Half a croissant, on a plate, with a sign in front of it saying '50c'
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Where's waugsqueke?

Pick waugsqueke out of the pictures of crowds
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This would be a series of delightfully illustrated children's books. Each page (or pair of pages) would show a scene full of people in an interesting setting (i.e., at the beach, in the park, at the zoo, etc.)

The object is to locate waugsqueke among the crowd of people. Later books in the series would have increasingly difficut scenes to pick waugsqueke out of, until the last page of the last book is a brilliant rendering of the HalfBakery. Waugsqueke doesn't actually appear in this scene, which should keep the kiddies busy for hours trying to find him.

(Does anyone know Waugs ITRW? Anybody got a clue what happened? Has this been answered someplace that I missed?)

mwburden, Dec 19 2001

The Epic Saga of the Well http://www.wired.co...l?topic=&topic_set=
Any of this sound familiar? [PotatoStew, Dec 27 2001, last modified Oct 17 2004]

Straight Dope: Colitas http://www.straight...lassics/a5_001.html
When in doubt, consult Cecil. [waugsqueke, Jan 10 2002]


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Annotation:







       Waugs wrote me that the halfb had become too great a drain on his energy, attention and time. After some introspection, he decided to "pack it in." I wish him well and I will miss him here.
bristolz, Dec 19 2001
  

       lets kidnap him!
po, Dec 19 2001
  

       no YOU have his waugs thank you
po, Dec 19 2001
  

       But will this be like UnaBubba's recent retirement from the 1/2B? I.e. will he be back in 3 days?
pottedstu, Dec 19 2001
  

       Maybe, but his history of annos and ideas won't, alas.
bristolz, Dec 19 2001
  

       SIGH and not a sigh of relief. bristolz - tell waugs to come back in after Halfbakerlosis goes into remission.
thumbwax, Dec 20 2001
  

       Is there any way for Jutta to bring back his ideas and comments, or are they gone for good? Restore the account and make it undeletable?
cp, Dec 20 2001
  

       He deleted his account? Wow. I thought he was just stepping out for the holidays.   

       [cp]: regarding bringing back his account and making it undeleteable, I'm almost positive jutta would *not* do that, as it would kind of defeat the purpose of allowing account deletion.
PotatoStew, Dec 20 2001
  

       any x-filers out there - I am reminded of the last scene in "Ghost in the machine"   

       Are we sure he has not just reincarnated himself? This Pert Oak chap is highly dubious for a start.
po, Dec 20 2001
  

       Is this the first time an eminent halfbaker has left *and* deleted everything? I know various (e.g. Mickey The Fish) have stopped visiting, but not deleted their accounts... It might be appropriate to notify people at this point that one of lewisgirl's New Year's Resolutions is to be to try to redress the time ratio between schoolwork and bakerytime, so if the resolution is successful, there will be a lot less lg on the pages of the HB. But 12 months on you stand a chance of getting a new member called Dr Lewis.
lewisgirl, Dec 20 2001
  

       I agree that it’s a shame about waugs’ annotations getting deleted along with his account. It’s left a great number of threads hanging and I doubt (though I don’t know) if that was waugsquekes intention. As PeterSealy has noted elsewhere, this does seem to highlight a weakness in the interface. People should, of course, be able to delete their annotations and their account if they so desire but it would be nice if jutta could come up with some way of preventing the ‘scorched earth’ effect that has occurred here. I guess that that would require a radical change in the programming relationship between a persons account and their annotations though. Not a short job.
DrBob, Dec 20 2001
  

       cp, PotatoStew: I'm pretty sure Jutta does have logs of everything that's annotated even if it's deleted (but I'm not sure how far back they're kept). But it would be unfair for her to restore waugs without his permission.
pottedstu, Dec 20 2001
  

       I don't need to do anything. If you want to change your password, change your password. If you want to delete your account, delete your account. The decision is up to the person deleting it.
jutta, Dec 20 2001
  

       If you post to a public forum, then maybe your comments can no longer be considered *yours* any more, so they could be kept without any ethical objection. The forum could be pretty badly harmed by 3 or 4 significant people pulling out. I dunno.
lubbit, Dec 20 2001
  

       If the forum gets harmed by significant people pulling out, maybe the forum needs harming. Maybe it is taking itself too seriously. (Admittedly a scary idea, lubbit...)   

       This isn't a yahoo group or one of those write-only BBSes. This site doesn't keep a history. Here, stuff can change. In order to accomodate change, you have to periodically go back and see, is your comment still relevant, or was it just banter? Is the site you linked to still there? Has the person that you admonished fixed their typo?   

       (It would be nice to be able to specify, "I'm referring to this, this, and this", and to automatically be told when these things change, but I don't know how to do this with an interface that is easy enough to actually use - we're used to just doing these things with language, not by checking boxes or whatnot.)   

       So, this is different, but I enjoy this set of problems over "oops, I posted something stupid and now it's set into stone forever" (or until the provider decides to shut down their site without warning and sell their address list).
jutta, Dec 20 2001
  

       The user ID 'waugsqueke' could be retired like a hockey player's number (in part to avoid confusion or deliberate impersonation). And maybe hung from some sort of metaphorical rafter.   

       Alternatively, recovered posts and account details might be used to construct a waugsqueke AI that would post funny things from time to time and then eventually completely derail and kill us all.
Monkfish, Dec 20 2001
  

       this is bad, I will miss him. I don't have the nerve to look at all the posts I know he responded to such as the post on Vanity Racehorses....they can't be anywhere near as fun and interesting now....
Susen, Dec 20 2001
  

       I've never deleted my account, and I'm not about to experiment, but when you get your confirmation screen, does it warn you that you'll be deleting all your annotations? I'm almost tempted to try, and then say 'no' at 'are you sure', just to see.
pottedstu, Dec 20 2001
  

       Bristolz, tell Waugsqueke I said hi and bye...   

       Might it, speaking to everyone now, not be appropriate to ask if we could restore the annotations? If Jutta had the ability and Waugs and Jutta both were willing to do so...   

       It will make a lot of things look strange, now...I know I used to reply directly to him a lot...
StarChaser, Dec 21 2001
  

       No. I don't think it's appropriate to second-guess people in this way (that is, I wouldn't even ask), and it would take weeks to put the annotations back in.   

       Rods Tiger, nicely said.
jutta, Dec 21 2001
  

       I don't think it would hurt to ask, but I don't want to make that much work for you...
StarChaser, Dec 21 2001
  

       I've been thinking about the implications of all this for a couple of days now. I absolutely agree with what has been said about the positive side of shaking things up every now and again (the king is dead, long live the king!) but I also think that the effect of deleting great chunks of annotation will eventually make old ideas incomprehensible for newcomers to the 1/2bakery.

One of the great complaints that the 'regulars' have is that of 'newbies' ( I don't like that word incidentally, it doesn't seem very welcoming to me) rehashing old arguments. I think that this is bound to increase if the old arguments have big holes in them, although I'm not sure if this is a good thing or not. One of my favourite quotes is "he who does not re-read, learns nothing". The same can be said of old arguments.

This is an exaggeration of the current position, of course, but these things tend to have a cumulative effect over time and I feel that it's best to address them at an early stage.

In a similar vein to the first point, I also agree and disagree with Rods' comment about nothing important going on here. I agree, in that the basic reality of the world isn't going to be affected by anything that happens in this forum but I also disagree in that, quite clearly, the 1/2bakery provides a common focus for people who like a bit of mental candy to make their day interesting. It really is a community and anything that brings people together in that way is not unimportant, no matter how trivial the actual content. That's not to say that the halfbakery is particularly significant. It just happens to be the place where I choose to make my contribution.

Before this all turns into an incoherent ramble (if it hasn't already), I'll conclude by saying that, after a bit of thought, I'm glad that waugs has deleted his account because it really does raise some interesting questions. I hope that he's doing something that he feels is fulfilling instead.
DrBob, Dec 21 2001
  

       The thing is (in my opinion anyway) that deleting off topic annotations is not a bad thing but when the whole topic disappears... I wonder how long it will be before some new person posts one of his ideas again and will they be attacked for doing something they couldn't have avoided?   

       Now there is a thought - if someone was to systematically re-post all of waug's ideas, how long would it take before we noticed?
RobertKidney, Dec 21 2001
  

       I don't know if you'd consider this a bug or not, but one thing that evidently was not destroyed with waugsqueke's account is the links to his now-vaporised ideas. The specific example I noticed was on "Bushido Newspaper Carriers," which was inspired by one of his ideas. A link back to that original idea still exists, but it now leads to a dead url.
beauxeault, Dec 21 2001
  

       I used to have that working in the old code, but didn't have the time to put it into the new code. May happen in the future.
jutta, Dec 22 2001
  

       About a year ago I pushed [delete] just to see what would happen … um, psych … and stopped the action. It seems that a bunch of annotations to other's ideas were gone, but original reensure stuff was there still. Interesting, but I resolved to be less the pain in the ass and more contientious of the regs and NOOBes. 'bye waug.
reensure, Dec 22 2001
  

       To each his own--burn the bridges, flame out, take a breather, go silent, lurk more and write less, whatever. It's all valid. See ya waugsqueke.
Dog Ed, Dec 22 2001
  

       I don't know as much about the 1/2 bakery as all of you (being a 'newbie' and all) yet I beleive that it would be a good idea to have an option not to delete your ideas and annotations when you delete your account.   

       I don't know exactly know how familiar any of you are with the role-playing-game Dungeons and Dragons, but I know that if a campaign (aka: plotline or story) ends (for reasons like it was just the end of the story, argument between players, or millions of other things), the stat sheets, maps, and battle scrap paper still exist as a reminder of times past so reminising, or perhaps even rekindling can occur. Sure, niether the 1/2 bakery, nor a silly RPG 'mean' anything, but then again, what does? Who is to say that this type of human interaction, intelectualization, and just plain fun means nothing? The 1/2 bakery, as much as anything else, can alter the course of our lives for the better or, yes, even the worse. So how can anyone but 'meaning' on anything, since even the smalest things sometimes make the largest effect in their own time.   

       Anyhow, In a situation such as this, to delete the ideas or annotatons, or to burn the stat sheets and maps, is denying it ever happened. No matter how much credit we try to give to the human mind, everything is forgotten if we have no physical representation to remember something by. Sure, everyone will remember waugsqueke, but what about all of his ideas? Let us not slip into a web forum type '1984', For whoever controls the past indeed controls controls the future, and that, in my opinion, is a power no one should have.
NeverDie, Dec 22 2001
  

       there are butterflies at the end of my garden.....
po, Dec 22 2001
  

       I would have trouble distinguishing that from its Markov chain output.
jutta, Dec 23 2001
  

       Neither the vanishers or the stayers are responsible for our own growth
po, Dec 23 2001
  

       How does one pronounce 'waugsqueke'?
cp, Dec 24 2001
  

       [PeterSealy]: It's in merchandise because presumably one could print the book that I described and sell it. It would presumably be somewhere near the "Where's Waldo" books in the bookstore.
mwburden, Dec 24 2001
  

       For the record I deleted my whole account a while back and it took quite a while for it to be deleted successfully. This saw quite a lot of ideas, links and annotations removed from the Halfbakery.   

       However this is just par for the course. It's the Halfbakery, you can explicitly do this kind of thing and each of us only has so many heart-beats before we die. Waugsqueke's decision should be respected as soon we know it was a considered one and should not bother him with our trivia and distractions.   

       There is a time for all things and all things have a time.
Aristotle, Dec 24 2001
  

       (((((blissmiss)))))
thumbwax, Dec 25 2001
  

       bliss, I think Peter in his inimitably understated way was actually being quite sympathetic - believe it or not. (mind you if he had said that to me I'd have understated him in the mush in my own inimitable way.)
po, Dec 26 2001
  

       I came across a Wired article about The Well (see link... it's a long article, but very interesting), a very early online community. As I read it, I kept thinking, "This is talking about Halfbakery". It was weird, and made me feel kind of queasy at the same time.   

       To those who have said this place doesn't matter: I'm not sure I would be so quick to say that. Surely it must be different for every halfbaker. To some, it may be an extremely important place. To others, it may be a fun, yet mostly obsession-inducing time sink. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. The problem occurs when it's one of those two for you, but you mistakenly think it's the other one.
PotatoStew, Dec 27 2001
  

       Good link, PotatoStew. It goes on a bit but a fascinating read nevertheless. It's all been done before!
DrBob, Dec 27 2001
  

       29 pages and Well worth it.....
Susen, Dec 27 2001
  

       A lot less expensive, you mean?
DrBob, Dec 28 2001
  

       mwb: you'd have to know what I look like in order to find me.   

       'wax: my Halfbakerlosis seems to be clearing up (the medicated ointment helped a lot). And bris did exactly that.   

       Great comments here. Thanks all for the kind words. I seem to have triggered a very interesting debate. I tend toward jutta's view. Nothing is sacred.
waugsqueke, Jan 09 2002
  

       welcome back
quarterbaker, Jan 09 2002
  

       and so the world comes back up to full rotational speed.
bristolz, Jan 09 2002
  

       [waugsqueke] Easy, you just look for the guy wearing a tee-shirt with an ingredients list for the human body!
mwburden, Jan 09 2002
  

       There is order in the universe
thumbwax, Jan 09 2002
  

       You've got me there.   

       Y'know, it's really quite something how quickly it all comes rushing back.
waugsqueke, Jan 09 2002
  

       Hell is beginning to thaw again.
Galileo, Jan 10 2002
  

       First UnaBubba, now waugsqueke...so who's next to fake his or her death?
iuvare, Jan 10 2002
  

       Well, "death" is a bit strong. Hey, folks are fickle. Rather than conduct an autopsy, I'm rather pleased just to have them both here intact.
bristolz, Jan 10 2002
  

       I'm glad you're back waugsqueke, TPPCPPC was one of the first ideas I read at the halfbakery. It had me *crying* with laughter. I have never been so grateful to Google for their caching function, the page is now stored on my hard drive for posterity.   

       Haven't laughed so hard since I discovered Mondegreens... what is it about lyrics that contains such intrinsic humor value?
madradish, Jan 10 2002
  

       Oh My God! TPPCPPC was lost? Now that's definitely a bad thing. We may have to start that again.
lewisgirl, Jan 10 2002
  

       [Rods Tiger] ...you can check out any time you like...
hippo, Jan 10 2002
  

       iuvare... it's all about circumstances. At the time, it was necessary to leave, and it did not appear that the situation was going to change. I left with no intent to return. I assure you nothing was faked. (No mirrors, no camera tricks.)   

       However, the situation has indeed changed. Plus, I was coerced.   

       The popularity of TPPCPPC song lyrics always mystified me. I'm glad y'all liked it, but I had posted it on a lark, really. It's not typical HB fare, and I don't think it warranted making the top 10 list by any means. I still have it, and can re-create it for posterity if favo(u)rable to the general consensus.   

       "Warm smell of colitis... "
waugsqueke, Jan 10 2002
  

       Rods, I heard it was some sort of Spanish reference to marijuana.   

       (added: Voila... c'est un link pour vous, aujourd'hui.)
waugsqueke, Jan 10 2002
  

       Okay, I feel like I've totally missed out. What's TPPCPPC?
RayfordSteele, Feb 20 2002
  

       I was going to say that. What on earth is he up to?
DrCurry, Jan 15 2003
  

       [Waugsqueke]'s annual holiday. Now who's going to ride up front with me?
egbert, Jan 15 2003
  

       I highly recommend it.
waugsqueke, Jan 15 2003
  

       what's going on here? Does waugsqueke have a periodic self-destruct set on a timer to destroy his account every month? I remember in the good ol' days when he was almost always around.. yadda yadda.. pointless reminiscing..
Parvenu, Jan 15 2003
  

       Sure, whatever.
Parvenu, Jan 15 2003
  

       <sigh> not again :(
madradish, Jan 16 2003
  

       Do you mean :( because he's gone again, or :( because he's again back again?
egbert, Jan 17 2003
  

       Both ;)   

       Actually because he was gone when I posted that. Also because I'll now have to prevail upon him to post TPPCPPCSL for a *third* time.
madradish, Jan 17 2003
  

       Nae, its time has passed, finally. btw, I never went anywhere, I just cleaned up a bit.
waugsqueke, Jan 17 2003
  

       Keep your friends close and your enema's closer.
DrBob, Jan 17 2003
  

       Schrodinger's waugsqueke. He's experiencing fluctuating wave-particle duality; tries to leave but somebody keeps opening up the box...
RayfordSteele, Jan 17 2003
  

       There's something oddly appropriate about the total swiss-cheesing of this idea, isn't there?
DrBob, Jul 31 2003
  

       Actually, it looks like he's referring to him as "oddly appropriate."
bristolz, Sep 01 2003
  

       Jes who?
FarmerJohn, Sep 01 2003
  

       Jes Kidding.
po, Sep 01 2003
  

       Aw, see how quick you can learn to love him?
egbert, Sep 01 2003
  

       Money? Cookies? What is it?
k_sra, Sep 02 2003
  

       Hmm...These Boots Were Made For Walking ~Nancy Sinatra...
Tiger Lily, Sep 02 2003
  

       Robert Frost?
jivetalkinrobot, Sep 02 2003
  

       You keep saying, [renbo'], you got somethin' for me
Somethin' you call heav'nly cookie dough, but confess
You've been cookin' where you shouldn't have been cookin'
And now someone else is eating all your best!
Tiger Lily, Sep 02 2003
  

       Thanks, but I'm on a diet. You should have them, [Tiger Lily], for that superb poem!
jivetalkinrobot, Sep 02 2003
  

       like your boots, tiger!
po, Sep 02 2003
  

       is that advertising?
po, Sep 03 2003
  

       // What would you recommend? //   

       The help file for starters is full of clues. I have a feeling some folks thought you were someone who had been here before but then left, (we have that from time to time, people who get booted for being jerks but then come back pretending to be someone else).   

       So that was why they raised an eyebrow when you called waugs as waugs; it seemed like you were already pretty familiar with the culture, which was somewhat unusual.   

       Another thing I'd recommend is clicking on the 'view' button. Lots of options there to do searching and custom views and such.   

       Read through some of the 'Best' list, and perhaps some of the poems or songs as well to get some halfbakery history. Might help to read through the 'Worst' list, and figure out why they bombed. Not easy with all of the swiss-cheesing that's happened for some.   

       Don't forget to be yourself, and don't worry too much about fish or croissants. People who react badly to fish, (rant and rave or whine or whatever) tend to accumulate more fish.
RayfordSteele, Sep 03 2003
  

       Where's waugsqueke?   

       "Well, his lil' piggy toe use da squeek sumpin' arful ever time it gotsed hung up on sumpin' but I ah reckin he dun gotsed it oild --lessin he finely gots dit sole' down at da market".   

       Crying shame winna man has sumpin' like dat happ'n to 'im, bein' a lil' swine always follerin' ya 'round in yer boot an' all.   

       Ah pity the piggy gettin' caught for dat sin...
Tiger Lily, Sep 03 2003
  

       Rene Descartes!*   

       *Diet cookies to whoever picks the show from which I stole this.
Detly, Sep 03 2003
  

       I don't wanna rain down on everyone's parade here...but i'm gonna anyway. This idea has been baked, as i'm sure all of you know, so that's why i'm giving it a fishybone. Does where wally ring a bell...Or how about "find Kanga", those crappy books qantas give out to the kiddies every flight. Sorry, it had to be done
Mind_Boggle, Sep 04 2003
  


 

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