* Posts by Stevie

7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008

UK tech titan Mike Lynch's US fraud trial begins today

Stevie

Bah!

Cripes, is that train-wreck still happening?

Talk about grinding slow.

Yes, I did just crash that critical app. And you should thank me for having done so

Stevie

Bah!

That sort of thing would make you a mail ex in my book.

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

Stevie

Re: Worst case I ever saw ...

From my archives, Bob.

Stevie

Re: Too many to count

I used to think lawyers had to be smart, but than I met a few and belatedly realized they only have to shine twice in their lives: Once when they take their law school finals, and once when they sit for the bar.

The rest of the time they can be delightfully thick.

Stevie

Re: not "British English"

Is there actually a Britain anymore, post Brexit?

I heard the bits not identified as "England" were looking to quit the Empire, soonest, so they could get back to traveling & working sans passports & paperwork.

Stevie

Re: GIF pronunciation controversy

I pronounce it "stole the proprietary algorithm to do the compression from Unisys corp and almost precipitated a shirtstorm flurry of webmaster activity to save their sites at the dawn of the WWW".

Stevie

Re: (Like refilling paper in printers

Once watched a colleague spend twenty minutes making a sign reading "This printer is out of ink" and attaching it to a dot matrix printer, knowing full well it would be one of his "peers" who would need to do the necessary.

I estimate if he had lifted the lid it would have taken about half the time to figure out how to change the ribbon cartridge.

Stevie

Yes, but

Have you ever tapped the page of a paper book and been momentarily puzzled as to why the page won't turn?

Or tried to swipe left on a printed page?

Every day in every way I seem to be losing the thread.

Stevie

scrolling on teams

Or clicking madly to try and stop the mad, seasickness-inducing back and forth scrolling through a ServiceNow ticket during a screenshared CAB.

Stevie

clicking on the screenshot

Greenscreen equivalent: Once had the pleasure of watching my boss get more and more angry as his compiles refused to acknowledge his updates to code.

Once he had reached the state of asking for another pair of eyes, this been-there-done-that programmer of old asked innocently "you're sure you are not updating the output print file from the compiler rather than the code itself?"

Then, of course I had to make myself scarce for a day.

Want a Cybertruck? You're stuck with it for a year, says Tesla

Stevie

Bah!

Why would anyone want the bug-ugly thing in the first place?

Woman jailed after RentaHitman.com assassin turned out to be – surprise – FBI

Stevie

Re: I hate to say this, but it's sad that there are homo sapiens so f'in stupid

So, what are you spending your share of the 350 megaquids per week on in thenLand of Genius Decisions?

Shock horror – and there goes the network neighborhood

Stevie

Re: When checking voltages...

There are those that don't know the difference between EMF(Voltage) and current, those that think they do and a very few that do. I am not sure that it ultimately makes much difference :)

Like the time I used a Quicksilver power supply in my brother-in-law’s G3 and was roundly castigated by the Online Applescenti because it wouldn’t work (despite the fact I was telling them in as many words that it did) due to the “trickle voltage” being too low.

This has informed my opinion of Apple users ever since.

Don't fear the Thread Reaper, a Windows ghost of bugs past

Stevie

Re: More Cowbell

Or, if listening to The Mutton Birds cover:

Faster playing of that one piano note!

Windows 11 23H2 is a Teams effort but Microsoft already spoiled the best bits

Stevie

Bah!

I used Skype at Xmas to talk with my kid and her hubby, and then had to change the physical port the camera was plugged into to get proper functionality back for Discord for my monthly Space 1889 game. Not keen on repeating that.

Teams, however is a cowpat in the field of interpersonal communications. Intrusive, because managers now feel they can schedule meetings at a moment’s notice during (unpaid) lunch hours, and managers snug in their offices do not hear the chaos of multiple competing Teams meetings in a cube farm. And try as I might, I have not found a way of deleting a “contact” from Teams once one has foolishly added it, which is why during lockdown I used an old, damaged iPad (which has no contact lists to “helpfully” scrape for me) for teams and would not allow it on my new shiny iPad or my personal phone.

Stevie

Re: Hopefully they've fixed Bluetooth - You using a Dell XPS ####?

Had this same “fix” for a BT mouse that occasionally would disconnect because BT was AWOL.

After about a year and a half of periodic faffing about as my temper rose, I discovered the BT service was set to “manual” start. Changing that to always-on seems to have solved the problem. It certainly brought back BT in one swell foop instead of the two, three or twenty seven tries the other techniques required.

IBM to scrap 401(k) matching, offer something else instead

Stevie

40 years ago

… the IBM 3-letter brigade didn’t earn fabuloso salaries with concussion-inducing bonuses.

Techie labelled 'disgusting filth merchant' by disgusting hypocrite

Stevie

Paying?

Hey, people were paying serious money for Netscape Navigator once upon a time.

Stevie

One Good Earworm Deserves Another

Hey Mickey! You’re so fine!

You’re so fine you blow my mind!

Hey Mickey!

Hey Mickey!

Resilience is overrated when it's not advertised

Stevie

Bah!

I once had the pleasure of watching someone demonstrate the resilience of Veritas multi-path volume management.

Unplugged one of the arrays - no problem.

Plugged it back in - massive problems as system started yelling about duplicate network addresses.

Seems that the system would fall over, but could not get back up.

Some wag suggested hanging a "life alert" on the frame, but was made to sit in the uncooperative corner.

Stevie

Re: Fallback fault-tolerant

In the mid-90s I grew very tired of visiting sites where the resilient nodes were named "Calvin" and "Hobbes".

Hard to smile at a joke you've heard many times before.

Have you ever suspected your colleague doesn't hope this email finds you well?*

Stevie

Re: fish curry

See that and raise you the guy who cooks the curry, then jams the bog with the inevitable results and the other bloke who doesn’t recognise the situation despite the bi-weekly replay, and “adds” the the janitorial experience.

Oh, and the colleague who must use copious amounts of water during their bizarre bathroom ritual which leaves the entire cubicle soaked and every scrap of paper a soggy mush.

And the guy who conducts experiments to see if half a toilet roll won’t flush on the first Friday of the month, whether the same laws of plumbing apply every Friday that follows.

Hard to believe we require proof of education before we employ anyone.

Judge denies HP's plea to throw out all-in-one printer lockdown lawsuit

Stevie

Re: Brother Laser Printer

Love mine, but discovered last week that Adobe Reader doesn’t recognize the double-side print feature any more. LibreOffice sees the feature just fine. 8o/

So there’s that.

Cops cuff pregnant woman for carjacking after facial recog gets it wrong, again

Stevie

Bah!

Sue the pension fund. Make the buggers abusing their power pay the price instead of the taxpayers.

The Blue Wall of Silence would soon crumble.

Scientists strangely unable to follow recipe for holy grail room-temp superconductor

Stevie

Bah!

Cold Fusion, 2.0.

Techie's quick cure for a curious conflict caused a huge headache

Stevie

Re: Bad things happen when good people stay quiet.

I've found that is more generally the case when one does speak up.

Douglas Adams was right: Telephone sanitizers are terrible human beings

Stevie

Re: completely wrong

Unlike the SFX tour de force that was the TV show’s version?

Imagined convo:

“How will we convince the audience the fake head is alive? It looks like a mardi-gras head!”

“We’ll have it asleep for the entire show!”

“Great idea! Make it so!”

Later:

“Every time the actor moves the fake head bounces around enough to give it a concussion!”

“Hence why it is asleep all the time … ?”

Techie fired for inventing an acronym – and accidentally applying it to the boss

Stevie

Bah!

I think getting upset about "Karen" is tantamount to being a right Nigel.

What?

Shag pile PC earned techies a carpeting from HR

Stevie

Bah!

Cripes.

Now everyone will feel the need to pile in.

Backup tech felt the need – the need for speed. And pastries and Tomb Raider

Stevie

I have a similar story

I once fell overboard and was almost eaten by a shark.

But here's the funny thing.

Its head was shaped almost exactly like a hammer.

PC tech turns doctor to diagnose PC's constant crashes as a case of arthritis

Stevie

Re: Trinitron

My dad (a chartered electrical engineer who taught industrial electronics at college level) rented a Sony Trinitron with which he was extremely happy. We had suggested he buy one, but his motto was “let them sort the problems out and I’ll buy when it’s a mature technology”.

When the rental period expired he asked if he could buy the set, but the rental company declined.

So he bought a new one.

And entered a personal hell.

In the interim, Sony had cheaped out on the build. Instead of using I.F. cans to adjust the scan characteristics of the electron beam, a technician now drove plastic wedges into the x-y coils to distort them and the magnetic fields they produced to adjust the convergence.

The results were “good enough”.

We would be watching a show, and suddenly dad would leap up, jab his finger at some part of the picture and yell “SEE THAT? AARGH!”

Naturally, none of us could see that.

He was blocking the view.

Don't lock the datacenter door, said the boss. The builders need access and what could possibly go wrong?

Stevie

Re: rebooting the system

“What do you do for a living?”

“I work with computers. Doesn’t everyone these days?”

“Can you fix my computer?”

“No. I work with them, not on them.”

Stevie

Re: Datacenter door?

I worked in a place where there were four or five security checkpoints with wire cages and closed circuit tv between the front gate and the shop floor. Then an ordinary door to the computer staff office. Then an ordinary door to the mainframe room, which turned out to be in a wooden extension to the main building (ie a big shed). Then a hole in the wall gnawed by rats to the carpark.

Two signs in the comms cabinet said 'Do not unplug'. Guess what happened

Stevie

Bah!

Brass plug with body connection to live electrode.

Stevie

and still can't quite believe they turned off a network to charge a device.

I don't know why.

Here in NY we had a guy get on stage during a broadway play to plug in his phone.

He was outraged to be told to get off stage and stay off, and had the nerve to ask "well, where can I recharge my phone, then?"

There is no bottom to human stupid.

Boss broke servers with a careless bit of keyboarding, leaving techies to sort it out late on a Sunday

Stevie

Re: "an on-prem email server"

Um, what about the unpredictable emissions coming from the unshielded nuclear reactor some twit left running about 8 light minutes away? Servers in space have to be a bit harder than the ones in the repurposed coat cupboard.

Go ahead, be rude. You don't know it now, but it will cost you $350,000

Stevie

Re: Accent

I was flying to the USA in ‘84 on an 18 month contract (that turned into a lot longer but that’s another story).

Pan-Am, 747, you could still smoke and drink.

I walk to the back of the plane to use the bathroom and there’s a bloke there with a six-pack of beer standing in the part where the seats stop and the fuselage starts to narrow, one can being swigged, the others dangling from the other by the little plastic harness.

“Yeeaarrgh argaaa mcvoot jimmeh!” He bellows at me as I pass.

“I’m terribly sorry, I’m English. I didn’t understand you” I say, ingenuously.

“ENGLISH? WADDAYA MEAN, ENGLISH? AHM FR’M NOOCASTLE!”

Absolutely true story.

Stevie

Re: The Problem Isn’t The Issue

Exactly!

I have to commute using the bloody Long Island Rail Road.

Periodically they have problems that will take a long time to fix. Police activity, derailments, downed trees, snow drifts etc etc.

It isn’t the problem stranding us for hours that is the primary annoyance. It is that despite having met these same issues many times over the 100+ years of “service” they never have a f*cking clue about how long it will take to fix.

“We’re being held indefinitely here at <some station> due to an police activity unauthorized person on the tracks” (translation: The cops and EMTs are picking up various organs). “Indefinitely”? Really? You know how long it typically takes to do corpse cleanup in the dark from gthe umptytump times before. You know what the backed-up congestion is on the tracks. How about “We won’t be moving for an hour at least. Best you get an uber ride back to your car”?

Stupid, and predicated on a captive audience.

Just follow the instructions … no wait, not that instruction to lock everyone out of everything

Stevie

Bah!

Absolutely!

A depressing number of stories resemble Sir Walter Raleigh’s tale of the time he fell overboard and was almost eaten by a hammerhead shark, and the magic phrase “flames shot out” has been completely absent for years.

This is not The Register’s fault, it is that of the authors or these, well, one hesitates to call them Tales of Woe, centering as they do on conflagration-free non-firings. The young IT professionals of today are simply not trying.

It has to be said that the world of modern electronics to which they are exposed does not lend itself to loud detonations, people jumping around with their skeletons flashing on and off, and breakers at the substations tripping. One simply cannot get the same Oomph from a wall-wart designed to deliver 3 anna bit volts at a current so small it barely fibrillates the heart as one could in the late 1960s, when the St John Backsides Comprehensive “computer club” would turn on the floor-mounted socket with a three ring binder because there would be “some arcing” As the old IBM 1301 they were rebuilding from scrap began to stagger into half-life.

How I yearn for the days when a casually misplaced finger while pulling a crystal from a shortwave set could result in a loud cry of “OOYAH!”, an impressive standing long jump - backwards I might add, a hand-shaped burn in the desk top and the smell of frying finger flesh redolent in the air.

Not for the young engineer the exciting experience of leaving a screwdriver stuck in the ceiling after the reassurances of a colleague that the chassis of the TV was indeed unplugged turn out to be less-than definitive, nor shall their ears ever receive those energizing words: “SHE’S GONNA BLOW!”

Hot, sweaty builders hosed a server – literally – leaving support with an all-night RAID repair job

Stevie

Re: around ten meters worth

Why are you still using French units of measurement?

Aren’t you Standing Alone Together* like we did in ‘39? Shouldn’t you be using good old yards?

* Up to the armpits in freezing seawater while being strafed by Messerschmitts.

No, working in IT does not mean you can fix anything with a soldering iron

Stevie

Re: family support

http://theoccasionalstevie.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Mac%20G4%20Debacle

Stevie

Re: bell wire

Ha! When I tore out the wall of an upstairs bathroom I found that the previous owner had approached the laying of Romex cable over a wall stud in an inventive way.

One *should* run the wire *up* the stud, and cross it in a rebate cut deep enough to house the cable, then cover it with a metal plate so johnny next owner doesn’t drive a screw through it.

What Mr Bodge had done was lay the cable on the nailing face of the stud. He had used half-thickness wallboard, cut a slot in it to situate the cable, then laid another piece of half-thickness wallboard over the whole thing.

That was it.

Add in that this was 1950s, silver lizard-hide insulated wiring, so two conductors only with grounds arranged “locally” to a water pipe if the “electrician” remembered (never did).

I have a big reel of green wire so I can run grounds when IO discover yet another one isn’t there.

Bad UI killed the radio star

Stevie

Bah!

Pikers! Not one “flames shot out” in the whole comment section so far!

I’ll fix that.

I worked in an enterprise where an electrician was asked to run a new circuit. He decided to save time by not pulling the main breaker, then drilled into the breaker box with one of those long electrician’s drills.

A sad mistake.

His corpse set fire to the building.

I wasn’t there at the time, but I think “Flames shot out of the electrician” can be assumed.

Using the datacenter as a dining room destroyed the platters that matter

Stevie

Re: Smaller buddies

I had a “colleague” who was a total slob. I worked in a different room, but was prompted by the filth and squalor to ask why didn’t anyone complain about his filthy, food-and-mouse-turd-strewn desk.

“That guy’s a genius.”

When he finally retired they started pulling out the piles of greenbar stacked under his now-cleaned desk and found one stack had embedded in it a nest of mummified dead mice.

Personally, I don’t tolerate people in close proximity who are so smart they pose a health hazard.

The answer to 3D printing equipment on Mars might lie in the Red Planet's dust

Stevie

Bah!

So we now need to add “enough titanium powder to print what we need - 5%” to the tool list.

Oh, and the printer, of course.

Microsoft warns of bugs after nation pushes back DST switchover

Stevie

Re: The Chile Zone: Meat-Based, No Beans

Local times are the PITA.

Everyone should be on Zulu time* and lump it.

*Zulu time defines the baseline as the time “Zulu” was shown on BBC1 on Christmas Day 1980, that being stated as 00:00:00 Zulu time.

Stevie

Re: I hope they don't add Pacific/Christmas

Indeed.

That would be crackers.

Yeah, we'll just take that first network handshake. What could possibly go wrong?

Stevie

Re: The guiding principle

"Interpreter App?"

So obviously not really compiled then, and even more obviously, not real Cobol, but some silly compiles-to-C (or worse: compiles-to-Java) toy computer nonsense.

@ACOB,CRYPES lads, with special option 7 for those times your team can't figure out why the damn thing guard modes unless MONITOR ALL is compiled in.

Now: Get off my Zen sand garden c/w fishing gnome!

Stevie

Re: maybe a QuantumBoolean or Qlean

Presumably pronounced "clone".

Stevie

Rhyme "Kleen" with "Lane"

Then spell it the way you want it pronounced!

Gordon Bennet, there can be no more worthwhile project than to get rid of all the clixby mispronounceable names infesting IT today.