My long-lost friend, William Muk, is rather good at photography and creative design. And it seems he’s been eating out a lot lately. So I posted him on Facebook last week to consider starting a foodie blog, but he turned me down with “I can’t wryte.” See how he’d cheekily played with the word “write” 🙂
I finally responded yesterday — I was hit by a dry spell (as in, uninspired) for a while — with this and more (see it on FB here):
“Take it slow, byte a bit at a time. Soon, you’d be adding kilos and megs, if you just do the gig. And one day, it may grow to terra-ble proportions.”
If you dig computer terminology, I made quite a few references to memory sizes in my reply, namely:
- bit: smallest unit for memory size; holds either a ‘0’ or ‘1’ as its information.
- byte: a group of 8 bits; though 7 are enough to represent the English alphabet, numbers, typical symbols and some control characters, i.e. ASCII. Also a play on the word “bite”.
- kilo: 1024 bytes; a typical unit to indicate file sizes. In the good old days when I started computer programming, 64 kilobytes was a scream!
- meg (or mega): 1024 kilobytes, or 1,048,576 bytes; this is what today’s photo files are measured by. Same goes for small videos…
- gig (or giga): 1024 megabytes; seems like a lot, but a double-sided single-layer DVD has a capacity of nearly 10 of these units. Also a pun on the English word, meaning “job of uncertain duration”, which may be what William might face should he start a food blog.
- terra (should’ve been tera; alamak, what a blunder!): 1024 gigabytes; now, that’s really plenty of memory!
Note: I haven’t been keeping up with computer stuff for a long time. It seems that now the kilobyte has become the kibibyte — see this Wikipedia write-up for more details. The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) had proposed some years ago to change this name (and others), avoiding conflicts with the SI definition of kilo (which means 1000, not 1024).
But here’s the punch line:
“Remember this — one small step for Muk, a giant step for Makan*.”
* “Makan” is Malay for “to eat”. An apt word since we are talking about food.
Good, right? That’s what a shower did to me — I emerged with a WittyCulus-ly neat play on “One small step for man, a giant step for mankind.” Oops! I didn’t realize it should have been “a giant leap…” Haiz, this one already public, got no chance to fix liao ! Lesson learned: Should have run it by Google.
