No, no, no! Disco joke hit bum note in the rehab center Welcome once again, valued reader, to Who, Me? – The Register's comfy Monday nook wherein we share stories of times readers weren't quite so clever as they imagined. This week, say hello to a reader we'll Regomize as "Gene" who, once upon long ago, worked in the IT department of "a fancy rehab facility." Or perhaps more …
The rather excellent Mitch Benn got jolly annoyed with Hallelujah was covered by the Christmas xfactor winner. I have no idea who it was or what it sounded like but I do like his song about it. What’s really nice is that he doesn’t use the actual melody but does his own so as not to tarnish the original.Stay the hell away from Hallelujah https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ_ayRYWbrc
Alexandra Burke.
Quite honestly, the X-Factor producers/Simon Cowell deserve to have the longest version in existence, all 15 pages if possible, on loop, just to teach them that it was not a suitable song for the dull, emotionless treatment they gave it on X-Factor. I'm sure Alexandra Burke had no idea about the meaning of the song when they told her to sing it.
Don't get me wrong. Hallelujah, in it's original, and also IMHO the Jeff Buckley versions is an excellent song. Alexandra Burke is an extraordinarily capable performer, one of the few worthy winners of X-Factor. The SyCo producers are idiots for that and the other the choice of songs they made for her when she won X-Factor, and afterwards in my opinion.
Seems a bit sloppy to me. It's not like the guys who created this system weren't familiar with how the phone ring works.
Looks like they just decided to pipe the mp3 to speaker and not bother with cutting it off because, obviously, who would configure a 90-second ringtone ?
And that's where we get the difference between what a system is made to do, and what it can do.
"because, obviously, who would configure a 90-second ringtone ?"
They made an assumption. Any assumption quickly becomes a limitation if not a bug. Assume as little as possible, Even so it should be a requirement of ringing a phone that the ring tone ill be cut off as soon as it's answered.
I'd imagine it was a skeuomorphism. In old-skool phones, picking up the phone didn't result in instant silence, the literal bell continued to be heard reverberating. Similarly if I think back to the DTMF touch tone ones that replaced them continued to play the whole ring after the phone was picked up. Either for simplistic design, or because an interrupted ring sounded discombobulating.
I'd put it down to :
Phone rings by playing short track, then pauses, then plays track again, pauses, then ...
If the track is only a second or two long, then no problem - many people take longer than that to get the phone from the hook to their ear, hence the ring has stopped before they start listening/talking.
It's still a bit of a shortcut (to be polite) not stopping playback when taken off hook, but understandable if you make certain assumptions about the sound file being very short.
I mean even ignoring the 90 second ringtone issue, if you had a 10 second one and answered it on the second ring you don't want it running another 6 or 8 seconds. It should be preparted for a file long enough to catch the attention if you don't have the phone to hand, but obviously cut off pretty promptly once picked up.
After a particularly short trip abroad but which had been long in distance my team were all in the people mover that work had sent to collect us from Heathrow. This was just after mobiles got the ability to use MP3s as ringtones. Heading away from the airport one of my colleagues suddenly asked the driver to stop the vehicle please. The person sitting next to him was very alarmed fearing his neighbour was travel/car sick. The driver asked if he was about to barf and the stricken man said no but could the car please be stopped. Driver says nope and then we can all hear it…….
Coming from his bag which is in the boot separated by a ventilated plexiglass screen can be heard the Chicken Song by Spitting Image. (If you don’t know what this is do not search YouTube for it.)*
Okay it’s not so bad** and it will eventually stop which it did to relief all round. Then it restarts as the caller tries again to get through which isn’t good. It cuts out at the same spot and it is assumed the person will leave a voicemail and go away. They do but the phone rings to let the owner know there is a voicemail waiting. It does this three times before the driver pulls over onto the hard shoulder of the M4 and tells our colleague to get out. He then opened the boot of the people mover and told the man to turn it off or we would be left at the Heston services to fend for ourselves.
*I really mean it just don’t
** It could have been Joe Dolce with Shaddap Your Face***
*** That song kept Vienna by Ultravox from number 1 in the charts which is a crime.
Chicken Song by Spitting Image. (If you don’t know what this is do not search YouTube for it.)*
Apart from it being a funny parody of the "silly summer" chart hits we used to get every year, that Top Of The Pops video is the only time you'll see Ronny Reagan on Drums and Maggie Thatcher on keyboards :-)
But since you hate it so much, I shall just leave you with a couple of hints towards some different ear-worms. Agadoo doo doo, push pineapple, shake the tree...because...There's Klingons on the Starboard Bow, Starboard Bow, Starboard Bow...
I'm just glad he picked some Disco (pretty poor) as opposed to my first thought, which was a particular sketch by 'Derek and Clive' (AKA Peter Cook and Dudley Moore).
My first thought was (NSFW) this, and the second (Very NSFW) was this.
At one point, I was involved in the dev of something known as a 'Subscriber Data and Telephony Adapter', which was supposed to 'drop' both internet and voice into customer premises via a microwave-type PTP radio link. I had come up with an exchange simulator to test various call-flow scenarios and options. The Devil on my shoulder said "Hmmmm...unplug target's desk phone from floor jack, connect to the SDTA instead......program simulator to play a black-humor voice announcement (Redundancies were happening) and disconnect when any digit is dialled..."
Backfired a bit as it wasn't received well (odd, he'd do that to other people) and I had to take the morning off for safety...and eat a huuggee slice of humble pie in the afternoon to avoid HR involvement.. (Actors:Keith, Neil and myself)
Some seriously shonky coding going on there if it plays the ringtone to its end even though the call has been answered. Forget the jolly jape of It's Raining Men playing to a conclusion on every call, it means that any call will be answered with the chosen ringtone still playing unless the recipient knows to answer it as the ringtone is about to finish.
Hmmm. Not sure if the developers thought this through and tested it to any degree of sanity, or if we’re being misled a little with this Who Me.
I've had the misfortune of being a exhibitor at computer shows in the errrrrmmmmm late 80's.
For a time every other stand wanted to showcase their MIDI\Sound offerings & heard repeatedly over the summer was the Theme from Biggles The Movie or Staus Quo's In The Army Now.
Only trumped by proximity to the suite of Space Harrier machines & someone dying in game every 75 seconds for 6 or 7 days at Earls Court.
Many years ago, one of our 'louder' colleagues, who got on everyone's nerves, went off to a meeting and left his mobile phone unattended on his desk.
It didn't take long for the office prankster to unlock it and set his ringtone and notifications tone to the [in]famous clip from "When Harry met Sally" and cranked the volume right up.
When he returned from his meeting, in the company of several senior managers, someone rang his phone to the amusement of everyone in the open plan office and his great embarrassment.
Fortunately the lady from HR saw it as a joke and just said "I'll have what she's having!" rather than treating in the serious way things would happen today.
We had a similar episode of an unattended mobile 'phone in an open office.
No interference/hacking required : just pop it into the office 'fridge.
Not a perfect sound-proof box (and radio waves get throug the seals), but it dialled the level down to "minor irritation".
My late friend would do things like that. If you left your computer unlocked to use the facilities or something, he'd start sending messages to random people on the company IM system pretending to be you, or set up meetings for like 3AM on a Saturday to discuss the weather. It wasn't too uncommon to hear someone saying, "Get the hell out of my cube!" and you knew exactly what was going on without even having to look. He claimed it was to teach people about computer security, btu I knew him well enough to know he was just doing it for the shits and giggles of it.
One time many years ago one of my managers knew well that if he went on holiday he'd find something "amusing" on his return.
The company had a Cisco Call Manager network with phones with customisable screens and ringtones.
Said manager got a lot of ribbing for driving a Mazda MX5. There's a classic Harry Enfield/Paul Whitehouse sketch called Clarkson Island (look it up).
Result - phone screen had a photo of said car and when the phone rang it would shout out "Girl's Car, Girl's Car..."
Didn't backfire on me, but I saw it happen.
The resident IT geek managed to land himself a steady date with the resident office redhead. This was back in the days of cryptic Win9x error messages. So he wrote a little script, made it auto-launch, and left it on her machine. Every few minutes it would pop up some random gibberish error message. And, of course, it always came back after reboots. He proceeded to tell her to write down the errors exactly so he could properly troubleshoot them. The 50th message was something about professing his undying love for her.
Everything worked out for the best. He found more time in his schedule to code cheesy scripts, and she bestowed her ample assets on a different target of affection.
It’s actually an extract from a guitar piece called Gran Vals, composed in 1902 by the Spanish classical guitarist and composer Francisco Tárrega. Though that itself may contain references to earlier work by Chopin.
See https://thenextweb.com/news/where-did-that-nokia-theme-tune-really-come-from
Some other detail is contained in the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_tune
There are single tracks of The Dead's Dark Star up to 43 minutes long (live in Cleveland).
Greyfolded is a 109 minute compilation of Dark Star performances.
Archive.org has an 11 HOUR compilation of Dark Star but rigged to be difficult to extract. (But if I can hear it, I can record it.) https://archive.org/details/DarkStar_1972
Dark Star was first pressed as a single, 2:44. Upbeat, peppy, bouncy, almost frantic. "sank like a stone."
'darkstar' is also a hostname in Slackware Linux. And a 1974 student film.
Dark Star will always be playing, somewhere.
"It's Raining Men" is an Aerobics Craze Era power anthem.
I think it's post-Disco.
I clearly remember that Disco was declared dead some time before the Reagan/Thatcher Situation.
Consider the attire required for this song: tights (not yoga pants), an awkwardly-high-cut leotard, sweat band across the brow, and leg warmers. Not high-heel boots and polyester leisure suit.
Richard Simmons, not John Travolta.
While I love the story, I see a small issue and I'm not sure whether the issue lies with the story teller or the phone architecture.
No matter what the length of the ring tone file (lets say it is 15 seconds). If I pick up the phone in the 1st second, it'll still keep ringing for 14 seconds. Putting to one side a 90s ringtone, 14s is still a LONG time to have music (or whatever sound was downloaded) playing through a call
That doesn't seem right.
Reminds me of a similar incident back in 2003 where the startup tune for a team leader's Windows PC was changed to "Are you Ready for Love" by Elton John. Not realising that the windows startup tune at the time actually paused windows starting up. As the team leader in question had his laptop speaker muted it took some time for him to work out why his PC was taking > 3 minutes to log in!
About 20 years ago, I used to work the occasional Saturday. Not always a comfortable thing, after a heavy night's drinking on Friday..
One Saturday, I'd come in with one of my colleagues. We needed to do something to one of the servers, and it was easier at the weekend (fewer users).
Even though we worked in different offices, normally (actually different buildings), my colleague and I needed to work together.
I've no idea why we didn't use my office, which obviously had my PC, and also had another PC that probably would have been suitable, but we didn't. We went into the office of another two colleagues, and used their PCs.
One colleague was Scottish, and the other a weightlifter, who used to spend at least 20 minutes a day looking at himself in the mirror while changing into his biker leathers. So, we decided to change their Windows NT startup sounds to sounds we thought were appropriate. My colleague changed the Scottish Guy's startup sound to The Proclaimers 500 miles. I changed the weightlifter's startup sound to "I'm too sexy".
The scots guy loved his startup sound. The weightlifter, not so much. We were both called in to see the boss the next Monday, given a light telling off and ordered to undo what we had done.
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