The set-up line for a genre of one-liners told by hackers
about themselves. These include the following:
not only do you check your email more often than your paper
mail, but you remember your network address faster than your
postal one.
your SO kisses you on the neck and
the first thing you think is "Uh, oh, priority interrupt."
you go to balance your checkbook and discover that you're
doing it in octal.
your computers have a higher street value than your car.
in your universe, `round numbers' are powers of 2, not
10.
more than once, you have woken up recalling a dream in some
programming language.
you realize you have never seen half of your best
friends.
A list
list of these can be found by searching for this phrase on the
web.
[An early version of this entry said "All but one of these
have been reliably reported as hacker traits (some of them quite
often). Even hackers may have trouble spotting the ringer." The
ringer was balancing one's checkbook in octal, which I made up
out of whole cloth. Although more respondents picked that one out
as fiction than any of the others, I also received multiple
independent reports of its actually happening, most famously to
Grace Hopper while she was working with BINAC in 1949. --ESR]
Node:Your mileage may
vary, Next:Yow!, Previous:You
know you've been hacking too long when, Up:= Y =
Your mileage may vary cav.
[from the standard disclaimer attached to EPA mileage ratings
by American car manufacturers] 1. A ritual warning often found in
Unix freeware distributions. Translates roughly as "Hey, I tried
to write this portably, but who knows what'll happen on
your system?" 2. More generally, a qualifier attached to advice.
"I find that sending flowers works well, but your mileage may
vary."