Posts by Scott 26 392 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
> There is no AI. There's just a machine that obeys orders.
I reckon.... I upset people at work. "It's not 'AI', it's an LLM, which is merely a statistical model"
"Now now Scott 26, you can't say that in front of our users...."
gah!
> "please consider the financial costs of your trips and help us save money"
When I first discovered el Reg when I was working my OE in old London town a quarter of a centuary ago (really??? that long??? sheeeeeeeet). We were doing a rollover in Edinburgh. We had had a change in IT Director. Old director was ex-US Military but hada background in IT, so things had to documented to the nth degree and run precisely in sequence (within error bounds of IT projects). But at the end of the project he was generous at the bar... Plus he and I would laugh when our English colleagues kept talking about "routers" (pronounced 'rooters' which means something else to Kiwis and Yanks).
New director was English, but background in accounting (???? da fuck was he doing in IT then?).
Anyways, back to Scotland: things went wrong and we said we needed another day (Sunday) to fix. New director said "nope, not paying Sunday rates, come home as booked"), so project team came back to to London, then first thing Monday went back to Scotland... but of course to the ire of the workers in the office who found only half their kit had been swapped out to the new gear....
> If you've something you want to get done, do it before you retire. You'll be too busy afterwards.
ex-colleague 'stupidly' bought a pub in his retirement.
I called in at Xmas:
"How's retirement?"
"Retirement? I've never been so busy, 16+ hour days, fixing this, negoiating that, etc etc"
Because it was Xmas holidays, he had his kids working as well. As one of them walked passed he said "one day this will be all theirs"... all he got back was a rolling of the eyes :D
> marginal tax rates only apply to the portion of income within each bracket, not your entire income,
We are in an election year here in NZ, and one of the oppostion parties has suggested a 'wealth' tax (basically a new tax bracket: 45% at 160k)... well, you should see all the wailing and knashing of teeth from the right. Until someone pointed out the 45% would only apply to earnings over the threshold. (Didn't stop the right from still moaning though... Shock! Horror! More at 10!)
You'd think some basic civics understanding would be mandatory to enter a life of policitics.... apparently not.
I hate dealing with MS for stuff like this.
"Just send us an email from xyz@domain.com"
me: "I can't - that's the admin account that we are trying to recover!!! Hence me contacting you!!!! Additionally, if I could get into that account it still wouldn't help: it's an admin account and by design does not have a mailbox!!!"
GOTO 10
we have something similiar - except it has a small agent on the user device to send the job to the follow-me queue (don't ask why... something something cloud based, probbably).
But we were getting tickets "my print job doesn't show up in the queue".....
hmmmm.... weird one, but eventually one of the team spotted the culprit - every ticket had something in common (and took a while to ask the right question to discover this)... the users would send the print job, then shut down their device (cos they were finishing for the day, or moving between floors/buildings/whatever)... that meant the agent on the laptop would close as well, and not send the job.....
reminds me of the time at my previous job - the MD wanted to do a 'Town Hall' using this new fangled MS Teams thing... 'cept the internal IT team couldn't work it out, so they ended up doing a 'normal' Teams meeting - people soon discovered that they could mute the MD.... /queue shenanigans
I had a manager like that 20+ years ago... I was an onsite engineer, but would spend 1 day a fortnight back on the helldesk so one of them could experience my job (so we had cover). Came into work, logged into the HD system... hmmm... this ticket seems like a curly one, let's have a look - took best part of 3/4 of the day, and then cleared a couple of other calls... didn't think much of it.... next day: "Why did you only clear 3 calls yesterday? Everyone else is clearing 10x that".... Because I cleared that curly ticket, that no-one else wanted to touch, and had been sitting in our queue for days/weeks with no notes on it at all.
Sought advice from my union rep shortly after that: he asked if "# tickets cleared per day" was a formal KPI. Checked my performance agreement: nope. He said don't worry about it then. Said manager got the arse about a year later due to a "restructure", I did not shed a tear.
I was doing a decom of a "small yet highly public business group stood up for a public inquiry" for a govt.nz... one of the 'consultants' kept EVERY SINGLE EMAIL.... including "Coffee in cafe XYZ at 10?' style emails. But worse: he also saved the .msg/.eml files for EVERY SINGLE EMAIL into his Home drive.
There's "everything we do is subject to the Public Records Act" and then there's this guy.
I had something similar: Business decided that needed 24/7 support for ONE of their processes (FTP upload of data to their system)... thing was: the FTP upload was scheduled for 3pm weekdays. Never after hours.
So the money-for-jam oncall bonus was to cover the inconvenience of having to carry an extra phone and learning to say "sorry your password reset (WTF do you want to log in 4am on a Sunday morning?) isn't covered by the oncall agreement, I'll log a ticket and someone will contact you 8am Monday"
(It all fell over when a 'precious' business group had asked the desktop manager if support would be available over the weekend while they got they Big Special Report out - it was for a .govt.nz so no doubt they were meeting a ministerial-imposed deadline.... desktop manager "yup, fill your boots"... Cue a phone to me late Friday night/early Saturday.... cue my usual speech about logging a ticket... cue them saying "no, we were told there would be support"..... hmmm... "who said that".... "Billy-Bob Wankenstein Fucknuckle III"... oh (I say in my head).... out loud: "no-one told me about this" back and forth a few times, and evetually they said they would ring "my manager" (who was not BBWF3)... "ok".... 30 minutes later BBWF3 is ringing me, first saying I needed to support the Precious People.... "need?" .... I only NEED to do what I'm contracted to do.... in the end I think I helped them... might have been a printer issue. But come Monday I resigned effectively immediately from the oncall roster, and also emailed BBWF3 and their manager about how poorly they managed the whole thing - offering up my services without telling me, or at least going through MY manager.
Then months, years later - at least 3 times - they tried to start up 'proper' full cover oncall, and I would relay this story of how not to do it.... would generally kill the plans until next time.... fuck the BBWF3s of the world and the horse they came in)
> It's "Service Desk" actually, if you want to be ITIL® compliant.
we were doing our ITIL training, and got to the point where call center vs helpdesk vs service desk was discussed.... I announced to the room, while staring directly at the helldesk manager, "so we have a call center, then?"
Icon for response, once they worked out what I had just said.
Brave has it's own problems: https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/
I know it's Chromium-based, but I'm currently trying Vivaldi on my personal machine (work won't let us use it work devices - which is a shame as V has excellent multiple profile handling, which is great working for a vendor and needing to have multiple contexts at the same time)
Years ago I did a 'simple' file server migration - windows 2000 to windows 2003. (or it might have been NT to 2008).
But I took the opportunity to scan the shares and build a histogram of file count vs age, so we could go to the business with the analysis "do you really need this share?" and have a bit of a tidy up.
One share had files with the newest date of 95 months ago.... so I went to the business with my spiel "hey these haven't been touched in 95 months.... etc"
The business came back "95 months....???? Oh, that's 8 years. Oh yeah, that share was for a project that shut down 8 years ago, so yeah that'll be about right"
me: "oh cool - dont need it any more then"
business: "ummmmmm...... if we did, could it be restored and how long would it take "
me, internally: "FFS!!!!!"
"loading dock"
had a similar thing with a new PURPOSE BUILT Salvationary Army Family Store my wife was earmarked to manage - "oh the boys on the donations collection truck can just lift sofas and beds etc down from the truck".... she walked away at that point if that was their attitude to staff
I had the opposite....
(~mid-90s) I used to part-time tutorial a CAD class for our 3rd year students. An in the computer lab about 5-10 PCs had a tablet attached, and the number of times I'd get a student saying "if I pick up the mouse and put it down, the cursor snaps to that position on the screen"
