* Posts by DuchessofDukeStreet

141 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jul 2017

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Batteries are so heavy, said user. If I take it out, will this thing work?

DuchessofDukeStreet

Car Maintenance Checks

My dad refused to allow me to apply for my provisional licence until I'd learnt how to a lot of the basic maintenance and repair checks: checking and replacing fluids incl oil, changing a tyre, etc. This was on the grounds that he couldn't bear the idea of another mechanically incompetent driver in the household - at that time my mum hadn't even put fuel in her car in ten years and hasn't ever done since . In theory I still know how to do all of these things but it's been a long time since I've done anything more than check levels and pour some liquids into the correct reservoir.

Secret weekend office bonk came within inch of killing sysadmin

DuchessofDukeStreet

Re: and there was a screaming sound coming from inside the computer room.

Where is Simon?

Sysadmin crashed computer recording data from active space probe

DuchessofDukeStreet

Re: NOT ONE WARNING to the effect of "don't use spaces" existed

Is that where that infuriating %20 comes from? It's been driving me nuts for months - now I know why!

Thank you.

‘I crashed a rack full of servers with my butt’

DuchessofDukeStreet
Paris Hilton

Re: Balls

Braggart :-P

Shopper f-bombed PC shop staff, so they mocked her with too-polite tech tutorial

DuchessofDukeStreet

The Customer is Aways Right

Fortunately I've never had the dubious joys of working on an IT helldesk. However I have spent more than a few years of my adult life behind a bar. And if you think these f*wits are troublesome sober, imagine what they're like drunk. There are many reasons for a customer to annoy a barman, and even more ways for a barman to retaliate; here are two of my more memorable.

At the nightclub I worked at back when smoking was allowed, all the slops were poured into a bucket before the glasses went into the rack to go through the washer. Bottles and glasses often had cigarette butts in them from folks who couldn't be arsed to find an ashtray or wanted to be absolutely sure it was extinguished. So the contents of the bucket were usually pretty rank and pouring it down the drain was a pretty revolting task. At the end of the night the remaining ice got thrown in the same sink. After we've rung last orders, some drunk neanderthal staggers up to the bar and demands ice for his drink. Nope, not got any, all gone, drink it up pal. Repeated f-ing and blinding ensues, with shouting. Eventually I lean over, smile sweetly and offer to take his glass and get some ice for him. I didn't say that it wasn't going to be from the pile of ice in the drain, that's just had all manner of slops and ash poured over it...

The second event was in the same venue but earlier in the night. I'm working a bar single-handed, serving two and three customers at a time with a couple of dozen waiting. The abbreviated version of the exchange goes: "oi b*tch, you've short changed me", nope, you gave me a ten and I've given you the change for that, "you f*cking thieving c*nt, I gave you a twenty" nope it was a ten, "f*cking b*tch, give me my f*cking mo..." at which point I've lost my temper, picked up the pint I've just served him and thrown it straight in his face " now f*ck off out of my bar!". Followed by a round of applause from the rest of the customers and a hefty tip from a few of them. (The second follow-up was that he went downstairs and complained to the door staff, who looked at his dripping face and asked what he'd done to deserve it. And then evicted him from the premises).

RIP Ursula K Le Guin: The wizard of Earthsea

DuchessofDukeStreet

Re: Six Earthsea books

The first three of these are the only ones of hers that I knew of and had read, but the stories and mental pictures sprang fully formed back into my mind as soon as I heard the news of her death. It's probably two decades since I read them last but I still have them; from this article and copies I may need to acquire the rest of her writings.

User stepped on mouse, complained pedal wasn’t making PC go faster

DuchessofDukeStreet

Re: Old as the hills

But as so many modern devices now don't use a mouse, but have touchscreen controls instead, it might well be the next generation are laughing at us trying to roll some new physical device around the desk/table.

Or maybe granny was just so far ahead of the technological curve she thought it was a touchscreen already...

DuchessofDukeStreet

Re: Hey Gran!

Nor is it a dictation foot pedal she may have used as a typist to control playback of audio tapes - although it's quite similar in shape and appearance.

User had no webcam or mic, complained vid conference didn’t work

DuchessofDukeStreet

Re: This one, every time

In the early years of this century I worked in an organisation that still had a layer of senior management who were totally unengaged with the idea of using IT - and still had secretaries allocated to them (not PAs, not typists, not Executive Assistants, but secretaries). Although email had been introduced, a number of these still insisted on the secretary printing out all incoming emails and presenting them in a folder to be read each morning. Once digested, the secretary would be brought in to take shorthand dictation of the response which was then typed up (in draft) and represented for review and approval in the folder, before the secretary could press the send button on the draft...

PC lab in remote leper colony had wrong cables, no licences, and not much hope

DuchessofDukeStreet

Re: Delivery

Amazon don't deliver to the Scottish Highlands (mainland) and Islands, never mind New Ireland islands...

Last week: Microsoft accused of covering up rape claim. This week: Microsoft backs anti-cover-up law ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

DuchessofDukeStreet

Not all courts are equal

Whilst I'm no expert in US Law (but I watch Hollywood-made movies so I know *something*, right...?) the employment contract clause at present doesn't read as though it has any impact on a complainant's right to report a potential crime to the police - and therefore its progression to a *criminal* court. Instead it actually refers to the initiation of *civil* law proceedings - ie instead of launching a civil suit of $10m against the employer because co-worker said/did something nasty, this has to be handled through an arbitration process (which I assume is much cheaper and efficient to handle, particularly in the US system).

The UK enforces the same rule on couples wishing to divorce - it doesn't present a wife reporting domestic violence to the police.

Telly boffin Professor Heinz Wolff has died

DuchessofDukeStreet
Pint

I met him once as part of a schools' Great Egg Race event and he was as mad, exuberant, engaging and clever as his television persona, which reinforced my juvenile interest in attacking things with screwdrivers and asking "why?" and "how?".

My dad, who was responsible for the greater part of that interest, had met him some years earlier when the Professor had been engaged to deliver an evening lecture to an RAF research team. Unfortunately the Professor had become so engrossed in his conversation with a fellow passenger on his train that he'd missed his stop by over an hour and had to be rescued by a combination of guard and station manager (who phoned the lecture organiser to explain) and returned in the correct direction.

Strangely enough Dad and I had only been talking about him a few weeks ago whilst I was trying to explain the appeal of Robot Wars. Between Prof Wolff and Tomorrow's World, I miss the time when inspiration came from scientists and engineers...and it was mainstream aspiration. Now everyone just wants to make a dotcom fortune instead...

Put down the eggnog, it's Patch Tuesday: Fix Windows boxes ASAP

DuchessofDukeStreet
Pint

Re: "Put down the eggnog"

Ahem, may I refer you to my late Lancastrian grandmother who not only drank eggnog as her traditional Christmas drink, was known to make her own on occasion. As children, one of our Christmas treats at granny's was a (very weak) bright yellow eggnog. Things went mildly astray when a newly married and very young aunt was tasked with mixing the drinks and failed to realise that the luminous yellow substance was alcoholic and poured it almost neat.

Disk drive fired 'Frisbees of death' across data centre after storage admin crossed his wires

DuchessofDukeStreet

Re: As in James Bond?

Oddjob - usually performed with the brim of his hat

Don't shame idiots about their idiotically weak passwords

DuchessofDukeStreet

With my user head on, I am currently in debate with the administrators of our ERP system (payroll, procurement, timesheets, etc). The password is set to change every 30 days, subject to all manner of complexity rules and, worse of all, has a no-reuse parameter set. So every 4 weeks I have to think of a new complex password I've never used before. In a previous life I used to implement this system, I *know* exactly what the parameter is and how to set it better; the admin team continue to tell me it doesn't exist. I could even show them how to set up single sign-on if they'd let me...

Stick to the script, kiddies: Some dos and don'ts for the workplace

DuchessofDukeStreet
Unhappy

Re: I'm technically under a NDA

"Naked Database Administrator"

It's not Friday....I don't need mental images like that in my head!

Stop your moaning, says maker of buggy Bluetooth sex toy

DuchessofDukeStreet

I am speechless.

Hopefully.

BOFH: But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?

DuchessofDukeStreet

Dr G Freeman appears to have the situation summarised...Simon will never be working with a Boss for any legitimate reason. Such behaviour would be treasonous to a BOFH of any calibre...

User asked help desk to debug a Post-it Note that survived a reboot

DuchessofDukeStreet
Happy

I confess to being very amused that you are complaining that the women in your lives don't talk enough...surely you should only be grateful?

UK.gov: IT contracts should be no more than 7 years. (Not 18, Fujitsu)

DuchessofDukeStreet

So a 7 year contract (assuming longest permissible) with mandatory supplier change at the end of it? Two years at the start where the incoming supplier is still trying to learn how it works and scraping together all the information/knowledge that wasn't handed over at transition, and two years at the end where everyone's focussed on getting their new job and wrapping stuff up (no development projects, no long term strategic enhancements). About three years acceptable operating levels if you're lucky.

Great news if you're a public sector procurement "expert" Stinking pile if you're a user, employee or taxpayer...

BOFH: Do I smell burning toes, I mean burning toast?

DuchessofDukeStreet

Re: !!!!!!

"You lot owe me another keyboard.... and a pot of coffee, and a new chair because I've fallen off this one laughing and several 1000 pounds to cover the lost earning because I hurt my back too"

You might need to start a class action.

Car trouble: Keyless and lockless is no match for brainless

DuchessofDukeStreet

Re: You ended up with a Nissan Puke? Unlucky!

Booooo! My Juke is beautiful inside and out and very well behaved. The only experience I've had of unexpected bleeping in the locking area is when I tried to lock my keys inside the car - I see that as a bonus. Maybe it's a XX thing...

Software update turned my display and mouse upside-down, says user

DuchessofDukeStreet

Re: Now it can be told...

I have witnessed the "switching the wallpaper" trick in action...evil, positively evil. 3:-)

Leicestershire teen admits attempting to hack director of the CIA

DuchessofDukeStreet

So given the high profile extradition battles for other alleged hackers of US government systems, how come this one is being tried in a local Crown Court?

Royal Bank of Scotland customers say digital services gone TITSUP

DuchessofDukeStreet

Re: Critical resource sub-optimality

Given the (in)frequency of the event being celebrated, I'd be surprised if it was this side of Hogmanay.

MH370 final report: Aussies still don’t know where it crashed or why

DuchessofDukeStreet

If we can't find a single body in a rubbish dump (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Corrie_McKeague for non-UK readers) why is anyone surprised that we can't find a plane of wreckage in the ocean?

Why Uber isn't the poster child for capitalism you wanted

DuchessofDukeStreet

You're assuming that the petition was signed solely by London residents. I know numbers of people who've signed it, and shared it online, who live elsewhere in the UK and, in a few cases, in different countries where Uber doesn't currently operate. But they've heard so much about how cheap and easy it is to be a Uber customer, they don't really care about employment practices or law evasion techniques or business ethics/morals so long as they can summon a cheap fare from the convenience of their smartphone screen.

(Uber operates where I live - I've never used it for similar reasons to why I've never used Ryanair)

Compsci grads get the fattest pay cheques six months after uni – report

DuchessofDukeStreet

Value for Money?

How on earth can a child with less than 6 months working experience be worth £45k in any job? That's ridiculous.

Bill Gates says he'd do CTRL-ALT-DEL with one key if given the chance to go back through time

DuchessofDukeStreet

Re: O la la!

That may well be the most useful thing I've learnt today - and one handed too :-)

Quebec takes mature approach to 'grilled cheese' ban

DuchessofDukeStreet

Re: If even the Canadians can do it

Nor is it even a cheese toasty - it is a cheese toastie. And it involves two slices of bread, as TRT rightly points out.

BOFH: We're only here because they said there would be biscuits

DuchessofDukeStreet
Paris Hilton

Re: More spying?

Less the invisible internet demon, more the revoltingly visible PHB...

One of my former PHBs had an obsession with hosting team meetings by video rather than phone conference (we were scattered across a few countries so face to face was once a year or so) which he also liked to have on Monday mornings and Friday afternoons (a decent BOFH would never have permitted this inclusion into beer o'clock but we weren't even trainee BOFHs). (He also repeatedly suggested that we should actually work permanently with the video camera active on a webex session so that we could just look up and engage with the faces of our colleagues even if they were hundreds of miles away).

However Friday was the day that a lot of folks worked from home so you got all sorts of backdrops from offices to kitchens. Then we got a young female trainee who clearly still lived at home and her backdrop was teenage girl's bedroom with the uncomfortable combination of Hello Kitty bed sheets and discarded underwear. I suppose some people would pay good money for that view but most of us found it rather awkward and inappropriate.

Video conferencing died a death when one slightly eccentric team member firmly stated that as Friday was his WFH day, it was also his "naked" day and he wouldn't consider dressing for meetings.

User worked with wrong app for two weeks, then complained to IT that data had gone missing

DuchessofDukeStreet

Re: Test / Dev

Your wife and I must be ex-colleagues. Those ten days were "interesting" to say the least, as were the couple of weeks and months that followed. There were backup tapes in place, but as the live system had actually been corrupt and broken for several days without anyone realising, none of them could be used - it was debatable if anyone would actually have known how to restore anyway.

We all learnt a lot about DR and BCP - and the difference.

Another reason to hate Excel: its Macros can help pivot attacks

DuchessofDukeStreet
Devil

Re: Waddyamean 'Another reason to hate'?

Sir Runcible

You can do that one by allocating the resource for less than 100% for a given task. I'm actually quite a fan of MSP (very sad I know) and the only failing I've found with it to date is its complete inability to display two plans side by side.

As for that other MS abomination of Powerpoint, well...that shouldn't be allowed within half a mile of anyone who actually has to think for a living. Leave it to fluffy sales droids and creative marketers but keep it away from the rest of us! (I once had to work with someone who insisted on drafting project plans in PP - her justification was that it was the only way she could get something simple enough to understand. Which says more about her IQ than the product. Miaow.

Fujitsu's Australian cloud suffers storage crash, outage

DuchessofDukeStreet

And of course customer beancounters are always quite happy to fund the costs of having proper back-up architecture for their dev and test environments. Because they're not really important, and if they go down, the outage can be accommodated and the platform restored at leisure.

Until it can't, of course.

75 years ago, one Allied radar techie changed the course of WW2

DuchessofDukeStreet

Re: Yoof today

I'd need to do more searching that I have time for, but if you look into the records of the Mass Observation project, you'll discover that in the late 30's, as the government planned for war, the expectation was that there would be a massive intake of the population into the lunatic asylums as they would unable to cope with the psychological horror of war and aerial bombing.

Not just the "youth" but the entire population was deemed to be incapable of coping, being too soft and weak to cope with modern war. That would be the generations that we now laud as being so resilient, as to brand their great-grandchildren as snowflakes.

When I were a lad....

Och. Scottish Parliament under siege from brute-force cyber attack

DuchessofDukeStreet

Re: Holyrood

Hollywood aka La La Land?

RBS sharpens axe again: 900 IT jobs to go by 2020

DuchessofDukeStreet

Bean Counters

They are .... you just don't see/hear about them because the finance industry doesn't have an equivalent of the Register.

HR jobs however....

Nosey ex-NHS staffer slapped with fine for illegally peeking at medical records

DuchessofDukeStreet

Almost guaranteed - dismissal from a current post, and striking off from relevant professional body. Good luck with any chance of ever getting another job in the medical professions.

Thought your divorce was ugly? Bloke sues wife for wiretapping – 'cos she read his email

DuchessofDukeStreet

Re: Hey why not

Yes - a prosecutable offence under the Computer Misuse Act. I know someone who did similar - logged into the email account of a partner that he'd been given the password to during their relationship - and ended up with a suspended prison sentence. Unfortunately he was in a profession that doesn't tolerate its members having any criminal convictions: end result, he lost his job and is unlikely to ever work again. All for a moment of madness.

BOFH: Oh go on. Strap me to your Hell Desk, PFY

DuchessofDukeStreet

Re: Benedict?

*groan*

Thanks to that link, I've now found the BOFH archive. How am I supposed to get anything done until I've read ALL of them now...?

DuchessofDukeStreet

Fatal Error

Whereas if PFY had shared the technology with BOFH in advance, what a fabulous new method of user/PHB management...

Bad move, PFY, bad move...

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