Saturday, July 19, 2008

New Rule

Wright's Law of the Random Shuffle: All playlists contain one obnoxious, irritating song that you thought you enjoyed when you put it on there but since have determined you dislike, intensely - however, you are too lazy to remove it. If you put your player on random shuffle, the player will ignore the other two hundred and fifty songs on the list and repeatedly come back to the one tune you can't stand. Over and over and over.

The songs you really want to hear will never come up. Ever.


  1. Dude, that's just a restating of Murphy's Law of Electronics.

    Other statements of this same law include:

    "The solder joint that is broken will be in the most inaccessible and delicate place on the circuit board."

    "The first component to fail will be the most expensive."

    Software versions include yours, and

    "The bug will only show up when the user is busiest / most irritated."

    One particular one to my lab was:

    "The clueless Eastern European will decide to clean the dust out of the detector's interior before you have a chance to explain that those 'cobwebs' are actually the wiring from the mother board to the CCD chip. In the camera we got custom-made out of a surplus spy satellite CCD."

  2. And no matter what, your car won't make that noise when you get it to the shop.

  3. Nathan's pointed to the Special Automotive Case of the natural law that says "No intermittent malfunction is observable by more than one witness." The same exact thing happens when you try to show someone else something a computer or other electronics device was doing.


    "See, when you do this, it... huh. It's not doing it now. It was doing something weird earlier."


    "No, seriously. Watch, when you... what the hell. It's not doing it."

    "If you'd like to stop wasting my time, I'll be in my office."

    "Right. Sorry. I wonder what--hey, come back, it's doing it again!"

    "It's doing it again, okay, let me--what's it doing."

    "You'll never believe this, but it started working again as soon as you came back in."


    "I'm serious! It was totally--where are you go--hey, it's messing up again! Hey, come back! It's messed up again! No, come look!"


    The reason this happens is because machines hate us.

  4. Estimates are never revised downward, only upward.

    Dogs never pee/puke on the linoleum, only on carpet. Or bedding.

    Camera batteries never run out when you're at home, taking pictures of flowers in the garden - only when you're two thousand miles away at Yellowstone with no charger.

    PS: Delete the song. It was 99 cents. You won't miss it. ;)

  5. 99 cents?

    Naw, I load my ZEN from my music library with is, uh, extensive. Basically it cost me nothing. Also, because the ZEN has so much storage capacity, I basically load entire albums, or entire catalogs for artists I like - which means I get the songs I like, but I also get the artist's crappy b-sides as well.

    And the dammed song only plays when I'm doing finishing work, i.e. my hands are encased in nitrile gloves and covered in spar varnish. Later, when my hands are free, I forget.

