A step by step guid to Love Song writting on this Valentine's Day

There is an interesting (funny) story on CNET about how divorce is partly to blame for global warming

Divorced couples use up more space in their respective homes, which amounts to to 38 million more rooms worldwide to light, heat and cool, noted the report.

And people who divorced used 73 billion kilowatt-hours more of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water than they would otherwise in 2005.

Dissolving a marriage also means doubling possessions, from the lowly can opener to the SUV. The report, however, did not estimate how many more natural resources the children of shared-custody parents consume by getting birthday and holiday gifts twice.

First Law

The Computer is always right

Lemma one

Programmers are occasionally right

Second Law

The amount of time needed to debug a program is inversely proprotional to the time allotted for debugging

Corollary

Programs never work the first time unless there is virtually unlimited time to complete the program

Third Law

Any programmer can find 90% of his bugs simply by explaining his program to an uninterested observer

Corollary

The uninterested observer may be sleeping, dead, nonhuman, or, in extreme cases, nonexistant

Forth Law

The most difficult or nearly impossible programming problems appear obvious or extremely simple to anyone with little or no knowledge of programming

Corollary

Those problems most easily solved by a programmer appear to be overwhelmingly complicated and marvelous to the layman

Fifth Law

Computers are never more intelligent than their programmers

Corollary

Most computers are incredibly stupid

Sixth Law

The rarest bugs in any operating system or major programming effort will always show up in a demonstration of its use to prospective users or customers

Corollary

These bugs usually cannot be reproduced and therefore cannot be located

Lemma One

Customers will never purchase programs which appear to be riddled with bugs as verified by demonstration

Paradox

Most programs are unfit for sale

This sure does sound about right

1. Programmer produces code he believes is bug-free.
2. Product is tested. 20 bugs are found.
3. Programmer fixes 10 of the bugs and explains to the testing department that the other 10 aren't really bugs.
4. Testing department finds that five of the fixes didn't work and discovers 15 new bugs.
5. See 3.
6. See 4.
7. See 5.
8. See 6.
9. See 7.
10. See 8.
11. Due to marketing pressure and an extremely pre-mature product announcement based on overly-optimistic programming schedule, the product is released.
12. Users find 137 new bugs.
13. Original programmer, having cashed his royalty check, is nowhere to be found.
14. Newly-assembled programming team fixes almost all of the 137 bugs, but introduce 456 new ones.
15. Original programmer sends underpaid testing department a postcard from Fiji. Entire testing department quits.
16. Company is bought in a hostile takeover by competitor using profits from their latest release, which had 783 bugs.
17. New CEO is brought in by board of directors. He hires programmer to redo program from scratch.
18. Programmer produces code he believes is bug-free....

Next Monday is the second anniversary of my wedding. In honor of my wife and geeks everywhere I'm posting this letter to Tech Support.

Dear Tech Support,

Last year I upgraded from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0 and noticed that the new program began unexpected child processing that took up quite a lot of space and valuable resources. No mention of this phenomenon was included in the product brochure.

In addition, Wife 1.0 installs itself into all other programs, and launches during the system initialization where it monitors all other system activity. Applications like Pokernight 10.3, Drunken Boys Night 2.5, and Monday Night Football 5.0 no longer run, crashing the system whenever selected.

I am thinking of going back to Girlfriend 7.0, but the uninstall does not seem to work on this program. Can you help me PLEASE!?!?

Thanks, Joe

Dear Joe,

This is a very common problem men complain about but is mostly due to a primary misconception. Many people upgrade from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0 with the idea that Wife 1.0 is merely utilities and entertainment program.

Wife 1.0 is an OPERATING SYSTEM and is designed by its creator to run everything. It is very unlikely that you will be able to purge Wife 1.0 and still convert back to Girlfriend 7.0. Hidden operating files within the system would cause Girlfriend 7.0 to emulate Wife 1.0, so nothing is gained other than small change of scenery. It is impossible to purge, delete, or un-install the program files from the system once they are installed. You can not go back to Girlfriend 7.0 because Wife 1.0 is not designed to do this.

Some have gone as far as installing Girlfriend 8.0 in a hidden subdirectory, or tried installing Wife 2.0, but end up with more problems than the original system had. Detection of Girlfriend 8.0 or Wife 2.0 can result in Wife 1.0 creating general protection faults such as “Warning- Cannot find Alimony or Child Support files, or files are out of date.” Because Wife 1.0’s directories and sub-directories are almost impossible to understand or modify, some over-rides have been installed to assist you in (at least) making Wife 1.0 a livable experience.

I recommend that you attempt the following at the onset of ANY problems that you might have. After any system crash, Wife 1.0 WILL give you an opportunity to fix the problem yourself (although you might not see the opportunity, it IS there, you just have to look for it). At the C prompt enter the following:

c:\apologize

Generally this should work, unless you have truly created a massive error. In any case, avoid hitting the “Esc” key at all costs! There are also add-ons that you can install to assist you in your efforts. Try buying a copy of Flowers 4.1 or Chocolates 5.5, or both for really big errors. Do not, under ANY circumstances install Secretary v38.24.36 with short skirt upgrade! This is not a supported application for any of the Wife OR Girlfriend series programs, and is likely to cause irreversible damage to the system.

Best of Luck, Tech Support