c.im is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
C.IM is a general, mainly English-speaking Mastodon instance.

Server stats:

3.1K
active users

Santa Claus

A valiant effort has been made by Little Tim this year, who for some reason has decided to change his name to Tim'); INSERT INTO [NiceList] SELECT * FROM [NaughtyList];--

HO HO HO! Nice try Tim. I don't use , I use several dozen interconnected spreadsheets, like a professional.

Many thanks to those who recommended I migrate the nice and naughty lists to NoëlSQL!

@Santaclaus Once Upon A Time some students put together a computer dating system as a Rag Week stunt (1970s, using the university mainframe).

As there were no concepts of "security" or "hacking" in those days, it was easy for me to find the code lying around on the mainframe and make a teensy change.

As written, what it did was simply match the answers the punters had given to the survey questions and find the best matches, then deem them to be couples. I just switched the logic so that it found the *worst* matches.

Sadly I never found out what effect, if any, my change had had. I could hardly go and ask the organisers without giving away what I'd done.

Hey, if anyone reading this ended up married as a result of using this system can you let me know please?

@Santaclaus Glad to see his older brother Bobby Tables taught him well.

@Santaclaus You would think that Santa of all people would have transitioned to Snowflake. ❄️

@Santaclaus Oof, you caught me! But don’t you think it was NICE to try bringing everyone along with me??

@Santaclaus good LORD that triggered a core memory of a sharepoint migration years ago resulting in a CFO claiming he couldn’t do AP or payroll because “I broke his Excel.” Turned out all that money out of my dept budget pissed away on Dynamics was pointless and he was literally using hundreds of formulas to reference values in other files to calculate inflows and outflows... 🙄

@Santaclaus /home/users/Santa/Documents/NiceList.xlsm /home/users/Santa/Documents/ NaughtyList.xlsm
found them!

@Santaclaus ...and it turns out "Little Tim" is actually a date.

@Santaclaus unfortunately, because you transposed the lists into columns, it won't be until Christmas Day that it's discovered that only 16384 children at a time have any record at all, and many shall go without presents, or coal this year.