Posts by Little Mouse 1499 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Dec 2014
Wuh? Seriously?
With 1.2M visitors a year, this doesn't read like some "Tiger King" back-street Zoo. Yet they thought it was OK to hold onto personal data for for 25 years?
The "no need to complain" and "as we worked through this challenge together" made a nice change from the usual boilerplate response though. Nothing to see here!
The one thing blocking us from going full Linux at Mouse Towers is Mrs Mouse's dependency on Excel. She's a proper "power user" - someone who actually regularly uses those features that the rest of us are barely even aware of. She 100% needs it for work, but maybe less so for the home accounts etc.
So we're spending the next few weeks trialling Libre Office to see if it's good "enough" and compatible "enough". For 99% of people I'm sure it would be...
Fingers crossed we can finally cut the MS cord before the enforced Win11 shitshow begins.
I know we're not supposed to mention him anymore, but Scott Adams' "Build a Better Life Stealing Office Supplies" came out around the same time I got my first office job and it's always made me chuckle.
How was it possible that he could know this new group of strangers that I'd only just been introduced to so well?
Relocating is for young people with no ties.
Anyone with a family or established ties to their community is going to be far less likely to give up what they do have for a company with a famously bad culture of poor job security.
Its just IBM's ageist layoff policy - but more subtle this time.
My Pixel 7 smuggled a "Smart Keyboard" feature in under the radar a little while back.
The first I knew of it was when WhatsApp kept suggesting responses for me each time I got a message from someone. But I couldn't even read the message that they'd sent me because it was covered up by the inane reply that my idiot phone thought would be the perfect response, which I had to close before I could even read what had been sent to me. Every fucking time. Seriously annoying.
It took a few weeks before I realised that it was actually my phone's OS sneakily inserting the responses into the App on my behalf - and not what I had assumed was a seriously poor UI choice by WhatsApp themselves.
"I'd probably turn off the external lights"
I dunno - Stealth can backfire if not thought through properly.
Back in the days when getting home at 3:00am would incur the wrath of parents, a friend of mine had the bright idea of killing the car engine whilst still on the approach to the house, intending to just coast into the driveway, minus engine noise and lights.
Unfortunately he was also minus power steering, made an unholy mess of the lawn and hedge, and woke everyone up in the process.
A very long time ago - back before I had graduated Uni and my IT career had even begun, I was earning beer money doing evening & night-shifts at a Mobil petrol station across town.
During my day-time induction no-one had thought to show me how me how to turn the outside lights on when it got dark (I mean, obvious, right?) In hindsight, moving a big lever switch to the "Off" position was never going to be the correct choice. In my defence, I was young, stressed, feeling a little bit out of my depth, and the big switch was very compelling...
I had to wake my boss up at home (No idea why he was asleep - it can't have been later than 22:00), and he did a sterling job of stepping me through the site power-up process from memory. Apparently if I'd left it 5 more minutes before ringing him, the pumps would have lost their internal config and needed re-programming.
Somehow I kept my job - I even got a reputation for being one of the more reliable members of staff, which might go some way to explaining why you don't see Mobil around any more...
"Apparently it is the processing ... that extracts fairly decent images ... augmented by a fair bit of "filling in" the missing bits"
We're probably all familiar with a lot of famous\traditional optical illusions - Our brains are clearly hard-wired to fill-in and augment visual input in some quite specific ways.
I've often wondered if anyone has ever scientifically concluded exactly what the brain is trying to achieve in these cases. Have any papers been written up that draw conclusions regarding what is going on with each specific illusion? What real-world scenario is filling in imaginary black dots into a lattice of white criss-cross lines actually replicating (and presumably conferring a Darwinian advantage in doing so...?)
"physical optics ... are actually pretty rubbish"
An actual biologist can call me out on this - I'm possibly regurgitating complete bollocks - but as I understand it:
You can't keep your eyes completely still, they are constantly moving very slightly. That means your brain gets lots of slightly different "lo" res images that it can effectively upscale to give the impression of higher detail.
"the bigger problem is that all the screens get rearranged"
100% this. Oh, and technical stuff keeps changing behind the scenes, too. Like actual, technical, stuff
It makes documenting even basic tasks & processes almost impossible. Well, OK, documenting them is easy. But try using that bulletproof tested step-by-step document 6 months later? Hah! Good luck with that.
100% this.
By 2019 the story had been running for years already, including in this very rag, and it was very clear at this late stage that the Post Office were very much on the back foot and had been for some time.
Read literally couldn't have not known what was going on. For him to claim otherwise is just egregious cover-your-arse bullshit. Some people will say and do anything for money.
The higher-ups will use alternative words and phrases to cover "unpleasant" situations and decisions. Whatever helps them sleep at night, I guess.
But it's a bit creepy to hear the people having it done to them using the exact same terminology.
You're being laid off. Let go. Made redundant.
Surely there's a point when it's OK to stop singing the company song?
Obviously, it can't all be "built-in" - There must be a chunk of back-end look-ups going on once the camera has done it's initial - ummm - "triage"? Could all that back-end data sit on the PI itself, keeping everything self-contained, or would it absolutely require a connection to the wider world?
Or does it just depend on the complexity of what I'm trying to classify?
And there was me thinking that perhaps encouraging these criminals to carry out their crimes by rewarding their efforts with cash might actually, I don't know, give them the idea to do it again. And again. And again.
And not a snarky journo comment in the entire article. Shame. Are we supposed to just accept that Ransomware Negotiation is a good thing? Totally normal? Totally OK?
A cup of tea didn't literally save the day, but it did put everyone in the right frame of mind after a major unexpected power outage.
We had time to plan the various steps of the power up - Lots of steps, lots of dependencies. What needed to be checked before we moved onto the next step, etc. All scribbled onto a whiteboard ready for when the power came back. But then we had to wait for an unknown number of hours, knowing that management would be on our backs to get everything back on as soon as possible the moment the lights came back on.
The one key risk that we oldies wanted to avoid was flipping from half-asleep boredom to unruly excitement in a heartbeat when that happened - Too much potential for excitable engineers to power up the wrong thing at the wrong time and set us all back.
So step one on the chart was - "Put the kettle on and have a brew.", and we took that 10 minutes to calmly go over The Plan one more time. One of the best spent 10 minutes of my working life.
You're describing a proper "British" cube, like my nan would have in a bowl, wrapped in paper in neat pairs. Are they still a thing?
The "cubes" I see in todays cafes these days are more like large unwashed chunks of sugar ore, straight from the sugar mines. Considerably larger, plus all the grit and unrefined bits (it's natural, innit?) all adding to the overall mass.
In most places I've worked, certainly the bigger ones, company culture silently encouraged this kind of behaviour. Because "Incidents" always take priority over "Service Requests".
If you want something done quickly, report it as broken. But then you have to run with the lie until the very end, despite all evidence to the contrary.
When I worked for a local authority, there was no chance of luxury overnight accommodation due to it all being funded by the taxpayer.
To their credit though, they didn't always book the absolute cheapest. Except for once, In Reading. I saw my hotel on the news a month or so later - It turned out there had been a murder there not long before my stay.
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