Exclusive OR or Exclusive NOR. Exclusive AND and Exclusive NAND are oxymorons. I do love the incursion of electronic hardware into poetry. I used to give interpretive readings of Atmel AVR assembly code at some of our engineering meetings.

Posted July 30, 2007 1:16 PM by Stuart

Man, I am giggling so hard I hurt. Sniffling, too, at places, but still.

Thank you for collecting these, Jim.

Posted July 30, 2007 1:17 PM by elise

Exclusive AND and Exclusive NAND are oxymorons.

is OK. we can fix it in the firmware and upload a new bitstream.

He did say it was a xilinx FPGA, after all.

Now, if it had been a fuse-burning atmel chip, then that would be a different story.

Posted July 30, 2007 1:29 PM by Greg London

or a more mundanely stefnal purpose — pulling sound off of materials that slowly hardened, like paint or ice.

Because, of course, no on in this age of shortened attention spans has the patience to listen to paint dry in realtime. They want the stop motion version.

Posted July 30, 2007 2:50 PM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

Thank you, Jim.

Posted July 30, 2007 3:32 PM by Fragano Ledgister

Next week on the Skiffy Channel: Inverse Matrix, in which some evil crazy mathematicians in a land where they wear funny hats create a really big matrix on a gigantic array of parallel Mac Minis, and then — wait for it — they invert it, using a highly mobile, standard-transmission, white-sidewall solution concept

I don't remember to ask Mike if the movie explained who provides production support for those thingabobs.

"For help with connectivity problems, press #1."
(Presses #1)
"For MAC computers, press #1. For Windows XP, press #2."
(Presses #2)
"Exterminate! Ex-ter-mi-nate!"

Posted July 30, 2007 5:27 PM by Serge

I am irresistibly reminded of the Mighty Mighty LPD song.

Mighty, mighty lpd

mighty mighty lpd,
carries the print jobs to liberty,
overcoming the evil printcap,
with a jaunty daemon bitch-slap

talking with brethren all over the world,
to whom our print jobs could well be hurled,
provided postscript code doesnt gag 'em,
forcing the use of lprm

piping files to kingdom come
and just maybe actually printing some
we know our output is laying somwheres
and we hope it ain't in lpd-errs

mighty, mighty lpd
doing it's job so faithfully
sad that it's such a loner
damn! the printer's out of toner

(attribution - Tony Lyon, talk.bizarre)

talk.bizarre was the Making Light of the nineties.

Posted July 30, 2007 6:47 PM by Dave Hemming

It's... an ode to a Xilinx FPGA. Wow. I bet we could get a few rousing choruses of it going at the wee hours in the digital electronics lab at MIT. Any idea to what tune it is supposed to be sung?

Posted July 31, 2007 4:31 AM by Kevin Riggle

Aha! As soon as I took another look at it, it dawned on me that the tune is "Oklahoma". Of course. (The "Xiiiiiiiiiii-linx" was the clue.) Never mind. Ignore sleep-deprived me.

Posted July 31, 2007 4:34 AM by Kevin Riggle

I read the one that starts "Spillane was dead" three times, just for the sheer joy of the words.

That's what I really miss, not his great writing, but the little things like that he just threw off like sparks.

Posted August 1, 2007 3:50 AM by Jo Walton