Posts by Versace

A certain millennial turned 30 recently: Welcome to middle age, Microsoft Excel v2

Quattro Pro

Borland's Quattro Pro should be mentioned among the early spreadsheets. It is still around in the Corel WordPerfect suite (WordPerfect...there's another blast from the past...)

Help desk declared code PEBCAK and therefore refused to help!

Customer codes

I had a client (a wholesaler) who coded his account customers as follows:

W - W***er

TW - Total W***er

RTW - Really Total W***er

Not very subtle, but transfers well between systems.

The lady (or man) vanishes: The thorny issue of GDPR coding

AE1B

That is just the AE1B design paradigm (all eggs in one basket) - what could possibly go wrong?

Mushroom farm PC left in the dark and fed … you know the rest

Let them eat cake

A bakery used to give me cakes after on-site call-outs. They seemed to think that a £1 cake would somehow discourage me from sending a £100 invoice (it was a while ago).

Switch survives three hours of beer spray, fails after twelve

Football clubs

Football clubs are crap clients. They expect special treatment because they are household names, but won't pay for it because most of them run at a loss.

I recall one club, some years ago, who used our software to print the match tickets on a dot matrix printer (yes, they were hard up). This was quite noisy, and the person in charge of printing thought he would just leave it to print a few thousand tickets. In his absence the printer jammed, and friction started a fire. Luckily it was noticed before it did much damage. Our software got the blame, naturally.

Microsoft warns of super-sized Patch Tuesday next week

XP expired

Does anybody know how many XP patches have been released since support expired?

SPB's mountaintop HQ menaced by wolves

Doggy do-do

More chance of people being attacked by the guard dogs than by wolves, I reckon

Five bods wrongly cuffed thanks to bungled comms snooping in UK

Data collected from Google, Vodafone et al helps track down tax evasion. Ooh, the irony...

Australia should head-hunt Michael Gove

Papua / New Guinea should head-hunt Michael Gove

IMHO