Posts by Hazmoid 261 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Mar 2014
A friend who worked a 4 day week found that the option was either Monday or Friday. This gave them a 3 day weekend. Regarding the extra hours, I find that I am working those long hours anyway so a day less of them would be a God send. Who in IT does not grab a coffee on the fly and eat at their desk while still taking calls? So technically we are doing those longer hours anyway.
Was like that when I worked for a Stockbrokers in the late 90s, early noughties. It was expected that we would wear suit, shirt and tie in the office. After wearing the knees out of 2-3 pairs of suit trousers, I asked the boss why we, as IT, had to wear business shirts and ties ( where the shirts would end up with toner on them and the ties ran the risk of being caught in fans) when we were never in the public eye.
He being the awesome boss he was, went to management and explained that IT from now on would be wearing polo shirts with the company logo. From that day on, we were the trendsetters in the office when it came to men's clothing.
Back in the mid 90s I worked for a stockbroking firm and we had recently rolled out Netware servers to a number of our remote sites, along with user personal directories.
We were getting alerts regarding storage on one of the remote sites, ran a scan across the user directories and found that one of the brokers had taken it upon himself to place his complete p*rn library in his user directory, complete with catogory filing under different directories. He was quickly warned that if we could see it, HR could as well. They disappeared a week later, and our server stopped complaining about low storage.
We also implemented surfcontrol at one stage, and my job was to scan the blocked items and send a form email to the recipients that continued reception of prohibited items would result in HR being informed, i.e. tell your buddies to stop sending you p*rn at work otherwise you may not have a job.
unfortunately the contract will be written in such a way that they could take a shotgun to their machines, divert their phones to the talking clock and still fulfill their "contract obligations".
With less than a month to go on the contact you are better waiting it out, taking all the schmoozing their sales drones apply and still tell them to "Go F%ck off" at the end of the schmoozing.
Where as AI will not have any arbitrary KPIs to meet and therefore will treat each claim as genuine until proven otherwise. Human agents will have KPIs and don't tell me that one of them isn't minimising claims paid by any means possible.
I'm reminded of Mr Incredible finding ways to circumvent the arbitrary rules of Insuricorp to make sure people get paid :)
I started following the Post Office debacle from reading about it on el Reg, mainly because I am in Australia and we usually don't get much news from the UK unless it involves the Royal family.
Until some of the instigators of the complete technical and policy stuff up are jailed, both from Fujitsu and the Post Office hierachy, there is never going to be an apology that makes up for the ruined lives created by this farce.
During covid shutdowns, I actually came to the office because there were 4 adults in my house trying to work remote. This resulted in internet bottlenecks (thank you Libs FTN NBN :( ) and I usually work in the office by myself, so there was no difference except I was not having to deal with the other adults in the home. Bonus was that when I came home, I could instantly switch off.
Hey google, where is the nearest "takeout of choice" ?
once that displays, pick one and then hey google call this takeout .
If I'm driving the last thing I want to be doing is picking things off a touchscreen menu and being distracted.
There are already enough idiots on their mobiles on the road and I do not see the car manufacturers move to touch screens reducing that.
Had to run the local Joeys section for my Group ( As Group Leader, sections that do not have a qualified leader often fall to the GL to run) so made sure to bring my Scout uniform to work and would change before I left.
Also back in the dim distant past I worked for a stockbrokers in Western Australia and as I lived closest to work, I got the on call job of being first into the office each morning. Because of Daylight savings in Australia, that meant I needed to be at my desk by 5am (8am East Coast time) during summer. I would frequently get calls while riding the bike to work and would go straight into the office in my cycling clothes. So people saw me a few times wandering around in skin tight lycra ;) although in those days I like to think I was reasonably fit.
I used to work the early shift for a Stockbrokers based in Perth WA, and we worked East Coast hours, so during summer we needed to be in the office 3 hours before normal people, i.e. the market opened at 10am AEDST so we needed to be in the office before 7am WA time. I would usually get there about 5am, have a shower and catch the elevator to our floor before 5.30 to answer calls from the Eastern States offices if there were any issues.
One morning, the lift broke down between floors. Fortunately the security staff were on call, and answered the telephone quickly but could not get anyone from the lift company until 8 am so I was stuck in the lift for a few hours. That was ok, I laid down and tried to get some sleep which would have been fine except security kept checking every 15 minutes that I was still ok :( After the first couple of times I told them that I was going nowhere, so they could just call me when the lift maintenance people got there.
As with any IT person, getting on with building security and maintenance is essential to ensuring that things go well, so we had a running joke about shutting down lifts so that we could have a catnap during the day.
I'm a bit biased here having had a son working in retail who was abused and told to F off when he asked the customer to pay for the stuff loaded in their trolley.
Based on the video shown on the news last night in relation to this story (various scum attacking staff and customers), I feel that Bunnings Duty of care to their customers and staff overrides any qualms I have about my face being recognised. I think the area they fell down on was not having signs up saying that you agree to be filmed on entering the premises. Having setup up surveilance systems for a number of clients, I'm sure that having FR would be a boon as in most security systems, the video is stored and re-visited after the event.
If this prevents someone with a known proclivity for theft and violence from entering a store, myself as a customer welcome it. It saves me money ( not having to pay more to allow for "leakage") and prevents me being placed in a situation where I may be injured.
https://7news.com.au/news/bunnings-shares-cctv-of-attacks-on-staff-after-facial-recognition-cameras-breached-privacy-c-16802827
Used to manage a network for a national stockbrokers, and we had VMs set up so we could vmotion them between sites. An electrical contractor was finishing up some work in our Melbourne computer room and removing his gear. Unfortunately, he leaned his ladder on the wall next to the door, right on top of the electrical isolation switch which did not have a molly guard. We found out that day what equipment was not protected by UPS. Cue screaming from the trading floor that this was "costing millions". A shutdown for power redistribution work and mollyguard installation was programmed shortly after.
Exactly! I have had enough of these to know that after 2 weeks you can write off the job.
However, I do know some companies are slow to send rejections because they want to make sure that the chosen candidate accepts their offer and actually starts before writing off all the unsuccessful candidates. This way they can avoid re-doing advertising and interviews by going to their 2nd and 3rd choices.
My first sysadmin role was managing a Sun system containing a major herbarium database . At the time, all the specimens had labels printed ( from the sun system) with bar codes for ease of cataloguing.
I was constantly tweaking the form for the labels to allow for different fields and lengths of information.
So long ago I have forgotten most of it and the building is no longer standing.
I suspect that if the provider specifically disables the user connection to the internet through their services, then they would be well within their rights. i.e. by resetting the router they were wrong, but if they reset the user connection password at the provider end, thus preventing connection from the client router, they are covered ( it would be similar to removing access for disabled accounts, a security requirement)
See that is why Australians lead the world in being ripped off by scam artists ;)
With paypass, tap 'n' go and other world leading tech, I think the last time I opened my wallet was to check the 3 digit code on the back of my card for an online transaction.
As an Australian, checks are a Pain In The A$$ (PITA). You have to physically attend a branch to deposit them and often the funds are not available for 3 days. Nowadays actually finding a bank branch that is open nearby is nigh on impossible.
So we are being forced to use cash or electronic, with our supermarkets being defacto banks.
Getting users to download an authenticator is hard enough without bad actors getting into the action. I have seen a number of people caught out with the Microsoft Authenticator being spoofed and then being asked for account details to pay for the software. There is a product in both the play store and the appstore that is very similar in design to the MS authenticator logo.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-19/global-it-outage-crowdstrike-microsoft-banks-airlines-australia/104119960
appears this is world wide. I suspect this company is going to be in a world of hurt when the washout of this comes out. Fortunately it is late Friday afternoon for the East coast in Australia so I suspect there are going to be a lot of early marks taken. However you may be struggling to get a beer unless you have cash as a lot of banks and POS machines have been hit as well.
I've been playing around with proxmox and for the small users that I support ( that only need a Domaincontroller/dns/dhcp server and maybe a file and print server) this could be ideal. Of course if using Microsoft it may be nbetter to use HyperV
Even moving them to Microsoft 365, and using Azure connect is better than relying on VMware now.
Agreed, anything that needs to be referred to in the field where it can get wet or dirty can be printed and laminated for longevity. Even taking mobiles into the field needs a rugged case and access to power which may not always be available.
We recently held a camp in Western Australia where we had ~5000 participants camping out for a week. The amount of paper generated was extraordinary, but only as it was the easiest way to ensure all participants saw announcements that were needed.
I've said it before, but printers are the bane of my life (small MSP) because they always break down at the most inconvenient time and will try to find the most convoluted way to break.
We rented a unit that had previously housed an unrepentent indoor chain smoker. We had to take down and wash all the curtains, wash all the walls with Triclenium and have the carpets shampooed 3 times before we could move in. I still got a whiff of cigarette tar when we opened unused cupboards.
There is a brilliant video of Richard Hammond sitting in a car while it was being hit by simulated lightning strikes. The Car died because the lighting destroyed the electronics but inside the car, Richard was fine . also Airplanes are regularly struck by lightning.
For many years, I was used to being on 24/7 access, being as I was the only IT support on staff and working for a 24/7 organisation. I expected that I would get calls after hours as work paid a premium to make sure I was available. We had an MSP as a backstop that was used when I went on leave. However whenever I have gone to subsequent organisations, I have insisted on a separate phone and PC. These have been turned off when I get home.
Now I am working for a small ISP I expect calls after hours but they are booked as billable hours.
Having dealt with dealers in the "Wild West" (Perth Western Australia) I can confirm that every minute the system is down or not available results in dealers banging on the roor with their very expensive custom keyboards. We were fortunate that we organised the security systems and had a lock on our door that only it staff and certain senior staff had access to.
Unfortunately that did not extend to the phones, and one day I resorted to the, "the longer you tell me how much money you are losing, the longer it takes me to get off the phone to fix it" line whilst my boss was in earshot. He told me to ignore the phone and fix the issue, there were enough others in the office who could answer the phone. A great boss and one I miss. He looked like the PHB from Dilbert but was the exact opposite.
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