A guy at work has this taped to the side of his computer. He works a different shift, so I never see him but I’ve passed by it at least 100 times without realizing the joke. Then I took a good look one day and had a laugh. On the side of his computer is…
chown -R us ./base
The beauty of this is you have to be at least somewhat geeky to even get it.
I’ll spoiler it for those who want to figure it out on their own.
chown is a Linux command to change owner ship of files. In this case, your changing all the files in the directory ‘base’ to the user ‘us’. Or in other words “all your base are belong to us”.
I sort of got it. I understood it was a Linux command, that it had to do with the directory ‘‘base’’, and that is probably meant ‘‘all your base are belong to us.’’ So I guess I’m a partial geek.
While it doesn’t quite reach the same level of geekiness and isn’t really a “joke” per se, I really like this XKCD comic. My wife, who has picked up a fair dose of my geekiness through proximity, liked it so much she bought the T-shirt.
In college the engineering school had a t-shirt that read (in the proper calculus shorthand)
Lim Engineering (as GPA approaches zero) = Business School
One of my PIs at the lab gave us all nerd shirts that say “If you were DNA Helicase I’d let you unzip my genes” and I have a picture on the bulletin board in my office of the chemical structure of a diene (2 double bonds) that looks like its on its back and says “Help! I’m diene!”
I like the Futurama episode where they are at a horse race. It ends in a quantum finish and Professor Farnsworth complains that “they changed the result by measuring it.” Classic.
Unix systems assign varying levels of power to different users to ensure that no one screws up and deletes important files because they’re too naive to know any better. Only “superusers” have unfettered, absolute power over a Unix system. “sudo” is the prefix used to execute the following command as a superuser command - it will be done, no matter what. The joke is that it would be awesome if that worked in the real world - sudo giving us the ability to, well, compel people to make us a sandwich.
That is geeky on so many levels that I doubt it can be topped.
