* Posts by error 13

24 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jul 2018

Client demo in 30 minutes. Just what could go wrong?

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Facepalm

Once seen an entire trading floor network taken down by some genuis (these were the days of manually configured IP addresses, NT 3.51 era so late 1990s ) by the technician manually getting the workstation IP and gateway backwards, so making the new workstation think it was the gateway for the entire network.

Actually, I say once. More than once

What is your greatest weakness? The definitive list of the many kinds of interviewer you will meet in Hell

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only job I never got was the one I never applied for. Working as a contractor for a city bank just after the millennium and my role got outsourced to global outsourcing company X. Interview, as well as it could went OK. Questions like "why do you think you are qualified to do this role" were met with "well, i have been doing it for 24 months and I know as much about it as anyone can, because it's, er, my role" were brushed off.

Final question - because we don't have your CV to hand (mostly because I hadn't done one) - what degree do you have. None, I answer. Working in IT since I was 17, didn't go to university. "oh" they say, this will be a problem. We only employ (I was a contractor - mind boggles) graduates.. "Never mind", I say, "probably wouldn't want to work for you anyhow"

As it transpires, this didn't go down well, but in an entirely unrelated and coincidental event, the role that I was doing was reclassified as no longer being an IT role and hence outsourced to company X, but a business role that was still under the bank's control.

A second twist of fate later and the same bank then introduced an across the board, "immediate 10% rate reduction or walk" policy. I was less than a month away from contract renewal and expressed my displeasure at this underhand tactic and said I would happily take a renewal at 10% less - however they wanted 10% now. I think I had something like 28 days to agree to the reduction so I ignored it, got a new contract at an old client following on from the day my one at the bank finished, and simply left my desk and didn't go back. I got a number of "where are you" calls, plus offers of rate+10 rather than rate-10, but I suspect that they still haven't learnt the lesson that if you have key staff or contractors , those people have other options if you piss them off. Only the smart ones leave.

What a Hancock-up: Excel spreadsheet blunder blamed after England under-reports 16,000 COVID-19 cases

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Coat

Re: Oh surely not...

Have you had an irony bypass or just had a bad day?

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Facepalm

The solution is simples:

https://www.change.org/p/microsoft-increase-the-maximum-number-of-columns-in-excel-to-32-768

Up from the depths, 864 servers inside, covered in slime, it's Natick!

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great for cooling I guess

Shame Microsoft didn't have the spare capacity in the Azure UK south yesterday when they had a massive outage due to cooling failure...

Estate agent dodges GDPR-sized bullet after exposing 18,610 folks' data for two years

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Re: An estate agent playing fast and loose with customer data?

the only less likely category to do the same would be recruitment agents

Let's talk about April Fools' Day jokes. Are they ever really harmless?

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first every job, DOS era and a Novell Netware server. It was a common mistake when you were in a hurry and to type

f and hit enter instead of f:in order to switch drives . I helpfully wrote a batch file in the public directory so in the search path for everyone called f.bat that consisted of vaguely

@echo off

f:

echo I bet you meant to type F: you @**&*& idiot.

Luckily the client watching over the salesman's shoulder found it amusing. The batch file remained, but the sarcasm sadly had to go

Never let something so flimsy as a locked door to the computer room stand in the way of an auditor on the warpath

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Re: Wouldn't Happen Here

Done the same - over the suspended ceiling past the secure door, took about 45 seconds and left no trace.

It did have a small raised floor too but I would have to have been desparate to try it. Don't fancy pushing a tile up from underneath nor what I might find on the way.

Ethiopian Airlines boss confirms suspect flight software was in use as Boeing 737 Max crashed

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> instructed the on-duty pilots on how to disable the safety system so they could regain control of the aircraft

I would applaud the irony of this statement if the outcome wasn't so tragic

All good, leave it with you...? Chap is roped into tech support role for clueless customer

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Re: "While you're here, could you just..."

you're lucky. Rule here is simply "if it has a plug on it".

Guess who descales the coffee machine, unblocks the pinhole at the back of the fridge that ices up.

Brave claims its mobe browser batt use bests whatever you're using. Why? Hint: It begins with A then D then V...

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Re: sigh

no law that says you have to visit these sites that consume your power and hardware resources. You choose to do so, if you don't like it take your business elsewhere

That'll teach em

Sure, you can keep Grandpa Windows 7 snug in the old code home – for a price

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Re: Redmond

Probably ought to rename it haven't to appease the grammar police

Forget snowmageddon, it's dropageddon in Azure SQL world: Microsoft accidentally deletes customer DBs

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Re: roll forward logs

or - top tip - before you drop a customer database, make damned sure you have a snapshot of it first? It's not that hard is it... single user / drop connections / snapshot / drop

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Re: Holy crap, Microsoft....

B) you think would have been less bad if they restored a 5 minute old dB with the original name and let systems connect to it automatically and carry on processing - without knowing that the data is FUBAR?

Are you sure your disc drive has stopped rotating, or are you just ignoring the messages?

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Re: I can believe it!

sent an allstaff email once with a picture of the dishwasher, door badly outlined in red with pbrush, pile of dirty dishes on the surfaces all around it.

email title was "good news. the dishwasher door has been checked and is indeed working"

some of them got the point

Google Play Store spews malware onto 9 million 'Droids

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Re: Do phones still have an IR port?

Or answer questions with "don't know"

Error pop-up? Don't worry, let's just get this migration done... BTW it's my day off tomorrow

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Re: Reminds me of...

Case Elsevier

Message box "something else gonna wrong"

Why millions of Brits' mobile phones were knackered on Thursday: An expired Ericsson software certificate

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I thought all certificates were good until 2037..?

Boeing 737 pilots battled confused safety system that plunged aircraft to their deaths – black box

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Re: Hey software, get the fuck out of the way!

I believe there is a rather simple system for this - each stick has a red button called something like priority control. Push it and hold it and you get exclusive control. Why the captain didn't push the button will forever be a mystery

Azure, Office 365 go super-secure: Multi-factor auth borked in Europe, Asia, USA

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Not true, Microsoft don't turn stuff off and back on again.

They 'cycled impacted servers which has resulted in significant service recovery, with many customers now reporting signs of recovery'

Microsoft sysadmin hired for fake NetWare skills keeps job despite twitchy trigger finger

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Re: Who writes the damn matching algorithms???

I once wrote one of those algos.In essence I built :

Select * from punter where punter has (requirement 1 and requirement 2 and requirement 3)

ANDs ended up being replaced by ORs..

Bloodhound Super-Sonic-Car lacks Super-Sonic-Cashflow

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Re: Bah!

> the wheels - solid machined metal - no tire would stand up to the G-Forces alone on the rim.

They're obviously not making the wheels of large enough diameter

Microsoft devises new way of making you feel old: Windows NT is 25

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Re: 16MB?

oh the good old days. seemed to get a lot better when the ODI drivers came out, I eventually managed, with much cursing to get a PC simultaneously running IPX, NDIS and DECnet stacks - with the icing on the cake getting enough up in high memory for windows to start. Getting windows to start was the benchmark ...

Of course if you wanted to add an extra device like a scanner you were stuffed and had to enter the qorld of Quarterdeck. QEMM me up baby!

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Re: NT

yeah, Netware 2 was on 5 1/4 inch real floppies - at lest Netware 3 and above came mostly on solid ones :)

MSoffice used to come on floppy too . That was a tedious installation...