Posts by Montreal Sean

Sysadmin broke hardware worth more than he made in a month – and lied his way out of the mess

A long time ago...

Back in the early 2000s, a little after starting my career at an international IT services company as a break-fix tech, i collected my day's parts and assignments.

As I was walking out of the building, a laptop HDD slipped out of its padded envelope, bounced across a road, and right into a puddle.

I called the company who sent us the warranty HDD and told them it made a strange ticking sound when I installed it in the laptop. No, nothing had happened to the HDD while in my possession...

I don't think any of us have made it through our careers without stupidly damaging some hardware!

Texas senators cry foul over Smithsonian's pricey Space Shuttle shuffle

Re: Pick it up

Trump can ask his best bud Putin.

He may need to trade Alaska for the helos, but that's a small price to pay, right?

Energy drink company punished ERP graybeard for going too fast

Re: Oh really ?

Before beeing medically retired at the ripe old age of 49, I was working for an IT services company that renamed the HR department to the "People&Culture Office".

Is that an improvement? I think so, it at least recognizes us as people and not resources.

Intern did exactly what he was told and turned off the wrong server

Double check, always

This is why you always get more than one identifying label.

Check for the correct name label, then confirm it is the correct server by verifying the service tag as well since they can't be accidentally placed on the wrong server.

The client should always provide both server name and server service tag when creating a ticket, otherwise they can't fault the tech for unplugging the right name-wrong server.

User demanded a 'wireless' computer and was outraged when its battery died

Re: Wires will never go away

The same as problematic users!

State care (or in my case province) was actually more expensive than putting both my parents in a private residence.

If I'd gone with state, I would have been paying for two separate rooms as my parents need different levels of care.

Private residence meant I could have them both in their own little apartment, and pay for the added services each parent needed.

Private also meant they get to stay together.

Field support chap got married – which took down a mainframe

Re: women to drag their male partners' heads down low enough for convenient kissing.

Oooh nurse!

Techie fixed a ‘brown monitor’ by closing a door for a doctor

Re: hmm

You want those screens to be as sharp and bright as possible.

Having been the victim (?) of a poorly calibrated medical screen I speak from experience.

There's nothing like going in for laproscopic surgery to fix an obstructed bowel, and ending up having major abdominal surgery where they manually check every inch of your intestines and then tuck them back in...

Re: Brownware

They're getting on in years and bodies in carpet rolls are really heavy.

Re: Does not sound like any kind of fix to me

I almost gave myself a hernia when I installed my 21" flat tube Sony Trinitron CRT in the early '00s.

That monitor weighed 70Lbs if I remember correctly...I remember adding an extra leg to my desk beneath the monitor so the desk wouldn't flex under the weight of the monitor.

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

Re: Surely simpler to stick with correct English

Here in Montreal, I refer to them as either short or long pints.

USA pint: Short pint (16oz)

UK pint: Long pint (20oz)

:)

People find amazing ways to break computers. Cats are even more creative

My cat is definitely a Cat6, he's on the thick side.

Weeks with a BBC Micro? Good enough to fix a mainframe, apparently

Re: Loud printers

That noise absorbing foam was great, until it got old and dry and would start to drop small pieces of foam into the line printer...

Re: "I think that transducer has incorrect coefficients"

Reroute power from life support in the marketing department, they've been a waste of oxygen for several quarters.

Glitchy taxi tech blew cover on steamy dispatch dalliance

Re: Hilarious

Was it a picture book?

FDA clears Google watch feature to call 911 if you flatline

Re: what's the point?

How long without a pulse before you can be considered dead?

I went into VFib twice during major surgery, no detectable pulse, and was shocked back.

Does that mean I died twice?

Just curious, because if I died and came back that means I have 2 birthdays, so birthday cake twice a year!

No thank you, I think my heart attack is doing fine on its own.

Re: I am surprised that it does not ask you ...

I can't tell you how being zapped by a defibrillator feels in the moment (I was anesthetized for both incidents) but there was definitely an ache in my chest for a few hours afterwards.

VFib is not something I ever want to experience again.

The ache took a back seat to the pain from the emergency abdominal surgery.

Morphine is great at making you lose track of the passage of time, but did nothing for my pain.

One stupid keystroke exposed sysadmin to inappropriate information he could not unsee

I thought his name was Master Bator?

His bunk was never very clean.

Welsh woman fined for flatulence-fueled cyber harassment

It's fine, she had a screen protector.

Those protect against farticles, right?

SpaceX resets ‘Days Since Starship Exploded’ counter to zero

Re: caused the ship to RUD

I look at it more as I used my expertise in disassembly so that someone else could show off their expertise in reassembly.

Tech support warrior left cosplay battle and Trekked to the office

Re: C-suite? Must've been full colour printer

With the recent upgrades we have Tribble the storage!

BOFH: Forecasting and the fine art of desktop upgrades

Re: The BoFH

Tell your boss it will help cut down on headcount and won't require those pesky exit interviews.

Re: I've had to suffer a hardware buy that was the other way around!

I have a client like that.

They are a national property management firm, and they bought a bunch of HP laptops for a hardware refresh.

The refresh was delayed by several months, and then took a few months to complete.

A couple of months later they started placing service calls for some of the new laptops, and were quite angry when told the units were no longer under warranty.

Apparently they believed the warranty should only start once the laptops start being used...

Pornhub pulls out of Florida, VPN demand 'surges 1150%'

Re: Why would they bother with a VPN?

The moaning sounds different in the foreign "films", so Americans don't recognize them as fake.

Jimmy Carter set the solar, space, and environmental pace

Re: A loss no doubt

And it will be the biggliest healthcare plan ever!

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

Re: Screen savers

You should try Rolling Rock!

It's not even piss-water, it's just water. They call it beer, and even claim it contains alcohol.

I disagree. I drank most of a two-four of Rolling Rock and all it did was make me need to pee.

Re: Screen savers

Ah, Lucas! Tri-state Electrics.

On, Off, Flicker.

My dad owned a 1958 MGA 1500 roadster with wire knock-off wheels, a couple of old Minis, and a 1951 Triumph Trophy 500.

The MGA was definitely not made for Montreal winters.

Re: I had one user...

Maybe so, but isn't it so satisfying in the moment?

Change the way you look at it from "Oh no, another idiot user" to "Oh look! Another sacrifice to bring me momentary joy!"

Airbus A380 flew for 300 hours with metre-long tool left inside engine

Re: Multi-Fail

That must have hurt!

Do you now wear a shirt when working on your bike?

Re: "as it would pass through the rotating blades during flight"

Sorry, the partridge is busy in the pear tree.

Fujitsu claims 634-gram 14-inch Core i7 laptop is world's lightest

Re: Lenovo please take heed

Panasonic Toughbook with the built in handle.

They aren't thin or light, but they can definitely be used as a weapon.

Techie took five minutes to fix problem Adobe and Microsoft couldn't solve in two weeks

Slowest quicknfix for me was an after hours call that took me 3 hours to drive to the site because of Friday traffic at the start of a long weekend.

3 hours, 125kms later, I arrive at the site to look at the receipt printer that the user reported would not power on even after plugging it into another socket...

They showed me what they did, and they really did move the plug to another socket. Unfortunately the power lead was not seated in the adapter.

Plug it in, show the user what I did. Buy some snacks to test the printer.

Climb back in my car, drive 2 hours home. Almost 6 hours of overtime to plug in a printer.

At least the mileage reimbursement was generous, and I accumulated 1.5 days of time in lieu.

Muppet broke the datacenter every day, in its own weighty way

Re: I'm meeeeeelting!

Xerox had this type of problem a few ago with one of their Workcentre printers.

These printers would have print quality issues intermittently and no one could figure out why.

It turned out that one of the ventilation grills on the side of the printer would let sunlight in and this somehow affected one of the optical sensors.

I'd love to meet the person who figured that one out, as it would only happen if the sun hit this grill at just the right angle.

Xerox created a new part to fix the problem and retrofit any printer that had the issue. the part was basically a hard plastic awning.

Microsoft decides it's a good time for bad UI to die

Re: Tesla

The owner of Tesla is a spanner.

Re: To sum up

In my experience as a field tech fixing all the big brands, it's only Lenovo which requires you to enter the keyboard language when a system board is replaced. And then only on a very select few models.

HP packs all that config info into the product sku which is one of many things you need to program into a new board. It is all taken care of by a nice step by step config tool, the HP SBCT USB key.

Lenovo has a similar tool for configuring the new board, but it doesn't usually include keyboard locale.

Dell only asks for the serial number and asset number to be set in the BIOS screen during the first boot on a new board.

You work on the fjords and I'll work on the mountain ranges.

I love a good mountain range.

Tech support chap solved knotty disk failure problem by staring at the floor

For failing to fix the problem those engineers have now walked the plank.

BOFH: The true gravity of the Boss and the 3-coffee problem

Re: Coffee? Kindergarten?

I can confirm that.

I've got ADHD and Monster/Red Bull/Rockstar etc cause me to become drowsy.

I can be wide awake, drink a Monster 300 (300mg caffeine) and within 20 minutes be struggling against the drowsiness.

Guru does not make me drowsy though, it actually gives me a boost the way Red Bull does for normal people. Best I can figure is the caffeine source for Guru is guarana which acts differently to caffeine from coffee beans.

My brother in law is a perfect example of coffee-shits.

Each morning he has a cup of strong coffee upon waking. He then preps his breakfast and lunch for the day which takes just long enough, about 30 minutes, to bring him to the shitting part of the morning.

Regular as clockwork. Without the coffee, no shitting.

Raptor Lake microcode limits Intel chips to a mere 1.55 volts to prevent CPU destruction

Re: 1.9v

It's kind of like my car.

It has a redline of 6500 RPM and I can push the engine past that point, but the manufacturer puts a hard cap just above the redline and starts cutting the fuel supply.

Some Civic owners like to bounce the engine on the cut-out so it makes stupid noises, and then complain when the engine craps itself. They'd probably do the same to their computers...

Dangerous sandwiches delayed hardware installation

Re: Try to keep it culturaly correct please

I first parsed that as "incontinence" facts.

There is no honor among RAM thieves – but sometimes there is karma

Re: Sad they have to do that

They have to do that here in Quebec too...

Teachers paying for any art materials for their elementary school students, among other things, that the school boards just won't cover.

During teacher appreciation week the school board wouldn't pay for a staff luncheon, so my wife and I provided lunch for 40 teachers and staff at my kids' elementary school, for 8 years.

We laid on 3 course meals, including vegan and Kosher options, all home cooked by my wife and paid for out of our pockets.

We figured it was the least we could do, given they were teaching our two kids!

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

Re: Good

I'm glad you mentioned the problem with engine braking and modern smaller engines cars.

I compression (engine) brake frequently with my 6 speed 2017 Forte so I'm well acquainted with its uses.

Unfortunately, like you said, the engine is too small to hold back the car when going down slightly steeper grades and the engine ends up spinning quite high.

Re: Good

It's not hard to stick to the posted limit without the use of a speed limiter or cruise control.

My 2017 car comes with a speedometer, same as all the cars I've ever driven, and it tells me how fast I'm going.

I have a brake pedal to slow me down if I'm going too fast, and an accelerator pedal to increase my speed.

I find that by occasionally looking at the speedometer, and using those pedals, I am able to keep my speed within the posted limits.

If you aren't able to drive without all the "assistive" technology, it might be a better idea to take a refresher course on driving instead of adding more "assistive" tech.

Re: Good

My car has the hill assist too, and I can't stand it.

The hill assist has been responsible for stalls on hill starts that I would never have had if the assist was gone.

Electronic stability control is hit and miss, it activates at times that I would rather it not and causes the car to not do what I expected it to do which makes it more of a hindrance to me.

Traction control needs to be turned off frequently during the winter here, as it causes problems getting through deeper snow and going up inclines, because it kills the throttle if there is too much wheel spin.

I've been driving 32 years, driving 27k kilometers a year on average, mostly in manual small sedans, but also big old automatics from the 1970s, cube vans, RV...and I find that most of the new assists in cars just lull people into a false sense of security because " The car does it for me".

Microsoft updates accessibility feature Voice Access to auto-restart

I can fix this for them.

All they need to do is add a splash screen that appears during the crash auto-restart that says "Restarting to improve performance"

California upgrade company aims militarized 'Tactical' Cybertruck at police forces

Re: Bodies of water

At least the Hilux can sink, be dried out (a bit), and be started again to continue the trip.

Endless OS 6: How desktop Linux may look, one day

Re: Gnome? Friendly?

You must be new to the internet.

China shows off machine-gun-toting robot dog and its AI-powered puppy

@Andy Non

No, it would put a spanner in the woofs!