they even had Peter Jones introduce each episode in the same manner as he did for the misadventures of Arthur Dent, et. al.

        As for the humour, well, let’s say that having a background in radio helped.

  2. I used to play with lasers but they made holograms.
    Damn, I should’ve had the upgrade…

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