It’s been quite a while since I last was an active member of BLF (by my estimates about half a year or so has gone by). We recently finished the move to our new warehouse and showroom location in San Jose and our expansion into the e-cig market (batteries+chargers) have kept me so busy I stopped checking in. I’ve been hanging out a lot on the /r/flashlight subreddit on Reddit.com and on the freenode ##flashlight channel come check us out there! and we’re in the prototype stages of our first flashlight design. I just wanted to apologize for anyone who has tried to contact me in the last half year or so and look forward to being a regular member of BLF again. So what’s been going on BLF? Got any questions for me? Ask away!
Whatya talkin about Wilis? Most of us know that you have had a crazy 6 months. As far as I am concerned you and Illuminations have still always come through.
It’s a catch phrase from the TV show Diff’rent Strokes.
The first time I saw it was when I gave Netscape a URI it didn’t understand. It responded with an error page which said only “Whatchew talkin’ ’bout, Willis?”.
Those were good times, when popular software didn’t take itself so seriously, when errors could be playful. Kind of like how Chrome has a dinosaur game when something won’t load. One of my favorites was how the xv image tool responded to errors:
It comes to mind sometimes in group buy threads when there’s nothing I can do to help someone: Unlucky person: My light finally showed up and it’s broken. Me: Bummer!
Can’t actually say that, of course. Sigh.
Most of the amusing unix error messages have been replaced with less silly ones. None of these work any more:
$ cat "food in tin cans"
cat: cannot open food in tin cans
$ ar x "matey, the treasure"
ar: matey, the treasure does not exist
% If I had a ( for every $ Congress spent, what would I have?
Too many ('s.
% sleep with me
bad character
% [Where is Jimmy Hoffa?
Missing ].
% ^What is saccharine?
Bad substitute.
% got a light?
No match.
% man why did you get a divorce?
man: Too many arguments.
Hi Calvin, will be great if your new own design flashlight has some european distributor. (here is very dificult get acceptables prices from US now, because the shipping cost (for one unit) and Tax).
