15 odd years ago I managed to put an accumulator on something like Ipswich to win and the Higgs boson to be discovered by 2015. Unfortunately I lost the first leg.
Posts by Spanker
39 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2014
British gambling giant Betfred told to pay stiffed winner £1.7m jackpot after claiming 'software problem'
From Maidenhead to Morocco: In a change to the scheduled programming, we bring you The On Call of Dreams
Monday 22nd March 2021 12:28 GMT
Actually I once drove a Citroen BX to Norway and back with 12 loaded UE2s in it in 97. We were fed up with the courier smashing them to smithereens so I volunteered.
Five days per diem was enough to get me to nordkapp, grabbing some souvenirs, and back to Oslo in time. Case of beer each for the lads in the office (Norway’s booze is stratospheric expensive) and I was on my way.
Trouble is I got stopped by customs on the way home in Newcastle. It was the only time I could look at customs officer in the eye and answer when asked what carrying “computers and antlers”
I mounted them onto my monitor back in Milton Keynes like Grizzly Adams taking a desk job.
IBM manager had to make one person redundant from choice of two, still bungled it and got firm done for unfair dismissal
Tuesday 6th October 2020 08:48 GMT
As I said, the judge dismissed the entire case from unfair to disability. On hearing that I had applied for salary insurance payout she said "I'd like to win the lottery too". She managed to write an entire judgement without referring to any of my evidence or any point of law.
My barrister was hopping mad and drew up a strong appeal and said I had a 55%+ chance of winning. My solicitor then forgot to file that appeal on time. The same barrister then stood up in court defending the subsequent negligence case and stated that my appeal had no merit.
I stood my ground and we settled.
Shysters, the lot of them. I could write a book on that case.
Monday 5th October 2020 21:09 GMT
Nothing surprises me in that field.
I was simultaneously the only deep technical person with decade of lead experience capable of supporting our billion dollar billing system out of hours but apparently the least capable when it came to redundancy scoring.
I scored lower than the staff I had mentored.
The employees the director wanted to keep had their assessments cut and pasted from the highest scorer.
He couldn’t even start to explain this in court but the Judge said nothing to see.
I had done 15 years there, after 3 years I was diagnosed with and struggled with progressive muscular dystrophy. 4 months after I started a claim for disability insurance I was out.
Probably didn’t help that I threatened to go to press with their fiddling their contracts with the US government!
After a lot of back and forth and NDAs I ended up with 6 figures and a new, albeit part-time, career.
Overload: A one-way ticket to a madman's situation
Monday 15th June 2020 13:27 GMT
Re: Not me...
Ah yes. I was at Unisys in 97, we used dozens of xterm pizza boxes for our xwindows GIS app. Then we scrapped them for NT4 with X.
Optimistically I thought I could sell them so, with approval, rescued them from skip. I never could as no one had invented Ebay yet so I stuffed all 18 of them with 21” monitors in my rented house loft and forgot about them.
Cue irate phone call from landlord 18 months after I left as his new tenants couldn’t fit anything up there.
UK Carphone Warehouse shops set to sling their last phones, 2.9k redundancies hit high street, as Dixons closes all 531 'standalone' sites
BT CEO tests positive for coronavirus, goes into self-isolation after meeting fellow bosses from Vodafone UK, Three, O2 plus govt officials
Is everything OK over there, Britain? Have you tried turning the UK off and on again? ISPs, financial orgs fall over in Freaky Friday of outages
Socket to the energy bill: 5-bed home with stupid number of power outlets leaves us asking... why?
You better get a wiggle on then: BT said to be mulling switching off UK's copper internets by 2027
IEEE says it may have gone about things the wrong Huawei, lifts ban after US govt clearance
Tuesday 4th June 2019 07:46 GMT
Re: Security concerns?
Never understood the strong left lean of this site. The dissonance is legendary and growing daily.
Cheering on a repressive, fascistic, expansionist state? We’re all global citizens, right? Unless you’re American, right?
Decrying every minute deviation of western governments from a mythical citizen’s charter of freedom and equality but flag waving for China as it slaughters and displaces anyone non-Han, tortures and executes dissidents, denies everything it doesn’t like from basic human rights to IP law. But god forbid someone in the west Mis-genders you.
Attacks Brexit for its allegedly potential damage whilst carefully avoiding the phrase ‘in my opinion’ but cheers on Corbyn as he unveils plans to repeat the maelstrom of the 70s.
Attacks IR35 as regressive and punitive and installed by ‘Red Dawn’ Primarolo but votes for an openly Marxist shadow chancellor that would make IR35 seem like a child asking for pocket money.
Except you won’t will you? When you get into the privacy of the booth you’ll think about the 60% tax and £3000 a year garden tax and the banning of cars and vote Tory like you did last time.
Manchester man fined £1,440 after neighbours couldn't open windows for stench of dog toffee
Plex plucks media cloud service, sends users scurrying to exit
No, eight characters, some capital letters and numbers is not a good password policy
Fake prudes: Catholic uni AI bot taught to daub bikinis on naked chicks
1,300 customers of Brit bank TSB defrauded due to botched IT migration
Wannabe W1 DOW-er faked car crash to track down reg plate's owner
Adrift on a sea of data: Architecting for GDPR
Sacked senior Intel sales head accuses IoT chief of perjury
Wednesday 10th January 2018 21:08 GMT
Re: Rubbingthe judge the wrong way
Ah, so the truth depends on how nice you are.
Yes I had that too. Lost my case as on day 1 the judge took a huff to me claiming company disability benefits , saying ‘well, I could win the lottery too’.
And there was I on support group ESA, muscular dystrophy and in a wheelchair but hey, I won the lottery.
Downhill from there. My barrister was useless, timid and sloppy with no game plan. Bullied and interrupted dozens of times.
Anyway so we go to appeal and my lawyer forgets to file my case on time. Tier 1 firm with head of employment law - just forgot to file a £1.3m claim. Then set of breaking every conflict of interest rule in the book even to the point of arguing AGAINST me, their client, in the appeal court.
If you’re looking for a recommendation for an employment lawyer don’t ask me. I’d name them but not sure if I can here.
Forgive me if I think they’re all a bunch of fuckwits.
Meltdown, Spectre: The password theft bugs at the heart of Intel CPUs
Car insurers recoil in horror from paying auto autos' speeding fines
PayPal, accused of facilitating neo-Nazi rally, promises to deny hate groups service
WannaCry-killer Marcus Hutchins denies Feds' malware claims
O2 admits to throttling network bandwidth for EU data roamers
Smart burglars will ride the surf of inter-connected hackability
Voyager 1 passes another milestone: It's now 138AU from home
Dodge this: Fiat-Chrysler gets diesel-fuelled sueball from DoJ
SSD price premium over disk faaaalling
The world's leading privacy pros talk GDPR with El Reg
We need to talk about Granny: She's way more likely to fall for phishing
Mumsnet ordered to give users' real life IDs and messages to plastic surgeon they criticised
Sony kills off secret backdoor in 80 internet-connected CCTV models
Tech giants warn IoT vendors to get real about security
Friday 25th November 2016 09:09 GMT
Just got back from a 'conference' held by yet another minor talking shop hoping to net some of the millions doled out by clueless government hoping for some iot street cred.
I bought up the very point. I was asked what needs to change and I said we need i) isp routers to ban anything not accredited, stamp a green padlock on each thing and ii) a successor to uPnP, which has to die a horrible death.
This was pooh-poohed. A non-starter. Let's publish another consumer leaflet instead and talk about getting Chinese manufacturers onboard. Sigh.
Microsoft phone support contractors told to hang up after 15 minutes
Monday 16th May 2016 08:37 GMT
Back in 2002 following the worldcom bankruptcy I found myself one of three left in a vastly shrunken team supporting the Arbor billing system.
Budget was pared to the bone, nothing for new work, barely enough but to support operations. No new work meant no new bugs but we were kept on just in case. My American boss and her sidekick went home. We were left alone.
So from late 2003 through mid 2006, when we started work on the new system, we did NOTHING. I gave up asking for something to do after 6 months.
I added new skills, traded stocks, learnt French, pubbed, slept, read a stack of worthy books and generally wore out my trouser seat.
The two other guys went stir crazy. Eventually the company relented and offered ONE redundancy. Cue a bizarre situation where each fought to claim the one package by arguing at length how the other guy was far better at his job and please sack me.
Finally we got the green light on the new system and the madness ended. I got a new assignment and the other chap got his redundancy as well.
The only trouble was my new boss had watched me do nothing but was powerless to do anything, not for want of trying though. Took a while to get her back on the right foot !
Biting the hand that feeds IT
