Thursday Thirteen

Thursday Thirteen is a meme with one purpose:  to get to know bloggers better. Thirteen secrets they’ve never shared before, Thirteen random things about themselves or their lives that give the reader a better idea of who they are.

This week I’m only letting a little bit of information about me slip out.  This is because I am secretly weeping tears of sorrow because Sioned didn’t stop by to look at the blog entry that I dedicated entirely to her yesterday.  Tears of sorrow.  It’s nearly enough to crush a man’s spirit.  Then I thought WWCYFD?  So here I am blogging again.

Thirteen Acronyms

1. WWCYFD – In any difficult situation you should always ask yourself What Would Chow-Yun Fat Do?  He’d look cool and probably kick someone’s butt but he’d do it in a wise way.
2. TLA – If in doubt chuck a Three Letter Acronym into conversation. 
3. PEBKAC – An IT problem that is the fault of incompetent users.  Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair.  A typical fix for this is percussive maintenance.
4. RTFM – Another IT favourite.  Read The Fucking Manual.  I’ve told everyone that it means Read The Fix Manual but secretly I smile inside whenever I say this to someone.
5. DNA – deoxyribonucleic acid is amazing stuff.  So simple yet it contains a total map of what it is to be a human being.
6. FAQ – Frequently Asked Questions that are actually answers to questions that few people actually need to ask.
7. GNU – GNU’s Not Unix.  A joke in the naming of the free operating system.  I think it’s really clever that the name is built into the acronym like that.  It just shows how meaningless it really is.
8. Laser – Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.  I bet you thought it was a real word too.
9. WWTD – What Would Thor Do? In The Order of the Stick Durkon asks what his deity would do in a difficult situation.  The comic can be found here.
10. ROTFLMAO – Rolling On The Floor Laughing My Ass Off.  Not literally obviously.  I rarely use this acronym but I do tend to get a warm fuzzy feeling whenever I see it in response to one of my comments.
11. WSB – The name of the little company that my chums and I formed.  The WSB nominally stood for Warblington School Boys but I secretly named it We Sell Brains.  Officially it stands for Wireless (and Wired) Systems for Business.
12. OK.  Another non-word.  The origins either come from US military term for Zero Dead (0 killed) meaning a successful mission or from the greek phrase “olla kalla” meaning all’s good.
13. NIIOMTPLABOPARMBETZHELBETRABSBOMONIMONKONOTDTEKHSTROMONT (Нииомтплабопармбетзелбетрабсбомонимонконотдтехстромонт). The 56-letter initialism (54 in Cyrillic) is from the Concise Dictionary of Soviet Terminology and means “The laboratory for shuttering, reinforcement, concrete and ferroconcrete operations for composite-monolithic and monolithic constructions of the Department of the Technology of Building-assembly operations of the Scientific Research Institute of the Organization for building mechanization and technical aid of the Academy of Building and Architecture of the USSR.”  I like it because it’s long.