BOFH: The new Boss, Aiman, is suspiciously good – for now BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns So I'm sitting in on an interview committee to choose a new Boss. A new Boss from a candidate pool of one. Aiman. One applicant never showed, one called this morning to say she had a better job elsewhere, and the third of the four possibles wanted to negotiate his package by doubling his …
Careful what you wish for!
This episode is too close to lived experience for my liking. :(
The Djinn boss - you rub the the brass bottle and poof "your wish is my command" - never Barbara Eden is it?
Actually the F Anstey novel "The Brass Bottle" (1900) is worth a read and the 1964 movie too in which Eden also appeared (non Djinni role.)
Inevitable defeat as a consequence gratuitous wish fulfillment seens to be the lesson of both book and movie. :)
I imagine Simon is going to have his new boss quietly sectioned and strap his boss AI/LLM model onto the boss' home computer and periodically siphon the boss' bank account into his own bofh slush fund account.
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I work from home and two of my kids are homeschooled. Our best family-level friends have the kid-candidates, and it would just turn into playtime for all of them, especially in the summer -- outside in the pool (and uninterrupted work for me, or an early log-off for pool time).
Apart from passing the time, I do not doubt Aiman's salary (and settlement money) will somehow end up in Simon's Lager fund.
Aiman as a name was a bit of a giveaway, I must say. Great episode nonetheless, and 'bring someone else's child into work' day is brilliant (as is ordering chairs for all employees with standing desks.
My guess was that the other three candidates were genuine, but that Simon had made them pull out by clever mail server admin tricks. Faking two incoming withdrawal emails and two outgoing "the position has been filled" emails and passing the wrong interview address to the third or something.
Esperanto is the official galactic unions language in the "stainless steel rat"/James Bolivar diGriz series from Harrison.
The intriguing thing about this artificial language is a very simple, non mutating grammar and for non-esperantians its astonishingly readable in textform. I came across a text in esperanto in a german textbook in primary school/"grundschule", third term and could understand quite a lot of the text. Later coincidental contacts with texts in esperanto were a similar experience.
Esperanto is simple and straightfoward, and will stay so, until it becomes widely-spoken. Then, like all other widely-spoken human languages, it will mutate, because people always have, and probably will continue to, mutate their spoken languages. Homonyms will be created, intentional mis-spellings will gain currency, linguistic puns will be made, and marketers will do their corruptive bit (the latest trend is the omission of vowels in company and trade names; locally, I've seen "Hyphn", "NBRHD", etc.).
Yup. Even languages that have official academies that dictate What Is and What Cannot Be (French, and to a lesser extent Castillian Spanish), dialects will always happen (Quebecois French, every Spanish that isn't Spain Spanish). ...In fact, you could argue the reason Esperanto hasn't taken off (besides its lack of intrinsically-bound identity and culture besides "look at me learning this language"), is because of the stiff-upper-lip approach to following Da Rules™. It's a noble idea, creating a language that can be anyone's second language regardless of their first language... but until there's a critical mass of people for whom Esperanto is their birth language, it'll always remain a niche.
As there are already other made up languages around, at least it might survive along romulan, klingonese and the tolkien-novel related gibberish.
But its still the only artificial language i know that gives fast access to basic understanding, pretty well designed as it seems to me.
If we're alluding to one Linus Torvalds, I think I'm right in saying that his native tongue is Swedish, and he speaks Finnish fluently, but as a second language. Further reading
Well, he definitely swears in suomi when he sees bad pull requests on the LKML.
Semi-related fun fact: Lithuanian is one of the few languages to not have expletives as a general language feature. If you're in Lietuva and you need to curse, mówisz po polsku, kurwa!
I have worked at one company that had a genuinely wonderful HR manager. She even stood up to the finance director when he asked her to do something illegal (he was desperate to cover up some dubious decisions he'd made by getting another director fired). It ended up with the finance director being frogmarched off the premises. The HR manager was then in the sights of some of the other directors with dodgy things to hide, such as giving contracts to mates that they then never delivered on. Things got quite nasty, but taking on a competent HR manager is not a good idea - she stuck it out until she had enough evidence to easily win a constructive dismissal case and net thousands in compensation. Since the company was a part public financed one and the press got wind of what was going on (I was involved in the whistleblowing) quite a few directors left to "seek opportunities elsewhere". My own director, who had given one contract with no sound business case to her lover and another to her close friend, had to agree to a period of not being able to work as a company director.
["BUT WHY?" the PFY snaps.
"Well, it passes the time."]
"And until that happens guess who is getting most of his pay? I did need a replacement gaming rig... and the killer Roombas needed upgrades... and I was out of beer money."
"Got the fancy beer then?"
"Is on tne fancy mini fridge that I stole and hid on the server room... I think during the pandemic? It has COVID beware stickers so it may have been during the pandemic when it would have been quite easy to steal it."
fits into a 19" rack... Then grab the front bezels of some old DELL servers and stick them to the front.
As those bezels are full of holes and gaps and general lack of design, grab a stack of old Hot-plug disks, cut the end with the locking arm off, connect wires to the LEDs in that piece and stick them to the door before placing the bezels.
For extra points, fit pressure transducers to the shelves and use an arduino to display the number of lagers on each shelf as a RED LED among the Green ones.
Yes, you can use a RPi to connect it to the network and show it all on a fancy website, but what's the fun in that?
I had a boss once who nearly bought a a rack mount fridge but couldn't work out which bits of his rack-mount HiFi to remove from our broadcast-chain racks to make space. Personally I'd have kept the nice CD player and amplifier and lost the satellite crate; no-one deserved the Chart Show every week.
M.
I think that the closest USian phrase would be "garden variety". That is, perfectly ordinary, normal, run-of-the-mill, plain... you get the picture. It doesn't usually mean sub-standard or shoddy. Now, shoddy is an interesting word, originally it was
Sorry, Nurse says I have to stop now.
Unless you come from the Spen valley part of the textile industry specialising in using recycled woollen fibres - not necessarily from old clothes, but also from waste generated within the textile and tailoring industries. It had the reputation of being hard-wearing but down-market.
For dropping your mobile in the toilet at work while hiding from your boss. damnit made me laugh so much they also managed to find me and drag me off to a meeting....
Luckily , for all my bad behaviour and cynical attitude I'm pretty much un-fireable... unlike our new production engineer who was a bit out of his depth.... And no the PFY did not push him into the plating tank either (it was very tempting though....... )
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