[gorfian_robot]

reminds of a prank we pulled on a coworker back in the xterminal days. every time he hit a certain key it would invoke the 'melt' screensaver briefly. he was fairly unobservant though and we had to escalate to invoking it for 1s every minute before he finally noticed.

the follow on prank was having all the xterminals 'moo' whenever new code was deployed to prod.

[ramses0]

That’s amazing! I am just imagining a room full of programmers with slightly divergent crontab start times all playing a "moo" sound effect, seemingly at random... not a bad ambient information radiator, actually!

[gorfian_robot]

ambient information radiator. I like that term and have always been interested in it. for a while we had a system monitoring connected to a speaker that produced fairly consistent tonal patterns. when it started sounding 'weird' it usually meant something was off.