Thursday, July 22, 2010

Meet-The-Parents

This is an email trail from my parents last night that I was cc'd in on (but did not take part in as I was asleep in Antipodean shores). Each line was a one line email with the initial subject line of: 'Translate in to English':

Mum: "Need for research in the paradigm of structured-data retrieval"
Dad: SQL
Dad: Dig up your ancestors.
Dad: Beat Alzheimers - back up your brain. In at least three places.
Mum: Let's see what Donal comes up with ... :)

6 comments:

Dad said...

What did Donal come up with?




muggins said...

Still smiling. :)

Dad said...

Well what did he?

Donal said...

Think of a box of lego and you're looking for a certain piece. If there is a big flat rug of lego unsorted and unclassified, then there is no rhyme or reason to the layout. If you categorise the lego and put it in boxes by shape, colour, function and ownership etc then you have structured data as such :) Not the best analogy but close.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unstructured_data

Dad said...

You mean it means:

Tag your Lego pieces.

Now I understand.

But they may not fit any longer :)

muggins said...

By god, that Lego was great.