Posts by pirxhh 171 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Sep 2017
Indeed. When I looked for a furnished studio apartment for rent in the mid-sized town my new semi-retirement job is located, I got a (quite economical) offer for such an apartment in an assisted-living facility, It allows residents to move in while they are fully self-sufficient and avoid having to move later when they might want more help.
On many industrial sites, there's a T-card* system to record anyone inside. Nowadays, it may be electronic with turnstiles to get in and out while scanning your access card - including visitors who get a temporary card. I have quite a collection of T-cards acquired during my career. Tomorrow will be the last day of my 20-year tenure in the company, I'm just about disposing of those cards while clearing out my stuff for semi-retirement...
* From the traditional shape of the cards, similar to a t-shirt so they can be stuck into a slot without falling through.
To be honest, when you are not trained, don't waste time with the extinuishers - evacuate.
I'm trained on them as basic firefighting is part of the (mandatory for my job and very much fun) BOSIET course,to be repeated every four years.
Extinguishers are very useful for minor and especially nascent fires, but as soon as one extinguisher does not cut it, evacuate - in fact, evacuate anyone not actively firefighting immediately. Smoke inhalation is deadly.
In many buildings in the US, it's just a pushbar, not a handle, so it's possible to make a genuine mistake here.
In our building, not so much - you have to break a cover and push a button to open the door when there's no alarm. This will trigger an alarm to building security. In a drill or actual alarm, security remotely opens all the exit doors.
Many, many years ago (1990s), I was on a project where the manager weekly handed us our expense allowance in cash, no receipts needed. It was something like $100 daily, from which we had to pay meals, transportation (cab rides and buses, not flights), and calls. Hotel was covered by the company directly.
We actually paid... way less than that. I don't think I managed to spend even half of that at any single day out of the 6-months project.
Never did I make that much take-home pay (corrected for inflation), afaik.
I've travelled on the check pilot (i.e., third in-cockpit) seat on an A320 once. I was working in the IT arm of the airline at the time, so I had the clearance to fly on jump seats, and the plane was full to the brim due to weather resulting in lots of delays and cancellations.
The seat was uncomfortable, and the flight took two hours to get into the air with ground delays, de-icing and such, but it was very interesting.
I had a somewhat similar incident, not in the US. Arrived at immigration, and the officer had us wait.. and wait... and wait.
Then my phone rang and our in-country contact asked me where we were, as the driver did not find us at the exit.
A brief explanation later, he asked me to hand the phone to the immigration officer, who became less and less sure of himself as the undersecretary for commerce (a cabinet post) expressed his displeasure. We were through within seconds after the calll ended.
This will have the same effect as the Jones Act, a deeply protectionist act limiting maritime transport between US ports to ships built by US yards. As the US basically has no competencies any more to build commercial ships, this means the existing hulls are so valuable that 40+ years-old ships are still in service - with safety rules in force at launch time still grandfathered in. The best-known case illustrating this was the SS El Faro, built 1975 and sank 2015 in hurricane Joaquin. Her safety was on a 40-year-old standard; abandonig ship in her open, hand-cranked lifeboats was never a survivable option under the circumstances.
Given the fact that there are basically no US manufacturers for home routers (design, development, components and assembly, not just badge engineering), this will keep insecure routers afloat longer, not shorter.
As for the Jones Act, where Alaskan, Hawaiians, and Puerto Rican customers pay the cost, and ultimately US seafarers lose their life, US consumes will pay the price with their wallets and data.
When we moved office, we got those newfangled 3D plans from the architects. Of course, someone had to make a Doom level from it, and (very crudely, using MS Paint, I think) photoshop coworkers' faces onto the monsters. Lunch break entertainment was... different. Great fun was had by all.
I indeed have photocopied floppy disks, to the utter bafflement (and amusement) of my peers.
In my defense, it was the easiest way to document which field office got which serial number (printed on the disks) of some software (Lotus SmartSuite, IIRC) so we could prove license compliance if needed.
When one of my previous employers moved offices, I somehow became the go-to person for the move.
For chairs, we got about 5 different models of varying price, and had each tested by 6 users of different stature for a week each. It was well-spent effort as the most popular chair, by quite a margin, was the second-cheapest one - and very little arguing happened as enough bums had voted.
To help troubleshooting my elderly mother's internet, I built a device with a few LEDs that are either green or red - monitoring her local WiFi, the fiber router, my mail server, Google, and her bank's website. It's just an unobtrusive IKEA picture frame on her wall that has saved me hours of frustration.
After a bit of cleaning up and adding Home Assistant capabilites, it's on Github now: https://github.com/quantenlabor/hass-led-panel
Yeah, most often it was (is?) stiction.
Had a case like this when a friend's server did not come up after a blackout.
I let the shower run for a few minutes, took the HDD to the bathroom, opened it holding my breath, turned the platter a bit and put the lid back on.
It worked long enough to recover the data.
I put my foot down when said friend wanted to reuse the disk, though.
I have a grill in my garden, made by the apprentice workshop of a chemical plant. This thing will survive not only myself, but generations to come - massively built out of pharmaceutics-grade stainless steel pipes and 4mm thick sheets, lovingly welded. It's over 30 years old and has never been protected from the elements in any way, nor needed such protection.
I generally move the output live wire (L1) to the second connector on the input live side (L) of a switch if I want it to stay on no matter what (usually because the light fixture is "smart" or motion activated). I label it accordingly, of course, but it's safe against people who don't read.
Clean, easy to revert, and relatively foolproof (until the universe invents a better fool, so 5 ms maybe?)
It's all kinds and sizes of businesses, unfortunately. We just received payment for a fairly substantial bill from a world-leading, highly profitable, billion-dollar company that was seven months overdue. Took us ages to hunt them down.
I honestly don't know why we still do business with them.
Not exactly breaking, but close: I was tasked with investigating if a particularly hard to install aircraft component could be simplified, while still doing the job.
This was meant to teach me good engineering parctices, not to actually solve the problem, mind.
So I went, designed somethinh creatively ab^H^Hreusing an existing component, and handed it in. Wrote a report about what I learned, and that was that. Internship finished, back to uni.
Months later, my grandboss let me know my design had passed all reviews, saved some 7 hours and 1.2 kg per aircraft, and would be used. Everyone, especially me, was completely surprised by this outcome; as the particular aircraft turned out rather popular with (so far) no crashes attributable to my part, I'll call that a successful (if unexpected) result of my internship.
Had a very hard time once to get rid of forest-level admin rights on a customer's system.
The project was finished, hand-over done, real end users on the system... and I still had access for months. No amount of begging made them at least deactivate my account.
IIRC we had to involve legal, who wrote a polite but firm letter that we couldn't be held responsible.
I also went to a somewhat convoluted process to ensure nobody knew the password any more (recruited three coworkers, initiated password change, each typed a word, a special character, and a number without the others knowing what it was; afterwards we all signed a statement what we did).
No, the concept is that if you are effectively an employee (you have to do the task personally, the employer telling you what to do, when, and how), you should be treated as such.
In Germany, that means the employer has to deduct taxes and healthcare and social security deductions from your salary, and the employer has to pay 50% of those contributions. And you get job protection, six weeks of paid sick leave, 24 days of paid vacation per year, etc.
A self-employed person has to pay all of their taxes, helathcare, and social security contributions.
Therefore, there is a test if you qualify as sself-employed contractor. One key indicator is if you are wholly (or almost wholly) dependent on a single client; others are if you have employees, an office, do yur own sales, and others.
Sure, they'll have people who can do it.
Should they? Not necessarily. Operating a service for that kind of user community is an almost 24/7 commitment, and volunteers are a limited resource. Their talents may be better spant at moderating discussions, creating challenges, giving hints, ... teacher-y stuff rather than fixing misbehaving updates at 3am.
I operate servers jsut for my family and a teen org of a much smaller scale, and it requires more intermittent effort than I woudl have imagined - usually when I'm on a business trip sevral timezones away.
So, in theory, outsourcing operation of something like Slack has its appeal, but it comes at a (possibly unaffordable) price.
Lesson learned: Have solid contracts in place, with reasonable pre-warning of contract cahnges built-in, and ensure data portability. A solution that is self-hostable may be best, even if you buy it as a cloud service - this way you can go on-premise if needed.
I had one customer who insisted on administering their own MAC addresses (!) on Token Ring and this then carried over to Ethernet. The wanted all theri MACs to be FE:01:a.b.c.d for TR, with a.b.c.d the octets from the IPv4 address, and FE.02:... for Ethernet. Never heard of ARP? "But that's so much easier!" - No, it isn't.
I have been on both sides of the equation (me career went from vendor to customer to consultant to a non-IT role, soon to go to "from July, you're on your on, boys" aka retirement).
I freely admit to overlooking the (in hindsight) obvious blunder we'd made, but also saved the bacon by thinking outside the box and/or around the odd corner or two - like triggering a bug in the core switches' OS, causing a complete network shutdown on a maritime asset (fortunately still in the shipyard, so the suppliers could do a full investigation and proper fix rather applying a band-aid and hoping for the best).
But I did my est to remain reasonably calm, polite, and professional - the one time I had to raise my voice at a telecoms provider, I profusely apologized in advance to the poor key account manager on the other end of the phone line.
Happens to all of us.
The most (potentially) desatrous I know of was a techie doing remote software updates, and subsequent restarts, on the control pods of a drilling rig's subsea BOP (blowout preventer, arguably the most critical safety system - think Deepwater Horizon).
He wanted to do that on a rig between wells, with the BOP safely stored on deck, but mistyped the address and basically disabled this last line of defense for an hour or so. Several people were decidedly unhappy. A pysical lock-out, with two independent locks, was subsequently installed, preventing any further unauthorized remote access.
One of the best managers I ever had was decidedly non-technical (he was from marketing).
He would not lose face by telling his peers that he'd check with his guys (usually, me) and come back, rather than being browbeaten into committimg to... unwise.. ideas.
A truly excellent manager knows when they are out of their depth; in IT, knowledge ages very fast (and badly) - won't I know it!
That happens a lot with my mum.
So I built her a gizmo with a few colour LEDs, one each for WiFi, "the Internet" (can ping Google), our email server (port 25 responds), and her solar system's web page.
It's basically an ESP with a few LEDs from an addressable RGB light strip, all built into an IKEA picture frame that has enough space behind the actual picture plane to hide the electronics.
Now when "the WLAN does not work", I can ask "which lights are red and which are green" and save eveyone involved a lot of frustration.
I've been in the situation of that user, due to my own carelessness... sort of.
On a business trip to board a ship in Anchorage, Alaska, I had made the mistake to pack my laptop's power brick in my checked luggage. When said luggage inevitably did not make it to the US, I was in the unenviable situation of arriving at midnight on a Sunday morning and having to board by Sunday 1pm. The only remotely electronics-adjacent shop open on Sunday morning was W**t, and I was delighted that they could supply me with evrything I needed to complete the trip - clothing, toothbrush, and a 65W USB type C power supply.
I subsequently told the airline to ship the luggage right back to my home, as bringing it to the next port of calll would be pretty useless.
We had quite a number to dispose of. A coworker's wife had a pottery kiln and we just wanted to heat everything over the Curie temperature.
Went a bit overboard and melted them down into puddles while having a barbecue at their house. Enough witnesses signed a statement that the media had, indeed, been rendered unrecoverable.
When we last moved (same building, different floor) we got boxes so we could pack stuff we wanted in a particular place. We also got bins for any crud we wanted to part with.
IT got moved by the professionals, same as anything not packed by us.
No better time than a move to organise several years of assorted stuff, with a preference for the circular file (pretty much all the important stuff had been digitised before or in the early phases of the pandemic-induced lock-downs).
