Posts by Blofeld's Cat 1343 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jan 2010
At one time the lights in the Droitwich transmitter building were ancient fluorescent tubes with bayonet cap ends, hung from the ceiling on string.
The lights burned night and day and were essentially "free", as there was enough stray RF around to light the tubes without needing to wire them up.
"Tragic really", said the BOFH watching the covered stretcher being carried from the charred office.
"Temporary insanity due to stress, they reckon", added the PFY.
"It seems the blast from the generator collapsed the shelving unit across the doorway, and he had no way out".
"Had he not insisted on having his window screwed shut after finding that broken latch ..."
I did a contract for a firm where one user had decided to store pron on his work machine. He had then renamed the files with something boring like "sales_forecast_Q3.xls.jpg", to cover his tracks.
One day, when the user was away, his boss logged in looking for the Q3 sales forecast ...
The user returned to find ALL his pron files now contained an image of his, more technically savvy than usual, boss grinning and holding up a sign that read "Don't do this again!"
In an alternative reality, a board meeting is taking place:
"Good news everybody.", said the CEO, "I've asked our new AI how to boost our profits. It suggests driving the English out of Aquitaine and embarking on a series of military adventures to conquer the Holy Land".
The CTO examined the prompt and its output. "I think you'll find, Mr Chairman, that 'prophets' are not the same thing as 'profits'".
Years ago when I was an apprentice, we did a lot of work in old factories and mills in North West England. Nearly every switch room you went in had something to avoid:
"Don't get too close to that busbar chamber with the missing lid. The bars used to be insulated with asbestos, but they removed it as it was dangerous."
"We think that the ebonite board with the brass knife switches is left over from the mill's generator set."
"Most of the stuff on the ceiling hasn't been properly supported since the air raid in 1941."
"I'm pretty certain turning this valve off isolates the halon system. Just don't hit any of the sprinklers."
I worked on a site where the company had half a racking bay in their warehouse filled with old, still boxed, 386SX PCs, which had been bought by a technologically-challenged PHB and his purchasing manager despite the protests of everyone involved in IT.
The story was that the salesman had taken the PHB out to lunch and had persuaded him the hopelessly underpowered systems were "state of the art", and could easily be updated to meet "any future requirements".
The deal had apparently been clinched when the salesman offered a discount for bulk purchases.
I worked on a site where the switch room key had a 20kg collection of steel plates as the "tag". The key was attached by a metre of equally impressive chain, so you could put the tag on the floor while working the lock.
Apparently they added another 1kg to the tag every time somebody took it off site.
Fermat's Cuisine?
I'm reminded of the (possibly apocryphal) story of the UK company that ordered some mechanical components from Japan. In their order they stated that they would accept 5% of out-of-spec components.
A few weeks later the parts arrived accompanied by a note from QC. The note read: "We do not understand your business methods, but the out-of-spec components you ordered are wrapped in red tissue paper in the top layer of the first box."
A medical technician friend of mine once tracked down who was stealing the tea pool's soft drinks by adding a small amount of a harmless diagnostic chemical to each bottle.
Completely harmless, but with the side effect of turning the patient's urine bright red.
Apparently the screams from the gents' toilet could be heard for some distance.
A former colleague used to have to maintain some communication antennas and associated gear for people who do not exist, at places that didn't appear on an Ordnance Survey map.
Not being on the map used to lead to some difficulty in actually finding the transmitter sites.
Fortunately one of the senior technicians had bought a set of old Soviet maps while at a conference in Moscow, and these showed the installations in some detail.
A flame war* between influencers who state that green bananas contain the most magic, and pseudoscientists who claim that they need to ripen to yellow, before their full potential is reached.
Both sides will consider the brown banana faction as being unredeemable heretics.
* Or possibly the more traditional type of war.
A colleague and his wife have tattoos where the wedding ring would normally sit, as they both have jobs where jewellery would be a safety/hygiene risk.
Their actual wedding rings only get worn on special occasions as they were made for them by a relative, who crafted them from meteorite iron.
When asked, "Are those rings antique?" their usual reply is, "Yes, they're just slightly older than the solar system."
<Waves hand>
Yes, I can remember when a half-crown was 2'6 or 2/6 or 2s 6d. I also remember the farthing, but we won't go there ...
The local bus company took some weeks to change over their ticket machines when the new decimal coins came in, so you used to tender fifteen new pence and be given two and a half new pence back for a half-crown fare.
Incidently until just a few years ago the UK railway infrastructure still used miles and chains.
"He got fired instead, but his code stayed."
I got landed with trying to sort out some code that had been hacked together by such a consultant.
Developed using the Borland C IDE (remember that?), his masterpiece mixed bad C code with blocks of embedded assembler "for performance". Comments were of the "you shouldn't get here" variety.
I wasted half a day going through something that couldn't possibly compile, let alone work, only to find that the genius had excluded that particular source file from the Make with an obscure command line switch.
"With modern poor road maintenance, bushes tend to get a bit of a hard time.
Oh, you mean mechanical bushes - it all makes sense now.
For a moment I had a picture in my mind of a car bouncing off the pot-holes and disappearing into the undergrowth.
Elizabeth Willing Powel: "Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy?"
Dr Benjamin Franklin: "A republic - if you can keep it."
Conversation recorded by James McHenry in his Journal on the last day of the Constitutional Convention, 18 September 1787.
I suspect that in this case the "AI solution" will be a database query as you suggest. Possibly one that is already being done under a different name.
Don't forget that "We implemented an AI solution" sounds much better than "We ran a database query", and scores more points on the buzzword bingo card.
If, however, the powers that be bring in one of the consultancy friends, then we can expect to see a multi-billion plan wrapped around the same query.
One of the fears of historians at the moment is that we are entering a new "Dark Age" where it is soon going to be almost impossible to research anything that happened after the middle years of the 20th century, from primary sources.
A friend was commissioned to write the history of a company that had been founded in Victorian days. The firm still had the minutes of every meeting written down in huge ledgers which lined the walls of their boardroom. Apparently she had so much material that writing the firm's history was very easy, with the hardest part being deciding what to omit.
These days most firms hold such records electronically and almost certainly delete them after a certain time. Quite often they are legally required to delete records that are no longer needed. To produce a similar history of contemporary firms you would often have to use potentially inaccurate secondary sources.
Obviously not every record survived when they were held in physical form, but it is a lot easier to casually wipe a hard drive than it is to dispose of a cellar full of filing cabinets and folders.
I did some testing for a hand-held test equipment manufacturer in the mid '80s.
One of their sales reps had turned up at a potential customer's factory to demonstrate an instrument to a very disinterested manager. Part of his sales pitch emphasized the robustness of the instrument, which was one of its main selling points.
The manager stopped him at that point, "What do you mean by robust?"
Their rep led the manager to an adjacent loading bay and threw the unit across the factory yard, where it bounced off a wall and landed in a puddle, without noticeable effect.
He said afterwards that he had half expected the unit to shatter into a million pieces, but it was the only way he could think of to get the order.
"The databases have no version control systems. Important fields for identifying individuals were used inconsistently – for example, containing junk data, test data, or null data ..."
Sounds like just about every corporate database I've ever been asked to merge, convert, transfer, etc.
"Well not all our customers have a VAT number, so we use that field for their nickname. If they do have a VAT number then we put that in the Fax field, as we don't want to confuse anyone ..."
While I was working on a large corporate site, there was a medical emergency - first-aider, paramedics, ambulance, trip to A&E - in one of the training rooms.
Their employee giving the presentation, in order to connect the ceiling-mounted projector to his laptop, had climbed on an office chair (with castors) that he placed on a folding table, with predictable results.
The front-desk mounted connectors, next to his laptop, were all found to be working correctly as was the IR remote. He had just failed to use any of them.
Ironically the presentation was about health and safety at work, and the presenter ran that department.
