1024: "Error Code Monkey"

[cellocgw]

Am I the only one who noticed that this is comic #10000000000?

No.

[thesingingaccountant]

I can't believe I just caught this... Nor can I believe that I'm the first to do so.

Title Text: It has a section on the motherboard beep codes that lists, for the beep pattern, a song that links up well with it.

Sorry to be a pain, Al, but you reproduced the title-text incorrectly. It should read as follows: "It has a section on motherboard beep codes that lists, for each beep pattern, a song that syncs up well with it."

[ajs007]

Oblig. Wordsworth

THE TABLES TURNED
AN EVENING SCENE ON THE SAME SUBJECT

UP! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you'll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun, above the mountain's head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless--
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:--
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

[ut_icedragon]

Beautiful artwork.

Beautiful message.

Great Job!

[wpenner]

Sorry but it looks a lot more like a pond than a lake....That error will never go away unless you follow the directions more closely.

[blkballoon925]

I don't really understand the point of this one... But more importantly, I had really hoped Randall would do something more special for #1024. You know, since it's a significant, round number.

[jpers36]

You far sighted fools! There are not "four" water lillies like you claim! Get some glasses, you blind, befuddled, rabid bats. There are 'five' water lillies! Morans! No wonder the world is such a mess. Cripes!

Oh. Whoops. My apologies. The 'fifth' lilly was a piece of omlette on my monitor.

[AvatarIII]

You far sighted fools! There are not "four" water lillies like you claim! Get some glasses, you blind, befuddled, rabid bats. There are 'five' water lillies! Morans! No wonder the world is such a mess. Cripes!

Oh. Whoops. My apologies. The 'fifth' lilly was a piece of omlette on my monitor.

[Kronos912]

This book would help every developer once in a while. And the once already registering negative error codes for sure need a break!

I would love to see a collection of things people succesfully used to distract themselves during a messy project for a while!

[quanqued]

I sense a theme for the next xkcd book, which would absolutely have a place by my computer at work and be referenced regularly.

[SirMustapha]

Am I the only one who noticed that this is comic #10000000000?

No.

Best response ever.

Sorry to be a pain, Al, but you reproduced the title-text incorrectly. It should read as follows: "It has a section on motherboard beep codes that lists, for each beep pattern, a song that syncs up well with it."

Well, either the guy was genius enough not to use copy-and-paste, or Randall changed the alt-text (on stealth mode, of course) after the thread was created. My money is on the latter.

I don't really understand the point of this one... But more importantly, I had really hoped Randall would do something more special for #1024. You know, since it's a significant, round number.

I am amazed at the lengths that people to go show how much they know base 2, as if anyone cared.

[Brutz]

I can't escape the feeling that Randall is subliminally testing and training his fans as part of some sinister phantom cell scheme. I bet when he planned #993 he thought "I'll do something common to so many readers' experience that a large number of lurkers will write their first forum post". For today it was more like "Let's try to manipulate a small number of suggestible individuals to do a very specific harmless action in their area". In a year or so it'll be a hat guy comic leading to world wide power cable sabotage!

Anyway, I should appreciate the fact there are 2 lakes right outside my town more.

[Sprocket]

::cuddles::

[dp2]

Eat your heart out, Monet.

Subject aside, that's like the opposite of Monet.

[dp2]

Great artwork. In fact, the only criticism I have is that the dialogue at the end is completely unnecessary. Cut those lines off and the comic is pretty much perfect.

Wow. I came to complain that there are only 4 or 5 lily pads in the picture, but if it's good enough for Sir M, I'll keep it to myself.

[The Moomin]

I can't believe I'm the first and only one to notice this, as no-one else has pointed it out, but the sky in the picture is different shades of blue.

Also, I am aware that numbers exist.

[GenericAnimeBoy]

A very nice comic indeed. Gratz to Mr. Munroe for comic 2^10

[cellocgw]

You far sighted fools! There are not "four" water lillies like you claim! Get some glasses, you blind, befuddled, rabid bats. There are 'five' water lillies! Morans! No wonder the world is such a mess. Cripes!

Oh. Whoops. My apologies. The 'fifth' lilly was a piece of omlette on my monitor.

ummmm.... "KHAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNN" ? And yeah I know it's the wrong Captain.

[RollingHead]

I can't believe I'm the first and only one to notice this, as no-one else has pointed it out, but the sky in the picture is different shades of blue.

Also, I am aware that numbers exist.

This.
Anyway, beautiful comic, if the sun weren't already setting I'd go sit by a lake right now!

[yaliceme]

This comic made me all happy and peaceful inside. I should go sit by a lake today (lots of them here in central NY).

As an aside. I enjoy the faith with which xkcd characters follow rules they find in books. Reminds me of http://xkcd.com/330/.

Also, I'm adding this to the list of xkcds to show people who think "stick figure art" = "can't draw."

[udqbpn]

goo, are a dooble bapso, du bapso!

[JamusPsi]

If we defictionalize it...

Maybe a non-cached non-crawl lookup from error code/message to zen. Maybe we populate it with the messages, then the lookup algorithm is "closest hash". For messages looked up, we'd probably want to store the result so that it's self-consistent, and won't change results when new zen messages are later added.

But unless we also want our product to try to catalog ACTUAL answers, we should probably be careful to avoid google indexing our error messages...

[Spoom]

You far sighted fools! There are not "four" water lillies like you claim! Get some glasses, you blind, befuddled, rabid bats. There are 'five' water lillies! Morans! No wonder the world is such a mess. Cripes!

Oh. Whoops. My apologies. The 'fifth' lilly was a piece of omlette on my monitor.

This made me unsuccessfully stifle a laugh in the middle of the office.

[cream wobbly]

Am I the only one who noticed that this is comic #10000000000?

No.

Best response ever.

Gosh. You must be the sort of person who writes "epic" instead of "epical" and thinks "meme" only describes Internet fads.

[forivall]

Am I the only one who noticed that this is comic #10000000000?

To me it's comic 0x400

[Sir Lunch-a-lot]

You far sighted fools! There are not "four" water lillies like you claim! Get some glasses, you blind, befuddled, rabid bats. There are 'five' water lillies! Morans! No wonder the world is such a mess. Cripes!

Oh. Whoops. My apologies. The 'fifth' lilly was a piece of omlette on my monitor.

ummmm.... "KHAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNN" ? And yeah I know it's the wrong Captain.

@jpers36 - good one!
@cellocgw - Nope. Try TNG 6x11 - Chain of Command Part II instead of ST:WOK (really, watch part I and II of "Chain of Command" - it's well worth a watch if you've never seen those episodes).

[dp2]

Am I the only one who noticed that this is comic #10000000000?

No.

Best response ever.

Gosh. You must be the sort of person who writes "epic" instead of "epical" and thinks "meme" only describes Internet fads.

'Epic' is correctly used as either a noun or an adjective. And funny enough, so is 'epical'.

I'll let someone else do the link to Etymology Man.

[mrjack]

Great comic, must say

reminds me of an old Leunig cartoon - http://www.curlyflat.net/yabby.gif

[algorerhythms]

I'll second (third? fourth? whatever) the defictionalization idea. I'd like to know what Error 14 means, as the wavemeter manual's description (multi-mode laser input) is entirely unsatisfactory.

[Sortie]

Oh, how fun! I happen to work on a hobby OS. This error code just went into it.

#define ELAKE 41

Now to figure out when to display it. Perhaps after a successful # rm -rf /.

[bnesheim]

Am I the only one who thought of the i ching? Hexagram 41 can be interpreted as "sit by a lake" although the majority of the sites I found were much heavier handed than that in their analysis.

[Djehutynakht]

So... it's agreed upon. As soon as our respective climates warm up we should all go and sit by a nice, scenic lake.

[ggh]

I too would like to hang this picture on my wall, as a reminder of what to do whenever something digital is raising my blood pressure. Is it possible to get the hi-res file? Just beautiful.

[907Code-G]

Am I the only one who noticed that this is comic #10000000000?

No.

Best response ever.

Gosh. You must be the sort of person who writes "epic" instead of "epical" and thinks "meme" only describes Internet fads.

'Epic' is correctly used as either a noun or an adjective. And funny enough, so is 'epical'.

I'll let someone else do the link to Etymology Man.

[bekalm]

Did anyone else notice the huge gap between the E and the R in the last panel?

[Elmach]

Did anyone else notice the huge gap between the E and the R in the last panel?

...

Screw you, kerning comic.

I don't really have much else to say.

[Envelope Generator]

I have a numbered deck of Oblique Strategies cards for precisely this purpose. Each card says "try faking it".

[addams]

Yeah. I know a lake like that. Not much more than a pond. Sheltered from the wind on most days.

A magical place. I like the Lilies that float on the water. They do get thick sometimes.

Used Book stores have books like that. It's true. Some do.

The numbers can be used any way you want to use them.

[SirMustapha]

Am I the only one who noticed that this is comic #10000000000?

No.

Best response ever.

Gosh. You must be the sort of person who writes "epic" instead of "epical" and thinks "meme" only describes Internet fads.

No, I actually did think it was the best response ever. Otherwise I would have written "Best. Response. Ever." but I used less capitals and less periods.

[addams]

What is that yellow thing in the lake?

there's 4 of them, they all look like the same thing mirrored and resized, I assume they are supposed to be water lilies. but you'd assume if they were, they'd look a bit more like actual water lilies, and not yellow boxing gloves/tiny rucksacks/ squashed tennis balls, it's not like they're hard to draw.

But; They do look like 'yellow boxing gloves/tiny rucksacks/ squashed tennis balls' at this time of year in those kinds of ponds.

Have you never seen them? Not all Water Lilies are the same. They all have common characteristics.

Oh, You poor baby.

It seems that Mr. Monroe has seen real Water Lillies. Oh, Such a lovely picture. I have no idea how that is done. I am, just, glad that it was.
That Lake reminds me of a place. There are hundreds of places like that.
A pond, sheltered from the wind by a bunch of trees or a hump of ground.

Will there be a great deal of looking for the Ideal pond?

I can give you the directions to mine. But; I can't go there, anymore. (Whiiinne.)