Build Date: Sat Feb 15 16:30:44 2025 UTC
I wonder how the engineering would change if the racecars had to race through peanut butter and the cars had to be made entirely out of wicker.
-- Mr. Bad
Cookin' Up a Filipino Box Spring Ogg
2000-10-03 16:27:55
Passed samizdat from hacker to hacker for the past eight years, the Lambda Expressway is a surreal tale in the spirit of The Phantom Tollbooth. Originally a series of cassette tape letters recorded on a basement 4-track mixer, it has spawned a MUD, a written edition, and at least one sequel. Now, thanks to the freedom-loving peoples of Ogg, you can hear it on your own computer.
About forever and a day ago, I asked for a CD of the Lambda Expressway, so's I could rip it.
Some kind soul pressed a CD from fresh lemons and shipped it in an envelope woven from his own hair. I was elated. I was drafting a speech proclaiming the praises of this generous benefactor and announcing the release of the e-lek-tron-ik verzhun of the lambda expressway.
I then got laid off and lost access to machines with modern facilities like CD-ROM drives, power management hardware, and little rubber feet.
But my new job gave me a fancy-pants black obelisk with rich corinthian leather. It has four on the floor, factory air, and antique hardwood floors. It can run for three days on a pint of guinness and it can de-vulcanize rubber.
When playing around with the woody release of Debian GNU/Linux, I stumbled across
___. .__ ____ ____ ____ ___ ____________\_ |__ |__| ______ / _ \ / ___\ / ___\ \ \/ / _ \_ __ \ __ \| |/ ___/ ( <_> ) /_/ > /_/ > \ ( <_> ) | \/ \_\ \ |\___ \ \____/\___ /\___ / \_/ \____/|__| |___ /__/____ > /_____//_____/ \/ \/
In the past, when one wanted to make compressed audio files, one had to use the "rm" utility, which compresses all files to length 0. Then along came Suzanne Vega, who managed to compress the lyrics to "Tom's Diner" to a series of doot-doot noises.
Hearing her over a music pirating medium known as "the radio", a Fraunhofferstoffelson, AG, GMBh engineer known as "Karlheinzfritzerikholger" realized that he could patent this method if he grandfathered it into the MPEG committee's audio layer three (in between either the lettuce and the pinto beans, or the transport and data link layers, depending on whether you're ANSI or ISO, respectively) standard.
So successful was this coup that Frinkenzooblehoffen, GuS, pHD now collects heavy royalties on most music distribution. Not to be outdone, the free software hacker gnomes began working on a freaky replacement that uses snakes and omniscient beings and all sorts of crazy futuristic ish.
Named "Ogg Vorbis", because you kind of oggle while you listen to the extremely vorbly sounds coming out of the speaker, it was given away to the world in the same spirit of universal siblingness and conscientious objection that brought you the coke commercials with all the baby boomers singing from the mountains about how thety'd like to buy the world a social security blanket.
And this brings us back to the Lambda Expressway! I called up Vasco da Gama last night and we talked at great length about ogg vorbis. He gave me the instructions for encoding the CD by finding the corresponding cypher wheels and entering them into the collossus machines in the hold of his trireme. What came out was joyous music.
Vasco shoved a banana into one of the paper tape readers, and it was fixed. Out came the vorbized edition of The Lambda Expressway. My mission was nearly complete!
Smuggling it home in a box full of Communist literature, I fired up my ASR-33 and uploaded the data to zork.net, my offshore merchant banking system.
Thus, those of you who want to oggle at the vorbized lambda expressway (a saga to make the one you are reading tremble with performance anxiety), kindly send the following HTTP request to zork.net by intelligent squirrel:
GET
http://zork.net/~nick/ogg/gunpoint_studios/lambda_expressway/
And before xwrits wrestles me to the ground and pins my arms behind my back, I'll tell you how you, YES YOU, can play ogg vorbis files:
Just download and install the free software!
Yes, folks, it's as easy as that. Or, if you're running Debian's woody (unstable) distribution, you can simply run the following as root:
apt-get install ogg123
or
apt-get install xmms-vorbis
and watch the juicy software install!
T O P S T O R I E S
The Future Ain't What It Used To Be
Ideas have taken horrifying shape and rooted into our modern reality. (More...)
The Once & Future King of Dust
Only The Onion could have acquired Infowarts. (More...)
Another Nobel Prize-Winning Author Describes Drunkenness
This book won a Pulitzer Prize. Here's its famous paragraph on getting drunk... (More...)
Why I'm pretty sure JD Vance had sex with a couch
True or false? The answers await us in that magical land where all truths are revealed -- the internet. (More...)
In 2010 Dr. Cheng-Huai Ruan discovered a way to cause a patient with an abnormal heartbeat to get back into a normal rhythm by sticking a finger up the patient's ass. (More...)
WKRP in Cincinnati aired from 1978 through 1982. Howard Hesseman played Dr. Johnny Fever, a DJ from Los Angeles who was fired from his previous job for saying the word "booger" on the air. In the show Hesseman would do some dialogue, introduce a song, and start the song. You'd hear a few notes, but never the whole song. (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
40 Acres, a Mule, and a Crummy 90-Second Spot on Weekend Update
Consider the plight of the Black Man. The Black Man on "Saturday Night Live," I mean. Has there ever been a more pathetic thing than a token unredeemed for 28 years? Where is the NAACP when you really need them? (More...)
The Ancient and Correct Sake Ceremony
Many Americans have learned to appreciate the delicate, sophisticated flavors of Japanese food and drink, along with the beautifully refined rituals of Japanese dining. San Francisco, as a gateway between East and West, has especially benefited from the flowering of Eastern consciousness in America. It is hardly possible to walk down the street without stepping on somebody's sushi. (More...)
The IBM Selectric Typewriter Changed My Life
I ran my hands lovingly across her frame, lightly brushing her metallic nipples with my fingers, admiring the shapes and the ways of her curves, the empathetic hum she produced as I had my way with her, the way she made it all seem so effortless and right... she didn't even seem to mind the way I roughly manipulated her knobs and tweaked her casing. She was extremely tolerant, for a typewriter. (More...)
Our man Daemon Agent checks out the heavy heavy sounds of crazy space surf rockers Man or Astroman?. (More...)
High Availability Guinness Stress Test
All too often we forget the incredible depth of technology behind the weekly ritual of TNiPN@*. We tend to only become aware of the strategy of High Available Guinness (HAG) when it rises to the forefront during a complete and utter venue failure. Yet we should all be super grateful that this system exists. (More...)
Ratsnatcher gets HOT HOT HOT in this classic road tale that looks at the steamy underworld of Bay Area Linux advocacy. Loosen your collar for this one! (More...)