Ten Points Random

So last Friday the Unix Epoch reached 1234567890!  This happened at 4:31 PM.

Of course, working in the programming department of a web development company, I was not the only person aware of this momentous occasion.  We managed to rife up enough excitement that, by the time the final countdown began, we have the time stamp up on the projected warboard on the wall, with everyone was standing up watching it.

When the final countdown commenced, everyone counted down together.  When we reached the sequential Epoch time, the time that has been printed on everyone’s keyboards for years past and to come, everyone cheered, my manager flashed the lights on and off, and I rang the gong a bunch.

This, coming from someone who slept through last New Years.

Let’s face it.  I’m a geek.

So I was working on trying to get the extra mouse buttons on my Logitech G5 to work under Linux and I realized, after I had laid the issue to rest for the night, that I am really rather much of a nerd. The backscroll on my shell window (or, rather, a command I had earlier typed) contained something to this effect:

[email protected]:/dev/input$ cat mice

And, after having typed it, I actually expected something useful to happen.  Not only did something happen, but it happened just as i expected it to – with the exception of a couple of my buttons that didn’t send any data.

Anyhow, I thought that was rather random: Telling my computer to hand “mouse” to “cat” actually is a valid thing to do.

(For those that don’t waste their life away in front of a green and black [my preferred colors] terminal screen like I do, “cat” is a program, short for “concatenate”, which allows you to see or write to the contents of file(s) directly with the screen/keyboard.  Also, on Linux, input/output devices have virtual “files” associated with them which, in essence, allow you to read and write directly to/from the device, such as a mouse.  Hence “cat mice” will dump all the input form all the mice on the computer to your screen in the form of all sorts of funny heart shapes and strange glyphs.)