Re: Idiotic tariff nonsense
Hawaiian coffee is amazing, but terrifically overpriced.
695 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Feb 2014
It's constant installing and fiddling with computers that makes them crash.
If memory serves, the PC was running Service Release 2 of Windows, and separate installations of Word and Excel, nothing else was installed during that time, because he simply didn't know how to install software - he barely knew how to operate the mouse.
He did save his work in completely random places, prompting calls for me to find the letter or spreadsheet he'd just saved, which wasn't fun with Windows 95's crappy indexing system...
Back in the dim and dark late 90's, the company I worked for decided to enter the digital age and planned to install online "workbenches" so we could enter sales data into a shared spreadsheet and place stock orders direct with suppliers.
These "workbenches" were Wyse dumb terminals connected to head office via an ISDN line.
My manager at the time was a total luddite who had never even used a typewriter, nevermind a computer. So, prior to the arrival of the Wyse terminal, I installed an old PC in his office with Word, Excel and a web browser so he could practice.
As this PC only had a modem rather than ISDN connection, I plugged it into an unused phone line and set him up with one of the "free" ISPs that used 0845 numbers to collect payment.
Everything went well, and the manager overcame his fear of the digital age.
Then the phone bill arrived, and it was really quite high, well into 4 figures.
I checked the charges for each line and found he'd managed to connect to the internet, but at no point did he disconnect until I removed the PC ready for the arrival of the Wyse terminal, he'd racked up about 6 weeks worth of per minute charges to an 0845 number that charged about 5p a minute at the time...
Back in the early 90's, when I worked for a high street catalogue retailer, I sacked a saturday lad I'd caught smoking in the stockroom.
I asked one of the staff to walk him up to his locker then escort him off the premises.
This was clearly too much effort, so the lad was allowed to make his own way to his locker, which he did via the server room.
The servers, bizarrely, were the only computers that couldn't be locked, and the lad used one of them to change the bin locations of all the products in the store to one shelf on the top floor.
It took me well over a week to manually fix the locations of all the products, as the bin locations weren't part of the nightly backups.
This "feature", along with the un-lockable servers, were later fixed once my store manager reported just how many sales we'd lost due to not being able to find stock...
The map tallies closely with the Ookla mobile phone coverage map for my area.
It does claim I can get good coverage on O2 indoors and outdoors.
Ahh, but that doesn't account for the cavity insulation, which has essentially turned my house into a faraday cage, no mobile phone signal indoors, and my WiFi doesn't leak into the garden unless I leave the balcony door open on the first floor so the router beam the internet outdoors...
In my last job, we trialled some Ubiquiti kit that let us run fibre to the desktop, which gave us 10gig to every desktop in the room.
We trialled it in the IT office, obviously, and noticed zero benefit over the original gigabit connections, so decided not to roll it out to the rest of the site.
We left the kit in our office as each unit gave us 4 copper connections to every desk, so it was handy when rebuilding PCs
I don't understand why you've got a downvote for a genuine question.
I bought the Pi500 because it's the computer in the keyboard, it's ideally packaged to pop in a bag with a mouse and a Micro-HMDI cable and work anywhere there's a screen.
I also like how it's reminiscent of the home computers of my distant youth.
I've got a Pi500 as my second PC, I use it with a 15" FHD screen I bought for about £80 in Aldi's middle aisle, it's an almost perfect computer for light office tasks and web use.
My only problem is I seem to have one of the models where only half the spacebar works reliably, so I have to hit space with my left thumb, not my prefered right thumb...
When I worked in PC repair, we had a laptop sent in with an all caps note attached saying we were not allowed to power the laptop up, or examine the hard disk.
The laptop belonged to a best selling childrens book author and contained their next book.
The service centre manager contacted the owner, explaining there was zero chance we could diagnose the problem without booting the laptop, the manager was treated to a foul mouth rant, followed by a warning that booting the laptop would result in a visit from her lawyers.
We returned the laptop unrepaired, with a print-out from the warranty contract detailing how they had already given us express permission to power up the device in order to diagnose the issue, if they wanted their laptop repaired, please return it with a note confirming they agree to our terms and conditions.
We never heard from her again...
Same for me with the M6.
It's a constant hum as the cars zoom past about 100 yeards from my house.
You only really notice it when the traffic stops because of an accident.
First lockdown was very, very weird, absolute silence for a few weeks, I could hear mice scurrying in the fields for the first time ever...
Peter learnt everything from our dad... he being the one who tilted a cab forward before checking everything lose was fastened down, cue driver's TV tumbling from the bunk and through the windscreen.
Still, dad was the only man in the country who could fix the gearbox on the first ever ERF vehicle when it failed on it's 75th anniversary run, so dad, who was born the day the first ERF rolled out of the factory, was called from his 75th birthday party to fix it...
My brother's wedding ring saved his fingers, literally.
We was a truck mechanic back then, and was working on an engine with the cab jacked up, when the hydraulics holding the cab up suddenly failed, the cab fell down onto his hand. Luckily for Peter, his newly acquired wedding ring took the brunt of the force.
The ring needed cutting off, whcih was a much simpler task than sewing all his fingers back on.
My last job was at a large boarding school that had buildings spread across the village where it was based, these buildings were connected back to the IT department using fibre or CAT6
When Barclays closed its branch, our facilities department decided to buy it and use it as their office.
There was no budget to physically extend the network to this building, so we decided to use a wireless bridge, with one end of the bridge on the outside of the nearest boarding house, the other end on the outside wall of the new office.
We fired up the link on a Saturday afternoon and everything was hunky dory.
The staff moved in on the Monday and chaos ensued. The network was dropping at seemingly random intervals, checking the logs didn't tell us anything, so the staff were willing to live with random drop-outs, except sometimes when the network dropped, the printer died, needing a reset.
Eventually, we decided to sit in the office and wait for a drop-out, to see what was causing it.
The cause was farmers' hay wagons, they were high enough to block the signal as they drove past, and if they were stuck at traffic lights, the network was down for long enough for the printer to demand a reset.
That weekend we hired a cherry picker and raised the bridge on poles, which stopped the drop outs, and provided a resting place for a peregrin falcon while he watched for mice in the school grounds...
I used to sell large-scale CCTV systems to casinos and the likes. As a tiny offshoot of a US globocorp, we were only allowed to sell Dell storage arrays, but I remember one customer insisting on using HP after watching this advert.
I asked him if he'd ever heard of active shooter incidents in UK datacentres, he said it didn't matter, he wanted to be ready if there was one...
I've got a Mac Mini at home, its day job before I aquired it was a file server for the art classroom at my last school. It had been running for a little over 10 years without being updated or powered down.
It's now my file server at home, and has been running for 3 years after I updated it to Catalina...
My last job mostly involved fixing printers and projectors at a large independent boarding school.
The school was spread across many acres, with buildings dotted around the town. One of the boarding houses was almost a mile from the IT office. Thankfully, as this house was mainly occupied by rugby players, they made little use of IT, so we were rarely called up there.
One day I was summoned there. I remember it was cold and wet, and I cursed the house master every step of the way up the muddy path.
Upon arriving, I was ushered into the library, this was a little used room, which was a shame, as it was oak panelled with a real fire. Standing on a card table in the corner was a Brother laser printer with all three lights flashing. It was only a paper jam, so easily fixed whilst enjoying a cup of Taylor's Italian blend coffee, which all the houses served, and was one of the many perks of working at this school.
5 minutes of swearing and scuffed knuckles later, I retrieved the jammed paper. It wasn't printer paper, it was a sheet from a lined A4 refill pad, and unless this printer had a remarkably accurate "barely literate teenage boy's handwriting" font, the paper had been written on before feeding into the printer.
I put the printer back together, tested it and reported my success to the housemaster, he thanked me with a bottle of 19 Crimes, another perk of working at that school...