Dylan Greene dot com

Item one:

Last year there was a recall of exploding frying pans. For some reason I found this funny.

"The pans can explode or separate when preheated, used on high heat or used for frying," the safety commission said in a statement.

It explodes when you fry something in it.

Apparently "frying stuff" was not in the test plan for the frying pans.

Item two:

During the run-up to Windows XP Service Pack 2 Beta in December of last year, there was a list of five bugs that the release management team decided were so critical that they were going to slip the beta until those bugs got fixed.

The third bug on the list: Deer Hunter 4 won't run.

Deer Hunter has the power to stop a beta.

Source: Exploding frying pans and Do not underestimate the power of the game Deer Hunter.

Both of these I read on Raymond Chen's blog The Old New Thing.  His blog is often fascinating and humorous as he explains the history behind seemingly strange and awkward decisions Microsoft (and others) has made that we now live with.  Here are some classics:

• Why do you have to click the Start button to shut down?
• Why is the default 8-bit codepage called "ANSI"?
• Why is the line terminator CR+LF?
• Why isn't Fast User Switching enabled on domains? 
• Why does the taskbar default to the bottom of the screen? 
• The martial arts logon picture
• An insight into the Windows 95 startup sound 
• What did the letters "NT" originally stand for? 
• Why Daylight Savings Time is nonintuitive 
• Why doesn't Windows have an "expert mode"?