Posts by Juan Inamillion 529 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Feb 2009
>The doctor (surgeon) who trashed a PCMCIA card (and messed up the slot on the laptop) because he wanted to take it out and look at it. Except instead of using the eject button/switch/slidey thing, he used a set of forceps!!!!
Could have been even messier if he'd have been a gynaecologist...
In the late 60's when I was a slightly precocious teenage schoolboy interested in electronics, I convinced my father that I could squeeze a bit more life out of our old black and white TV, that was gradually fading away.
Opening it up I located the mains transformer which, like most in those days, had various taps on it to adjust for slightly different AC mains voltages around the country. I moved the the wire to the next tap, which increased the voltage in by about 10 volts. I switched it on and my father marvelled at the increased brightness of the screen. Maximum brownie points.
Three months later there was a bit of a bang and a burning smell.
Oh well, we needed a new one anyway...
Many years ago my then partner and I co-owned a house. We were splitting up, not particularly amicably, accusations of misappropriated money from mortgages on the house etc. She sent me a document prepared by her accountant outlining what they thought the split should be with all the costings. At the bottom I saw the the tell-tale 'Sheet 1' 'Sheet 2' 'Sheet' 3 of a default Excel spreadsheet, and lo and behold there were all their workings, comments and annotations.
Needless to say she failed mightily to stitch me up.
Many years ago my then g/f and I went on holiday to Gomera (one of the smaller Canary Islands). It turned out the island and our hotel in particular were very popular destinations for German tourists. Sure enough every morning we got down to the pool all the sunbeds were either occupied or had towels on them, sometimes for hours with nobody turning up.
One night, late after returning from a local hostelry, definitely a bit worse for wear, we thought what fun it would be to take all the towels from the little store room by the pool and put them out on the sunbeds and see what happened in the morning. We came out at about 10am to an eerily quiet hotel and no-one in or around the pool. Obviously very curious we went to reception and asked where everyone was. The receptionist said 'It's Wednesday, all the Germans have gone on their scheduled walk round the island...'
Many many years ago a client gifted me a HP laserjet 1015 A4 printer. I don't really know how long I've had it but I just checked and it could be used on Mac OS9 and I'm now on MacOS 12.6. I don't think I've bothered to install drivers since MacOS X first shipped. It's very fast and economical. I've probably used 4 or 5 toners (which I can buy now at £11).
The bane of my life as an Apple tech was always inkjet printers, I recommended several clients (even domestic ones) to buy colour lasers (Brother have always been particularly good) and bin their inkjets and have never looked back.
p.s. I just saw a for sale advert for a refurbished HP1015 for £145. Way overpriced realistically, you can get the similar but WIFI enabled brand new HP LaserJet M110we for under £90, but the new model uses 'chipped' toner carts at £54 each! Hahahahaha! Way to go HP!
What puzzled me most was looking into studio recording technology and thinking that was the limiting factor. So no matter how much you waste.. I mean spend on playback stuff, you'll never be able to reproduce sound that wasn't there.
Yep, I worked in recording studios most of my working life and can vouch for that. Always especially enlightening when some audiophile named Tarquin rabbits on about things he (it's always he) can allegedly hear on a disc on his Turbo ZXZ1000 Mega system, when I was there at the recording and I know he's talking complete and utterly bolleaux.
Very briefly, you're talking out of your fundament.
Train drivers are put through 2 years of intensive training before even allowed to drive (assisted) a train on the network. There's a massive amount to learn about signals, health and safety (they're entirely responsible for every passenger, which can be hundreds), they have to learn individual routes so they know where they are in times of problems.
It is most definitely not pushing 'doors close' and 'go'.
And the most recent strike was not even the train drivers, it was the network staff.
Now get back to your class.
Client says his Mac is very slow and he's very fed up, can I fix it 'now'.
Get info on his HD shows it's very nearly run out of free space.
Check his Trash, ooerrr lots of files there, GB's in fact. So I empty it.
Yep.
"But that's where I save all my stuff!!!!"
To this day I have no idea of the thought process that says 'Save important data in the Trash'.
I'm slightly heartened by the similar experiences in this thread.
A million years ago (well, the 60's...) a friend of mine was working in an 'electrical shop', where back in those days sold appliance which often didn't have mains plugs on the the power lead as there were still a lot of houses with old two pin sockets. When you made your purchase you told the shop assistant what plug you required, took it home and fitted it yourself.
One day an elderly gentleman comes in to buy an electrical kettle. My friend says fine, what plug do you need. The gentleman says three pin please. My friend tells the chap to very careful wiring it up and make sure it's earthed properly. He came back a few days later complaining the kettle didn't work. My friend opened the plug to check the fuse and discovered he's put all three wires onto the earth pin....
In an earlier life I was a recording engineer in a London studio. Large multitrack (2" 16 or 24 track) analogue tapes were starting to be moved around different studios and eventually overseas, particularly the US. (Much much cheaper to send someone with a tape to New York and record a band there than to ship the band to the UK!).
However, US customs suddenly cottoned on to the fact that these tapes contained 'product', albeit unfinished music tracks, albums etc. So they started to charge import duties based on some figure that they thought these were worth. The courier would then have to make frantic phone calls to make payment. Anyway someone worked out that the courier should say that the tape was only a backup tape (there's your IT angle) with only an intrinsic value of the cost of the tape. Amazingly this worked....
I haven't owned a car for a long time but I rent a lot (e.g. car club or Hertz for longer period - it's cheaper for me than owning), therefore I get to try a lot of different cars. By far the biggest pain in the butts are the ones with everything in the sodding 'infotainment' system. As far as I'm concerned it's no different to using a phone while driving. Even if I familiarise myself before setting off ( Yet Another System...) I still don't consider safe to use while driving. Even having controls on the steering wheel doesn't work as you still need to work out which button does what and how many levels you have to go through to get to what you want.
Early 80's I bought a Philips colour tv, I think 19" maybe 21". After a year it started to play up. Had it fixed, a few months later more problems; fixed, a few months later... anyway, you get it. I eventually got a chatty engineer who told me Philips tv's always suffered from dry joints and the fix was to just reflow them every so often.
Much later I had a Philips VCR and Hifi (I was working for someone who was sponsored by Philips CD...). The hifi fell apart, literally, after a few weeks. The VCR lasted a while though. Shit software.
Absolutely avoided Philips ever since.
Client with half a dozen Apple Macs with the AAUI interfaces and connected via BNC in a token ring. On two previous occasions a connector had 'come undone' and on each visit to fix it was carefully pointed out what had happened when they 'lost their network'. The third time I insisted they checked every connection and they insisted that it was all ok . I walked in and before I'd even removed my coat I pointed to the connector on the desk... 'No No NO' they insisted they'd checked... I connected it and walked out in less than 5 minutes and charged the full call out fee.
"CBP officers at JFK Airport recently seized 2,000 counterfeit Apple AirPods"
Then it was pointed out that the goods weren't packaged as 'Apple Airpods' so can't be called counterfeit.
Whoops! Better find some other tenuous reason to save our sad arse.
“Upon examining the shipment in question, a CBP Import Specialist determined that the subject earbuds appeared to violate Apple’s configuration trademark,”
Job done!
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I used to be in Zen's Partner Program so I got a small commission if I sold clients their services (I was an independent Apple trader, retired now). Incredibly helpful, they'd even help out if the client equipment hadn't been purchased from them. In nearly 20 years I never had a complaint about them.
How did it come to this? It seems impossible that what should be simple accounting ends up with lives at stake, lives and families ruined. And all the associated people, relatives etc and what about friends and neighbours? \all the people in their local communities who trusted them and all that trust erroneously cast aside. All who came to mistrust these sub-postmasters and for what? A fucking computer error.
If I had a few million I'd put it into their fund to ream those bastards. Paula Venells for a start. Millions she 'earned' and then off to another highly paid job with no accountability for what havoc she's caused.
It's an utter utter disgrace and no doubt none of the fuckers responsible will ever be held to account.
Sorry it's been a long day...
It seems to me that if an article was referred to as 'lies' it would be taken a whole lot more seriously by it's author and m'learned friends in the public domain.
Using the phrase 'fake news' is almost childish, playground banter-ish and so much less likely to be taken seriously, but ultimately devaluing the discourse.
Back in the '70's when I was a sound recording engineer for while I remember one client who was paranoid about the safety of his multitrack tapes and insisted they were wrapped in aluminium foil (sigh) and that he took them home every night. One day he came in, we lined up the tape and pressed play... and the tape sounded like the old Radio Luxembourg with the sound fading in and out. Obviously it couldn't be the studio's fault and he hadn't travelled home by London Underground (oh yes, that was supposed to be a problem too!). But when he'd got home the night before he'd parked the reel of tape next to his (CRT) TV....
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