Posts by GtBFilms

Beware the trainee with time on his hands and an Acorn manual on his desk

I used to enjoy livening up computing class at school by picking a random ID of one of our networked BBC Micros and using:

*FORCE CH."Invaders"

and sitting back to watch the fireworks as a confused lass mate explained yet again to the irate teacher that the computer "had done it by itself".

I don't have to save my work, it's in The Cloud. But Microsoft really must fix this files issue

Many, many years ago I was called to a user running Windows 3.11, because she'd been on holiday and all her icons had 'fallen off the screen'. It was a long walk up a lot of stairs to that office, so I made sure I got her to scrabble about under the desk looking for them before showing her how a scrollbar worked.

The same user also had her screen saver time out set to 1 second; "To prevent the radiation baking my brain".

I think that horse had already bolted.

Blue Monday: Efforts to inspire teamwork with swears back-fires for n00b team manager

Always best to be on the safe side and use silly made-up names when testing.

I used to stick to Michael Mouse, Donald Duck, Ronald McDonald etc.

Then I'm demoing a change to my manager. "Why did you pick that name?" she asks, pointing out Ronald McDonald.

"Oh it's just a silly name, I picked a bunch of silly names at random"

"What's silly about it, my husband's called Ronald McDonald" she says.

I just use 'firstname lastname ' now.

Sir Clive Sinclair dragged into ZX Spectrum reboot battle

Re: Answer me this

"frickin' laser beams", surely?

ZX Spectrum reboot firm's shareholders demand current directors go

Timewarp

Odd grasp of chronology: "Earlier this week we quietly advised on social media that we had good news..."

as far as I can see, this announcement only appeared on social media at half past ten this morning. The original Register article appeared at 09:47.

Depending on which came first, the shareholders revolt could be an attempt to derail delivery OR just a convenient excuse.

Sysadmin’s worst client was … his mother! Until his sister called for help

My best (worst) call ever was from my Dad.

"Help! The moon's all covered in walnuts wrapped in paper"

WTF?

Turned out he'd changed his desktop wallpaper to a photo of the moon, and the walnuts wrapped in paper were the Windows config file icons (cog on a sheet of paper) that some software he'd installed was dumping on the desktop every time he ran it.

He also used to 'forward' interesting emails by printing them out, scanning them in, and sending the resulting jpg as an email attachment. Great fun in the dial-up days.

When their grandson was born I emailed some photos. My mum asked for me to sent them all again. "Have you deleted them by accident?" I asked. "Oh no, but we want another copy to forward on to your Uncle".

Re: Ahh, parents

I've seen worse in a professional situation - we delivered a suite of reports to a Banking client once and were called in again 2 months later to offer support. The original reports were there, but they'd added some new versions. They had decided the best way to differentiate these versions was to use a space at the end of the original report name.

Hence about 60 reports named:

'Monthly Transactions.rep'

'Monthly Transactions .rep'

'Monthly Transactions .rep'

'Monthly Transactions .rep'

"Which version's causing the trouble?"

"Oh I think it's version 17, or it might be 21, hold on I'll count the spaces."

Crunch time: Maplin in talks to sell the business

Help yourself to a cata£ogue

I see they are still charging £1 for a Maplin's catalogue. I could never understand how they got away with charging customers to take away what was basically a book of advertisments.

Last time I checked Maplin was for an 5V illuminated push button - £2.89 each (plus £2.99 standard delivery if you can't be bothered driving into town) (£5.88 each)

Or sit at home and buy FIVE of the exact same thing from a Chinese Ebay seller for £1.69 with free delivery. (34p each)

At 17x the price, you'd have to be pretty impatient to use Maplin.