Posts by Bob Wheeler 381 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Oct 2007
I spent 30 minutes changing everything that could be changed on a mates WfW PC. The colour scheme, width of the borders, the works. All the settings held in the WIN.INI file. Then changed the file attribute to READ ONLY. Everytime he reset everything, it could not save the settings, but never gave any warning message that the system couldn't write to the INI file.
The fun lasted a week before I took pity on him.
Bob (Retd)
We had three old AS/400 mini computers. The end user kept insisting that the data held within them was vital, but refused to pay to have it converted and transferred to a modern system.
It took 20 years to get them decommissioned. I think the breaking point was the H/W maintenance firm was unable to get the 2GB SCSI disks anymore.
Bob. (Retd)
I had to work with 'controlled stationary' a.k.a. pre-signed cheques used for the payroll run. Once week, the senior manager in charge checked the stock of cheques against his log and found 100 had gone missing.
After much searching, acquisitions and the such turned out the managers log was wrong.
anyway folks, today is my last day of gainful employment in IT and after 40 years I'm being put out to pasture (or the glue factory) one or the other.
Enjoy and keep the BOFH faith.
Issue from the last update my system no longer goes to sleep after the allotted time, unless I log out.
With Aprils update, the system defaulted to ENG US keyboard rather then ENG UK it should have been.
then 3rd party utils removed as "they no longer work with this version of windows"
And this is progress.....
... I had an evening job in the local cinema. I got to see the films, always in small parts, and out of sequence depending on actually doing some work. We had a double bill of "Blazing Saddles" and "Holy Grail" on for about three weeks - shows how popular the films were.
The jokes in Blazing Saddles got stale after the first week, but Holy Grail kept us laughing every night for three weeks.
Many years ago (mid 1990's) I was the technical lead on tender negotiations for hardware/software supply (5 year exclusive supply of PC, server, printers etc.) to a local authority.
during a long coffee break I was talking with the would be Account Manager and he asked what the Councils policy on 'backhanders' and who was the best person to talk to, to 'ease' the negotiations.
So I explained that there was six people on the tender evaluation team, and as such was impossible for one single person to sway the other five towards any preferred outcome. The Account Manager was rather dismayed at this.
However I said that after a contract was given, it was extremely easy for one person to get a contract cancelled say six months later by lodging a raft of complaints about the supplier, i.e. incorrect invoicing, missing items, late delivery, bad services etc.
While that put a smile on his face, I smiled back, called my boss over and (in front of the sales person) repeated the conversation I had had just had.
Their tender was rejected within the hour.
... all this data being collected sounded familiar.
Foundation series of books by Isaac Asimov
"The premise of the series is that the mathematician Hari Seldon spent his life developing a branch of mathematics known as psychohistory, a concept of mathematical sociology. Using the laws of mass action, it can predict the future, but only on a large scale"
My brother used to by two or three monthly PC magazines with the free CD full of stuff to try out.
One day he called me to ask how to re-install "file explorer" on his Win XP machine as it would no work. I started to explain that you can't just re-install it, I would need to d a complete OS install.
Anyway, I went around and after a bit of head scratching found that he had installed three different AV products at once. When the machine booted up, each AV scanner was fighting with the others to scan the disk etc.
Took me the best part of the day to fix his machine and I never even got lunch - bastard brother.
Sub Folders are a double edged sword.
I've seen too many examples of 30 or even 40 levels of sub folders and each folder name and different variation of the folder above
reports/annual reports/2017 reports/hr reports/finance/2017/directors reports/finial reports/ etc etc etc
The wife bought a new electric toothbrush the other week. I was bemused to see on the packaging that the toothbrush has Bluetooth. So I got thinking "well, a blue tooth needs brushing doesn't it?"
Turns out that the is also an app your put on your phone, and pair with the toothbrush via Bluetooth and the app monitors you brushing your teeth and tells you if your doing it right or not.
How did I live without this before?
Dear Chairman of the Bored
I have to inform you that not only the 'pages are alive', that 'emails get resurrected' but also there are ghosts in the machines - how else do you explain these damn systems working one moment, then failing then working again without anyone even touching them. I swear the software is taunting us.
In addition to that, it has been known for many years in the highest level of BOFH'dom that the servers also have gods that not only require, but demand blood sacrifice from any mortal working on them in the machine halls.
yours faithfully
IT bod in chief
@Will Godfrey
I think you have touched on the nub of it here.
In the past, you would have had some memory of "wasn't that the guy who....", then that might spur you to go to the local reference library and trawl thought the daily paper of your choice, or maybe spend a day in Fleet St. itself.
Nowadays you don't even have to have a the foggiest notation that 'that guy' was involved, or not, in anything at all.
On balance, I'm more on goggle's side in this than not.
A few things that have just come to mind.
1) What happens if your writing a biography/history of someone/some event in 10, 20, 50+ years tine.
2) What about Bing? do they automatically have to apply the same 'no result shown due to EU law."
3) google.com still shows the result when google.co.uk (or other EU's googles) don't
I was working on a 16-node Novell Cluster, updating drivers. A process that had been done many times and non invasive and with no loss of service so deemed by management as safe to do in working hours.
The process was simple, take a node out of the cluster - “CLUSTER LEAVE”, copy the new device drivers and then reboot that node - “SERVER DOWN”, wait for it to start up and re-join the cluster, and move onto the next node.
By about the 14th or 15th node, after typing the same commands time after time, instead of typing “CLUSTER LEAVE” to take the node out of the cluster, I typed “CLUSTER DOWN”.
It should be noted that Novell does NOT ask “Are you sure?” when you type such a command, and it does what the command suggests it does – instantly. All users, potentially some 4,500 of them suddenly lost their file shares, email, printing, internet access – the works.
My only saving grace was it was late afternoon on a Friday so there was not that many users actually affected.
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