Sunday, April 11, 2010

The Dissatisfactory Doily

The most recent incarnation of SIGBOVIK, the annual celebration of all that is computer science humor, occurred on April 1st. I didn't have much time to recap it earlier, but it went very well. With the exception of being just a tiny bit long, this may have been the best SIGBOVIK ever. If you're interested in a (free) electronic copy of the proceedings or a ($7) paper copy of the proceedings, go back and click those links!

But I mostly wanted to talk about my own paper, The Dissatisfactory Doily. The premise of the paper is this: You own a sports team. You are jealous of the Pittsburgh Steelers and their ability to sell $10 Terrible Towels. You's like to make your own, but you don't have a clever, alliterative name. Well look no further than the Dissatisfactory Doily, a random name generator for Terrible Towel knock-offs. It takes a list of adjectives (synonyms for terrible) and a list of nouns (cloth-related) and spits out your new product name. For a long list of examples, please see the paper, but some of my favorites are, The Wanton Wall-to-Wall Carpeting, The Abominable Afghan, and The Horrendous Hanky.

In further news, this was likely my last year as SIGBOVIK MC. It's been a lot of fun, but my jokes are getting stale. Time to pass the torch!

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