wee doors banging

The keyserver says: have run out of OGR-NG work.

It wasn’t too long ago that I read a similar message from my distributed.net client log regarding the OGR-25 project, but once again distributed.net has fans of distributed computing efforts rejoicing at the completion of another massive computation. They have successfully harnessed the spare capacity of thousands of ordinary computers around the world to exhaustively determine the optimal 26-mark Golomb Ruler, thus completing project OGR-26.

The European Union is to fund the creation of an “Emulation Access Platform” that will be able to accurately render “digital objects” of various kinds, including video games. The intention is to develop new ways of storing and accessing images, sounds, documents and, yes, even video games, so that they may still be accessed long after the original platforms for which they were created have been made obsolete by the march of progress.

It was pointed out to me just recently that girv dot net is the top Google search result for “girv”. Me being the sort of person who doesn’t quite believe things until I try them myself, I duly entered the magic word into the search box and hit the go button. Lo, and indeed behold, there I was at the top of the list.

Yay me, I rock, I am so cool etc. … until you scroll down a little way (but still on the first page) to this result from the Urban Dictionary.

According to the Urban Dictionary, a “girv” is defined as a “lesbionic, ugly, scary creature”. There are those who would agree with that definition, at least in parts.

On the next page, they also have quite an apt definition for “girvinator“, which I’ve also been called in the past.

The internets give, and the internets taketh away I guess.

My only remaining question is why someone would search for “girv” in the first place!

John Girvin is a software engineer, sci-fi buff, cyclist and retrocomputer fan (ie: nerd) from Belfast, Northern Ireland.

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There’s a meme on Facebook at the moment where you write 25 random things about yourself that your friends may not realise, then send it to your friends and get them to do the same. Normally I don’t bother with these “do this zany fun thing then spam your friends” requests that seem to infest Facebook, but this one intrigued me. What 25 random things would I write about myself and could I successfuly transplant the idea to blog land?