Posts by DuchessofDukeStreet

Elon Musk's galactic ego sows chaos in European politics

Re: Why hate free speech?

Because he's using that to shout "fire" in a crowded theatre...

Tech support warrior left cosplay battle and Trekked to the office

Incongruous

Not so many years ago I was heading to a castle in Scotland to celebrate Hogmanay (New Years Eve to the rest of you) in possession of appropriately smart clothing for a formal dinner and ceilidh in such a location. Due to some supplier issues, I had to divert to a secure data centre en route and meet a colleague to spend several hours unpacking and checking £xm worth of hardware that had arrived later than desirable. Kit dealt with, I carried onwards in the firm knowledge that nobody I would meet that evening would have spent the day in such grubby manual labour around such valuable items.

Europe's largest local authority settles on ERP budget 5x original estimate

The Missing Partner?

Oracle has its failings but as a functional ERP system, it's not entirely culpable here. It sounds as though a poorly experienced council employed an integration partner (not named here but named elsewhere as Evosys) and then failed to manage the expectation between technology change and business change. Then as it started going badly wrong, brought in multiple consultancies (KPMG, EY and PWC all seem to have been involved at some point) who undoubtedly ran up significant bills to tell the council what they should already have known.

I've not seen anywhere a breakdown of where the £108m has actually been spent, but I'd suspect Oracle themselves would have been one of the minor beneficiaries compared to the integration partner and consultancy firms.

I read it as the estimated cost of the project before it began; £1000 seems a reasonable rounding point for a budget of c£20m.

UK council still hadn't fully costed troubled Oracle project 2 years in

Re: 'lessons learned'

After the number of failed UK Local Authority Oracle implementations, you'd think *somebody* would have actually identified what the root cause was. Perhaps if there was a corporate policy to reclaim sales bonuses on failed projects, a little more upfront honesty might appear...

Odds on, the council only wanted to buy an "off the shelf" product, but also wanted it to work with all of their existing processes and other legacy systems.

Northern Ireland schools ditch £485M Fujitsu deal after less than a year

What Next?

So now what happens?

Fujitsu walk away, the incumbent supplier doesn't want to stay beyond their contract end and nobody else bid for the job. So at the end of Capita's contract....what?

BOFH: Don't threaten us with a good time – ensure it

It's optional in the UK - a policy can either be written to be owned by the life insured (and the payout therefore goes into the estate on death) or to be owned by a named beneficiary (who is then technically liable for paying the premiums) which keeps the payment outside the deceased estate. If the estate is subject to income tax, both options benefit from professional advice or a lot of personal research.

Woman stuck upside down under rock for hours after trying to retrieve dropped phone

This absolutely. The first thing any responder is taught is to ensure the environment is safe - or as safe as it can be and you know what the risks are and what mitigations you have in place.

Justification? If you fall off a Scottish mountain, I might be the person who keeps you alive until the helicopter gets there.

After we fix that, how about we also accidentally break something important?

Re: hmm , am I a hoarder

Aged 17, my Christmas present from my dad was a box of Black Magic chocolates. I failed to notice the cellophane wrapping was missing and chose to prioritise other sweets for a few days. When I did lift the lid, I found not a single chocolate, but a starter tool kit of screwdrivers, pliers, hammer, fuses, sandpaper, allan keys etc. Give Dad credit, he'd managed to bite his tongue while he waited, and, possibly more importantly at the time, kept all the chocolates in a safe place to hand them over. I was still using the chocolate box fifteen years later when I finally gave up and bought a proper tool box to contain the much expanded collection. I still get the odd "practical" present under the tree, although I'm expected to use them myself these days, occasionally with a benevolent supervisor overseeing via WhatsApp video call.

Re: No good deed …

M&S may be an institution, but they're not yet a government body.

My guess would be the wonders of East Kilbride....

UK government's bank data sharing plan slammed as 'financial snoopers' charter'

Re: What is all this self-assessment?

I started full time work at 16 and SIX WEEKS later, at the end of the tax year, got a self-assessment form. Unfortunately for me I had a small Post Office savings account that paid interest without deducting tax which meant I owed a few pounds more than I'd paid through payroll. As a result I then was stuck on self-assessment every year afterwards, even after closing the PO account. Oddly enough it stopped when I got married and changed my surname, but that's a pretty extreme way of avoiding HMRC and I wouldn't recommend it.

Techie made a biblical boo-boo when trying to spread the word

Re: When your computer tells everyone in the office you're watching porno

I remember that .exe. It was sent to a colleague of mine at time when we were all working in a very large, noise-carrying open office. From memory the precise words his laptop shouted were "hey everybody I'm looking at gay porn".

It would have been slightly less awkward if not for the fact that he was the Head of IT at a time when you actually had to be a techie to get into that role.

Out-of-office email ping-pong fills server after server over festive break

Re: Never trust a CV

Not even just technical roles, I know at least six people whose LinkedIn profile (and probably their CV although I've not seen all of them) states that they were the Programme Manager for a large scale multi-company implementation and transformation programme. In reality, every one of them was a project manager looking after the business acceptance side of one or more workstreams in a single company in the group. Not an ounce of actual technical delivery amongst them.

I automatically downgrade "lead for" on a CV to "worked in a project/team that had people working on" unless I know otherwise but it's really not easy unless you're familiar with the specific technology that's being claimed. I know a little about a lot of things but most importantly, I know my limits!

IT meltdown outfit TSB to refund all customers that fall victim to fraud in 'UK banking first'

Re: How fucking big of them ?

The point of this proposal is that it *isn't* their fuckup, its the customer's (they have plenty of their own, but not this particular situation). Said customer having been slightly foolish at best, possibly coached to behave in a certain way, tell a certain story to underpin the transfer, fed a faked invoice with dodgy bank details on, etc. It feels a little akin to Ford proposing to reimburse me for any traffic fines I incur through careless driving. It isn't the shareholders who will be refunding the stupid, it's the other customers.

User secures floppies to a filing cabinet with a magnet, but at least they backed up daily... right?

Re: Magnets!

How do you evidence the destruction of anything (without a video camera)? If there's evidence, then it wasn't destroyed enough!

Motion detectors: say hello, wave goodbye and… flushhhhhh

Re: Japan

Encountered on a regular basis whilst in Russia, India and further east...

https://i2.wp.com/travelswithtalek.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/dashboard-jap-toilet.jpg?resize=600%2C338&ssl=1

(Also in a castle in Scotland)

All's fair in love and war when tech treats you like an infant

Re: Why has it been made so difficult?

Yes to scan-as-you-go. I end up completely confused now when I have to self-scan at the end, or use a cashier. I ended up in the local supermarket on Christmas Eve (the circle of hell that Dante didn't dare contemplate....) needing to buy half a dozen things. Elapsed time - less than 10 minutes and zero queuing. Awesome.

Techies take turns at shut-down top trumps

Re: did anyone ever use these buttons the way they were intended to?

A "soccer" ball???? How very dare you....

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1012434/

Packet switching pickle prompts potential pecuniary problems

Re: And I thought my home bill was bad..

British Leyland? How old do you think I am???? :-P

Re: And I thought my home bill was bad..

Back in the mid-90's (whilst living in the middle of nowhere in central England - mains gas had only arrived a few years earlier and the nearest road markings were about a mile away) we had dial-up which I generally used for the high-tech task of playing backgammon online. HWMNBO was working in a job with random shift patterns that frequently involved overnights. Neither of us quite realised that the use of modem meant that the landline phone didn't work (this is looooong before either of us had mobiles). We discovered otherwise when he ran out of petrol on a single track road several miles away on route to work. Having walked a mile or so to the nearest house and convinced them to let him to use the phone (he didn't *look* like an axe murderer....) all he got was a repeated engaged tone.

I was really surprised when he turned up on foot back at the house at nearly midnight...and somehwat less than sympathetic when it transpired that he'd known the car had no fuel and was hoping it would make it to the next town on fumes....

Biker sues Google Fiber: I broke my leg, borked my ankle in trench dug to lay ad giant's pipe

Re: Micro trenches

Certainly new constructon/repairs work that way, but the vast majority of the UK utility networks have been there for decades and they aren't exactly perfectly documented. Either in terms of depth, location or underground protection - sometimes ducts, sometimes a layer of tiles over the cables/pipes. So every digger of trenches in the UK knows to think carefully before they stick buckets or spades into the ground... this is what happens when they don't. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLTDVCeFFCo

I've had to watch a video of what happened when an operative wasn't wearing full hi-viz. I'm very glad that nobody has developed a method for recording smell.

UK legislation (which clearly doesn't apply here) allows for the claimant to raise their initial claim against any of the parties involved (telco or utility company wanting the work, main contractor, or any of the subcontractors in the chain) on the grounds that whilst there might be a sign up saying "we apologise on behalf of Cornwall Electric", there won't necessarily be anything public that declares it to be the work of Malley Engineering plc, Brown Brothers Groundworks Ltd or Fred Smith Diggers. Any of those can then rope the rest of the chain in as co-defendants under Section 20 (I think...it's been a while). Most commercial contracts pass the liability down the chain, but section 20 ensures that there should always be at least one solvent (aka insured) entity available to cough up if the claim is upheld.

I have seen a claim where the judge (it went that far) ruled that the main contractor had been entirely blameless but as the only extant party to the claim where the claimant had unarguably suffered serious injuries, became fully liable for the seven figure settlement. This is why anyone working anywhere near members of the public needs to hold good liability insurance.

Sure, we've got a problem but we don't really want to spend any money on the tech guy you're sending to fix it

Re: Travel Policy

The other one was a programme where the initial PD had a policy that travel was to be conducted out fo hours and he was happy to pay for peak rates flights/trains/overnight accommodation on the grounds that the additional cost was far outweighed by having the expertise available for full working days. Nobody took too much of the proverbial and mostly everyone was happy.

New PD comes in and decides to adopt the wider corporate policy of insisting on people travelling off-peak, lower cost which invariably meant during the day. So an afternoon meeting in London meant you then spent much of the morning travelling, a couple of hours in the meeting, then travelled back at 8pm having spent 5-8pm in the airport bar. Some people (mostly those with a vested interest in the speed of completion of the project) made up the hours on another day. Others (mostly those who were interested in extending their expensive assignment for as long as possible) did no such thing. Thursday afternoons you could tell who the employees were (as opposed to the contractors) by who was still in the office after lunch and not "travelling home". The programme was still running six years later and hadn't delivered fully. It might even still be going.

Travel Policy

Where do I start....?

With the company that decided that domestic flights weren't going to be permitted? So when I tried to book my regular flight from middle England to central Scotland for a day trip (it was in the early days of budget airlines so flights were cheaper than getting to the airport), told me I had to go by train instead - which would have turned it into a 2.5 day trip involving spending at least one night on a station platform.

Or the same company that decided hire cars were prohibited also? So having finally won the argument about the flight, I asked for a hire car to get me from Edinburgh airport to the site in a very small very remote village, they suggested I get a train. Would you like to have a look at the rail network in Scotland? Ah yes, but you still can't have a hire car. Their solution? They could book a car with a driver to collect me from the airport and deliver me to and from the site... So I cant have a hire car but I can have a chauffeur?

Or the companies (several) that insist on a maximum rate for a hotel room? So I can't stay at *that* hotel which is across the road from the office but is £3 a night over rate, but I can stay at *that* hotel which is within rate but will involve a £10 cab fare each way between hotel and office?

Or the company (singular) that applied the above but decided there was no need to apply a London uplift. I might possibly have been able to find a room at the rate available, but it would probably have been renting rooms by the hour. Alternatively I could stay in the home counties and get a peak rate train into central London.

However the absolute prize has to go to the company that decided staff below director grade were not entitled to private accommodation when travelling and booked everyone else into twin rooms. The first time that happened (we'd been the shafted part of a "merger"), half my particular team refused to check in, walked out of the hotel and drove home. Our director (I was told later) was told to start disciplinary proceedings against the people concerned; whilst he no doubt used more than two words in his response, you can probably guess that nothing happened....

Hold horror stories: Chief, we've got a f*cking idiot on line 1. Oh, you heard all that

Re: Help desk

Marketing/Sales in NOT a profit centre - it's a fecking liability.

Handset error

A good few years back I was supposed to go to a meeting in Hampshire which got changed to a meeting in London which I couldn't then get to so agreed to dial into alongside a few other remote attendees, whilst everyone else sat round a table with the audio coming out of the ceiling speakers. I couldn't find a meeting room/quiet office where I was so dialled in on my Blackberry with wired earphones plugged in and listened.

About 30 minutes in, the PHB introduced the latest consultant who launched into his spiel about what a GENIUS he was and what changes he was going to make to how we managed comms (which was actually one of the few things that worked REALLY well on that programme, as we'd already hooked into all of the longstanding effective channels the company had and people looked at) and what BRILLIANT new tools he was going to introduce and how we would LEVERAGE these ASSETS to make a PARADIGM SHIFT (you get the idea, right? Dilbert would have had a field day).

No idea how this was being received in London but I had the Blackberry face down on my desk and my head in my hands, muttering "you ****ing idiot, what ****ing planet are you on?" or words to that effect.

The sounds from London stopped abruptly and a voice said "who said that? who's dialled into this call?"

At which point I spotted the microphone on the earphone cord which was still only a few inches away from my lips...

More recently I have typed a comment about a meeting attendee into the meeting chat window rather than the 1-2-1 chat window I had open with another attendee. Fortunately the offending person was so busy pontificating he wasn't looking at the chat. If he was, he's never mentioned it anyway.

Mumsnet data leak: Moaning parents could see other users' privates after cloud migration

Re: Penis Beaker

Oh god, I'd managed to let that particular mental image into the archives...

AC, I hate you!

'Numpty new boy' lets the boss take fall for mailbox obliteration

KYB - Know Your Boss

As in, if you cough up, will they throw you under the bus, or will they protect your arse while you fix stuff?

As an occasional boss (although hopefully not a PHB variety) I work on the basis that if you tell me you messed up my job is to run interference for you, if someone else tells me I'll wring your bloody neck. This does occasionally include the following sort of conversation:

Them - we broke something, we're going to fix it

Me - what are you going to do?

Them - you don't want to know

Me - okay

I believe in politics its called plausible deniability.

Users fail to squeak through basic computer skills test. Well, it was the '90s

Re: Not sure...

Unless you're pretending to be the Great Gatsby, they are *never* a good idea. Fizzy wine of any variety should be served in flutes to stop the fizz escaping too quickly.

(Does it have to be *beer* o'clock? Can i have prosecco o'clock instead? Or champagne o'clock on pay day?)

Are you sure your disc drive has stopped rotating, or are you just ignoring the messages?

Re: Any key

Editing the autocorrect function is far more entertaining, although you do have to have access to an unlocked session to do it. The trick is to ensure that the replaecment word is vaguely similar and the human eye skips over it, eg leave becomes love, shrug becomes shag, etc

None of my colleagues have ever done such a thing.

The lighter side of HMRC: We want your money, but we also want to make you laugh

Moral

Nothing wrong with my morals...my morale may be a different matter

Come mobile users, gather round and learn how to add up

Re: Patronised a customer?

The problem with that is that I don't think the left side column quite has the same effect now..

Until now, if Canadian Uber drivers wanted to battle the tech giant, they had to do it in the Netherlands – for real

Re: Always the Netherlands?

Everywhere other than the US and China, you're dealing with Uber in the Netherlands (both as a driver and a user). Most probably because of the tax position that the corporate structure benefits from...

http://fortune.com/2015/10/22/uber-tax-shell/ (old but it won't have changed)

I'm just not sure the computer works here – the energy is all wrong

Re: Maybe it just needs to know where it is

And did it then know where to find it?

Time for a cracker joke: What's got one ball and buttons in the wrong place?

Re: Embarrasing

Alternatively, sometimes that's the only way to have a manager who doesn't try and interfere with what the workforce are doing, and leaves them to get on with their areas of expertise whilst protecting them from the non-techie corporate garbage.

Here's 2018 in a nutshell for you... Russian super robot turns out to be man in robot suit

Re: Action Man

Oh. My. God.

Never mind beer o'clock, I now need vodka o'clock. On a loop.

Lenovo tells Asia-Pacific staff: Work lappy with your unencrypted data on it has been nicked

Two months to discover that the lost laptop had an entire payroll on it? Did they not ask the questions, or did the owner not tell them what they'd done?

It will all have been on the laptop because HR people are very important and have to have immediate access to all the data they need, which nobody else is allowed to go near of course. But they can be trusted with that kind of confidential important information!

Dine crime: Chippy sells deep fried Xmas dinner

Walkers' crisps are the antichrist

Beyond the pale! Walkers crisps are the pinnacle of crisp-ness - it's every other pale imitation that has their crisps in the wrong coloured packets.

And *of course* it's Scotland, I'm just impressed that it's the leafy more salubrious part near Perth.

Naked women cleaning biz smashes patriarchy by introducing naked bloke gardening service

Re: Why is it sexist

@ledswinger A naked gardener isn't high on my list of interesting things - possibly because I live in a top floor apartment with no garden. A naked Chippendale doing the housework? Actually I'd settle for any body else doing the housework to be honest.

I met a couple who'd set up a naked butler service in Glasgow a few years ago (they offered to hire my mate's son). All their staff wore an appropriate butler's apron, which the hiring customer was *not* permitted to touch or move, it was actually a lot more appealing than the fully naked version.

Support whizz 'fixes' screeching laptop with a single click... by closing 'malware-y' browser tab

I know it's early (at least in this time zone) but.... >>>>>

Dell deserved.

Consultant misreads advice, ends up on a 200km journey to the Exchange expert

Re: Mini brakes

Those bits are in the templates I have to use for the most irritating and inefficient process ever - and you're the first person who's ever explained *why* they're there...

I really am an idiot sometimes.

Re: Bad advice

@Olivier2553, if you're in the UK you can buy it mail order from Lindt

https://www.lindt.co.uk/shop/our-brands/excellence/excellence-dark-caramel-and-sea-salt

I also know you can buy it in Waitrose (and allegedly Sainsburys and Tesco but the butler doesn't shop at those establishments).

Re: Bad advice

Data scripts...wonderful things! Some years ago I was working on a data migration for a corporate demerger (customer was an arse, objected to me doing terrible things like wanting to use encryption on files relating to HR and payroll records) and the functional techie came up with a script to do the extract. It looked good in theory but something I couldn't identify made my nose twitch so I ended up taking it to the lead Oracle DBA (who was the kind of BOFH that didn't believe anyone should be allowed near "his" systems: developers, support analysts and users alike) who read it through in silence and then explained in no uncertain terms exactly how much damage it would do to the platform if executed, followed by exactly how much damage he proposed doing to its author. We negotiated (he was okay if you asked him for things in the right way really) and I gave it back to the techie with the edited highlights.

While the techie was reconsidering his life choices, I decided to google the problem - only to discover the EXACT wording of the script (formatting and spelling mistakes included) in the very first returned site. Which is how I first discovered stackexchange.

Microsoft reveals terrible trio of bugs that knocked out Azure, Office 362.5 multi-factor auth logins for 14 hours

Re: I'm a bit slow

I was just impressed it was up all the way to 364...

Oh, I wish it could be Black Friday every day-aayyy, when the wallets start jingling but it's still a week till we're paiii-iid

Re: Scottish passport

We have IrnBru. No further discussion required.

And whisky.

QED

Pasta-covered cat leads to kid night operator taking apart the mainframe

Re: RE: Dried Pasta & Stubborn, Unmoving Cats...

Probably gets rid of the mainframe as well...

But a cat will always be exactly where it wants to be - if that co-incides with where you want it to be, great. If not, probably easier to change your thoughts than the cat's location.

Technical foul: Amazon suffers data snafu days before Black Friday, emails world+dog

Re: catalogue shopping

I like cats a lot, but I ain't going within a hundred yards of an angry moggy that's been dropped off by a drone - I also like my skin, my clothes and my eyeballs...

What the #!/%* is that rogue Raspberry Pi doing plugged into my company's server room, sysadmin despairs

Re: Not quite as dire

Never been fortunate enough (although the last employer didn't tell HMRC that I'd left and they weren't paying me any longer, with the result that HMRC then changed my tax code to reflect that my salary had doubled....) but about 15 years ago, several employers ago, the Head of IT was let go (following a vile takeover for him to be replaced by a useless PHB). Nine months later, he turned up on site for a service - in his company car. Turns out that, although he'd been let go (and paid a settlement figure to avoid a tribunal) HR hadn't stopping paying his salary (and new PHB hadn't spotted the cost), providing medical cover or asked him to return the car, his laptop, his security pass, etc, etc He'd been putting all the money into a specific savings account so he could return it if asked.

DBA drifts into legend after inventive server convo leaves colleagues fearing for their lives

Re: Why? Just why?

Not IT related in any way but, like many people, I spent some of my early adult life working behind a bar. A good number of the other staff were students taking their first job to supplement their university grant, and therefore deemed ripe for practical jokes by the regular clientele. Added to the usual funnies about telephone calls for Mike Hunt (pre-mobile era....), the local speciality on a first shift was asking for a pint of Guinness shandy. Ignoring the fact of this being a criminal waste of the black stuff, the first introduction of Guinness to a glass half full of lemonade resulting in a volcanic explosion of froth, embarrassed barman, next attempt, more waste, more embarrassment, another attempt, etc until another member of staff intervened and the customers placed their real order.

All fine until they tried it on a young home counties lad, not realising that he'd spent his entire life living in a pub and been pulling pints since he was in primary school. One "perfect" pint of Guinness shandy and an out-stretched hand for the payment later, and that particular joke was permanently retired...

Re: Why? Just why?

Every industry has its own jokers; I'd argue that the military is probably the most humour-ridden. And probably the best at knowing where the line is - which is usually several battlefields beyond where a civilian thinks it is.