Posts by GlenP 1093 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Apr 2012
On a smaller scale a former employer dictated that we would replace our existing ERP systems with SAP. A Dutch sister company would be the pilot (despite the fact they had a bespoke warehouse system that they insisted on replicating and didn't do manufacturing which we would need). The last I heard the bill had exceeded EUR3M for customisations alone and was still climbing. A change in corporate structure meant the UK company were no longer part of the same division and could carry on with our existing system which wasn't perfect but worked.
Commonly known as the K-9* MicroVAX. A great piece of kit in its day. Unboxing sometimes meant literally cutting the box front and folding down to form a ramp.
Several of the PDP-11s I worked with in my first role were on wheels, we used them for various monitoring equipment so it was useful to be able to move them easily.
*Dr Who reference for any youngsters.
Farmer is not on the list of example recognised professions*, however a signatory can also be a "person of good standing in the community". Being, or being retired from being, a chairman or director of a limited company is on the list, as are many other "professions".
Personally I qualify more than once, as a "manager or personnel officer of a limited company", "director, manager or personnel officer of a VAT-registered company", "member, associate or fellow of a professional body**", "local government officer" and "civil servant (permanent)" (although the last two were a long time ago).
*All this applies to UK passport countersignatories.
**Institute of Mathematics and it's Applications for the record and I do have Chartered status.
I had early versions of Windows Mobile and at the time it just worked. The best I had was an HTC P6500 which I wangled for free on contract with Orange (even the contract price was £400). It synched reasonably to Office, had usable GPS which ran TomTom and a decent battery life. It was also robust, surviving a drop onto a concrete step with cosmetic only damage.
Having gone the iPhone route for a while I returned to MS with the Nokia Lumia 1020, still probably the only phone that could genuinely replace a compact camera (especially with the optional camera grip/extra battery). Ultimately though it was the app ecosystem that killed it. When I was using much later and better versions of MS Office on the work phone than on the Lumia I decided enough was enough.
Cutting a hinged piece of plastic from a tape box and sticking it on provides an effective cover over such switches. In our case it was the main power switch for a server that was adjacent to the tape eject, and no I wasn't the person who pressed the wrong one by accident.
what's the point of a passcode to actually use it ?
It may be the passcode for using the lift only permitted access to your floor?
I've certainly stayed in a hotel where tapping the room card just took the lift to the relevant floor, right pain when there were 8 people all wanting different floors.
That's OK provided there isn't the merest hint of any glare on the lenses, as happened to me previously.
The replacement photos, without glasses, taken in the booth at the passport office* were far worse but deemed acceptable.
*Urgent business meeting and I found my passport had expired so had to go in person.
Many years ago I was told by an IBM printer engineer that they'd wanted some new posh vans, with tail lifts, for deliveries. Ford quoted for the Cargo but IBM management in their wisdom looked at the carrying capacity and opted for a cheaper quote using a Transit as they only needed to load two printers at the most.
First one arrives and amidst managers and guests a printer is wheeled out, onto the tail lift and sits there with the front of the van rising into the air. You need to check *all" the dimensions and weights!
20 Years ago I was IT Manager for a manufacturing company (so not much change in the intervening period!)
We'd completed the upgrades on the ERP system for Y2K in plenty of time and had tested all the PCs for BIOS issues so were looking forward to the festivities.
Back in the mid-late eighties when keyboards cost about as much as a PC does now (£130 IIRC for a DEC keyboard, equivalent to over £340 now) we ended up dismantling one keyboard that had Fanta spilled on it. A good soak then a thorough scrub of the PCB under the tap got it working again. Now keyboards are just another consumable item.
Equally I can recall coffee (fortunately without sugar) being spilt into a monitor. Left overnight to dry out and it worked perfectly the next day.
More recently though we had a Dell laptop wrecked by spilt Coke. Had the user admitted it immediately I may have been able to do something but of course he didn't, it was only a few days later when the screen stopped working that I found out what had happened. It just wasn't worth the cost of a replacement motherboard and possibly other components to resurrect it.
I had a work 486 box with a sticky HD. A quick twist of the PC in the correct plane at startup would get it spinning.
We did have a 5 1/4" HD that refused to spin up at all. As a last resort we took the top off, plugged it in and then spun it manually. Once it was running it kept going long enough to retrieve the data.
The old square metal cased Microvitec CRT monitors had an occasional issue, I believe due to the top connection to the tube being a bit close to the metal case. Occasionally the users would complain of a wobbly picture.
Standard practice was to visit the user's desk and explain that you had to carry out a very technical and delicate procedure that required special training. Once you'd lulled them in to a false sense of security giving the monitor an almighty whack, simultaneously on both sides, would generally cure the problem and make the user jump in the air.
Much the same here, 24/5+ working on three continents means there's little downtime.
I will respond to urgent matters out of hours or on holiday, if only to save having an even bigger mess to deal with on my return*.
*Like the time, many years ago, when the backup tape drive failed on a 486 Unix box while I was on holiday. I actually had a "mobile**" phone with me and told the office categorically to leave it until my return a few days later. They ignored this and called in a PC engineer without telling me. His first action was to switch off the box without any attempt at a shutdown. When I returned a few days later it was chaos as they'd been without the system, I then spent a week rebuilding things and retrieving data, since of course there was no recent backup.
**Motorola car phone mounted on huge lead-acid battery pack.
Put away sensitive documents but a constantly clear desk looks like you're not doing any work.
Some years ago the CFO of the American Corporate was visiting the UK office. Insistence from manglement that everything had to be clear, nothing on desks or cupboard tops, etc.
He walks into my tidy, but with in use kit around, office and says, "Nice to see someone works around here!" We got on very well after that.
Office supervisor who should have known better stored her "dealt with" emails in Deleted Items 'cause then she only had to press one button to "file" them.
That's why we now, in addition to the DR mailbox database backups, run a granular Exchange backup (CodeTwo for the record) so we can find and restore individual emails even if they have been deleted completely.
The fundamental reason WinPhone failed was the lack of app support.
It was a good operating system on some decent devices.
I, and I'm sure many others, would have continued to use it but once it got to the point where even MS themselves weren't keeping apps up to date (the Office app was at least 2 years behind the IOs version) I called time, shame as I still miss the Nokia 1020 camera.
I went SIM only years ago partly to avoid this issue (although I'd had some cracking deals out of EE on phones and tariffs over the years).
Now, each year EE email to say the cost is rising by the rate of inflation so I then go onto the website and change tariff to one that is cheaper and/or gives better benefits.
Add to the list:
8. Unable to use any weight equipment 'cause prats* think it's clever to load up as much weight as possible then carry out 1 rep every few minutes, spending the intervening period chatting to their mates.
*I think that's what the trainer called them, it may have been much stronger.
Back in the days when IT had to carry out substantial month end processing on a Sunday morning* on an AS/400 I had it sorted so that, if I wanted to work away from home, I could dial in to work via the Nokia mobile with an IrDA** connection to the laptop.
Sat outside my tent at a rally, laptop connected to phone processing away when the connection drops. Cue putting phone and laptop adjacent to each other with a dark sweater over the top to block out the bright sunlight.
*We used to get 1/2 day off in lieu for doing so. When that was stopped we reduced the processing to an absolute minimum and told the bean counters they'd have to do the rest themselves.
**For reasons to do with signal levels the serial cable would only work reliably if the phone was fully charged and plugged in so it wasn't an ideal alternative when there was no mains power.
Are pedestrianised areas not already covered by the same general rules as pavements (sidewalks for our left-pondian friends)?
It would depend on the wording of the Traffic Regulation Order that created the pedestrianised area.
The advantage of a PSPO is offences can be dealt with via a fixed penalty notice, I'm not sure if the same applies to a cyclist breaching a TRO.
Took a new employee to the National Museum of Computing the other week, and mentioned that "back in the day" we had DEC RA81 450MB drives, stacked 3 to a 19" cabinet, they were the latest thing at the time.
GB capacities were just about unheard of and I don't think anyone envisaged storage in terabytes.
25 years or so back when first semi-living* in the US I was surprised that nobody ever looked at the signatures whereas over here in the UK most people at least made a pretence of comparing the card with the document.
Can't now remember the last time I signed a card receipt though, it's all tap-and-go or chip-and-PIN now.
*I spent more time there than at home for several months.
We will shortly have FTTP available from GigaClear thanks to a grant-aided installation throughout our village.
If I still only had 3Mb* (on a good day) ADSL I'd consider upgrading to their service. As it is I've got 70Mb FTTC, which is available to most of the village, so can't see the point in spending significantly more for FTTP plus a VOIP service for phones.
*It's the connections from the exchange to the cabinet that are throttling this, not cabinet to premises. It took OpenReach / MJ Quinn about a week to complete the connection with vans seen at all points between house and exchange.
I'll take the manufacturer provided image any time, there's a good chance the drivers will actually be the right ones.
There's a huge difference between doing this in a walled hardware/software ecosystem where one company controls both sides (Apple and MS for the Surface) and having to support multiple hardware configurations.
IrDA had its uses but could also be a pain in the proverbial.
Many years ago I used it to connect the fairly ancient laptop to the Nokia phone, due to incompatible voltage levels the alternative serial cable only worked if the laptop was on mains and fully charged. It did mean I could dial in to the office and run the month end processing from my tent but there was a huge issue with electromagnetic interference to the signal - caused by the sun! Had to put the phone by the laptop and cover the connection.
Sat on a training course a few years later we discovered the many corporate standards didn't include having the IrDA port on the same side of the laptop so my machine and the one belonging to the person next to me kept trying to communicate until we built a mini-wall between them.
I once worked for a company with one of those dragon-like beancounters who would only open the stationary cupboard once a day and you had to produce the remains of the old pen/pencil/Tippex*/whatever before being, reluctantly, given a new one. The only reason it reduced theft from the company was that people tended to bring their own and guard them fiercely as it was easier that way.
*She also insisted that recycled, as in only printed one side, paper was used in the fax machine, until the day somebody decided to Tippex out the printing on one side of the page so it could be reused. Do you know what fresh Tippex does to a laser drum? Glen does!
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