Ah, Pong. I pretty much understood that game. You may gather I’m not up to speed on the whole area. When it comes to gaming, I feel like Marge Simpson, asked what music she likes: Gaming is none of my business. Still, I think Microsoft’s move towards end-user programming is interesting. I’ll just leave it to wiser minds to evaluate the situation.

On Let’s Kill Dave, Dave Weller discusses what’s good and bad about Microsoft’s approach with XNA Game Studio:

Being an ex-XNA member, I can still say, without a shadow of doubt, that Microsoft is offering a groundbreaking game channel, and that some people stand a chance to make great money from the system. It’s an exciting opportunity, but the danger for consumers lies in Microsoft’s deliberate steps to avoid discussions regarding game quality, even during peer review. I firmly believe that avoiding commentary/ratings on game quality will result in frustrated consumers, who will have no way to discern the quality of a game among (ultimately) thousands.

Security researcher Didier Stevens conducted a test last year to see what kind of a clickthrough rate you might get from an ad offering drive-by downloads. .16%, as it turns out…

Here’s an excerpt from his blog post about the test, ”Is your PC virus-free? Get it infected here!”

Would you click on this Google ad?

No? Sure? Because 409 persons did!

How do I know? Because I’ve been running this Google Adwords campaign for 6 months now.

.16% clickthrough. On an ad that was unabashedly offering to infect your computer. At a cost of $23. If Stevens had actually been phishing, he could have made some money.

You’d have to think that an ad that made some attempt at subterfuge would do considerably better. And most people looking to give you a virus or recruit you for their zombie army  at least offer you something you want. Steven’s ad didn’t even say the service was free.

I think I’ve been underestimating how lucrative this whole malware thing is.

~ Ivy Wigmore

On Of Zen and Computing, Tom Harrison writes about the virtual floppy disk:

Floppy disks have been obsolete for a long time now, but I can see this utility coming in very handy for someone who wants to work with a set of antiquated device drivers, or perhaps relive the good ‘ol days of Commander Keen and The Oregon Trail.

I haven’t missed floppies too badly. Of the three computers in our house, only one has a floppy drive. Still we do have an antique with that capacity. Should we ever need a virtual floppy, I guess we can use it to create one.  And, what with so many manufacturers omitting the drives from computers and so many retailers no longer selling diskettes (did anyone ever call them that?), you’d have to agree that at least the physical floppy is heading for extinction.

Elsewhere on the blog, Harrison explains why the floppy deserves to be dead. Well, for starters:

Floppy Disk capacity is virtually useless

So why do away with floppies? Simply put, their capacity is a joke compared to the size of today’s files and storage mediums. A floppy disk can hold up to 1.44 megabytes of data. Just how small is that?

* The capacity of an 80 minute CD-R is 486 times larger than a floppy disk.
* The capacity of a DVD is over 5000 times larger than a floppy disk.
* The capacity of a 512mb USB drive is over 350 times larger than a floppy disk.
* The capacity of a computer with a 150 gig hard drive is over 100,000 times larger than a floppy disk.

As you can see, you’d need volumes upon volumes of floppy disks to get the same capacity as modern storage devices.

Come to think of it, I can’t remember the last time I used a floppy disk. Give me another decade and I’ll probably have gotten rid of the piles of them on my office shelves…
~ Ivy Wigmore

(Photo credit: steffenz, republished under a Creative Commons Attribution license.)

It’s 2008. Do you know where your avatar is?

Only three years to get your avatar unless you want to be lumped in with the bottom 20% — by 2011, Gartner says that the vast majority of Internet users will have avatars to represent them online in various gaming and non-game virtual environments. Which, I guess, are expected to proliferate. The clock’s ticking — Gartner predicted that last year at their Symposium/ITxpo 2007 Emerging Trends.

And they aren’t talking about the 2D image that pops up beside your posts in forums. I mean, even I have one of those. And she’s cute, if a little on the flat side. But she’s no Lara Croft — her ass-kicking ability is extremely limited. And I can’t see the world from her perspective, in a 3-D immersive world.

I have friends in virtual worlds, have had invitations extended — but so far, I haven’t wandered into one. I completely understand the appeal. Wow — talk about a rich fantasy life! My stock response, though, is that I don’t have time for my first life, let alone a second one.

I guess I’m going to have to make time. According to Gartner and near-futurists such as Gerri Sinclair, more and more of our online activities will move to virtual environments and our interactions will be conducted by 3D representatives with all the capabilities we and others possess in the real world — and then some. Sinclair is executive director of the master’s degree program for digital media at the Great Northern Way Campus in Vancouver and her students are creating a parallel virtual university.

Here’s an interview on MSDN’s Channel 10.

Apparently, the future of online interaction is going to be pretty much conducted by avatars, in 3-D surround everything. I was thinking about that — my worklife avatar would be plunked in front of a computer looking at a computer screen and my online leisure time avatar would best represent me by sitting around chatting in book store cafes. But then, I guess, “I” could wander over to the shelves and find something to read or go get some sprinkles on my latte…

Maybe it’s just a failure of imagination on my part. In a 3-D immersive world I can be and do — virtually — anything… Hmmm… Well, it looks like I’m going to get sprinkles on my latte. Then… on the way to the counter I feel inspired to… do a triple backflip. Hey! Perfectly executed — and not a drop spilled! Now I’m going to drink my coffee. For real.

~ Ivy Wigmore

No more free nibbles! ICANN is doing away with the exemption for a twenty-five cent transaction cost on refunded domain names.

Which can add up when you register a bazillion domain names. Like spam, domain tasting has to be done in volume to be profitable.

According to Jay Westerdal, ICANN’s act will end the practice within the year.

In his blog, CEO of GoDaddy.com, Bob Parsons wrote about the magnitude of the problem:

Ever wonder why it seems more and more difficult for you to get the domain name you want? Quite often it’s because the domain name tasting and kiting industry is alive, well and running rampant. The practice of domain tasting and kiting continues to rage out-of-control. In February 2007, 55.1 million domain names were registered. Of those, 51.5 million were canceled and refunded just before the 5 day grace period expired and only 3.6 million domain names were actually kept. With the exception of just a few names, 93.5% of those names were registered simply to see how much advertising revenue – paid by big search firms like our “do no evil” friends at Google – will generate when they are associated with a one page Web site and related links.

Hey Sweetie! I got you a little something for Valentine’s Day:

Yes, February 14th has rolled around again and if you’ve got (or want) a sweetie, you’d be well advised to show you care. And I found the perfect thing: Ironicsans.com has a lovely selection of valentines featuring our real heart-throbs: Scientists! In addition to the dreamy Carl Sagan *sigh!* there’s Darwin: “I select you, naturally!” Lots more on the blog as well as some excellent reader suggestions in the comments (e.g. Charles Richter: “I’m all shook up over you!”)

Ironic Sans began life as an idea for a font name. Until that dream is realized, photographer David Friedman is using it as the name for his blog.

Oooooh… New ones include Pavlov and Stephen Hawking. Decisions, decisions…

~ Ivy Wigmore

I was thinking about time today. Just the usual stuff: how to have more of it, why must it be so … precise. This all seemed to stem from looking at our definition of atomic clock, as I browsed the database for interesting Words of the Day for the weekend. Atomic clock came up in our Director, Margaret Rouse’s blog on IT Knowledge Exchange. She quoted Douglas Dwyer’s article on How Stuff Works:

Without atomic clocks, GPS navigation would be impossible, the Internet would not synchronize, and the position of the planets would not be known with enough accuracy for space probes and landers to be launched and monitored.

All that precision makes me fantasize about simpler times when (I fondly imagine) humans weren’t as time-driven. I tend to think that, for example, noonish would be a perfectly valid time to set an appointment if we were going by the position of the sun. (All appointments automatically cancelled on cloudy days!)

And yet… NIST’s A Walk Through Time seems to suggest that my fantasy is … just a dream. According to their section on ancient calendars, humans have been doing their darndest to track time for so long that if I want to go back to a simpler time where time’s less of an issue I’d have go go back to a time that was probably too simple for my liking. Before books and coffee, for example. I’m no technology addict (I’d be happy to read by firelight, steaming latte in hand) but there are limits to how rough I’m willing to go.

Here’s a bit from Ancient Calendars:

We know little about the details of timekeeping in prehistoric eras, but wherever we turn up records and artifacts, we usually discover that in every culture, some people were preoccupied with measuring and recording the passage of time. Ice-age hunters in Europe over 20,000 years ago scratched lines and gouged holes in sticks and bones, possibly counting the days between phases of the moon.

Ice age? No thanks! I can hardly wait till Spring as it is. The days get shorter, nights get longer and I start to fantasize about hibernating until, oh, Aprilish.

~ Ivy Wigmore

It’s sometimes said that the only constant that you can count on is change. Change is necessary, after all — “Adapt or die” being an imperative of the natural world. And perhaps even more so in the world of technology…

These are the sorts of thoughts that occur as I poke around in the definition database, reviewing likely suspects for Words of the Day.  WhatIs has been around since 1996, when founder Lowell Thing started his little “dining room table experiment in hypertext.” Eleven calendar years ago. I’m not sure how long ago that is in Web years, for which the calibration must always be ramping up. However long the years since, though, what it means for us editors is a whole lot of updating.

We try, with varying success, to make definitions as future shock proof as we can without compromising the value of current information. Today’s Word of the Day, Antikythera mechanism, lends itself to that approach pretty well. You don’t expect a lot to change on a 2000-year-old computer. But for breaking news and link rot, we’re pretty much set with that one.

On the other hand, there are those definitions that seem to have been written in a simpler time, probably in the last century. Occasionally, I review a definition that predicts future developments that have either not panned out or have proven so prescient that all we have to do is change the tenses and phrases like “might become” to “is.”

Take silicon cockroach for example. I came across that one yesterday, looking for WODs for the weekend. John Sidgmore coined the term back in ‘98 to refer to the multiplicity of small electronic devices that he predicted would prevail in the future. We added the definition in ‘01. Now, as we flip lightly over into ‘08, I see that not only do the tenses need to be changed from future to present but a host of new life forms added to the species. No mention of MP3 players, GPS , USB drives…

What does our definition say now? Well … that depends. How far into the future are you reading it?
~ Ivy Wigmore

‘Tis the season! We’ve made a list and checked it twice. Now we’re gonna find out who’s naughty, who’s nice… and who’s a really holiday-oriented geek! Okay, maybe it doesn’t rhyme, but we never claimed to be poets. If you qualify, we’ll put your name on our Festive Geek of Distinction list: the December honor roll. This week, our gift to you is a tasty sampler of IT terms with tantalizing clues. Let us know how you did!

1. If Saint Nick ate all of these that we kids leave out for him, he might need extra RP (reindeer power) to get that sleigh airborne! On the Internet, it’s information for future use that is stored by the server on the client side of a client/server communication.
What is it?

2. Sounds like the gift that always fits — although generally, the bigger the better! In an Internet context, it’s a storage area where automatically requested files are contained so they don’t have to be downloaded each time.
What is it?

3. In a North Pole context, this is an extremely seasonal worker. In a communications context, however, it’s a type of electromagnetic field having a frequency much lower than the frequencies of signals typically used.
What is it?

4. Nice in a festive beverage, but challenging for holiday travel: it also describes a Web page in which the primary content has a fixed width in pixel and assumes a left margin alignment.
What is it?

5. Does Martha Stewart liberally festoon her house with these for the holidays? On the Internet, this word is sometimes used to describe a Web site that is updated on a daily or other frequent basis.
What is it?

6. We usually remember these, although we might end up humming the rest of the carol. In audio production, this is one of the two standard audio effects defined by the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI).
What is it?

7. Does the magnetic stripe on your card wear thin this time of year? Well, negative or positive, in physics it’s a characteristic of a unit of matter that expresses the extent to which it has more or fewer electrons than protons.
What is it?

8. If all the stars at the top of all the decorated trees in your neighborhood could communicate with each other, what would you have? (Hint: this is also the term for a local area network in which all nodes are directly connected to a common central computer.)
What is it?

9. Migratory birds — and disenchanted humans — often fly south this time of year to avoid this seasonal phenomenon. In a computer context, however, it’s a system for archiving data such as business records and reports to one or more optical disks in a compressed but easily retrievable format.
What is it?

10. This sounds a bit like a kind of soft lighting that is flattering to elves of “a certain age” — fittingly, it’s the standard unit of luminous intensity in the International System of Units.
What is it?

How many could you guess correctly without peeking? Let us know!

Still feeling merry? Check out our:

Quizzes of Festive Seasons Past
Array in a Manger (2004)
Do you prefer your quizzes straight-up or with a twist? Each question in this quiz offers a link to a seasonally-themed hint before the link to take you straight to the answer. Good luck!

The Dickens you say!
For a little geeky and festive fun, try our new quiz, What the Dickens! In which, Dear Reader, we ask the techy questions and then supply hints from the text of Charles Dickens’ seasonal classic, “A Christmas Carol.”

Does the following sound familiar? You’re at your desk, opening email, preparing for a good solid work day. As you’re responding to one message, however, that little alert pops up on the bottom of the screen and before you know it you’ve got a bunch of open emails clamoring for your attention. And then comes the IM, which, being real time (as opposed to the several seconds elapsing between messages in an email exchange) trumps email. At the height of this madness, I’ve occasionally been exchanging email and IMing with someone simultaneously when interrupted by the phone. Guess who?

Whatever your job, if you do it at a computer you’re probably coming to terms with spending a fair amount of your day doing things that didn’t come up in your job description. (Hands up, anyone who saw “Writing and responding to email” at the top of the required tasks list?)

Ok, no surprise that email is eating our lives (not sure I even want to see the numbers on that) but did you know that you probably spend more time being interrupted from tasks than you do working on them?

This article looks at drive by interruptions and the toll they exact on productivity.

Here are a few stats:

• Interruptions crunch through 28% of the average knowledge worker’s day.
• Interruptions typically lower a worker’s IQ 10 points. (The researchers note that’s over twice as big a drop as experienced by someone who smoked marijuana. Man.)
• In a study of Microsoft employees, it took workers an average of 15 minutes to settle into a task again after an interruption.

If, like me, you telecommute you may not have the “drop-by drive-by” coworker sitting on the edge of your desk. On the other hand, family and neighbors (many, many of whom just never seem to get the “work” part of “work from home”) will typically take time out of their busy days to fill that niche.

When a friend of mine was working on his doctoral dissertation, he actually locked his door and tied himself into the chair at his computer with the belt from his bathrobe so that he couldn’t absent-mindedly wander away.

Ingenious, but it would never work today. We’re virtually strapped in at our computers but the potential for interruption just seems to get worse. Without so much as standing up, we’ve got email, IMs, RSS notifications… not to mention the siren call of the Net or even the archaic charms of the telephone.

So how to cope, get some work done and maybe even save your sanity? Well, here’s a hint: “Unplug” is number three on Lifehack’s top 50 ways to increase your productivity list. On rare occasions, I’ve closed out of Outlook and exited IM. It’s amazing how much you can get done without interr… oh, hold that thought — I’ve got to take this call…

~ Ivy Wigmore

They’re everywhere, and nowhere more prevalent than in the work world. Kurt Vonnegut symbolized them thusly: * As a means of maintaining our serious and sober demeanor on WhatIs, I shall follow his sterling example throughout this blog post. ~ IW

From the seagull manager (one who flies into the office shrieking, craps on everything, and then flies out again) to the copy shop employee who screws up the order for your 10-minutes-from-now presentation and shrugs, working life is studded with *s. You probably know if your boss is an *. You can probably recognize if a colleague is an *. Even your best friend may sometimes display distinctly *-like behavior. But what if someone even closer fits the description? Is it possible that you’re an * and just never realized it? How would you know?

According to Bob Sutton, who wrote The No * Rule (substitute relevant term for asterisk), an * is someone who leaves others “demeaned and de-energized.” A couple of warning signs:

• Thinking that what you have to say is so important that it supercedes what anyone else is saying, thus giving you the supreme right — perhaps even the obligation — to interrupt.
• People seem to get hostile in response to your emails. *shrug*
• You believe that you’re surrounded by idiots.

Sutton created a simple, 24-question test, the * Rating Self-Exam (ARSE) to help you find out if you are, in fact, an *.

Here’s a list of resources from Sutton’s site (Warning: Sutton does not subscribe to the Vonnegut style.):

ARSE Tools

• * Rating Self-Exam (ARSE) - Are you a certified *?
• Send an *Mail — help a victim or apologize for being an *
  
• The Flying ARSE — Do you make air travel miserable for everyone else?
• Tips for Surviving Workplace *s
• Places That Don’t Tolerate *s: The Honor Roll

Sutton’s work is intended to serve the greater good by allowing the *s among us to recognize themselves and repent. Here’s to an *-free work zone!

~ Ivy Wigmore

Avast, all ye scurrrrrvy sons o’ sea cooks!

I don’t usually talk to readers that way — but September 19th be Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Not talking about those folk that plunder the Web for ill-gained software booty. Nay! I’m talking about the power of the Web to spread the news about festive events like this and to provide trinkets for our amusement, such as:

A great assortment of videos from the originators of Talk like a Pirate Day, Cap’n Slappy ‘n’ Ol’ Chumbucket.

A pirate name generator. Rancid Eve Barossa? I’m going to try my luck elsewhere…

Here’s a quiz to scientifically determine your pirate name.

(My pirate name is: Black Mary Bonney. There’s also a little personality sketch to go with your name…
>> Like anyone confronted with the harshness of robbery on the high seas, you can be pessimistic at times. You can be a little bit unpredictable, but a pirate’s life is far from full of certainties, so that fits in pretty well. Arr!

A pirate glossary

Advice for the lovelorn pirate

And English-to-Pirate / Pirate-to-English translators.

Ahoy. Ahem. Arrrrrr. There be lots more treasure where that came from but SOME of us have work to do. Have fun and be safe out there, landlubbers.

And remember, if it’s software ye be wantin’, buy retail.

~ Black Mary Bonney

Birds do it, bees do it… Well, ok — that wasn’t true. Birds and bees aren’t getting into wikis and social networking yet but almost everyone else is.

Even spies are all over it. Last year the feds launched a wiki for the 16 US intelligence agencies (Did you know there were that many? I didn’t.) Based on the Wikipedia model, Intellipedia has three separate components based on clearance levels.

Unlike Wikipedia, Intellipedia is not open to public access. Here’s an unofficial blog dedicated to Intellipedia news, though. This FCW article explains how Young feds bring intell changes.

In this screencast on FCW.com, Chris Rasmussen (Knowledge Management Officer, Intellipedia, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Department of Defense) discusses “what it’s like to work as an Intellipedian, the rules they live by, and how the new tools are helping transform the ways of the intelligence-processing for good.”

At this writing, Intellipedia has about 30,000 articles online, undergoing 4,800 edits on a daily basis.

And with Intellipedia established, a social networking site similar to MySpace is under development. It sounds as if A-Space will incorporate the wiki site:

From an InformationWeek article:

A-Space will begin life as a portal that includes a Web-based word processing tool akin to Google Docs, a wiki-based intelligence community encyclopedia known as Intellipedia and access to three “huge, terabyte databases” of current raw intel for analysts to sift through. It’ll be scaled for 10,000 users at day one. By the end of 2008, the DNI hopes to bring in other resources like intelligence blogs, social networking capabilities akin to a Facebook for spooks, secure Web-based e-mail, better search functionality, and much more.

A-Space is expected to be online in December of this year.

What’s up next? Maybe a Second Life-like virtual world (If you ask me, this stuff is ALL a bit other-worldly). Here’s what Sean Dennehy, the CIA’s Chief of Intellipedia development, had to say (quoted in this FCW article): “I think it is a no-brainer. We could use it for training and other things.”

Other things might involve the ongoing “war on terror.” According to this article in The Australian: “…jihadists are turning to artificial online worlds such as Second Life to train and recruit members.”

Who knows what those guys will be up to next? Who knows what they’re up to right now, for that matter?

I’d tell you more but, you know, then I’d have to kill ya.

~ Ivy Wigmore

Last week I sent out a quiz about Latin-derived terms:

Quiz: For Latin Lovers

Latin is a dead language,
As dead as it can be.
First it killed the Romans
And now it’s killing me.

Years ago, when Latin was taught in the public schools, all the boys and girls inscribed their Latin texts with that little ditty. Or so our moms tell us. Despite its seeming unpopularity, Latin was — and still is — extremely useful for making you look like a real smartypants. Are you a Latin Lover? Take our quiz to help you decide.

In fact — believe it or not — I’m not a fluent speaker of Latin, so I set forth to look for potential phrases that I could bend to my purposes. I found, to my delight, that there was not a lot that I could use for the quiz, but lots of things that might be handy for other applications:

Here’s a slice of the long list of common and useful Latin phrases from Dialogue on Everything2.com:

Ne plus ultra: Nothing further; perfection
Nil desperandum: No reason for despair; never despair.
Nolen volens: Willing or unwilling
Non compos mentis: Not of sound mind
Non sequitur: It does not follow.
Nota bene: Mark well.
Obiit: He (or she) died.
Obiter dictum: A thing said by the way
Ora pro nobis: Pray for us.
Ore rotundo: With full voice
O tempora! O mores!: O the times! O the manners!

Below, there’s a coordinated list from Xerces. Here’s a taste:

E contrario: on the contrary
Experto credite!: Trust me!
Extinctus amabitur idem: How soon we forget!
Fama volat: Rumor travels swiftly
Filius est patris: He’s a chip off the old block
Forte consulto: accidently on purpose - a cool oxymoron!
Hic et nunc: here and now
Hic et ubique: here and everywhere
Humanum est errare: To err is human

From systay on Everything₂, Fun Latin phrases. Such as:

Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes
- If you can read this you’re overeducated

Vah! Denuone Latine loquebar? Me ineptum. Interdum modo elabitur
- Oh! Was I speaking Latin again? Silly me. Sometimes it just sort of slips out

Un idea perplexi na
- The idea is strange to us

albae gallinae filius
- son of a white chicken

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum
- I think that I think, therefore I think that I am

If you look to the bottom of the page, there are links to a variety of Latin pages on the site.

The BBC’s h2g2 pages have more Latin fun. Here are just a few of the need-to-know phrases listed:

Ita erat quando hic adveni: It was that way when I got here

Nihil declarandum: I have nothing to declare

Ut si!: As if!

Canis meus id comedit: My dog ate it

Die dulci freure: Have a nice day

Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabris, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam: I have a catapult. Unless you give me all of your money, I will fling an enormous rock at your head.

Utinam barbari spatioum proprium tuum invadant: May barbarians invade your personal space

Recedite, plebes! Gero rem imperialem: Stand aside, little people! I am here on official business

Or you could go to Abigail’s Big Table of Latin Phrases

Here’s a sampling of handy phrases from Abigail’s cheatsheet:

Heia, amice, utrum illae sunt sarcinae tuae, an modo Carthaginem despoliasti?: Hey, pal, is that carry-on luggage or did you just sack Carthage?

Heu, modo itera omnia quae mihi nunc nuper narravisti, sed nunc Anglice?: Listen, would you repeat everything you just told me, only this time say it in English?

hunc tu caveto: beware of this man

Id est mihi, id non est tibi!: It is mine, not yours!

Id imperfectum manet dum confectum erit: It isn’t over until it’s over

Illegitimi non carborundum: Don’t let the bastards wear you down

Illiud Latine dici non potest: You can’t say that in Latin.

And with that, friends, Absum! (I’m outta here!)

~ Ivy Wigmore

Poem: A Purple Cow

I never saw a Purple Cow,
I never hope to see one;
But I can tell you, anyhow,
I’d rather see than be one.
~ Gelett Burgess

My mom used to like to quote that one — still does, in fact, with (or without, truth be told) any prompting. I don’t know what might ever have inspired such verse but I’m totally down with the sentiment: I, likewise, have absolutely no wish to be a purple cow, despite occasional difficulties managing being a nonpurple human… On the other hand, if I’m ever looking for a job, I might fervently hope to be a purple squirrel.

In a WSJ Career Journal article, Sarah Needleman put together a list of jargon used by various recruiters as shorthand to describe applicants.

You don’t want to see the recruiter scribble PP (poor presentation) as you speak.

TMI? In reality, they don’t likely want to hear much about your hobbies or your cat.

A search virgin is someone who doesn’t understand how the process works. Which means that they won’t behave appropriately — and aren’t likely to get lucky.

You might get branded a “mortician” if you pull an outdated and ill-fitting suit from the back of the closet (My apologies to David and Nate Fisher. You guys are hired!).

But what’s a purple squirrel? That elusive creature is the rare individual with the specific qualifications that make them perfect for the job. Score: All the nuts.

On the other hand, some organizations ask for a tad much… From RecruiterGuy.net:

Anyone that has been in recruiting for any amount of time has been asked to find the purple squirrel. It’s that perfect candidate that has 5 certifications, 10 years of industry specific experience, speaks 3 languages, is willing to relocate to the Antarctic with 24hrs notice (w/o relo), and will work for minimum wage.

(For more purple cow fun,