Posts by Notmy Realname

Yes, there's nothing quite like braving the M4 into London on the eve of a bank holiday just to eject a non-bootable floppy

Back in my mainframe days I led a project developing an inventory planning system for a large aerospace company. After a few weeks of user acceptance testing it went live. Every day at the same time one user would ring up saying he couldn't access the system. No other users reported problems and everything looked good on the server end. Finally went to see what the user was doing. There was a Post-it note stuck to the terminal saying "Don't use between 12:00-13:00" that was left over from when we rolled out fixes during UAT. Removed the Post-it and all was well.

Burgers, birds, and Blue Screens of Death: Remember the joys of commuting?

Re: Does anybody really know what time it is?

Convert to decimal then Unix time and you get Fri, 05 Jul 2013 17:14:20 GMT. Probably the build time of the failing bit.

A word to the Wyse: Smoking cigars in the office is very bad for you... and your monitor

Years ago I worked with a guy with cerebral palsy. Every day he bring in a big jug is sweet iced tea and 6 oatmeal cookies that he wife made. His fine motor control was pretty poor so his keyboard, desk, and a two foot radius around his chair was a crumby, sticky mess.

Takes from the taxpayer, gives to the old – by squishing a bug in Thatcherite benefits system

Had the same 2 digit year problem when I worked at an insurance company back in the mid-80's. Used PL/1 a lot at uni but never in the real world. The only textbook I kept is called "PL/1 Structured Programming". Coding linked lists and hash tables from first principles was good fun.