BOFH: So you want more boardroom tech that no one knows how to use BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns I sometimes forget what it's like to deal with idiots. With the PFY away with long COVID – or as we like to call it, "extra holidays" – I'm dealing with the phone calls he often fields. "Yes, but it won't switch to 4K," my user gabs. "It's not a 4K screen. It doesn't have 4K resolution …
On't work. You'll just get another board indistinguishable from the first. Oops, sorry, previous board. It can't be the first because we recently lost a board in that unfortunate accident at bonus time. In fact, with the BOFH about there must have been quite a few boards and accidents over the years.
Perhaps a detonator cap is a bit harsh, so why not a remote-controlled BOFH-style cattle prod implanted in the rectal area? I can hear the muffled "kzzzzzeeeertts" going of every time a board member so much as thinks about cutting Simon's budget. Could be fun. Besides, you could always install detonator caps as an IoT enabled "hardware upgrade"
"Fit them with those detonator caps, by all means !"
I'm not happy that links for those wasn't provided in the article. I can see how they would be very useful and worth the time to research the best ones to buy (through several dummy accounts) and some coupons for cleaning supplies, but my salary only supports a certain amount of waking time at work per day.
But why go through the hassle of making personal caps ?
Just rig up the boardroom ceiling with really high powered microwave emitters, capable of heating up any human head over 48 degrees celsius.
Then install a tilteable floor, magnetic furniture that gets fixed on place during tilting operation and a self opening window front. Relocate a generously dimensioned quicklime filled dumpster below. with a weight sensor that triggers a replacement whenever the dumpster is filled up.
All set and automated.
Maybe implement voice activation of the BrainFry whenever dangerous words like "AI" , "synergy", "cost optimisation" are uttered to prevent loss of really important people like janitorial staff.
...where a contract worth tens of millions of pounds was being agreed. I was working for a large conference venue at the time which shall remain nameless but we had all sorts in over the years. This particular lot was compromised of various managing directors, members of government, academic think-tanks. Basically no one on less than 6 figures, and most much more than that.
The conference organiser was furious because the laptop we provided had "stopped working" and given the value of the conference this was completely unacceptable, out of order, we'll be speaking to your manager etc etc.
The problem turned out to be two fold. Firstly, our laptop (some kind of Dell Inspiron if I remember correctly) had been packed up and put in a cupboard by one of the conference guests because it was "untidy".
They had substituted it with their band new MacBook air, for which, amazingly, they had the correct dongle to connect it to the rooms projection system.
The second problem was that it was asleep. Has they done literally anything, pressed any key. Moved the mouse. Touched the track pad. Anything at all, it would have woken up. Instead, this room full of people whose collective annual compensation package had to be worth more than the building we were standing in panicked and called the conference organiser, who panicked and called IT.
Tell them that the unauthorised device has flagged as a security risk on your monitoring system, and it needs to be taken away for security screening and risk management, and that any other electronic devices they have with them will also need the same treatment, because the security process required for ISO certification has now been triggered.
Collect up all their laptops, phones (personal, and work), "smart watches", non-smart, but expensive looking Veblen Good watches (just in case), PDAs, key-fob-push-button-car-start "keys", Tamagotchis, etc., and take them away. After about an hour or so, return those that you have established have little or no resale vale, and report back that all the rest have been found to be a security risk and need to be safely disposed of.
On eBay.
edit - then invoice them, individually, for "emergency remediation work" at an appropriate rate (I'd suggest £1,000 per item)
"edit - then invoice them, individually, for "emergency remediation work" at an appropriate rate (I'd suggest £1,000 per item)"
If you are an outside provider. Otherwise, there's going to be a whole load of overtime to get everything processed quickly in addition to needing to bring in some extra people (friends, SO's, etc) on danger money. If you have to, you can take the OT "in kind" so you can take paid days off when you know there's some days you really don't want to be in the office/on the same continent. Of course, your friends and significant others will be getting paid so they can stand most of the rounds wherever you decide to hole up.
"No, that was definitely an autocorrect, but I'll take it."
Turn that crap off.
I just noticed that when I intended to type "friend", I typed "fiend". Of course "fiend" is a real word so the spell checker didn't flag it. It's no longer in the computer's dictionary until the next time I update so it will be flagged the next time I do that. I've been making changes to the spell checker so real words that I'd almost never use will be highlighted and I can manually decide if that's what I wanted to type or if I'm having especially fat fingers/brain farts that day.
As Mark Twain once said: "never argue with an idiot, he'll drag you down to his level and win". And in some situations, where the cattle prod, carpet, open windows, lift shafts, stairwells, etc. aren't an option, you need a bigger idiot. This was covered in Chris Morris' Jam but the alternative is the enthusiastic idiot à la Arthur Knapp in Cabin Pressure. Just point them at the target and head for the pub,
Simon, let me know if you're interested.
> Isn't "Special K" just Rice Krispies that failed the quality control test?
Best question of the day!! Let's Giggle:
Rice Krispies looks like puffy rice; Special K is puffy flakes.
Except in Canada where, up until 2014, Canadian Special K cereal was shaped like Rice Krispies.
And RICE Krispies are not just rice anymore, but "multi-grain".
The BOFH missed a trick here. Bearing in mind a conference room filled with top of the range gear none of the users are capable of using, then isn't the correct response is to accept a large budget, and spend none of it (except perhaps a can of spray polish) in the conference room? Shuffle a few bits of kit about and remove the dust, and noone is going to know the difference.
This. Times 2.
Strike 1: my employer has just spent a pile of money installing a top grade but nonetheless company standard rig for multi site meetings. Wireless mics and everything. First senior visitor to address us in the room declined to use said mic as his voice is “loud enough”. <Rolls eyes>
Strike 2: trying to use a spiffy conference room in a shared office space. There is a big space age thing in the ceiling which turns out to be a Sennheiser conference room mic/speaker connected via a Barco click device. Said mic will not come out of mute except with one colleagues Windows laptop who has a different configuration to ours. Doesn’t work with a Mac either. Perhaps my laptop needs a super special deep state black ops registry hack that is so secret Trump is not allowed within 10 miles of it and is definitely not allowed in his bathroom.
"Bearing in mind a conference room filled with top of the range gear none of the users are capable of using, then isn't the correct response is to accept a large budget, and spend none of it (except perhaps a can of spray polish) in the conference room?"
Get the large budget and keep adding to it as complaints come in when some nob can't make it go. I can think of a few profitable things to do with a heap of top end computing gear that isn't being used very often for its intended purpose. Crypto mining comes in around #37 since it's very low ROI, draws too much power to not be noticed and makes the fans go like mad.
Years ago an internet connected BBS I was on lived in a few rack spaces of a computing center in the basement of a large company. The operator put a label on it for something that wouldn't be messed with by anybody else. Funding for the hardware came from C-level budgets for video conferencing crap that the execs thought they had to have to be a large corporation but didn't get used much since said executives found it more in character to visit in person using a private jet. Had to be kept up to the latest standards, though. It was, but at a premium price and new gear would be spec'd in whenever we filled up the storage on the BBS.
While I was working on a large corporate site, there was a medical emergency - first-aider, paramedics, ambulance, trip to A&E - in one of the training rooms.
Their employee giving the presentation, in order to connect the ceiling-mounted projector to his laptop, had climbed on an office chair (with castors) that he placed on a folding table, with predictable results.
The front-desk mounted connectors, next to his laptop, were all found to be working correctly as was the IR remote. He had just failed to use any of them.
Ironically the presentation was about health and safety at work, and the presenter ran that department.
I once had a role of Training/IT/Dogsbody... There was a high powered conference about to take place and a Wing Commander turned up 2 seconds before the start demanding to connect his laptop to our network. Muggins was duly summoned and told by the head honcho to "make it happen". We had a strict policy of nothing connects to the network without being scanned by our standalone "Hot" PC. I Iinsisted that the laptop was scanned and as the policy was signed off by Mr Honcho it was agreed with much mutterings of I'll see you later...
We plugged the laptop into the Hot Pc and I have never seen so many red flashing warnings. The Wing Commanders face was a picture :-)
A place I used to work had a very expensive back projector screen in the conference room. Nobody ever used it and eventually it was declared obsolete and got chucked out. It was replaced with a very expensive interactive whiteboard. It never really worked properly, but it didn't matter because nobody ever used it anyway. After a few years, it was no longer compatible with the current laptops. so it got chucked out. That was replaced with a newer, better, flashier, interactive whiteboard which again nobody ever used. I guess by now they've gone around that cycle several more times.
In most companies, fancy conferencing equipment is just a waste of money. Unless you have a dedicated presenter whose job is to use it every day, it will spend most of its life sitting around gathering dust and will go obsolete long before it pays for itself.
"Useless when everyone works at home, though."
If people "mostly" work at home but come together from time to time, having a digital whiteboard could be a very useful too. Those sessions would be in a space that others might use so whatever gets written down/drawn is going to be erased in short order. Being able to send the work out and save it somewhere would be handy.
At an aerospace firm I worked for, we had tons of whiteboards and I just wished they were digital. Trying to get a photo (years ago) was painful with the crappy camera on my mobe. We had loads of them since we could get them cheap second hand and having lots meant we could leave stuff up for a long time until things got transferred into more permanent homes if needed. I'm so used to using them that I feel handicapped at my home office. There's no wall space left in my office to install one. I'm thinking if I spot a whiteboard going cheap/free that will fit on the hallway wall just outside of my office, I'm going to grab it. As I get older, I think I need one on the back of the front door for reminders.
Strangely enough, no one has ever mentioned the Smartboard my colleague and I removed from one of our largest meeting rooms and replaced with an A2 flipover we had salvaged from a dumpster.
Also, board members and managers are like US Marines; likes Crayons and makes a mess...
Anonymous because 'Facilities' doesn't really count among the 'no ones'.
In most companies, fancy conferencing equipment is just a waste of money.
Essentially it is a waste. However, board members go for status over reality. I knew a CEO once that had two private planes. He never used them but they gave him bragging rights when he met with other CEOs. For bragging rights.... some have airplanes, some have Ferraris, and others have multiple mansions they never use.
We tried the "laminate a sheet with the common options" but it was deemed "untidy" and the conference booking staff kept making us take it down.
See, the problem was that the main theatre had both a left and a right projector, the idea being that it could be used as a video conference room where you could put the screen showing all the other participants on one side, and the screen showing your presentation on the other side. It also came with a pair of PCs in it - a Linux one and a Windows one. We were a technical type institute, so a lot of people had fairly esoteric custom software and needed Linux to run it. We also had a socket in the lecturn to plug a laptop into, if you had some particular reason to bring your own.
Now we have the case where you can have:
Windows Screen1 left, Screen2 right.
Linux Screen1 left, Screen2 right.
Laptop left
Laptop right.
Windows left, Laptop right
Linux left, Laptop right
Linux left, Windows right
And then there was the "overflow" and "screen cast" features that let you use the other theatres as overflow seating, so you could _also_ decide to PiP any combination of the above and send it to the IP streaming device that would encode it and send it to one of the other rooms, or to either of the screens or - if you were feeling really fancy - have the AV techs up in the control room mix it with another stream from one of the half dozen cameras that captured different angles of the theatre:
Tight shot on lecturn for presenter,
wide shot of stage,
wide shot of audience,
regular stage focus left screen only
regular stage focus right screen only,
ultra wide from back of hall capturing audience and stage
These could also be sent to either projector and streamed to another room, and streamed to the internet.
The overall matrix of what inputs could be sent to what outputs numbered comfortably in the hundreds. The spectacular complexity of the thing necessitated a whole full-height rack in the projection room full of HDMI switches, mixers, amplifiers, video-to-ip encoders and decoders... It was absolutely impossible for anyone to use that room without an AV technician running it from the big mixing desk at the back.
Of course the booking team would very happily rent it to people without a technician on the grounds that "They don't need to use all that". Which of course they didn't, but given that it was there it just confused the absolute shit out of everyone.
We would have been much better served with a big button on the lecturn that just put whatever was showing on the machine there up on one of the projectors and turned everything else off. Since, you know, that's what everyone actually did with the room anyway.
We would have been much better served with a big button on the lecturn that just put whatever was showing on the machine there up on one of the projectors and turned everything else off. Since, you know, that's what everyone actually did with the room anyway.
Of course. However, if you start with the Use cases and rank them in likelihood you quickly see what needs to be provided on a regular basis. It's essentially a risk assessment. i.e the risk of being unable to work out how to use the bloody thing.
Then you can have a laminated sheet with a flow chart for the more complex ones and a big red button for the rest.
"We would have been much better served with a big button on the lecturn that just put whatever was showing on the machine there up on one of the projectors and turned everything else off. Since, you know, that's what everyone actually did with the room anyway."
Way back in the early days of home theaters, the company I worked for did house-wide systems so you could watch a laser disc from the machine in the media room, in the master bedroom. Laser disc players were expensive at the time so not needing one in every room was a bonus. The downside was the sorts of people we did these systems for (rich and clueless) were barely able to deal with a local VCR hooked up the local TV. Even the programmable remotes we started using from a company Woz was part of was baffling to them and they were set up so one button would configure everything (with power on/off) to put the downstairs laser disc player on the upstairs master bathroom TV. The kids had the whole thing sussed in about 30 minutes. I recall one system that we installed and were just leaving after the final hookups was already understood by the homeowner's kids. Mummy and Daddy were out of town and they were throwing a party so there was some motivation.
If it took 16 months, it didn't circumnavigate the globe in 2016.
2016 was a particularly dreary year that seemed to drag on, but it was definitely not 16 months.
Solar Impulse 2 may have _finished_ its circumnavigation in 2016, but in no way did it circumnavigate the globe in 2016
I could not do it but considering food is just an inefficient way to store solar energy (plants {and animals that eat them} get their energy from the sun) then a number of people have already done it and quite a few under a year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Around_the_world_cycling_record
I believe someone did it 80 days quite some years ago too, long before solar cells, even internal combustion engines were invented :-)
And even one of the Monty Python team repeated the experience more recently[*]
* for some value of "recently" that us older farts are more likely to think of as "recent".
I worked in a place that had an unuseable hi-tech board room. Even the light switches were unuseable - touch sensitive with a set of long/short/tap commands which, in spite of the instructions being pinned on the wall next to them, were useless and annoying. We got a new MD and first he got annoyed with people who were too stupid to work the switches, then he got annoyed at the people who laughed at him when he was too stupid to work the switches and then he called facilities and told them to replace them with normal switched dimmer knobs.
The projector and connecting to it was such a pain that old-hands brought a projector with them.
Non-techie users are mostly scared of anything more complex than a TV. The more expensive and techie it is the more scared they are.
But High status users expect to be given the best kit. Often leaving the front line staff who could benefit from the high-spec stuff with the junk.
The latter doesn't just mean IT.
Over the years as a local authority specialist teachers we went through;
A thin client green screen network handed to us because it had been replaced by some more important department - which had no usable software and no collaboration facility. Which was never used and sat piled in a corner for 7 years ( we used to have an anniversary party).
Replaced by a bunch of stand-alone Windows PCs with simple networking but no shared storage area. (or back-ups).
A used sofa and a single chair which had been replaced from the top brass's office, in the waiting area that parents used.
A copier under the council contract that didn't, unlike the ones in the town-hall ( we eventually found out) have a network card so that the council could save a few quid, but meant that we couldn't print from our PCs.
A "casual" mileage allowance when we were required to travel between schools and sites, which was daily. With all the paperwork that involved. Whereas the top brass who seldom traveled far from their offices had an "essential" allowance that gave them a lump-sum payment whether they used a car at work or not ( as long as they had one). And so on.
The linking factor is that status trumps need.
A "casual" mileage allowance when we were required to travel between schools and sites, which was daily.
When I worked at the local college there were three mileage rates applicable*. Bearing in mind this was a long time ago I think it was something like 4.5p/mile local rate, essentially travel between the two campuses, 7.5p/mile if you were attending training and 15p/mile otherwise. We never, ever, saw the 15p rate, the person vetting the expenses would always insist that anything you went to counted as training. He would also check any longer distances in a road atlas** and only allow the shortest possible route, even if that meant going through the middle of London in the rush hour. He used to frequent my local and was as parsimonious with his own money as he was with the Council's - he'd happily accept drinks as part of a round but would never buy any back.
*For cars, anyway. When I commuted by bike if I did travel between the two main sites I didn't bother claiming the 1.5p/mile cycling rate!
**I said it was a long time ago! Even Autoroute was a few years away.
He would also check any longer distances in a road atlas** and only allow the shortest possible route, even if that meant going through the middle of London in the rush hour.
In which case that is the mandated route and you earn your pay sitting in traffic. And ensure that your line manager knows this.
which means its friday... and hopefully some nice ideas that us techies types can use... especially the brain caps.
Although I'd make one little tweak to their design, rather than being set off by a wireless charger, how about neural activity moniters built in that set the cap off when neural activity exceeds a preset limit.
that way for the normal day to day activities of the C-level execs nothing will happen, but the instant one of them starts to have an idea..KAPOW, because in my past experience, anything emenating from that high up the manglement chain never ends well...
Still gave me something to giggle over as I stare at the results of another hydraulic hose failure and a complete lack of PFY to help clear it up. I think her phrase sounded rather like duck off and fry
that way for the normal day to day activities of the C-level execs nothing will happen, but the instant one of them starts to have an idea..KAPOW, because in my past experience, anything emenating from that high up the manglement chain never ends well...
Yup. We have something like three different systems (two commercial, one home-brewed in house) to analyze the same set of data. :facepalm:
or substitutes for the innate vacuum in the case of the board brain space, naturely brings you back to Neuralink and another notorious cranial void.
I can imagine a custom Semtex/C-4 enabled Neuralink device for those of the Muskite faith that monitors their doctrinal adherence and terminates any heresy... heretic.
I imagine our BOFH could enlist his the assistance of PFY to add a bit of LLM/AI to one of these neuralink devices customised for the board members to "activate" in specific situations.
Keeping the quantity of Semtex low (we don't want exploding watermelons* as their occurrences become increasingly difficult to explain) the unfortunate demises can be passed off as strokes (CVAs) which were the consequence of a lavish over-renumerated, expense account life style.
* We actually do. We don't want the explanations.
Bit late to the party... Prior to every board meeting it was standard procedure for the ex-Special Branch "Security Manager", at my old FTSE-100 company to appear. This guy was only a leather overcoat short of full Gestapo, and he would produce a mysterious briefcase and ostentatiously sweep the room for hidden bugs, devices and God-knows what else. He would then activate, with obvious satisfaction, a totally illegal high-power wideband jammer for the duration of the meeting, which had the immediate effect of knocking out most cellphone & WiFi service in the area, very effectively trashing our normally quite good shared DAS / Leaky Feeder setup. It could probably fry eggs at thirty feet! Cue helpdesk meltdown, howls of pain from staff trying to get on with their real jobs. This nonsense carried on over multiple board meetings and was clearly a massive ego-trip for the arsehole. Eventually, in the face of threats to call in Ofcom (not that they would have done much in reality) and, more effectively, complaints from department heads with rather more clout than IT he rather sourly backed down and took his box of tricks somewhere else to play with - maybe the Cuban US Embassy?
"A good thing I didn't have a mouthful of coffee."
Ah, the sign of a seasoned and regular BOHF reader. Never have food or drink within reach of the keyboard when clicking the link :-)
Anyone using the keyboard icon for it's intended purpose whiloe commenting on a BOFH documentary are N00BS!!! --------------------->
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