I used to work at a company that did distributed QA. Other people’s tests would run on your desktop. It worked surprisingly well. But occasionally a test of some audio resource would play on your speakers “The discrete cosine is a real, discrete version of the fast Fourier transform.”

I used to work on a debugger. It was called TotalView, and it was a really stellar multiprocess, multithread debugger. You could debug programs with thousands of cores and threads. You could type real C++ code to inspect values, inject code into a running process, force the CPU to run at a given line, like a magic goto. But we had a saying “printf wins again”. Sometimes you just can’t get the debugger to tell you what you need.

Russians used to go to the sea through Latvia, during the Czarist times. They often got sea sick. A case of any kind of gastric distress became a “trip to Riga.” (I learned this in a Russian language class. It may not be true, but I intend to believe it, regardless if it’s actual truth. Please correct me if I’m wrong. I’d like to know if I’m being unreasonable. It’s a sign of strength of character )