Posts by JimboSmith 1704 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Aug 2012
A friend who was a barrister and possibly a QC asked me about something technical. It was to do with the security of WiFi and I gave him an answer. He then confessed that he was working on a case where.this was very important. I said I didn't qualify as an expert and was told they already had one of those. He was just checking that the expert was giving them correct info.
Some rural parts of the UK are getting fibre thanks to local councils and fibre providers. My folks in the Cotswolds were approached by someone coming to the door asking whether they'd be interested in Gbps internet through fibre. The village had just had a company digging up the verge and installing it. Mum enquired whether it made emails go any faster or shopping on the M&S website. Saleswoman suggests that streaming would be faster etc. Mum says she doesn't do that and laughed out loud when she found out how much a month it was and the installation charges including the long way down the drive would be.
Went into a Vodafone shop a few years ago because they had a phone I was interested in. The sales bloke tried to tempt me away from Three. The sales bloke was telling me about their almost 50 countries I could roam in for no extra charge. He told me they were the first to abolish roaming charges within the EU. However they only did that because the EU said they all had to. Three with their feel at home were offering a service to more diverse places that allowed you to use your minutes text and data abroad for no extra cost. I looked at the Vodafone list and was instantly drawn to the fact that most of the nations listed were European or related to one. Also since when did the Vatican City get their own mobile network?
Aren't these mostly EU destinations?
"Oh well yes they are but then for a small fixed daily fee you can 'roam further' and use your minutes/texts etc. in more countries."
"So how much would say a 14 day excursion to the USA cost me above and beyond my allowance?"
<bit of maths later>
"£70 sir"
"How much!" which I said so loudly people had turned to look at me.
"It works out at only £5 a day sir"
"Oh wait are you PAYG or Pay Monthly?
"PAYG"
"Oh then it's <checks computer> 60p to make and 36p per minute to receive calls."
"That's just as bad."
"I think we're quite competetive sir"
"Well on Three it wouldn't cost me anything more."
"I'm not sure about other what firms charge sir"
"Then how can you say you're competitive?"
He also seemed to lose intetest when I mentioned I was on PAYG which spoke volumes. I then left the showroom totally bemused. Needless to say I didn't switch to Vodafone (or anyone else). Three aren't perfect by any means and if you're not in a feel at home destination it's wickedly expensive.
A manager where I once worked found some left over budget one quarter. His personal PA had been on at him to get a new chair for her different from the standard ones the rest of the company used. So she picked one out of the catalogue and it arrived a day or so later. Two months of use and she complains that it hurts her back and wants rid of it. I asked if I could have it and was told help yourself which was great for me. It was fully adjustable and if you set it up right very comfortable indeed. I almost asked if I could take it with me as part of my severance package when made redundant.
It had a very high back and it intimidated some of the people who had to ask me for things. They said I should have had a white Persian cat with a diamond collar and the name Bloefeld
You're closer to the facts than you know although with a different team. I worked somewhere where we had a small team and the name of everyone went into a jiffy bag (we didn't have a suitable hat). Then when a cock-up occurred and blame wasn't easy to attribute a name was pulled out of the bag and if it was your name it was your fault. It didn't matter if you were having the day off when it happened still your fault and you fixed it. It worked well because it made everyone potentially responsible and other people knew it probably wasn't actually your fault despite the fact that you were fixing it. Not sure HR approved though.
A friend told me of the time three backup generators at his dad's workplace fell over. The reasons were from memory that first was officially out for maintenance, the second developed a fault shortly after starting up, the third ran out of diesel. Now that might be embarrassing for any company but it's a bit worse when you're a large multinational oil firm.
A broadcasting firm I worked for was getting ready for Y2K. We'd been told that whatever happens you will keep broadcasting into the millennium. This was I believe to help stop people from panicking in the event that things elsewhere went TITSUP thanks to the bug. So generator ups at the ready at 8pm we told any remaining people in the offices to save their work and shut down their computers. I was monitoring one floor so not at the generator or UPS. The idea was that the studios would retain power as would everything needed to broadcast that was not in a studio. Strangely what was supposed to be a 15-30 min test lasted only 2-3. The reason was that the UPS had worked as expected but the generators hadn't been automatically switched over to. I was away the day of the post mortem so can't tell you exactly where the fault was. Everything was fixed, worked as expected on the next test and thankfully unneeded on December 31st/January 1st.
I've got a friend who lives out towards Bath and still doesn't have mobile coverage at home. Admittedly she and a few others houses are in a valley but.......you have to go a ways to find any coverage nearby. Reliant therefore on her landline and broadband for communication. Somebody in the village at least 10 years called the police about a rave/party being set up in a nearby field. The boys and girls in blue turned up and decided they needed extra officers. They asked to use the homeowners phone as they got nothing on their radios. One of them then walked up the hill where there was an Airwave/Tetra signal so that they could direct the others to the site. Apparently one of the police said he was grateful they didn't have to rely on mobiles to communicate.
Jim Hacker: I wonder why the Foreign Office didn't cover themselves.
Israeli Ambassador: Maybe they did.
Jim Hacker:They gave me several boxes tonight. I've been through them all except this one. I wonder if this could be it. ''Northern Indian Ocean Situation Report''. It's 138 pages - It must be it.
Next day
Sir Humphrey: May I inquire where the impulse for this little escapade came from?
Jim Hacker: Of course you may - It came from Luke.
Sir Humphrey: Luke!!!
Luke [from the Foreign Office]: From me?
Jim Hacker: It was you who put together that masterly Northern Indian Ocean Situation Report?
Luke: Yes, but it argued for not doing anything.
Jim Hacker: Come off it, Luke you can't fool me.
Luke: What?!
Jim Hacker: I can read between the lines.
Some politicians have a feeling for foreign affairs. I knew you meant St George's needed support.
Luke: Oh, yes - well, no, actually. Only in one paragraph on page 107.
Jim Hacker: It was enough, I can take the hint.
I'm giving you full credit, I told the Foreign Secretary it was your warning sparked it off.
Luke: No, no, it wasn't! You haven't?!
Jim Hacker: And I don't think I'm giving away any secrets when I say you are going to be rewarded.
Luke: Rewarded?
Jim Hacker: Ambassador at a very important embassy.
Luke: Which embassy?
Jim Hacker: Tel Aviv.
Luke: Oh, my God! You can't send me to Israel. Think about my career.
Jim Hacker: Don't be absurd, it's an honour - promotion.
(c) Jay and Lynn
Reminds me of a case a lawyer I sat next to on a flight in the US told me about. The case was about insurance on some pieces of very expensive farm machinery. The farmer had apparently read every word of the very lengthy contract document he'd been asked to sign. He was very clear on what certain terms and words meant. The lawyer said the judge was most impressed with how clued up the farmer was. In pre trial disclosure the insurers had provided a sh!tload of emails in what was a suspected attempt to swamp the farmer and his legal team. He'd also gone through those with the help of his lawyer and found relevant information. The insurers had lost the case.
You beat me to it that's an epic film https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxGfGZZ2Q7U. From the same stable as the also excellent Local Hero. I used to have the van jingle complete with Hello Folks as my new email alert. Think that's going to become a ringtone shortly.
A friend was using a database prog someone had written for the firm in house. He told of his amazement when an error message popped up saying "there is water on the C drive". Worried he phoned IT support who told him to stop making things up. He was encouraged to close and reopen the program and see if it came back. That error message didn't but a new one did minutes later:
"The Hard Drive is on Fire."
This time he sent a screenshot and they apologized. Somebody took the code apart and found some other fruity messages. The developer had quit some time before.
The hue hub does not need to receive incoming connections from the internet; it reaches out to a google cloud hosted service via https. It does this to receive firmware updates, and to allow for remote control when out of house, and for integration with voice assistants, etc.
Not on my system it doesn't, it's on a separate network that never connects to the internet or anything else outside the home.
I was in the market for a couple of Ethernet (wifi if needed) connected cameras recently. These were for a home network so that I can view the front and back of the house. I saw a Hive camera system at a local store and enquired as to the suitability. The sales bloke asked if I had a decent broadband connection and I asked what that had to do with it? He said it had to be connected to British Gas for it to work. I said I wasn't going to do that because I didn't want images or video leaving the dedicated home network I set up for the cameras. The bloke made his case again for buying one but I said no thanks.
So quickly he suggests Ring which I pointed out needs an internet connection too. He asked if I had thought this through as I wouldn't be able to see my home whilst away. I said that was true but then neither could anyone else. I eventually bought a couple of foscam ones that have pan and tilt. I hardwired them to a Buffalo wireless router and can see both sides of my house now.
I filled in a survey a couple of years ago on IOT device usage. It questioned whether I would:
Have any connected devices in my house,
Which devices did I think would be suitable for IOT and which wouldn't.
What benefits did I forsee coming from IOT devices for me.
Etc.
The survey didn't have options for saying you didn't want any IOT devices in your life. So when asked about suitable devices I mentioned things like my sock drawer, the shower, my coat stand. It was fascinating to see that it was such a biased survey. There weren't any questions that focused on security or any even remotely negative aspects of IOT. Wish I knew who the survey was conducted for.
When I used to have a landline at a previous address it was the number for a local public house that had sadly closed. I received calls for the first two years I was in the from the Performing Rights Society. The first call was to ask why I hadn't renewed my PRS license? The nice lady didn't seem to believe me when I said I wasn't the pub as she could hear my music playing in the background. I again suggested that the pub had closed and ended the call. They phoned again a couple of months later and I was again asked about my lack of a license. The woman who called this time was a bit more direct and told me at the start of the call that I needed a license. I said I didn't and she said she could hear the music playing and talked about fines. I told her that the pub didn't exist anymore and they were wasting their time. But if you don't believe me come round and check us out. A week later my answerphone had a fairly garbled message about being unable to locate the pub and had we moved? There were a few more calls to the answerphone over the next year or so until the pub website was finally taken down. Also had calls from suppliers to the licensed trade who were forever offering me deals on Alcoholic beverages. Sadly to take advantage of those I needed to be licensed just not a PRS license.
Having just completed the GDPR training at work I cannot but agree with that. Those tactics.have large fine written all over them. What happened if you were at home had the app open and were doing some horizontal jogging with your (or someone elses) partner? I can imagine the backlash if the Premier League did this.
If only there was some other way of moving money around. Perhaps one which relied on physical tokens which would be difficult or impossible for the government to track. Good thing we've got the blockchain for that though, because there's no way anyone could come up with anything similar.
You could call it Computer Aided Special Holograms maybe?
During the Dot Com bubble my boss at the time went to a meeting at a startup. He wasn't going to go at all but there was another meeting nearby and he figured what the hell. It was a sort of loyalty system for websites where you gained a token for visiting a site. These tokens would then be exchangeable for something later on when you had enough. I think they described it as a digital version of Green Shield Stamps. My boss said he asked at the very start of the meeting what the minimum spend was to obtain a token. Well there wasn't one all you had to do was visit the site and from memory that was it. You could only get one token per day per site.
He said he spent the rest of the meeting looking at emails on his BlackBerry hidden behind the literature he was given to read. He said they obviously hadn't considered the possibility that somebody might just set all the sites that offer tokens up as favourites/bookmarks. Then just open them once a day say when you started the computer. Also that didn't create loyalty as they may also sign up your competitor. They wanted companies to pay to be part of it with the minimum plus point for the company of extra traffic to the site. They wanted us to sign up and he said he'd put it to the board. That was his way of saying it wasn't going to happen.
Just recently walked into a small comms room on one floor of a very large building. The temperature was toasty because the aircon had failed. There was a non IT manager working in there on the single PC in there who commented how nice and warm it was for once. I immediately said it shouldn't be anything like this temperature and that I needed to use the phone. Whilst dialing building services to get this fixed the manager points out that on the wall box behind her there are only three lights on. She then confessed that had made her nervous and had considered flicking the switch on it. I said that there are only supposed to be three out of the four lights on. "That's the IT power supply switch for the room and the left two indicate that we are using supply 1 and it is healthy. On the other side are identical lights but only one is on indicates we're not using that power supply but it's there if we need too. Don't touch that box or indeed anything else in this room except that PC."
I've never had a cellphone contract and I hopefully never will. In the UK if you call somebody you're the one on the hook for the cost of the call. The big robot calls I've received were from personal accident claims firms. The best call went a little like this:
When asked by the lovely chap from the Indian Subcontinent if I had been injured in the accident that wasn't my fault, I said:
Me: "Yes it was awful I've never been in a fatal accident before at least not one where I died"
Sounding very interested: "So you were injured in the accident?"
Me: "Yes mortally wounded as it turned out, the funeral was lovely though"
Sounding very interested: "Can you describe your injuries?"
Me: "Yup Death by Decapitation and not the good kind, not going to walk away from that"
Sounding extremely interested: "Have you spoken to a lawyer yet?"
Me: "No very few people talk to you when you're dead, I'm grateful for your call."
Sounding disinterested: "Are you saying you didn't survive the accident?"
At this point there is the sound of someone else joining the call.
Me: "Yes, and I wouldn't recommend cremation if I were you!"
Line goes dead
Word of advice don't renounce your US citizenship (if you have it) and expect an easy entry back to the USA. A friend of mine who has lived here for 40+ years renounced hers when she got married to a friend of mine. She did this mostly to stop having to submit a US tax return. No problems for a good number of years until her sister who normally came to the UK to visit her had a bad bout of flu. Very concerned for her sibling my friend applies for an ESTA to visit the USA. She is refused and was told to go to the embassy in Grosvenor Sq for an interview. Forttunately her sister was okay and made a full recovery before the interview where she had to apply for a visa.
She's never used any form of social media and relies on the phone and email for communication. She said before her interview that they can look at her phone if they want. She said she'd point out the superior knitting patterns from the hundreds she has on there. Then there's the best type of wool to use etc.
You are Judge Death and I claim my £5.
He is the leader of the Dark Judges, a sinister group of undead law enforcers from the alternate dimension of Deadworld, where all life has been declared a crime since only the living commit crimes.
Somebody in a major department store asked me if I was interested in a Nest or a Ring system. I said no thanks because the latter had a couple of security flaws and the former an undeclared microphone. Plus I don't want anything 'smart' in my house except my phone. He said that there wasn't anything to worry about with these systems. I laughed and walked away.
Cable laying in a smaller shop I had a visit from the neighbours. They asked if I could move their card machine/till from one side of their shop to the other. All it was supposed to be was lift the floor tiles & run the cables. They didn't want them to be visible or a trip hazard. They'd already got the extension cables, i could work after hours and I was promised a drink so why not? "It'll only take ten minutes" She says.
I thought it shouldn't be too hard to push them underneath and pick them up at the other side of the room. Trying this with the cable didn't work because everywhere I tried was hitting an obstruction. I was going to have to lift a lot of heavy floor tiles. Well I discovered that this had originally been two shops that had been combined. As a result there was a reinforced concrete small wall under the false floor. That had originally been part of the separating wall between the two retail units. The contractor had cut through at floor level and then sat the close fitting floor tiles on that. There wasn't a gap anywhere let alone anything large enough to run a cable without cutting through reinforced concrete. I said sorry but I couldn't do it and explained why and the girl said she'd let the boss know. A phone call later and the boss remembered why the last person she'd asked had also said it can't be done. I did get the drink but that wasn't the promised ten minute job I had agreed to.
Novell Groupwise allowed you to delay sending emails until a particular time. Handy for slagging people off after you've left the company etc. So anyway two staff members at a particular company were having a friendly bit of banter via email. Unbeknownst to each other they were both going on holiday at the same time. They had both had the clever idea of sending the other a mildly insulting message after they'd left for sunnier skies.
The mail server filled up fairly quicly as one of them had included a picture of a beach in their out of office. Alarms started going off on the Network manager's desktop as the server started to reach capacity. The culprits weren't named but it was interesting what he said. In the five years since the groupwise was installed this was the first instance of that happening. When pressed further on that he said most people didn't know you could delay sending email. That lead a lot of staff to believe it was people on his team.
My .com has a .net company in the USA that's run by an elderly Mom and Pop. I have never had an offer on it from them or anyone else for that matter. However they do have a tendency to put the .com suffix when writing their email addresses. It's happened on things as diverse as a seminar on small businesses to their insurance renewal.
A mate at an ex employer had an offer on his .com unsolicited from someone by email. He figured it was a scam and never responded.
The SW/MW/LW/FM Sony SW100 radio which is cassette box sized had a problem with the original design. The ribbon cable that went between the two halves got pinched by the case and would eventually break. In the second version they notched out a space in the frame to prevent this. The radio is exceptional giving full SW coverage and all the other bands in something so small. There was another issue with the battery door assembly breaking because the negative contact spring was too powerful. That one was easily fixed by the use of a rubber band. However I've got two of them and one goes with me whenever I travel.
@Graham - timely tale on the day that the Daily Star has decided to cover up its girls.
My first work experience was in the post room at a large corporation one of them had worked at. My parents were expecting me to come home knackered given the amount of mail the company sent and received. Very surprised when I bounded through the door after the first day. Asked what my day had consisted of I said drinking hot beverages and reading the Sun/Star. Isn't there lots of post to deal with I'm asked? No everyone's on holiday for this and next week. They were unimpressed especially with the newspaper choices. Back then circa 1990 almost all the PA/Secretarial staff were women.
I can't say I'm that surprised given I predicted this was likely when it was first announced. I am even less surprised given they just sent me a late filing fine this week. This being sent despite my accountants sending in the return well before the deadline. They are chasing this to get it removed ASAP.
I called up at the end of March to ask about MTD for private landlords etc. i.e. those under the VAT threshold. I was told nothing has been decided yet on this such as the minimum amount required before registration is required. This conflicted with the information I was given at the end of last year by HMRC on another call. Somebody said this was down to the chancellor and the spring statement pushing the date back and not much else has changed. "I suspect he just wanted to get you off the phone quickly!"
Don't you mean "hallucination" ? Some manuals I've seen could only have been written by someone on LSD at the time.
Manuals? I've seen software which must have been designed with some mind altering substances involved. In one instance our most senior dev guy told me that he'd never seen anything like it. He said that the database structure was peculiar in the extreme and a sane person wouldn't do that.
Back in the day when Windows 95 was yet to be a thing I was doing work experience. One of the old timers had a gigantic mousemat that was a free gift/piece of merchandise tat from another company. It was about four times the size of the pathetic regular one IT supplied. He was very proud of that as it was the biggest in the office. Quite annoyed then when somebody produced a bigger one they'd made from an old wetsuit over the weekend. Apparently they'd measured the 'biggest one' on Friday night so they could make theirs bigger.
Somebody at the helm of a company I worked for back in the day had an argument with the head teacher of their daughter's school. I don't remember what the argument was about but I do remember his description of the outcome. He wasn't one to be DYKWIA normally and very down to earth. However the headmistress had done something involving his girl that had annoyed him. Head teacher had ended the call with a slightly sarcastic question as to what experience did this parent have running an educational establishment? He shot back that he was on the board of trustees for a university and a governor of a school. He said the line went very quiet and she said something along the lines of yes well I'm afraid I can't change anything now.
Back in the days when Hardcore Pr0n was illegal VHS copies of such filth were quite expensive and hard to get. Allegedly one of the kids at my school had found an unmarked tape in his parent's wardrobe when hunting after school for his Christmas presents. Attempted to watch it and had seen about 5 seconds of filth before the tape stopped playing and started to get spooled out inside the machine. Legend has it that he was down the repair shop on his bike (with the very heavy VCR machine in his rucksack) faster than you can say lightning. The tape was safely removed and was replaced just as quick in the back of the wardrobe.
As for the "dumb secretaries" part, I believe it's mainly because secretaries of the era were no better or worse than the average person when it came to computer literacy, but they were some of the first to receive PCs for work due to the nature of their jobs. Hence, lots of old stories about secretaries being poor with computers.
I met someone who claimed to have had the secretary that was the source for the following Essex girl joke:
How do you know if your secretary is an Essex girl? Because of the Tippex on the monitor!
She'd apparantly missed the training/familiarisation day for the "new fangled electronic typewriters".
At Uni where I was occasionally helping people out I had a friend (doing a not computer related degree) who complained that her work had gone missing. I asked her where she was saving it to and she proudly produced a floppy disc. She then showed me how she'd save it on the disc and come back to it the next day. However she showed me she was saving it to C: - specifically to a folder she had created called "A" that had now vanished. She did this because someone had told her to save it to the A drive. She had automatically seen the drive contents listed for the C drive and had naturally saved everything there in the A folder. She didn't realise that folders weren't drives and just assumed it was saving to the floppy because it was always there when she got in each day and put the floppy in.
The problem was the disc had proved to be empty when she was using her new housemates computer the night before. When she'd got into college the folder had disappeared there too and now she was frantic. The floppy needless to say when I checked it was completely blank. I asked if this was always the PC she used and yes it was apparently she got in every morning just as the college library opened. Therefore she had her pick of the computers and chose the one by the window so she got "More of the natural light". I asked one of the librarians if anything had changed with the computers and yes IT had taken one away for a service. In this case it meant a deep clean of both the internals and the hard drives.
I knew from talking to an IT bloke previously that the deep clean would have been a virus check followed by what we would now call a re-imaging of the drive. Fearing the worst I proceeded to check the other PC's that weren't being used hoping that one had just been moved. I eventually found the one with a folder marked "A" and a load of chapters of her dissertation. This was saved to the floppy and a bit of education on what drive were and what the difference between the C and A drives were. I told her to back up the stuff to at least one other disc as well just in case because she didn't want it going missing again did she? A few drinks later in the Union and she told me that she'd originally applied for a computing degree but hadn't got the grades the first time round. After retaking her A-levels she'd applied for the sociology course she was now on. I thought and she happily admitted that everyone had a lucky escape there.
Working for one retailer I was doing some stuff at one shop on a hot Friday afternoon including training. The manager stopped me at one point and said that I had to finish now as they had to input stock returns into the system. Curious I asked what they had to do and was shown a list of items that they had returned to head office. There were about 100 in total with 80 different item codes and it was a printed list that had come from an email. The list came from what had been received at head office and staff were expected to input this into the system for stock control. Basically the manager would sit inputting the data into the computer (the only one in the place) whilst another employee read it out to her. I said that's daft because it gave opportunities for errors to creep in. Why don't you import it from the data you've been sent on the email? They didn't know that was possible and actually neither did I at the time. However I had a look and it just needed converting to a CSV file whereupon it was easily imported.
I showed the manager how easy it was to convert the data and she thought it was genius. This wasn't the proper procedure that the company had laid down but it was faster a damn site faster. Well I was happy as was the shop manager but head office were not and said it had to be done manually. Their displeasure was evidenced by the fact that a month later my contract was not renewed.
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