Techie 'forgot' to tell boss their cost-saving idea meant a day of gaming

After a weekend of R&R, The Register welcomes you back to the working week with a new installment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which you confess to workplace errors and indiscretions and reveal how you survived to tell the tale. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Hannah" who told us about a job …

[Korev]

> I had also fit a tower PC into my car to play MP3s, so I thought I would tackle the thin client problem

Sounds like a flash car

[alcachofas]

This is the bit of the story I want to know more about!

[jake]

Install a decent inverter, plug in PC. Done. Not exactly rocket surgery.

_{I'd strongly suggest not using a tower box for this exercise. A laptop makes more sense.}

[The Organ Grinder's Monkey]

Agreed, especially as I can't see a traditional disc drive surviving for long with all the vibration & banging about it'd receive in a car if still fitted to a tower case rather than a shock-proofed housing?

For everything else, give that girl a coconut!

[PCScreenOnly]

Shock absorbers - kind of

The Dension mounted the 5.25" disk on some small rubber. How it never damage a disk I do not know, but it didn't

[Pickle Rick]

> I can't see a traditional disc drive surviving for long with all the vibration

I wish you'd mentioned that to our engineer that RTB'd a PC when he couldn't figure out the issue with a multi I/O card. In those days HDD heads had to be parked by 'manually'. That job cost quite a bit and overran the promised quick fix.

[Icon: the MD, who happened to be the engineer's dad!]

[bob, mon!]

Vibration & banging ?

My Jeep Cherokee had factory-installed CD player. If they'd ever heard the phrase "shock-proofed" it might've worked much better than it did.

I want a picture of where the tower PC was installed --- back seat somewhere? Surely not in the trunk!

[Apocalypso - a cheery end to the world]

Re: Vibration & banging ?

> I want a picture of where the tower PC was installed --- back seat somewhere? Surely not in the trunk!

In the front passenger seat with a woofer on top and a hat and coat wrapped around it, I hope, so she could ride the carpool lane!

[TuftedSiskin]

Re: Vibration & banging ?

I had a CD player installed in my (Inca Yellow ❤️) Triumph Spitfire in the 90s

As it was in the centre console, you could only take a CD out if the car was in 2nd or 4th. 1st or 3rd pushed the gear stick too close to the loader slot!

Beautiful car, absolute death trap.

[Roland6]

Re: Vibration & banging ?

We were amused by the CD player in the Lancia Delta HF turbo - it could only be played when the car was stationary, the suspension was so hard the vibration would cause the CD to skip.

[Sherrie Ludwig]

Re: Vibration & banging ?

Beautiful car, absolute death trap.

A friend had something similar, driving around Chicago was dodgy because the taller cars never saw you. I (5' 10", long legs) sat in the driver's seat once and told Dave I couldn't steal his car. because when the door was closed I could not get my left knee between the wheel and the door to operate the clutch . Dave was several inches shorter and like many guys, longer in the torso than leg.

[C R Mudgeon]

"give that girl a coconut!"

Hold the lime.

[Anonymous Coward]

And put the lime in the coconut and drink it all up

[Paul Cooper]

Well, in the 1980s I was working with prototype electronics (including a small Z80 processor) that was mounted in an aircraft - a DH Twin Otter, and they vibrate, not forgetting landing shock! The equipment included many vibration and shock-sensitive components, including various vacuum tubes (there was, for example, at least one CRT oscilloscope, and I THINK the radar system had a tube in it), mechanical recording devices (various generations of cassette and reel-to-reel tapes) and a thermal printer. We protected it from the environment with shock-absorbing mounts, with varying responses - soft ones with a long throw on the whole rack for landing shocks, and others tuned for the in-flight vibration on individual pieces of kit. It all worked, so I imagine that a similar system would be effective in a car.

[David Hicklin]

> mounted in an aircraft - a DH Twin Otter

In WW2 they mounted all sorts of very fragile valve based stuff in prop driven planes that vibrated like hell, so I guess it was a problem long solved by the 1980's

[xyz123]

>> I can't see a traditional disc drive surviving for long with all the vibration & banging about

If this car's a rockin, don't come knockin*

*Because I'll be playing some MP3s

[Antron Argaiv]

Not quite -- I investigated it a bit and there are some tricky requirements around how the system shuts down and boots up as the car is shut off and started.

But, yes, it was thing -- DIN slot CarPC. For nav and music, gaming (yikes!) and engine data. Before the car companies put infotainment systems in and enshittified the whole thing.

[Prst. V.Jeltz]

My never ending (and barely started ) project

Install a decent inverter, plug in PC. Done. Not exactly rocket surgery.

There is in fact quite a bit more to this, stepping up to 240V and back is not the ideal way .You've also got to think about auto starting and shutdown. I concur however that a tower is obviously the absolute worst form to choose.

I've been on this project since the days mp3 was invented , I've saved retired laptops for when i get round to it , that have been replaced multiple times by better retired laptops , I've still got the 800x600 VGA touch screen i was going to mount , I've got a still boxed gps unit I was going to add . I've got the book "Geek my ride" .

There was quite the scene for this back in the day , a site called mp3car.com was the centre of it , hosted forums and things , and sold stuff like anti hard drive vibration gear and power supplies.

People had written car friendly GUIs for those that had got the pc installed , I tried out the "roadrunner" software .

I never really got started in earnest though.

Nowadays all this and so much more is done "out of the box" with a cheap android box

The fail icon is for me , not Jake ---->

[JT_3K]

Re: My never ending (and barely started ) project

My favourite was the BMW E-series cars. When from ~'95 to '05 they had the head units with the screens that used to speak via CANBUS to the "navigation" unit in the rear. You could read the CANBUS and inject an additional item in to the main menu on their screen. Then you could sniff for the user selecting it and present on screen options. In turn you could sniff the buttons used (forward/reverse track, etc) and get it to drive your media output.

It was however, ultimately a stratospheric amount of effort at a time when iPod radio transmitters were a thing and usually fairly viable. Those with cassette decks would use the cassette adaptor to the same end. If you were bothered enough to spend car-PC money, you'd probably be bothered enough to pay for the Denison ICE link. Those looking to throw more money would spec the "base non-amplifier" variant of the car and install a full setup from scratch with a touch multi-screen or USB input.

Still cool, but very quickly bypassed as the iPhone era and screen mirroring became viable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: My never ending (and barely started ) project

You too? Glad it's not just me. I have a fold out screen as well and a mini-itx that literally just needs a power supply.(used to run the screen from a laptop for very early satnav)

[Pete Sdev]

Not exactly rocket surgery

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=THNPmhBl-8I&pp=ygURUm9ja2V0IHNjaWVudGlzdCA%3D

[Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch]

One of my favourite end-of-year events were the Revues put on by the junior doctors for the benefit of the hospital as the final "medical education" event of the year. One year a neurosurgeon had made some major headlines in the local media for leading a team which had separated conjoined twins.

Her sketch in the Revue showed her arriving in theatre, prepping and scrubbing, donning gown and gloves, and walking over to the operating table. Drapes were opened to reveal... a rocket, nosecone opened, wires and circuits haphazardly blinking. "Come on, guys, this is not exactly brain surgery!"

[jailbird]

If you're going to use a laptop, it would be a lot more efficient (and cheaper) to get a 12VDC adapter for the laptop that converts to the proper DC voltage, the ones with the old cigarette lighter plugs for a car/plane. Just chop the plug off and wire it in directly. A lot better than going DC->AC->DC!

[Robert Carnegie]

How healthy for electronics is the 12V DC supply in a car? Isn't it "noisy"? Obviously these days the car IS full of electronics, so it can be done...

[Eric 9001]

Quite a bit of fuel will be wasted inefficiently doing ~12V -> AC -> ~12V voltage conversion (although 99% efficient inverters exist, generally those aren't sold for vehicle usage).

Instead I would recommend a DC-DC convertor with a sufficient filtering caps that does ~12V->10.8V (or whatever the laptop voltage users) or ~12V -> 12V with filtering to power a pico-style PSU for the desktop (but that would require some ability to crimp or solder+stress relieve, rather than being able to just purchase a vehicle inverter and plug it in).

[mirachu]

Laptops generally use about 19V via the power plug, or 11 1-ish via the battery connector (which would be ugly).

[Ambivalous Crowboard]

Says someone who has clearly never done it before.

[Roland6]

If the objective was to play MP3’s etc. I suspect the installation of a sound card etc. would also be part of the project - something that is much easier with a full sized slot available…

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what I did with my first car (1986 Land Rover Defender 90, a really basic panel sided one that I "upgraded"...bigger alloys, raised suspension, steel plate around the lower edges and on the bonnet, halogen lights and in the summer I'd take the roof off).

Eventually, I had the car setup as a 3 person LAN centre for me and mates to deathmatch on at college in our "spare" periods. I did eventually work out how to tap straight into the cars 12v rail though...and had most stuff running without an inverter...except for screens.

Best computer case I ever had.

The Landy had another purpose as well...there was an arsehole that would turn up to college in his Dad's BMW and he would park in my space, every time...we had allocated spaces for cars...guy would always take the piss out of my Landy because it had a top speed of 80mph and he could do over 100mph...I felt a demonstration was in order, so I towed his car into the playing field with the handbrake on and left it there. He had to wait 3 days for the weather to dry out in order to get it off.

I miss that car...I'd buy one of those new Landys but they're far too expensive...my Landy was a former agriculture Landy (pre-worn by a farmer, which came with its own benefits like an upgraded engine with more torque and pulling power, if I bolted it to the ground and drove the opposite way to Earths spin, I'm pretty sure I could have slowed down Earth) cost me about £2,000...an entry level Landy now is orders of magnitude more than that!

[Sherrie Ludwig]

.my Landy was a former agriculture Landy (pre-worn by a farmer, which came with its own benefits like an upgraded engine with more torque and pulling power, if I bolted it to the ground and drove the opposite way to Earths spin, I'm pretty sure I could have slowed down Earth)

So, you had the Antichrist from The Gods Must Be Crazy. Sweet.

[Eric 9001]

Assuming that was in the UK, considering that rain was still common in the summer, how did taking the roof off go?

Did it end up not really mattering that it got a bit wet? (meanwhile, good luck spilling a bit of water in the back of modern cars).

[Rob Daglish]

It's a Landy. They tend to get quite damp between the leaks and the condensation. Fortunately, the water runs out of all the holes in the bodywork.

Tougher than old boots, but nothing like watertight.

In a similar vain, I once used mine to "gently push" the car of some Novanuts (who were deliberately blocking people in car parking spaces after they'd collected their chinese) out of the car park. They were quite surprised.

[Anonymous Coward]

I miss that car...

Get a Pinzgauer - you won't miss the Landy.

There are 4x4 and 6x6 versions.

I've had a 6x6 for 10 years - replaced a Land Rover 101 FC. Was always anxious about getting stuck when off-roading in the 101. With the Pinz, it's a lot more relaxed - both in my mind and the vehicle - it will tackle obstacles in a much more sedate way. Locking diffs as standard on all axles, switchable on the fly, portal hubs for ground clearance. Sure, you can get stuck - and when you do, it's further in/more deep than the Landy - so, you still need to exercise caution before you commit - though, if winching is your thing, then, nothing stopping you.

The British Army 101FCs were replaced in their roles by Pinzgauers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steyr-Puch_Pinzgauer

https://truck-encyclopedia.com/coldwar/austria/pinzgauer.php

[M.V. Lipvig]

"I'd strongly suggest not using a tower box for this exercise. A laptop makes more sense. "

Sounds like a plan. All she had to do is build a time machine, go forward a few years until laptops are plentiful, cheap and exist, then go back and replace her tower with it.

I don't know if thin clients and laptops ever overlapped because I only ever heard of them after the fact, but I was all in on the tower craze. I had a beautiful one, stood 3 feet tall and had enough sharp edges inside to push a cow in one side and get a ton of perfectly sliced beef out the other and an overspecced power supply that heated my house in the winter. But if I were going to install one in a car it would have been a deconstructed tower with all the guts hidden under the dash. And under the seats. And in a pickup. Back then I also drove a short wide regular cab full size pickup.

[Rob Daglish]

I had a tower like that, i think they were all the same.

For some reason, when I upgraded from a P75 to (I think) a P133, it would overheat if you put the lid on. Sadly it was too sharp to leave the lid off, so it had to go...

[Maximus Decimus Meridius]

Around 2003-4 I fitted a mini-ITX PC into my car in the boot with a VGA cable and USB cable up to the dash. A small touchscreen monitor sat mounted to a bracket on the dash and ran Sat-nav and a music player which broadcast using a very low power radio signal on FM to listen via the radio - the built in radio didn't support aux input.

It was quite the thing to do back then. Car cases and power supplies that could handle the drop in voltage during cranking the engine were fairly easily available. I seem to remember that it used a 2.5" drive mounted with rubber feet, but I may be wrong. It was part of the car case.

This was before Tom-Tom's were cheap enough. And the bigger display was great.

[DS999]

Why would it need to handle voltage droop during starting?

Unless you want to support such a large power draw with car "on" but engine not running, just don't send the signal to power it up until after the engine has started.

[Not Yb]

I remember one GPS unit that came with "lifetime maps". They discontinued the service entirely a few years later, as Google Maps came out and almost everyone now has a basic GPS assistant in their pocket. There was even a short time (before the first US Persian Gulf War) that GPS units would average out the purposefully degraded timing information for better accuracy.

[PCScreenOnly]

Dension DMP3

Much better way to go.

Trying to find something even to this day that works with lots of files and a folder structures. = AIMP and Music Player Folder do it in Android but even they are crap when in the car - AIMP is so slow and the later does not work in Android Auto.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Dension DMP3

Pi and SSD?

[theDeathOfRats]

Re: Dension DMP3

Nowadays? Yes, that's one option.

Back in the noughties? Not so much, unless your car was a heavily modified Delorian.

[breakfast]

Re: Dension DMP3

I've been impressed with Musicolet on Android for handling the weird selection of formats my music collection has been ripped into down the years and being tidy and easy to use.

[molletts]

Re: Dension DMP3

Yeah, I discovered Musicolet some years back and have used it ever since. It Just Works (TM) and doesn't mess about trying to rearrange my collection by someone else's idea of how a music collection should be organised.

[cd]

Re: Dension DMP3

VLC in Folder view. GUI not ideal but viable.

[BigKev]

Re: Dension DMP3

Couldn't agree more - I'm still looking for somethings that gives such a smooth in car usage

Loved playing on Random and then when tou really like a track, opting for the album and then resuming random with just a button press

[B33Dub]

Seriously. True hacker origin story.

[Luiz Abdala]

Vehicular MP3 player.

I solved my problem with a FM injector that reads USB dongles years later. Slap a 64GB flash drive in it with 10.000 songs, never have to touch it again.

But the tinkering earns respect.

[Phil O'Sophical]

Re: Vehicular MP3 player.

Maybe 20 years ago I had a car (Mazda 6, IIRC) with a single CD player, and the option to add a CD changer. Some digging around the internet revealed a small black box that took an SD card, but appeared to the car like a CD changer and plugged into the harness at the appropriate place in the glovebox. Its only peculiarity was that the SD card had to be structured like a CD changer, so 6 "discs" (directories) named CD01 - CD06, each containing many music files of various formats, numbered something like 001-xxxxx.mp3, 002-xxxxx.mp3 etc. Once that initial rather clunky setup was done (a small script on my PC solved that) it worked really well: the controls on the Radio/CD operated it, and the display showed the details taken from the embedded tags.

[Anonymous Coward]

Must have been pre Empeg.

That was IMHO one of the most fun developments ever. Brilliant idea.

[JulieM]

Not really

I worked for an engineering firm in the late 1990s / early 2000s.

If you got a lift in a car belonging to an engineer or a technician -- as opposed to a manager -- it would usually be held together with bits of string, and require a starting procedure that would qualify as an anti-theft device -- but there probably would also be an inverter and at least one BS1363 socket. (Except for one guy who had an old ambulance, partially converted to a camper van, with a 3kVA generator installed in it .....)

[cuthbertgraak]

Terminology

ITYM "flash drive" :-)

[xyz123]

>> I had also fit a tower PC into my car to play MP3s, so I thought I would tackle the thin client problem

NAND what else did you fit into the car?

[that one in the corner]

Clearly I don't have the correct mindset

Even in the Days of Yore, I'd've been thinking about a way to automate the keypress.

Which would mean a few days of fun, hacking something together* but that would be it. The more sensible Hannahs of this world get far more play time.

* yes, yes, these days all you need is a RubberDucky but back then...

[DS999]

Re: Clearly I don't have the correct mindset

Well you want to figure out a way to automate it, but not tell your boss about it. That way you still get paid to goof off, but don't have your goofing off interrupted every two hours!

[jake]

Re: Clearly I don't have the correct mindset

Way back in the day, I was having a Friday after work beer with a mate. He was whining about how he could only have the one, because he had to deliver a pile of similar thin clients to a guy to "fix" them for similar reasons. I mentally wondered why they weren't doing it in-house, but what came out of my mouth was "what do they charge for that?". He told me, and I said I'd do it for half price, and I'd pick up and deliver.

Unfortunately, his Boss was at the next table and I managed a new gig which consisted of weekend work. Pick 'em up on Friday, deliver 'em on Monday. That'll teach me to open my yap ...

Usually added up to 15 to 25 units/week, for $350 per. Paid the mortgage & utilities with that income for about three years.

It didn't take a week to build a boot floppy[0] that fully automated the entire procedure.

_{[0] Using DOS5 and NDOS, the Norton version of 4DOS, and a tweaked version of the manufacturer's flash program.}

[DS999]

Re: Clearly I don't have the correct mindset

At $350/each that adds up to between $21K and $35K per month. Unless you had one hell of a jumbo mortgage that was more than paying your mortgage. It could have easily paid you more than your day job - in which case you could have perhaps quit your day job and gone into business doing that. If there was one company that needed that many clients done per you wouldn't need to find many more to be pulling in a million a year.

It wouldn't have been a career since thin clients fell out of favor, but I'm sure if you talked to your clients they have other similar stuff they're being wildly overcharged for you could undercut on and still make out like a bandit! You could even hire people to do the grunt work for you - certainly the pickup/delivery and maybe the whole thing if you could make sure they wouldn't learn enough on the job they could go into business doing the same and undercut your undercut.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Clearly I don't have the correct mindset

1. I suspect Jake meant $350 per week, rather than $350 per unit.

2. Thin clients hardly "fell out of favor". They've improved a lot over the years; at $WORK, we use them all over the place as operator terminals.

[Robert Carnegie]

Re: Clearly I don't have the correct mindset

I wonder if certain revenue authorities read The Register comments and have a long memory.... I expect you would know by the time I'm writing this, one way or another. If I've given it away, then, whoops.

[kmorwath]

Re: Clearly I don't have the correct mindset

Homer Simpon's drinking bird?

[J.G.Harston]

Re: Clearly I don't have the correct mindset

Years ago I was programming EPROMs and a handful would fail partway through, but if you restarted it would get further and further until it completed. As long as the selection bar was still over 'WRITE' all it needed was RETURN pressing to do another write attempt. As I had other stuff to do, I built a little pile of lego bricks and bridged across to the RETURN key and placed an empty mug on it to hold the key down.

[Robert Carnegie]

Re: Clearly I don't have the correct mindset

So, this erased the EPROM data, then started copying it again?

I assume the EPROM did come out with the correct data in the end, and I assume that you did not assume that?

With compliments.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.

"Have you found a way to work without really working?"

I spent a year or so in IT sales, easiest year of my life but my conscience was too developed to allow me to continue.

[gv]

Re: Yes.

Been subject to two acquisition processes in my 30+ year career and the three to six months it takes for these things to work themselves out have been spent improving my Minesweeper skills for the first one and messing about installing various Linux distros for the second.

I'm currently in a consultation period for possible redundancy, so am seeing if I can finally sort out my ascension run in Nethack in between job interviews.

[PM.]

Re: Yes.

With a conscience problem you should've lie down and breath deeply. The doubts would go away after few minutes every time, guaranteed !

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Yes.

My soul isn't dark enough, nor is my head empty enough to embrace a sales role

[Adrian The Alchemist]

Re: Yes.

Was seriously annoyed by my company 25 years ago

They suddenly announced a full roll out of 5000 PC with Lotus notes etc

When it was our sites turn for installation it became obvious that the computer company was a middle aged bloke and his two sons and a load of off the shelf PCs

When they had gone I brought up the windows 95 system information and saw that they were pentium 1s and I had just got a pentium 3 with windows 98

It cost over £10 MILLION for out of date PCs, software company wide

Wish I'd known as I'd stuck a better tender in, anyways the next years head office got their PCs upgraded and the rest of us had to use a computer you could time with a calendar

[David Hicklin]

Re: Yes.

> were pentium 1s and I had just got a pentium 3 with windows 98

Around the mid - late 1990's $work also did a new PC rollout to go with the new shiny ERP system so that we would be nice and up to date.

They had a corporate deal with Dell that gave us really cheap PC's but sadly I was not involved in making the final decision what to buy (that was the bean counters and you can guess what is coming...)

So most people ended up with a desktop pentium "something" , 32MB RAM and windows NT4 and some version of Microsoft office (my memory is a bit hazy some 30 years on...) but basically the minimum spec.

All was well at first but they soon began to run like dogs and I was asked if they could be upgraded at all. Nope, everything was propriety DELL, even the PSU was a non-standard shape and a non-standard connector, processor was maxed out for the socket - same with the memory.

So they were stuck.

[Michael H.F. Wilkinson]

What a cunning plan

Indeed it is a plan so cunning you could put a tail on it and call it weasel

Doffs hat (black fedora today) to to "Hannah" and the authors of Blackadder

[Anonymous Custard]

Re: What a cunning plan

But then of course, we'd have to re-regomize her to Bob.

With due --> to Messrs Curtis and Elton, with honourable mention to Atkinson too.

[Bebu sa Ware]

Sometimes it seemed that …

90% of a sysadmin's life consisted of watching paInt dry. OS [eg proprietary Unix] installations and updates typically took hours.

A real incentive to automate tasks — I can imagine Don Libes developed Expect back in the day for this reason.

In the days before the internet and game consoles you were often reduced in extremis to reading the documentation… or indeed any documentation.

[jake]

Re: Sometimes it seemed that …

Compiling kernels and watching large disk arrays init were also way up there.

I always made sure I had something else useful to do before starting anything like that.

[Korev]

Re: Sometimes it seemed that …

My old work outsourced most of IT; they still had the physical machines in the UK. When there was a fault that might need to have the power button pushed or some hardware technicians babysat they used to get someone to hang around in the data centre - she usually occupied the time knitting and getting paid for it.

Beer money's beer money no matter how you earn it -->

[Andy Non]

Re: Sometimes it seemed that …

I remember the days when installations took many hours and an hour or two in there would be the inevitable and highly annoying "Click OK to proceed". Worse still, they would sometimes appear as a pop-under so you didn't even know nothing was happening. Seems to be less of an issue nowadays where all the relevant questions are asked prior to installations commencing.

[Cessquill]

Re: Sometimes it seemed that …

For all its many faults, at least Windows now bundles all the questions to the end when copying files. How many times have I left for lunch /. the day / weekend after starting a mass transfer only for it to decide it wants my opinion on something. Likely while I'm still on the premises.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Sometimes it seemed that …

Something similar was mandatory for any Solaris packages that we developed in Sun - ask the questions at the start and put the answers into a response file, then the installation would run unattended for as long as it took with no further interaction required. So much better than many of the Linux updates I do today, when it chunters on for ages, but when I go back after an hour to see how it's progressing it's inevitably stalled after 5 minutes waiting for the answer to a question like "keep or replace the modified config file?" FFS, it wouldn't have been modified if I didn't want the changes, so keep it (or merge any changes), place the new one beside it, and tell me at the end that I should review the differences.

[Eric 9001]

Re: Sometimes it seemed that …

Seems like an issue with a non-Linux package manager.

The portage package manager for example doesn't ask questions during compilation - you just run etc-update at the end to handle any changed configuration files.

[J.G.Harston]

Re: Sometimes it seemed that …

at least Windows now bundles all the questions to the end when copying files.

Ah yes. "Can't read file xxyyzzz.thing. Cancel?"

Errr.... which file xxyyzzz.thing? What directory is it in? What have you copied so far? Where's the "skip this one and continue"? The only option being: Cancel everything and start again, not knowing where the dodgy file is or what had been copied. grrr

[Already?]

Re: Sometimes it seemed that …

Reminds me of an iPad update a few generations ago. Apple had clearly listened and offered the update either now or use the option to set it to happen automatically overnight. I opted for that, and woke up to the iPad still waiting for my confirmation to do the update - Click Ok To Install.

When did you first realise that the slogan lt Just Works may not have been completely accurate?

[chivo243]

Re: Sometimes it seemed that …

Back in the 90's when I was greener than the Grinch, it wasn't thin clients, but 30 or so PC's* in a lab setting needed to be checked and imaged if 'necessary' each week. I was given one floppy to kick off Ghost. The check consisted of logging in and checking disk space and checking for any extra programs that may have been installed. Then re-image them if needed. Depending on how busy I was this could take the better part of a day. After the third week of logging into each station, checking for and finding the same thing each week, I ditched the checks, made many copies of the Ghost disk, and kicked off the re-imaging in about 15 minutes. I too had to hit enter when finished. I cut the time spent imaging down to about 90 minutes in total. One of the sys admins saw what I had done, and I was given other more meaningful tasks. Not much time to watch paint dry...

*All the same brand, but different amounts of RAM, different brand and sizes of HDs some finished in 20-30 minutes, a few much longer.

[The Oncoming Scorn]

Re: Sometimes it seemed that …

Many years ago in a IT Service Centre Hut, in the carpark at the back of Somerset County Hall.....

One of my colleagues (New starter like myself) was commended by manglement for setting up & configuring ghost casting a whole load of PC's in house.

This did not endear him to the permies\longer standing contractors as one of whom had done such a thing (Installed all the required drivers, apps etc then made a master image & set up a complete school IT lab in about 2 days & was hauled over the coals by the same manglement for doing the job faster than they had budgeted for & were charging the school by the hour.

[Herring`]

Re: Sometimes it seemed that …

I am old enough to remember setting up Novell NetWare 2.x servers for clients.

[BartyFartsLast]

Re: Sometimes it seemed that …

Same.

The scars on my mental health occasionally itch

[The other JJ]

Re: Sometimes it seemed that …

You've never experienced RSX-11M-Plus SYSGEN with customised drivers then?

[TooOldForThisSh*t]

Re: Sometimes it seemed that …

On 5 1/4" floppy disks ? Ah, the good old days!

[Inventor of the Marmite Laser]

Back in the early 1190s I was working with a small industrial instrumentation outfit. Muggins here was frequently called upon the prepare exhibition equipment and help man the stand during the show or whatever. This one time we were offered space at a trade show in Norway.

The idea was that I'd organise an hotel and a hire van. I'd load up the kit and drive from Luton to Newcastle on Tyne for the ferry to Stavanger. Our rep would fly out from Birmingham and join me for the show, which was over 3 days. He'd fly straight back, while I'd have a few days at leisure till the return ferry.

Then said rep pointed out a couple of things: Living in Norway was bloody expensive, plus he had a significant family event scheduled just before and wasn't keen on leaving his missus behind so soon, so he has a plan.

He'd pay the extra for his missus to go and they'd stay for a week. In the meanwhile I would book a minibus with a couple of back seats taken out for the kit instead of a van, and make sure it had a tow ball. I'd book for me, my wife and the kids in the minibus plus our caravan. I'd book us into a campsite that was about 20 mins walk from the exhibition hall. We'd stock the van with food, have a family holiday and the firm would be several hundred quid better off.

It was hard work, especially for my missus but it was a great free break.for us all.

[Doctor Syntax]

I remember somebody at a client site who'd just come back from Norway saying it was a great place. You could get anything for 20 quid. A bottle of beer. A sandwich...

[Simon]

1190's? You have been around a while, is your surname Mcleod?

[42656e4d203239]

>>is your surname Mcleod?

No, and he isthey aren't Spanish, he is they are Egyptian....

[breakfast]

The "ferry" to Norway in this case was clearly a longboat.

[Pickle Rick]

I thought it was going to be a story about a Univac system - my brain was trying to tell me it was a typo, but nope! (Looks around for more coffee...)

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you found a way to work without really working?

I'm doing it right now. And so are you.

[Michael H.F. Wilkinson]

Re: Have you found a way to work without really working?

Of course not! We are perusing this illustrious online journal and dutifully keeping abreast with developments in the field!

Or at least that's what I tell people

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Have you found a way to work without really working?

"And so are you."

Not really. I've just sent an email to ask for extra material to be added to tomorrow's visit to the archives and I've another to send for January's visit. Wander down to the gate to bring the bin back up and that's about it for the day.

Retirement.

[Taliesinawen]

Thin clients were an anachronism ?

> .. The thin clients were an anachronism ..

But reinvented as a Citrix/VDI client running a virtual Windows image in the “Cloud”.

> but not a problem unless the system image on their internal storage became corrupt.

How does a read-only image go corrupt. Oh wait :[

[mirachu]

Re: Thin clients were an anachronism ?

Even if it's read only hardware is still hardware...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes!

Used to work nights in a support role - at home. For the majority of my time there, nights meant 2 hours of work then spend the rest of the time waiting for the phone to ring which it rarely did. Of course I kept myself amused - games, watching something, operating HF radio etc. Miss those days.

[Anonymous Coward]

Used to spend most Saturday's watching Prison Break on Netflix whilst babysitting the IT. Good times.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nightshift in the colour lab..

I used to work as colourist in an ABS factory.

A colourist is someone who develops the 'recipe' of pigments to have to be mixed with ABS plastic to produce a certain colour. For instance, a car manufacturer would come in with a piece of leather and you'd have to develop the matching plastic colour. It gets complicated with additives, depth of colour and metamerism, but long story short, there is then also a 24/7 production that has to be kept an eye on. A trained eye, because even if you can see colours well (which I do, for some unknown reason because my father was as colourblind as they come), you also need to know how pigments and additives react when you start tweaking because a new batch of pigment has a small delta versus your lab batch.

Except, when there's no production because, for instance, the operators are cleaning the production plant (you do subsequent runs of colour batches, always from light to dark, clean and start again), then you're there with a colleague at night with nothing to do.

We had a spectrometer which ran off an 8" floppy, and its sole means of output was a dot matrix printer.

We already had a clone of that 8" floppy which didn't autostart the analyser software.

That floppy contained some form of basic ..

.. which was perfect to make it spend the night printing more of the Yahtzee forms we had just ran out of ..

:)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Nightshift in the colour lab..

Back in the 1990s the HP factory in a certain French city had an automated production line for making PC boards. It was the full setup, make the PCBs, populate them with pick&place, and run them through a solder bath. The local story was that someone had created a production tape for making pirate Canal+ decoders, and every so often in the middle of the night shift that tape would be slotted in for a bit to churn out a few hundred decoder PCBs, using stock components. A nice little earner, as they say, until they were caught...

[Bill Gray]

Re: Nightshift in the colour lab..

even if you can see colours well (which I do, for some unknown reason because my father was as colourblind as they come)

I am pretty sure that most forms of colo(u)rblindness sit on the X chromosome. So, as with hemophilia, women are relatively safe from it; if one X chromosome has the problem, it'll be masked by their other X chromosome. They will be carriers, and their sons will have even odds of being colourblind.

If you're male, you didn't get your father's "bad" X chromosome (just one from your mother), and his vision doesn't enter the equation. If you're female, you are definitely a carrier (you did get your father's X chromosome, but it's masked by your mother's "good" X chromosome.)

[JulieM]

Re: Nightshift in the colour lab..

There's a rare genetic condition where you can have two lots of DNA in your body and therefore four chromosomes; at least two of which will be X, and up to two of which can be Y (and yes, you can even have a 3-1 split -- which will cause you to test as both reproductive sexes depending where the sample was taken from).

[IGotOut]

C'mon

We need to test this new network setup before switch over (new offices, going from Token Ring to Ethernet, Upgrading wan links etc).

So we used to run the usual professional stress testing tools.... network Doom / Quake. Etc. Usually on a weekend at Time 1/2, Double time. After all, didn't want to take down the live environment.

Before anyone moans, every go live I conducted was pretty much flawless, we even pulled a go live, because the lag was horrendous. Turned out to be cabling fault. Tested the following weekend and all went well.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: C'mon

We "tested the network" like that almost every Friday afternoon :). We were in a corner of the building that was always warm, because in the days before proper VMs (think 80386, 80486) you'd be running two or three separate PCs. One Linux to do work, one with Windows for client work and one for testing that got reinstalled quite often..

[BartyFartsLast]

Re: C'mon

Regular cries of "who's got the high score on the diagnostics" used to ring out across our workshop

[Guido Esperanto]

Reminds me of working in a now long forgotten ISP Helpdesk, enjoying quite regular Duke Nukem deathmatch sessions over "lunch"

Until some numbnuts (not me I might add) proceeded to demonstrate to a relative of the boss "how cool our 'lunch breaks' were", resulting in a heavy hand and "The Duke" being evicted.

[Giles C]

Obligatory xkcd

https://xkcd.com/303/

To be honest I would have someone would have beaten me to this one….

[AustinTX]

That's what it is

I mean, that's essentially what in-house imaging is like. You wait and wait and wait while Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, display a whirling thingie and then randomly prompt; "Do you want to continue or shall I abort? 10-9-8-7...."

Or, as a trained and experienced tech, you come in handy dealing with issues such as; "We had a minor problem trying this thing once... Nobody thought to offer a "RETRY" button... So press "Cancel" to cancel, press "OK" to cancel, or press "X" to cancel and then we'll shut the PC off just to be that much more annoying".

If you want to make it more entertaining, set up a whole mess of identical PCs and then start them all at once to marvel at how they all fall wildly out of synch after just a few minutes...

[The Oncoming Scorn]

Re: That's what it is

I wasn't there for this but my last place of employment set up about 50 laptops & recorded the chorus of Cortana start up.

Ohhh look there's my desk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rp2rhM8YUZY&t=14s

Not sure if the Share & Enjoy song is worse - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wSBC5Dyds8&t=21s

[Roland6]

> recorded the chorus of Cortana start up.

Misread that and wondered why you had recorded a Mk3 Cortina starting up…

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got re-imaging our customer's machines down to about 40 mins now, which is 35 mins of waiting for things to install, and only about 5 mins when I actually have to be there.

Obviously we tell the customer that it takes hours at a minimum. Not because it gets us more money (it's a fixed price in the contract), but because otherwise they'd expect miracles. Always under-promise and over-deliver.

[cyclical]

In 2000 I had a overnight job setting up training PCs that I streamlined to 'insert a floppy disk and read a book at the back of the room for 4 hours while batch scripts did all the work'. It used to take the previous guy 7 hours of intensive work so I was still 'way faster'. I still remember fondly the clacking and whirring of 30 floppy drives while I sat reading some chunky fantasy novel in the middle of the night.

[jScrag]

I keep doing it to myself

I start a new role, optimise and automate it then have nothing to do. It's a blessing and a curse.

[Mimsey Borogove]

This reminded me of something I did in 1979. I had no computer training whatsoever, and was working as a Kelly Girl (temp) in various offices. They sent me to an office that ran on computers, and as long as they just had me inputting text, everything was fine.

One day, a person I knew only vaguely handed me a floppy disk and asked me to reformat it. I'd never heard of anything like that, and asked how to do it. She was in a hurry, so she just told me the command to type, then click OK. I followed the instructions, and the computer labored for a long time. I was still sitting there waiting for it to finish when she came back, surprised at how long it was taking. I said, I did what you said, I don't know anything about it. She looked more closely, then kind of shrieked - I was reformatting the C: drive! This meant nothing to me at the time, but several people got very exercised about it. I heard later that they had asked my temp agency to pay for it, but since it was one of my last assignments before I got a real job, I never found out what had happened. At least they didn't try to take it out of my hide!

I didn't realize what I'd done for many years, when someone finally got around to training me. Oops.