Posts by J. Cook 2120 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jul 2007
... and crap like that is why I received a directive from high up last week at [RedactedCo] to use my God-like Admin Powers on our Exchange and Skype install to remove all the user-supplied pictures and block the ability to change them.
We can never have anything nice...
Ah, the joys of ResEdit on Pre-OSX. Pretty much ALL the macs in the programming lab of the high school I attended had their 'pointing hand' mouse image changed to having it flip the bird. That is, when we could be arsed to actually do work as opposed to playing Net Trek on them, or DOOM on the PCs...
The third-party 'professional' cable modem installer who came out to set up my house kept giving me crap about the coaxial connectors I was using- despite the connectors coming from a well regarded company (leviton Quickport), certified for digital cable, the installer kept insisting that they were shite because the pastic they were embedded was a blue color. I eventually stopped arguing with him when I realized I was getting nowhere, and let him put in the (actual) crap wallplates he had, largely to get him out of my house.
He lost the 'professional' part after I saw how he connected the line on the pole- by hanging his ladder off the wire the cable was attached to. *headdesk*
Funny thing- I was getting absolute crap connection speeds until I un-did all his work inside the house, replaced the wall plates with mine, and removed the splitter he had put in between the cable modem and the line.
You forgot the best part:
"They're coming to take me away ho-ho hee-hee ha-haaa
To the happy home with trees and flowers and chirping birds
And basket weavers who sit and smile and twiddle their thumbs and toes…"
A blast into the past:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fn36l_z3WY
(not a rickroll)
Fun fact: the B-side of this album was the song, IN REVERSE.
One of the documents I wrote here at [RedactedCo] was the tape rotation process for one of the LOB servers that handles a gargantuan amount of financial transactions every day.
The document was written so that a non-terchnical person could comprehend and follow it. it was approved, and handed out to the frontline staff to use.
fast forward ~ 11 months, and we had a request to perform a restore from one of the tape backups. Only problem is that we couldn't find it anywhere.
The short, public version is that the people running the backups for the past, oh, 10 months have not been following the procedure (one of them even proclaimed that he didn't bother reading it), so the application's archive tapes have missing and incomplete data sets. After I put my jaw and eyes back in my head, I explain to the BSA for that app that there might be a way to recover the data from the monthly system backups, even though we've never tried it in that manner. He says, 'if we can pull that off, that'd be great', so after he finishes his smoke and I have my cool down, we go back in side, and I start researching what tapes I need to have the Copper Hill people bring back in the morning. Then about 15 minutes later, I go up and start looking for our boss with visions of torture even such that the Marque De Sade would find cruel and unusual to see if I can get two people fired, and charged with a couple counts of general stupidity.
THE [Redacted] [HOLY CRAP redacted] [Seriously, with a MONKEY?!] TECH DIDN'T DO A SINGLE WEEKLY OR MONTHLY BACKUP AT ALL FOR FOUR MONTHS.
And that was my first ever data loss incident. We decided shortly afterwards to take back ALL the backup duties away from that group during the big upgrade of that application.
THIS.
I worked for a place where we always asked for net90 terms from our suppliers, and paid them on the afternoon of day 89 or 90. and the few customers that we gave credit to, was almost always net5 or, rarely, 10/15. I think we had one company that had Net30.
And then we wondered by our suppliers hated us and in several cases dropped us once things were settled and refused to sell to us...
the 2nd in charge was also the 'chief beancounter', which explained a lot.
We had a little tiny problem when rolling out win10 in our corporate environment where the 'new' calculator app would stop working, along with the photo app.
After spending rather a good deal of time with Premier support, the best we got out of it was 're-image the machine', 're-build your master image', and 'pray that the process that builds those apps works correctly this time'. We couldn't get a root cause from them either as to why it would just fail out of the blue.
We were not impressed.
Here's a legit reason to go the 'Arrrrrr' route:
Getting content that the current owner of refuses to make available via any commercially accepted means except via broadcast.
There was a rather good cartoon made back in the mid 90's. it was only three seasons, but it does have a fanbase. Said property was created by a certain mega-corp with mouse ears.
As of this writing, I can only find the first two seasons of that show for commercial sale on DVD. (We'll politely ignore the fact that it took mega-corp nearly ten years to release the second half of the second season...) They've never released the last season on dvd. ever.
If I want that magical last season for completion's sake? Guess what, I have to put on my eyepatch and fire up the ol' bittorrent client, because that's the only place I can get it without doing rather a lot of work. (plus, other people have been polite enough to do said work and put it on said torrent sites...)
Don't even get me started with the WinSxS directory- on a well patched machine that's been three years between nuke n reloads, that folder will outmass every other folder in size. And you can't really get rid of anything in there, because 'backwards combatability'...
I never said I was against tape; the last two managers I had wanted desperately to kill tape at my company, but I championed for it because of all the points you mentioned.
I'm just disappointed that the last two companies that make the media decided to get into this petty squabble about the fact that they are 'only' getting half of the pie and not more...
It was a stupid argument, and I'm willing to bet that it'll finally kill off tape, because really, there's only two valid standards left in this day and age that'll satisfy the data size arguments: LTO, and IBM's (venerable) 3592 series, which (not surprisingly) do not inter-operate with each other, unless you've paid IBM a lot of money for a TS4500 and expansion frames, which appears to allow mixing both 3592 and LTO drive frames (Dx5) within the same logical library.
... the T580 that work issued me is dual battery, much to my annoyance when I went to force power-off the damned thing by yanking the battery only to find the damned thing was still chugging along...
The T580 is... decent enough for what I do with it (infrastructure admin, so lots of SSH, web GUI interfacing, and remote desktop), although Visio still causes it to grind to a studdering halt.
Haven't bothered with doing things like games or media, I have other devices for those tasks.
If the picture is anything to go by, I'm going to venture a guess at overheating from excessive exposure to direct sunlight? black paint/colored material tends to absorb heat and doesn't live giving it up for a while.
And certainly vandalism would play a major factor- some people just don't want anyone to have anything nice.
You are Correct, good sir! Evenings here this year since July have rarely dipped below the 100 degree farenheit (~37 C) mark up until yesterday when the monsoon finally broke and gave the evening commuters a reason to drive 15 kph in a 60+ kph zone. The temp finally went down to ~25 C or so. Made for a miserable morning, though, once it got back up to 30 ish and the place started to dry out.
(SERIOUSLY- a couple drops of water hit the place, and everyone and their dog thinks they are driving on ice for some reason, and traffic goes to hell in a hand basket...)
I suspect they are going to cover the entire roof of the data center with photovoltaic panels, along with the parking lot in order to get some measure of juice. Have no idea what this will mean for moving air on the 'hot' side of the cooling system, though- I suspect they might put those on the side of the building, or build them into cooling towers or such.
Evaporative cooling is only partly effective in the Valley of the Sun during the dry season. (We know it as swamp cooling.)
Currently, the relative humidity is ~40%, so evaporative cooling is useless. Plus, most of the data centers around here use standard heat pump style cooling, or the usual freon-based air conditioners.
I'm pretty certain that Microsoft located their data centers in those areas for the tax breaks rather than, say, proximity to the downtown area. (El Mirage is a tiny tiny suburb and doesn't have a lot of large businesses, same as Goodyear.)
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