Today on Twitter I saw a tweet related to the ability to remember the Redis port number. There is a trick, the Redis port number, 6379, is MERZ at the phone keyboard.
Is it a coincidence that it sounds not random enough? Actually not ;) I selected 6379 because of MERZ, and not the other way around.
Everything started with Alessia Merz, an Italian Showgirl (make sure to check some (not safe for work) photo as well).
I and my friends are used to create our own slang, that is evolving since... 20 or 25 years. Well one adjective that we use consistently since 10 years is "merz", but the meaning of the word changed so much in the course of the time.
Initially it started because we were really delighted by the stupidity of the sentences that the showgirl was able to state in the italian TV. So we started using "MERZ" when something was... stupid. "Hey, that's merz!". And so forth. But then with some time the meaning shifted in something stupid as pointless, but with very technical value, or with an impressive amount of skills and patience and work involved, but still... stupid.
For instance creating a 3D map of your hometown by sampling the points with a GPS and a broken car going around for the whole night, or analyzing tons of lottery data searching for biases, perfectly knowing that we'll never spend a single penny in a lottery ticket anyway, and so forth. "Merz" basically means... hack value, but is also referred to people not just things, people that act in a funny way just for hack value, or to be fun, and so forth.
So when I had to pick a port number for Redis I had no troubles, whatever number MERZ was at the phone, it was the Redis port number.
