Posts by David Robinson 1 85 posts • joined 8 Sep 2009
The first couple of generations of optical mice had problems with certain colours. A chap I worked with had a mouse mat with a red-eyed green tree frog printed on it. He swapped from a ball mouse to an optical one and retained the mouse mat. Every time the optical sensor moved over the frog's eyes, the mouse pointer went crazy. It took him a while to figure that one out.
I purchased my own rodent and keyboard for use in the office, whereas most others are content with the cheap shite supplied with the base units. If I'm using something 7+ hours a day, I want to make sure I'm comfortable with it. 16 year old MS IntelliMouse Explorer 3.0A, still going strong. Keyboard is one using Cherry MX Red switches, as I'm not allowed to use my Model M in the office. Something about Health & Safety and exceeding dB limits...
In the 25 years or so I've had to interact with Excel, it's never given me any grief. Word, hell yes. When using Word my reflex was to Ctrl-S every five minutes. Then there was Word 6 and 9x tendency to muff up the documents by saving older edits, which rendered the file unable to be opened. We found that the Word document could be opened in OpenOffice and saved back out. That stripped all the old crap out of the file and allowed it to be opened in Word once more. Added benefit was it reduced the file size.
The only complaint I have about Excel is our customers using it to send us log files. "Let me get this straight. You had a perfectly serviceable text log file and you decided to paste it into an Excel spreadsheet before sending it to us?"
"The wonder-OS [NT4] needed at least 16MB (preferably a bit more) and a decent CPU while Windows 3.1 would toddle along with 1 or 2MB and a considerably lower class of CPU."
When I first started this job, those were the specs of the PC I was assigned. My current work laptop has 16GB RAM and a 6-core i7 with Windows 10 as the OS, all to run PuTTY.
For reasons lost in the mists of time, I'd made a copy of /usr on a system. Time came to remove the copy.
root@server # rm -rf /usr
Yep, absolute path not relative path.
There's the one rule we live by in our office: "No five-minute changes on a Friday afternoon." Violating this rule usually means you'll be staying back 3 hours to undo the chaos such a change visits upon the system.
I still have and use my 5mx on a regular basis, mainly for the Palmtop Money app to track my finances. I've never found anything yet to replace the app's functionality to my satisfaction. Having a decent proper keyboard doesn't hurt either and runs forever on a pair of AAs.
Oh, and oblig. Psion = Potter's Scientific Instruments Or Nothing that someone usually trots out regarding the company name.
When I were a lad, I used to help out my dad in his business. He and his regular employee had a rather mixed system of measurements.
"It's one metre, six inches and a smidgeon."
"Big smidgeon or little smidgeon?"
"Little."
I was always surprised that things actually fitted together.
First off, grrr at Newky. Isn't that a seaside town?
Second, Geordie not Geordi. Latter was the engineer on NCC-1701-D.
It's called Dog, because when slipping off down the pub, the excuse would be "Aam taekin' the dug forra wark."
Five minutes later she cottons on, "Ha'ad aan, we divvent heav a dug."
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