AlsaMixer tries to be poetic

I've just unplugged my Audigy 2 NX from my laptop, not noticing that alsamixer was still running.

When switching to the terminal it was running, I was greeted with:

In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away---
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

(Lewis Carroll, "The Hunting of the Snark")

The sound device was unplugged.
Press F6 to select another sound card.

Someone did have too much time...

Comments

Floris Bruynooghe wrote on 2010-02-04 22:54:

I think we should have more error messages like that. At some point I tried replacing all critical and error messages in our code at work with haikus, the result was nice but indeed just too time consuming to keep up :-(

Ben Finney wrote on 2010-02-05 01:37:

> Someone did have too much time…

Yes, and that someone was Charles Dodgson. Our culture is much richer for the free time he chose to spend writing as Lewis Carroll.

I think these are a good way (far better than an apologetic "sorry, something bad happened!" or similar) to reduce the negative emotion felt by the user on seeing an error message.

Grgeor wrote on 2010-02-06 13:47:

It’s a feature.

Send your comments to evgeni+blogcomments@golov.de and I will publish them here (if you want).