BOFH: Well, we did tell you to keep the BitLocker keys safe BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns "How bad is it?" the Boss asks, checking for about the 20th time today. "Still bad," I say. "But haven't you done the fix?" "We're still working on it," I say, not looking up from my screen. The PFY, on the other hand, is wordlessly focused on scribbling away at a sheet of paper. " …
>Seriously, what is it about American chocolates leaving that slight tang of vomit behind?
It's a nasty tasting chemical added to make them shelf stable in hot weather - as an alternative to the primitive European option of using more cocao
That "slight taste of vomit" comes from the milk Hershey's uses. Even though it comes from their own dairy, the milk has to be "soured" to get what Hershey called the "proper taste".
If you get Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, the peanut butter covers the taste in the chocolate.
The difference is simply the percentage of cacao. US bureaucrats permit as little as 10%. The "odd" flavor is likely the result of milk reacting with the acid in the cacao. That would tend to start the milk artificially souring. More chocolate would mask that flavor with the bitter and savory notes of the chocolate. The better US chocolates can be very high in cacao percentage. My wife prefers a 70% bar.
I'm here with the Pertinent Pratchett:
Ankh-Morpork people, said the guild, were hearty, no-nonsense fold who did not want chocolate that was stuffed with cocoa liquor and were certainly not like effete la-di-dah foreigners who wanted cream in everything. In fact, they actually preferred chocolate made mostly from milk, sugar, suet, hooves, lips, miscellaneous squeezings, rat droppings, plaster, flies, tallow, bits of tree, hair, lint, spiders, and powdered cocoa husks. This meant that, according to the food standards of the great chocolate centers in Borogravia and Quirm, Ankh-Morpork chocolate was formally classed as "cheese" and only escaped, through being the wrong color, being defined as "tile grout."
GNU Terry Pratchett
The average British sausage consists of 32.5% fat, 6.5% rind, 20% water, 10% rusk, 5% seasoning, preservative and colouring, and only 26% meat, which is mostly gristle, head meat, other off cuts, and mechanically recovered meat steamed off the carcass. Excuse me, I don't feel particularly- I had one. I had one for breakfast.
Yes, that's actually quite likely with the enormous amount of different beers they have over here :).
When I get bored enough I might try and work out just how many different ones there are, but I'm guessing that number is going to be out of date pretty rapidly.
Re Belgian chocolates are overhyped
de gustibus non disputandum est
But for a much of the big name chocolate, Godiva, Leonidas, Côte d'Or and the like, I fully agree - it's absolutely abhorrent. There is, however, also excellent Belgian chocolate... try Marcolini for example.
Greetings from Brussels.
My dad has been very friendly with a local icecream maker since the 1970s. Way back then he was innovating, and the use of Belgian chocolate - rather than chocolate flavour syrups - was just becoming a "thing". He was interested in whether my father's factory could help make moulded chocolates - easter eggs, Father Christmases, that kind of thing - to be filled with icecream, and supplied dad with some moulds and an absolutely massive lump of chocolate to experiment with. Must have been 5kg if not actually a full half badger. Very Wonka. Or at least it seemed that way to me - bearing in mind I was still in short trousers at the time.
It was the most delicious stuff I had ever tasted; of course the best chocolate available at the time was Dairy Milk* or Fry's (or items from another friend of dad's who worked at the "OP" chocolate factory) and more often than was healthy, well-meaning relatives would buy me "treats" of those awful not-chocolate tools. What was that stuff? It tasted foul.
I have no idea of the brand, obviously it was supplied as a catering ingredient, but it knocked socks off anything available at the corner shop at the time. Shame it never worked out with dad's factory, but Mike Jenkins found another partner and the rest is history, as they say.
M.
*Is it just me, or have they changed the CDM recipe in the last 10 years or so? Have to admit we stopped buying it when Kraft closed that factory near Bristol and moved some production to Poland, but I'm mortified to find that I actually prefer Galaxy to CDM these days, and I used to hate Galaxy as tasting too greasy. Good thing I don't eat as much chocolate as I used to; means I can afford to buy half decent stuff; and by half decent I mean I really quite like the own-brand "Irresistable" chocolate from the Co-Op or the equivalent stuff from other supermarkets, moreso now that Thorntons is both more difficult to find and seems to have stopped selling actual "just chocolate" bars. Partial to Milka too, not a fan of Lindt.
*Is it just me, or have they changed the CDM recipe in the last 10 years or so?
I read that as CDM = cold dark matter. The cosmologists have certainly come up with various ideas about the recipe for CDM over the last decade. I don't think the actual recipe has changed in the last 13.8 billion years, though, just our ideas of what that recipe might be.
I'm sure none of us have ever blamed our own fuck-ups on a well publicised but unconnected problem right?
Of course not! Unfortunately the proof of my excellence and diligence is currently on a train, stuck just outside Paris. There's been an attack on TGV system - but I'm sure it'll be here shortly.
Would you mind paying the invoice in cash? Unfortunately my bank are currently unable to accept payments due to CloudStrike.
I'm sure none of us have ever blamed our own fuck-ups on a well publicised but unconnected problem right?
Early-/mid- 2000s I was doing some acceptance tests for a system. To be honest, it wasn't as mature as it should have been and I would have liked for us to have had a bit more time to work on it before subjecting it to testing in front of this customer. As I feared, during testing some errors occurred, commensurate with one of our components not processing data sent to it over the network.
Around this time there was a period of fairly intense solar activity - enough to get a bit of coverage in the press because aurora sightings were predicted for England. I took a punt and decided to blame the problem as being due to loss or corruption of data over the wireless network due to cosmic rays.
Unbelievably the customer bought it, and we agreed to reconvene for testing in a few weeks' time, once those pesky sunspots had calmed down. That bought us enough time to fix our software, and it passed the rescheduled test with nary a hitch.
And Simon's boss never cottoned on to fact that all their systems were running on IBM mainframes. :)
I am pretty sure no one in their right mind or the BOFH would give the boss a list of bitlocker keys or any other cryptographic material, so I wonder what was on the sheet of paper? Three blind mice hashed and split into chunks? :)
Not having ever had to deal with Bitlocker I was wondering what a recovery key looked like - apparently eight groups of six decimal digits which seems a bit odd when the keyid is in hex. Typing 48 digits per recovery would quickly deteriorate from tedious to torture I imagine. The barcode hack clearly a real sanity saviour.
Entering decimal numbers can be a lot faster/easier than entering their hex equivalents once you know your way around a numeric keypad, so long as the UI you're entering them into just lets you enter the entire number in a single operation without any need to add spaces, dots, commas, tab from one entry field to the next etc. etc...
The great dilemma - is it one that won't let you put the number in with spaces (but doesn't complain until you hit return) or the one that won't let you put it in without.
Top marks for an entry box that puts in the space automatically so you don't have to flip a coin.
You've reminded me of one of my pet peeves.
This is such a solved problem that "enter credit card number" should be in every web programmer's standard toolkit, so that they can all have one that does it right.
Bonus points if that standard toolkit includes "enter expiration date" and it provides the '/20' for you after you enter the first two digits, as the other side of the crappy coin you mentioned are ones that have a freeform entry box and only after you've clicked submit do you find out whether it wants a '/' or not and whether it wants the year represented by two or four digits (the ones that make you type in "2" "0" were presumably programmed by someone super anal who pats himself on the back for writing software that won't be bit by the Y21K bug)
We're not that far away from the last time we'll be entering CC information online. Already there are plenty of sites I can use Apple Pay if I login on my phone (or if I had a Mac) most/all of which would also accept the Android equivalent. Credit cards are increasingly NFC enabled, so once PCs have an NFC reader then it won't take long before PCI compliance and higher interchange rates forces online retailers to no longer accept manually entered CC numbers. I'd give it a decade at most before that's over with - decades before 2100.
And there's a special place in the Bad Place for the web developers who wilfully implement the Amex grouping, logo and 4-digit CVC to the entry boxes - but don't bother mentioning that the vendor does not in fact accept Amex.
You can easily tell the difference. Visa starts with '4'. MasterCard starts with '5'. AMEX starts with '3'. Discover starts with '6'. Any credit card wntry code should be able to handle this! Of course things like Firefox bring up a menu (sometimes) and tell you the last 4 digits and you click away.
>Top marks for an entry box that puts in the space automatically so you don't have to flip a coin.
The web programmer Medal of Honour goes to the ones that accepts the number with spaces, put up an error message telling you to enter the credit card WITHOUT spaces and then clears the entry for you
and then charging him for the use of a ladder to get out
"Because I need to recover the authentication server. But you made me stop that and start on finance."
"What?"
"The authentication server. Active Directory. Comes after accounting."
"You should have told me that!" he snaps.
"You wouldn't let me."
Hilarious! Classic BOFH
I've had the higher ups behind my desk once or twice while trying to do god's work. I stepped out the to WC, and sent my old boss a text to get them out! Before I lose my good natured reputation... He made them disappear, and they were never in the office during a crisis again. In fact, that boss is retiring this week, have one on me!
In the middle of a mess, I once told my boss, "one of us is leaving the room right now. If a speedy recovery is your desire, I suggest it be you, but I'm fine either way".
I've had bosses that I WANTED next to me during a problem, whether it be for guidance, a sounding board, or running interference for other managers. But I've worked for a few that needed to be in another room, and one that knew he was such an ass, he knew to not be seen until the event was over.
Sadly, it seems the good boss is getting rarer and rarer...
I must admit, I get the sense this was a well intentioned thing that the media have picked up on and blown out of all proportion. Their staff were working long hours, well beyond their normal hours, or called in early well before their start time, and so management thought it would be a good idea to offer them all a way to order in some grub to help them keep going, the equivalent of the team leader ordering in pizza when the team has a deadline to meet. I very much doubt a company with that level of income really thought that was the only "thank you" they needed to offer their staff. Of course, it wasn't helped by UberEats "computer days no" when so many vouchers got used up quick succession and started voiding them as potential fraud, yet another example of stupid computer systems being given "authority" without human supervision.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it would be interesting to hear the real story behind that.
long before UberEats ... a sales person I worked with got himself deep in a hole on some sale...don't recall the exact details, but something like 500 laptops needed modems installed before being shipped out the next day. Whole store got on the project, set up a few assembly lines to open boxes, stuff modem, close and retape box, etc. And this was when the commission on a few hundred laptops was non-trivial, but not only was he the only one getting commission on this sale, IIRC, other sales people chipped in to get these machines all upgraded in time. Those that weren't opening or closing boxes or spinning screw drivers were answering phones and dealing with walk-ins.
We did it...salesperson says, "Thanks everyone! I'm buying the store Pizza tomorrow for lunch!" This was cool. This was still when Pizza for lunch at work was some kind of extravagant event. So the next day...we all show up hungry for lunch...and J walks in with one...small...cheap pizza. For 13 people. We all looked at each other, grabbed our one slice, and then went out for lunch...on our own dime.
more of your wisdom oh great BoFH.
Especially when you give the boss important information to be safely stored away and then steal it off his desk before he can...... heh
Anyway... must go ... just been delivered the minutes from the end of month meeting I managed to avoid this morning..... just need somewhere to file them.....
and then its time for one of these >>>>
[quote]but stealing them off his desk later that evening was just the belts and braces approach of a true professional...[/quote]
that one little sentence, out of SO many that made me LOL until it hurt, true class :o)
also +1 for Belgium, country about the size of Wales, has around 400 breweries, and makes beer out of anything LOL
was there on a bike rally, a mate got slightly tipsy on what was euphemistically call fruit salad ...........
Strawberry beer
raspberry beer
gooseberry beer
blackberry beer
the list went on, as did his head ache LOL
If you want to feel indecisive, visit the Delirium Café in Brussels (near the Grand Place). It has well over 2000 bottled beers and an ever changing variety on tap. There is so much choice it is nearly impossible to choose. Personally I have some favourites, but if I fancy something new/different I pick a page of the menu at random and close my eyes and stab the page with my finger, then order that beer. Most of them have been pleasant or better, but I have had a few that fall into the same category as American Chocolate (puke flavoured). However, if you want to avoid the tourist traps, there are plenty of other bars with good beer selections available.
As for Belgian Chocolates, there is plenty of choice there from the mainstream manufacturers (Godiva, Cote D'Or, Leonidas, Neuhaus) but if you want something else there will be someone who caters to your tastes. Much the same as their beers, there are NO RULES and anything that doesn't harm customers is allowed. My favourites are Leonidas and Wittamer.
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