Couple questions, where did this phrase originate? And how do you say it in spanish?
It probably derives from SSDD – Single Sided, Double Density, a designation of floppy disks in the 90s. SSDD disks were used by Apple Computers; PCs used Double Sided Double Density (DSDD).
Some wag looked at the initials and coined the phrase.
Literally, it would be something like: El mismo dia, el mismo mierde. But literal translations don’t usually work. I may also have messed up the gender.
Guessing at it origin: military
Spanish: no help
Reminds me of a football play, though: SPD_ (same play, different ___) blank to be filled in with ethnic group of choice.
Do you have a cite for this connection, or is it a guess? I’m pretty sure the phrase is older than the 90s.
You’re right about the dating – that’s a typo on my part; I meant the 80s. By the 90s, Apple had switched to the Macintosh and SSDD disks had been discontinued, but during the early 80s, they were still in use.
The first I ever saw the phrase was on one of Nancy Lebovitz’s computer geek buttons in the mid-80s that said “SSDD = Same Shit, Different Day.” When I saw it, I immediately understood SSDD as “Single Side, Double Density” (and it wouldn’t have been a joke otherwise). It’s clearly listed in most sources as having Internet/computer origins.
I’ve heard the someone once told Edna St. Vincent Millay “Life is one damn thing after another” and she responded “Life is not one damn thing after another. Life is the same damn thing over and over.”
So the idea has been around for a long time.
[way geeky & OCDish dissent]
First-wave Macs used SSDD disks, 400K, formatted on one side only, 3.5", GCR-format on the low level, MFS on the high level. PCs of that era used 360K 5.25" disks, and since I guess 180K was the single-sided variant, that means they were DSDD? And MFM for the low-level, FAT-16 high-level.
But practically before the first year was out, Macs had switched to 800K diskettes, DSDD, still GCR, but HFS for the high-level. SSDD on the Mac was very very shortlived.
The first PCs to use the same PHYSICAL form factor (3.5" instead of 5.25") utilized a 720K diskette, DSDD, MFM format, FAT-16. They weren’t compatible, the drives could not read the other platform’s disks (yet). But not because one platform used SSDD and the other DSDD, but because of GCR vs MFM. (plus absence of drivers for the different hi-level formats).
Cross-platform floppy exchange became possible with the Mac “SuperDrive” or FDHD, which could not only read/write DSHD disks (the new 1.5 MB standard, formatted to 1.4) but could also do MFM as well as GRC. They could read PC diskettes of either size (720 or 1.4, both MFM) if a FAT-16 driver such as Dayna’s DOSMounter was added. A PC could read a Mac DSHD disk if an HFS driver such as MacDrive was added, because hi-density Mac diskettes were MFM, but still could not read 800K Mac disks.
So the big compatibility issue was GCR versus MFM. An MFM disk looks (electronically, not visually) like a pizza pie cut into wedges, then chopped into concentric circles. Each chunk of data (sector) takes up the same angle of arc as a sector on a circle (track) farther out, and the disk is spun at a constant velocity. A GRC disk does it differently, with each sector taking up the same area regardless of which track it is on, so the outer ring contains lots of sectors and the inner ones very few, and they do not take up the same angle of arc and it doesn’t look like a carved up pizza at all. The disk changes velocity as the read or write head moved inwards or outwards.
[/way geeky & OCDish dissent]
Macs? You’re *way *too technically advanced for this. 
The SSDD disks were used in Apple ]['s. They were 5.24" disks and were really just inferior DSDD disks (the manufacturing process used the same assembly line: if the disk was good on both sides, it was DSDD, but if there were problems on one side, they’d be packaged at SSDD). IBM and clones used the DSDD disks (360K) while the Apple ][ used SSDD (180K).
Macs started with 3.5" disks from the start; I don’t recall the SSDD disks on them, though I wasn’t using Macs at the time. The PC world used 720K high density 5.25" disks for a time (they didn’t work all that well), the slowly switched to the 3.4" 720K standard. Mac disks were essentially the same as PC disks at this time but were formatted differently and held 800K.
In any case, the Apple ][ computers were their mainstay up until the mid-80s when the Mac took over. Those using the Apple ][, the ][e, ][c, and the ][gs used SSDD disks, and, since at this time Apple was the big player in home computers, SSDDs were common and the letters were known to anyone who needed to buy disks.
More geekiness to add . . .
Apple II 5.25-inch disks were actually 143K, with 35 tracks of 16 256-byte sectors — although some people “cheated” and wrote up to 40 tracks on them. That would still only give you about 160K per disk. You could also be clever by carving out a write-enable notch on the wrong edge, flipping the disk over, and using the second side as if it were another disk. The drives could still only access one side at a time however.
Yes, there was a brief phase of 400K single-sided disks and drives on the Mac, in its early days. In fact it was a bit odd for a time, in that the first 3.5-inch disks and drives for the Apple II were 800K double-sided, right from the beginning. So for a little while, Macs had inferior storage capacity to Apple IIs.
Apple was using GCR encoding for both disk sizes all throughout this time. Also, Apple’s 3.5-inch drives, from Sony, used variable rotation speeds to increase the space efficiency. As AHunter3 said, this is why the two platforms couldn’t even begin to read each other’s disks, even ignoring the different file systems.
Interesting as all this is, I guess it’s not very relevant to the OP’s question. The “SSDD” acronym from computer technology could really just be a coincidence.
The word “excremento” is the appropriate word for “defecation.” The others words comparable to shit are “mierda” or “cagada.”
So. In Spanish:
“Misma mierda. Diferente día.”
or
"Misma cagada. Diferente día.’
The word “excremento” is the appropriate word for “defecation.” The others words comparable to shit are “mierda” or “cagada.”
So. In Spanish:
“Misma mierda. Diferente día.”
or
"Misma cagada. Diferente día.’
I vote for that one. It keeps the alliterative property the English version has.
“MMDD”.
It would be “día diferente,” no?
It actually sounds fine both ways. There are a few adjectives in Spanish that do; nuevo/a is one that comes to mind.
Depends on the context, but “Día diferente” and “Diferente día” are both correct, grammatically speaking. In the context of the OP is fine as translated.
“Misma Mierda. Diferente Día.”