Posts by Anne Hunny Mouse 92 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Jun 2009
I've been contacted several times for advice and knowledge from previous gigs, including from BT engineers.
I try to help where possible but my boss did get a bit shirty with the engineer.
Slightly off topic, but one gig was too tight to pay for on call mobiles. As a consequence my personal number appeared in the DR documents for the consortium.
I may have had a call after I left where the caller was told to Foxtrot Oscar.
One stumbling block you can find when trying to move to a different hypervisor is lack of vendor support.
Cisco only supports UC products on ESXi, some other vendors only support ESXi and Hyper-V.
It will take time for vendors to validate and support other hypervisors but I suspect some are waiting to see which one(s) are going to popular as they don't want to support too many platforms.
This has left organisations nervous about backing the wrong horse too. This means some have opted to pay up to Broadcom in the short term.
Pilot flying and duty hours are strictly controlled by aviation rules in most countries.
Airlines are heavily fined for breaches as fatigue is a major contributing factor in many accidents.
If there are delays at airports it is not unknown for flights to be cancelled due to the crew running out of hours.
There have been several accidents due to crews rushing to try to complete a flight before their hours expire, often as they don't want to be stuck at an outstation.
There are plenty of examples in the Mayday / Air Crash Investigation series.
E.g. Spanex crash where they rushed the checklist and tried to take off with no flaps.
On a previous job, early days on a secure gig for UK Government and building only just handed over for us t use.
One weekend, the electricians were working in the UPS Room and dropped a spanner short circuiting the giant UPS.
Electrics were back on for the Monday but lots of things weren't working or on the fritz, including the access card system.
Part way through the day someone decided the building wasn't safe until it was sorted so got a paid afternoon off.
There are a significant number of wind turbines in the sea around Blyth.
Blyth is billed as a centre of excellence for wind power.
The site used to be Blyth power station so should be easy to have significant grid access.
And yes, it's not in Blyth but Cambios. (Pronounced Camis)
The story has given me to some bad flashbacks to On Call issues.
One case there were issues with NTP on a air gapped network without a proper NTP source. Took hours to persuade the get the pseudo NTP to trust the Sun box used as the NTP source. (Not our network but one we had to use for something because of customers contractual requirements).
More recently, the NTPs of the DC's got out of whack and ended up pointing at each other.
As a result messaging and integration of the hospital systems so no results popping through in the early hours.
At least for that one I didn't need to go into site and once the DCs were sorted I could correct the rest of the Servers with a script and PDQ.
A Single Action does not mean nobody else bid.
A Single Action means it hasn't gone to tender.
They can be used when you can only go to one supplier (e.g add on for supplier of an existing system), unable to get an additional quote or award is urgent and going via framework or tender would take to long.
There are some other criteria but I can't remember off the top of my head.
I would guess that in this case they would cite the existing suppliers knowledge of the system.
The meters and displays aren't that smart.
The original SMets1 are tied to one provider, meaning they went dumb if you changed companies.
The in house displays cannot cope with tariffs which have different prices depending on the time and only display usage costs based the higher rate.
Smart meters are only useful if you are using one of these time based tariffs to exploit cheaper electricity available overnight for EV charging, heat pumps or storage heaters (though Economy 7 is more common for these).
Depending if you are north or south of a point in the country depends on how your smart meter connects.
North uses radio. This means certain areas you can't get smart meters as they have been deemed to interfere with radar.
The idea for smart meters is to cut peak usage as neither the generating companies or the Government want to built more power stations as they cost money.
Suspect that it was never explained to the software developer creating the software that there are duplicated waypoints across the world.
I've read that there are at least 4 duplicated waypoints but are very geographically separated to avoid issues.
Wonder if the plane's flight / navigation computer coped with the duplicated waypoint name or the flight crew had elected to only enter part of the route into the plane?
"We're sure the software engineers among our readership will also be scratching their heads at how such a problem could happen and how it was acceptable that the result was to fall into maintenance mode and write to a log rather than simply record and flag the failure and move onto the following file."
With the old Plessy \ GPT \ Siemens ISDX platform, if there was a call the system doesn't know how to route, or a routing route, would crash or flip processors if it had dual processors.
Even with 2 processors this situation still causes issues as all calls are dropped during a processor switchover.
Newer systems tend to drop a call in such a situation, but it is possible to easily bring a Cisco CUBE to it's knees if a voice routing loop has been accidently configured on systems connected to the CUBE.
When the Portal works and frequently it doesn't.
Microsoft calling minutes need to be purchased, as do licenses for Intune.
Previously users had an E3R license which didn't come with the Office Apps. The new deal is for E3.
NHS D (as was) has been pushing orgs to move to O365 licenses but there have been issues by Orgs that have moved.
Locum? Not attached to org so no license.
Reconciliation of licenses after someone leaves is very slow. This leaves orgs short for new starters.
Part of the deal is that NHS Orgs have to commit to reducing their existing Office 16/19/21 estates by 50%
Don't forget this unusual shared tenancy has lots of restrictions. Lots of integrations can't be done, Accenture / NHS X26 hold access to Azure etc
I would expect to AI to be better than most off-shored Contact Centres...
Contact Centre industry has been sliding downwards in the UK for years.
The beancounters love off shoring to reduce costs.
Sometimes they move back to UK if the company takes notice of the negative feedback on off-shoring.
There will also be some on-shore due to GDPR on the data or other constraints (e.g. Protectively Marked).
In the early 2000's I remember a Doctor in a Hospice using his deleted items to store emails..
Was fine until the AV flagged an email virus and his deleted items was emptied...
Have accidentally deleted /usr/bin on a Sun box. It continued run file. Just FTP'd the files from it's identical sister server on the other site and restored a backup the next day to fix the symbolic links.
Same here. Have a phone system which requires Java for the web access (a lot easier than the command line). It is not an old system, last upgraded 2021.
There was an exercise by a project team to collate sites which needed IE Mode. However, looking at the list produced it included several URL's and sites which don't work in IE.
Luckily it's not my project.
Have known people with following dodgy names
Anna Beaver
Wayne Carr
Susan Lavery
I know a medical consultant whose parents decided it would be a laugh to give her the initials HRH.
In the family she is nicknamed The Queen.
The best one was just a surname: Porcelloni
In Italian it translates as Big Pigs.
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