Posts by Outski 471 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Oct 2017
As a Notes/Domino person (plus some other email systems), I've done a few of these,. Other colleagues, seriously experienced people, looked at me like I'd performed some sort of Dumbledore level wizardry, but it was just basically knowing stuff after a couple of decades of using the software.
I had a CFO of a client's sub-company screaming abuse at one of my junior team members because of a third party outage.
I took the call over and took the effing and blinding, which was on speaker at the other end.
Three weeks later he was no longer in his job, I was and, more importantly, so was my junior colleague.
I think we have all done technical consultancy masquerading as interviews.
That actually got me my most recent job - I diagnosed a problem with a mail server based on the scant details from the hiring manager, the IT Director, a generalist who was very good, but didn't know this software.
Come second iinterview, he'd taken my recommendations and performance had improved by 90%. Hence he recommended me to his boss; I started the following week.
More problematic were, firstly, a lack of freely available training materials, although the redbooks were brilliant, compared to the MS guides that were on sale in most booksops, and secondly, the hare-brained push to put everything on Websphere, which, while undoubtedly a powerful system, was everything Notes/Domino wasn't.
MS's bundling of Exchange with the enterprise OS license also didn't help, but by the time it got to court, the damage was done.
More recent Notes installations allow you to just use a password (at least where I work at the moment that still has one last Notes holdout), but that may be a security setting that can be selected.
That only works if you have a properly configured ID vault - the ID file is uploaded on registration (or first use if it's recently added to an existing estate). Then user.id is downloaded on first use by the actual user to the \data directory, meaning that you can lock the client and reauthenticate happily, even when offline.
But you can tell the difference between the types of guitar, LP, Strat, Tele, PRS, Ricky... My beloved RS sounds nothing like my Squier Strat, even on the same amp settings.
And you can tell the difference between players as well - Dave Gilmour and Steve Rothery sound different playing the same piece of music, for example.
Bullshit. China has been trying to bully countries around South East Asia for well over a decade, this has got nothing to do with US foreign policy.
There are vast swathes of what's known as the the South China sea where countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines have territory and accompanying territorial waters, yet China seeks to claim sole rights to said territories and waters, and to bar international maritime traffic.
This is more of the same.
I was engaged to run an audit of Notes/Domino for a Chinese company. On the admin side they were good, but their appdev side had jerry-built a system to update names in the directory and all names fields in applications whenever a change was detected in AD, despite the fact that ND has a wonderful built in process to do this (Pascal Monett will back me here). When I pointed this out to the head of appdev, he didn't take it well, and I was gently steered by our contact (head of systems admin) to say that we could set up a test system to prove that a ten year old process actually worked, and that this would free up appdev time without losing face.
We secured that year long maintenance contract (until our guy, a native Mandarin speaker chose to come home to Malaysia).
Beer for our contact, who sent me back to KL with a lovely couple of gifts for the Outskits.
I had a Zen for about ten years, bought when I moved overseas and didn't want to take 100+ CDs with me, it was great, and Creative's after-care service was top notch, despatching a new charger gratis to my UK office on a short work trip back to Blighty to cover for the one I'd forgotten to bring with me from Malaysia. When I was on the look out for some PC speakers last year they were my first port of call, and didn't let me down.
Thank you, Mr Sim.
Many years ago, I was shown the server room of the central govt department I worked for (at a satellite office): lovely, huge racks, great aircon, big halon fire system (it did say it was many years ago, mid 90s to be closer) and a back wall of toughened glass.
Not toughened enough, apparently, to stop a Transit at 20 mph, into which was loaded a few tons of govt kit...
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