Re: Talking of rocket launches
I believe that is en-route to the colonies by packet steamer.
835 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Oct 2007
If you take that sentence fragment by itself, it means nothing.
But the original sentence reads correctly (if a little awkwardly). Adding some emphasis might help to make the meaning clearer:
"We posted hourly updates on the T-Mobile data issues all day on Friday for customers with repeated apologies."
ie the updates posted hourly on Friday contained apologies as well as being about the data issues.
The Intellimouse Explorer 2 is indeed (in my view) an excellent mouse, and I have several in use. But they do have one key flaw - the USB connector wiring cable is rather weak, and liable to break with anything more than very light desktop use.
I did pick up a batch directly from the Microsoft Store a couple of years ago, but I'm down to the last few.
My main PC has the bluetooth variant, which avoids the cabling flaw (along with the matching MS keyboard), but that has also been discontinued (indeed, decent bluetooth keyboard/mouse combos seem incredibly rare). And mine is getting rather worn (the battery covers are held on with sellotape & blutack), and I'm dreading the day they finally pack up completely.
"What am I meant to be doing every 3 months?"
I suspect it's mostly businesses and employers that are being forced into using gov.uk this frequently (or more), as VAT returns now have to be done electronically, and so does PAYE.
(don't get me started on the "we did nothing" reporting that now has to be done for PAYE if you don't pay someone - WTF is the point of PAYE RTI if we have to do this as well???)
And increasingly, legitimate small businesses like mine are finding that the likes of Google will silently blacklist us in ways that make it impossible for us to know whether a single person to person email will be received. (yes, right now, if I send a genuine email that the recipient wants and their email is hosted by Google [such as virgin.net], there's a good chance it won't get there, yet I won't know that [until the client and I are in contact via some other means])
It's a bloody nuisance.
Yes, W7 does come with Remote Assistance. And RA provides a better experience (than TeamViewer, IME) for the person providing assistance when it works. But I've also found it to be much less reliable at connecting than TeamViewer - particularly if the remote site is bandwidth-constrained (as is apparently the case here). So I tend to use TeamViewer by default, because it just works.
"You mean you know of an IKEA store where you can actually pay for stuff before your credit/debit card has expired?"
There are two key items of knowledge for successfully visiting an Ikea store in less than three lifetimes:
a) where the internal shortcuts are (so that you aren't forced to circumnavigate the building), and
b) never, under any circumstances, visit after 4pm or on a weekend.
«Take my work; every 28 days I'm instructed to "change my password for my security"»
The default in Windows domains is 42 days. I usually push that out to 90 days or so (it's a reasonable compromise for the environments I'm normally managing).
There are a couple of valid reasons for requiring regular password changes - a) if someone leaves and IT isn't informed (no, really, it does occasionally happen!), the password expiry should limit exposure[1], and b) it discourages users from password-reuse (in the same-password-everywhere sense).
[1] assuming supporting secure policies are in place (such as preventing remote changes of expired passwords).
"The fact that the entered password is only seen as a string of ******* doesn't help either."
The theory goes that this provides protection against shoulder-surfing. I suspect that this is less of an issue than previously thought (and those keen observers can probably achieve the same result by finger-watching).
This seems to be being belatedly recognised - I've seen a number of places where the user can now opt to show passwords as they're typed (for example, when connecting to WiFi networks in recent versions of Windows).
Conversely, in the run up to Christmas, I placed an order with eBuyer on Fri 19th, with next (working) day delivery, and received confirmation that my goods would be delivered on Monday 23rd.
So when the courier rang my doorbell on Saturday 20th, I nearly missed him because I wasn't expecting the delivery.
Not only that, but when I didn't answer (because I hadn't heard the bell), he knocked on the door as well, and was trying next door as I did belatedly get to the front door. And this was Yodel (formerly HDN).
"much easier and quicker to get someone else to text you the correct number than searching the net for it"
Really? In the time it would take to "phone a friend" and have them search, I've probably found the number, dialled it and dealt with the automated "press 1 for sales, 2 for accounts, ..." and reached a human being who isn't authorised to solve my problem.
192 was abolished in the name of competition (it was perceived that simply allowing other operators to offer equivalent services was not good enough, when everyone "knew" 192).
Personally, with the rise in ubiquity of the internet in your pocket, I'd expect the overall income across all the 118 operators to be falling off a cliff.
In much the same way that Hibu (yes, really), the owners of Yellow Pages, have recently gone into administration (their corporate rebranding can't have helped).
The logical response from the tech companies running these shuttles would be to arrange to collect from workers private residences instead, and not use the public bus stops at all. Then they won't have to pay the local authority fees (they may still need to pay something to the workers whose residential parking they "borrow" instead).