Posts by GrumpenKraut 1842 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Sep 2014
Customer: My internet is broken!
Me: Mine is working fine.
A colleague was in the room and told me after the call "Maybe you should not be saying this". Seconds later he says "Heck, just keep doing it." I did, but only with a very small number of high maintenance customers that were particularly annoying.
> What could account for it being concentrated in Bavaria?
Having been there I can give you one reason.
Air moved from the disaster area over parts of southern Germany. There was localized rain at the parts most affected. The rain was just enough to bring down the radioactive stuff, but *not* nearly enough to wash that shit down the drains.
Therefore some places where the rain water collected (but, again, didn't go further) were quite radioactive. At the Uni where I studied we had a small amount of such dirt/sand in the spectrum analyzer (term? I mean the one for radioactivity; that thing needed to be cooled all times). Over time you could watch the half life of several elements you normal never encounter in nature.
P.S.: I'd not be worried about radioactivity unless eating fucktons of that meat (or mushrooms), even in the 'hot' regions.
Mid 1990s: customer had his own bow with Linux and a web server running on it. Few month later, after a power outage, customer calls us "The web server is gone!", me: "So it did not restart, right?", "No, the *server* is gone!", "OK, I'll have a look". Upon inspection there was nothing at all on the disk. Customer had installed everything in the installation system in RAM, nothing had every been written to disk. Took me quite a while to figure that one out. After new install I made the customer reboot the box to make sure he did not repeat the error.
For Linux users: As clicking the wheel tends to rotate it a bit (which messes things up) you can use shift-insert to paste. Apparently very few people know this.
I have long looked for a mouse that has a non-wheel middle key, found zilch. Why the heck does nobody build one?
> ...network would come to a shuddering stop whenever the weather froze...
Because the cold makes the cable shrink and the bends around corner get to sharp, bad with coax. Seen that a one place: -12 degrees or lower simply meant "no network today".
About lightning hitting outdoors cable, seen it once and it was spectacular. All computers in one building toast, network cards had scattered those little electronicy parts, motherboards and RAM were fried as well. Some computers in the other building somehow survived, no idea how. All in all pretty expensive.
> I find the std classes to be INEFFICIENT
Inefficient is not a valid critique about std classes. Used right they are more efficient than the vast majority of home grown solutions. Also more correct than the vast majority of home grown solutions.
If you can match std classes with your own solutions, congrats, you are quite a gifted coder.
> and CUMBERSOME
Erm, have you ever looked at C++ 11? It is out for ten years now!
Btw. I do come from the background of what was described as "dipshit C programmers" in a comment above.
Your description is entirely accurate.
Here is a detail I'd like to add: we tend to over-plan everything and end up doing nothing or at least being terribly late to implement.
Covid-19 did change that in a way, things had to be implemented right away, basically no matter how. At Unis (I work at one) you got a license for Teams and Zoom and you had to start right there. I was lucky because I could emulate my usual style pretty well. Others (interestingly many who used a much more "multi media" approach) were essentially out of luck, some lecture simply did not happen.
> At Uni we had lectures of 60+ and there was no way you could ask any questions without disrupting the whole thing.
IMO a good lecturer should regularly ask for questions. The number of students is not that much of a problem in my experience. I never had more than 100 students in a lecture, though.
Getting no feedback from students tends to make me slightly nervous and I will ask whether the lecture was OK at the end.
> having seen one of my lecturers take all the copies of his book from the library 2 weeks before term started
Wow, that is completely unacceptable.
> what is the educational divide?
My personal view is that it is largely family background. If your father is, say, an engineer and has tons of books, this is a huge advantage against coming from a family where the only printed matter is the daily mail.
Nowadays with the internet offering all information for everybody one may think that the above is much less important. I'd argue this is not the case: kids still need guidance in order to find/pick useful stuff and not just sink in a torrent of crap.
> To my mind, the key to all success in education is teachers.
Yes, a thousand times. As far as I know this is the *only* parameter that significantly determines learning success. There is a current thought in Germany (and surely elsewhere as well) that if teaching becomes "digital" (whatever this means) everything magically gets better. Whenever I hear this, I really want to slap someone in the face.
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