Posts by mowaldo

Datacenter migration plan missed one vital detail: The leaky roof

Santa Claus and Top Floor computer centers

We were lucky enough to move from a ground floor computer center to a top floor computer room in a ten story shopping center building. It was a pain to move all the equipment but a nice place to work. Just before Christmas the shopping center flew in a giant fiberglass Santa Claus and placed it on the roof. Coming in on a Monday morning after weekend rains we found water and pieces of drop ceiling tiles all over our Printronix and Versatec printers, of course the hammers on the Printronix rusted and dropped out occasional dots. The water and tiles missed the PDP-11/70 and the tape drives on the other side of the room.

Questions were asked about the source of the water and it was determined that the metal brackets holding up Santa Clause were anchored to bolts drilled into the roof. The installers had missed some of the roof beams while drilling and had just covered over the incorrect bolt holes with loose gravel on the roof. The rain had built up on the membrane roof and had drained through the holes, onto the drop ceiling and then all collapsed into the computer room. Cleanup was a pain!

Repairs were made, and all went well, after Christmas Santa Claus was laid down on the rood and covered by a tarp. You could see the bottoms of his boots from the parking lot. Merry Christmas.

Ca-caw-caw: Pigeon poops on tot's face as tempers fray at siege of Lincoln flats

Re: Food

When I first read this comment I read what disease you "can't" catch from a feral pigeon and I thought about STD's. Maybe some people interact with pigeons in unusual ways.

Rereading the comment I think you can catch psittacosis.

From Wikipedia

Psittacosis—also known as parrot fever, and ornithosis—is a zoonotic infectious disease in humans caused by a bacterium called Chlamydophila psittaci and contracted from infected parrots, such as macaws, cockatiels, and budgerigars, and pigeons, sparrows, ducks, hens, gulls and many other species of birds.

Send printer ink, please. More again please, and fast. Now send it faster

Keeping the paper warm

We replaced the companies IBM Typewriters with AT&T PC's running Displaywrite 3, the Xerox laser printers would print unevenly if the paper was damp, the toner didn't fuse to the paper, the typists would put in 1/2 a ream of paper and leave the rest out on the desk. To keep the paper dry we built a wooden box to hold the paper that had a 20 watt light bulb to keep the paper warm and dry. We never thought about fires ! worked great.

Just how are HMRC’s IT systems going to cope with Brexit?

Simplify !

Everyone is way overthinking this problem and its solution.

Create a generic text tax document online, have each vendor and customer print it out and fill it out by hand and then FAX it in to the HMRC.

Good way to employ lots of people post BREXIT.

That will be 10 million pounds, I can have it done in 30 days.