* Posts by Potty Professor

306 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Apr 2021

Page:

Cops visit school of 'wrong person's child,' mix up victims and suspects in epic data fail

Potty Professor
Facepalm

Re: Similar mistakes not limited to public sector

I was once sent by my doctor to have a lung capacity test as I was having slight breathing difficulties due to Hayfever. The clinician who conducted the test remarked that I had almost doubled my lung capacity in the five years or so since the last test, and why was I worried about the results? I was surprised, because I had not had a test before, so I asked if I could see the previous test results. I pointed out that the details of the previous test were for a 70 year old man, and I was well under that age now, so it couldn't have been me. Turned out it was my father, whose name is very similar to mine, and had since died of Emphysema. Oops!

Developer's default setting created turbulence in the flight simulator

Potty Professor
Facepalm

Re: Software controlling real-world stuff

When I was working on the development of some new stuff for the Navy, part of my duties included keeping a record of the equipment as it progressed, and writing and updating the Instruction Manual. One day we had the complete equipment in the Test Area for a heat run, which was to be observed by the Customer. Lots of gold braid and stripes on sleeves, and the test was started.

As I didn't have any involvement in the actual heat run, I took the opportunity to take a few photographs of the complete, buttoned up, suit as it stood in the Test Area. Whilst trying to get the whole suite in frame, I backed off int a corner of the area, and suddenly the whole department went very quiet and dark - I had inadvertently backed into one of the Big Red Buttons and shut everything down,

Howls of fury and protest from the testers, and the Scrambled Egg Brigade were unceremoniously led away. The whole test had to be rescheduled for the next day as it had to start from cold. Needless to say, I was NOT allowed into the Test Area for that or any subsequent heat runs, officially observed or not.

Techie climbed a mountain only be told not to touch the kit on top

Potty Professor
Devil

Re: Had a similar thing happen

I have an app on my phone to act as my shopping list. Sometimes it hangs and the only way I can unfreeze it is to power cycle the phone and restart the app. Very inconvenient if I'm halfway through my weekly shop at the local supermarket.

‘I needed antihistamine tablets every time I opened the computers’

Potty Professor
Facepalm

Re: Not to whine about it ...

Place where I worked made huge transformers (amongst other electrical equipment). One of our external contractors was working above one such whilst the lid was off (naughty), and unfortunately fell in. As you can't swim in transformer oil, he was walking about, up to his neck in the oil, until someone managed to find a ladder and lower it into the tank for him to climb out.

He wasn't badly injured, but our Security department insisted on putting him in our venerable LDV Sherpa ambulance and whisking him off to the local hospital. He was showered to within an inch of his life and then kept in overnight for observation, before being discharged next morning.

He was ferried home by taxi, still wearing nothing but his hospital gown, so that he could put on fresh clothes and return to work. His old work clothes were destroyed as they were sodden with transformer oil, and that don't come out easy!

Enterprising techie took the bumpy road to replacing vintage hardware

Potty Professor
Unhappy

Re: Bizarre printer failure

Back in the mid eighties, when I was just learning how to program my shiny new ZX Spectrum, I managed to borrow a redundant dot matrix printer from my employer's lab foreman, all legal and signed for. After several months, a site inventory was called for, and grumblings were made about this ancient DMP being beyond its service life, so it was recalled. I took it back to the lab, and the foreman said that I could have it back on loan next day. Imagine my disappointment when I went to get it, only to find that it had been condemned and sent for scrap. There was nothing wrong with it, it was simply considered to be too old to remain on the inventory. :-(

Bank's datacenter died after travelling back in time to 1970

Potty Professor
IT Angle

Re: Priorities

My SWMBO was always late for anything. As far as she was concerned, leaving the house at the time we were supposed to be at the appointment counted as "being on time", I solved this by telling her a fictitious appointment time that was sufficiently advanced that we would have time to actually be on time. I used to say that she would be late for her own funeral - but unfortunately she wasn't. RIP Rosamund, still love you.

Microsoft's code name for 64-bit Windows was also a dig at rival Sun

Potty Professor
Boffin

Acronyms

I worked on a hardware project named "SMILE". Apparently it was an acronym for "Series connected Multi IGBT Low Emissions equipment". It eventually became one of the Company's Motor Control Centre products, and was (is) fitted to "All Electric" ships that I am not allowed to name.

Bank boss hated IT, loved the beach, was clueless about ports and politeness

Potty Professor
Boffin

Re: hammer

Dagenham Screwdriver when I was an apprentice.

Musk tells advertisers to 'go f**k' themselves as $44B X gamble spirals into chaos

Potty Professor
Boffin

Re: Delusional narcissist - Trump?

I have been IQ tested four times during my life, and the result was the same, 147 each time. I don/t think that I have a Personality Disorder though, maybe the boundaries are a little fuzzy?

UK government rings the death knell for SIM farms

Potty Professor
Boffin

Re: I want a 4 SIM phone

When I was working as a delivery driver, they gave me a mobile phone to keep in the van for business use. I also had my personal phone with me, so I connected that to the van's Hands Free system and set up automatic forwarding on the works' phone to shunt incoming calls to my phone, and thence to the hands free speaker. If I needed to call the shop or a customer, I would park up and use the works' phone to make (and pay for) the call.

IT sent the intern to sort out the nasty VP who was too important to bother with backups

Potty Professor
FAIL

Re: How was it basically the VPs fault?

I had a problem in a supermarket once. Each of the aisles had an informative sign hanging above it to allow one to see at a glance what the aisle contained, and one had only to push one's shopping cart along the headrow at the end of the aisles to find out where to turn in for the item required. Then came Christmas, and the aisles were festooned with adverts for "Special Offers", but those items were not necessarily in the same aisle. The placards also obscured the original aisle labels, so finding anything became a mad dash around the whole store, hoping to accidentally come across the required item. Add this to the fact that they had stirred the shelves with a big stick, so no item was where it had been the previous week. I complained to the Store Manager, but he just shrugged and said that he was obliged to follow Head Office's instructions.

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

Potty Professor
Boffin

Re: Are you sure, this isn't the plot of an IT Crowd epsiode?

Done that in my garage. Three sockets in a row, one for the tyre fitting machine, one for the wheel balancer, and one (with neon) for the compressor, with the machine name written on the backshell of each plug, after painting with white paint.

The neon is also wired through to another in the lounge, so that the compressor doesn't switch itself on at three AM and make enough noise to wake the dead (and waste electricity - who needs 100PSI at 3AM?). A quick check to see if the neon in the lounge is extinguished saves a late night trudge around to the garage to make sure it's off.

I also rigged up a circuit to show a green LED in the lounge to show that the garage and shed lights were off and both doors locked, for exactly the same reason.

Bright spark techie knew the drill and used it to install a power line, but couldn't outsmart an odd electrician

Potty Professor
Boffin

Zzzap!!

Soon after we were married, we bought a cottage in a village near where we both worked. My wife complained that she was getting a tingle from the cold tap in the bathroom sink, so I checked it for potential, and found that it was securely earthed. She said to put some water in the sink, and then touch the tap, sure enough, a small tingly feeling was experienced. I checked the plughole surround, and found that it was at about 50V from the earthed tap. I traced the source to the overhead cable running across the yard to the shed, the flat twin and earth had deteriorated in the sun where it was bent at a 90° angle to go from the vertical run up the outside of the brickwork to the underside of the horizontal catenary across the yard. When it rained, the current flowed out from the live wire into the damp brick, across to the lead waste pipe, through the wall, and up to the brass plughole. I cut out the lead pipe and replaced it with a plastic one, which solved the immediate problem, but later on I had to run a new SWA cable across to the shed to stop the leakage into the brickwork. I avoided the sharp bend by introducing a "Pigtail" curve at the minimum radius of the cable.

Potty Professor
Facepalm

Re: Other folks' DIY

Not IT, but very dangerous. We moved into a house that had a gas supply to a shelf above the kitchen door, where presumably the gas meter used to be. The current gas meter was in a cupboard under the stairs, with all of the gas plumbing correctly connected. I decided to remove the dead pipe from the kitchen, but when I loosened the blanking cap, gas issued out, so I hastily retightened it. I phoned the gas supplier and asked them to come and disconnect the pipe from the main, only to be told that their records indicated that it had already been disconnected, and any pressure inside was probably caused by corrosion inside the pipe.

I loosened the cap again to let the pressure out (after opening the kitchen door to allow the gas to escape), and waited for the hissing to stop. It didn't. I rang the gas company again, who were adamant that I was mistaken. I then said "So you wouldn't have any objection to my connecting my central heating boiler to that pipe, then?" There was a gas fitter round to my house within half an hour to cut off this unmetered supply. Should have kept my mouth shut :-(

BOFH: Monitor mount moans end in Beancounter beatdown

Potty Professor
Facepalm

Re: Sounds vaguely familiar...

...and modern metric manhole covers don't fit imperial manhole surrounds, meaning that the whole manhole has to be rebuilt at enormous cost, when a lorry destroys the old cover. Don't ask me how I know.....

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

Potty Professor
Facepalm

Statistics

When I was at Uni, one of our lecturers tried to teach us Statistics, and failed dismally. Oh! he knew his stuff OK, but couldn't explain what he was doing on the board. He would write a complicated equation at the top of the board, then a slightly different version, where he had solved part of the first equation. This was then repeated in several more lines down the board, each time simplifying the previous line, until he got to the bottom of the board and wrote the solution. We would all then be left wondering how he had made that enormous leap of logic to finish, but when asked for an explanation, he would say "but that's obvious". Not to us it wasn't. We renamed the class on our timetables as "Applied Guesswork".

Windows 11: The number you have dialed has been disconnected

Potty Professor
Headmaster

Re: the word GOT (was Tim Cook's punishment?)

One of my pet hates is the word "got". It is an ugly black weed that grows up through any cracks it can find in the English language, and should be avoided at all costs. Its only valid use is as the past tense of "to get", but it appears to have wormed its way into everyday usage. There are other examples of word misuse, but this is the worst.

Thousands of Teslas recalled over brake fluid bug

Potty Professor
Headmaster

Re: Breaking....

They break all the time, it's braking that's the problem.

Workload written by student made millions, ran on unsupported hardware, with zero maintenance

Potty Professor
Facepalm

Boundary Disputes, was The staying power of powerpoint

I have encountered similar discrepancies in both of the houses I have owned. The solution to the first was to get all four interested parties, my neighbour, me, and our two solicitors, together on site and physically measure the position of the boundaries involved. This process held up the sale of my property and the purchase of the next from January to May.

Once having successfully purchased the second property, I went to repair a broken fence, only to find that the measured distance between the two houses was less that shown on my plans (and also those of the neighbouring property) by about a foot. The two plots overlapped on the ground but were adjacent on the plans. Again, the only solution was to get all four parties, including two different solicitors from the previous time, together and physically measure the distances. These revised figures then had to be reported back to the Land Registry before I was given permission to rebuild the fence in the right place.

How is this problem mine, techie asked, while cleaning underground computer

Potty Professor
Facepalm

Re: Ah, the 80's...

When I was an apprentice in the late 60s and early 70s, one of the postings most feared was to Autolite, Belfast. Luckily, I was not asked to go there, I went to Autolite Enfield (among many other sites) instead. I don't know what I would have done had I been selected for that posting, but several of my fellow apprentices went there and had some hair-raising tales to tell when they returned. One chap, though, committed suicide just after he returned!

On the other hand, I spent three months in Dagenham Foundry, the noisiest place imaginable, and I still suffer from Tinnitis to this day.

Watt's the worst thing you can do to a datacenter? Failing to RTFM, electrically

Potty Professor
Facepalm

Re: I I be a-goin there, I be-n't start from here

Story told to me by my father, a long time ago.

One of his work colleagues, a Professor or similar, mentioned to him that the power kept tripping whenever he (the Prof.) tried to start a particular machine. Dad suggested that he connect a 100W light bulb in series to limit the starting inrush current, and switch it out (ie short it) when the machine was running to give the machine full power, thus "Soft Starting" the machine. The Prof. argued that that wouldn't work, saying that the bulb would blow because the machine would still want to draw its full current and thus overload the bulb. Dad had to patiently explain that it would work because the bulb would be in control, reducing the current, not the machine

What happens when What3Words gets lost in translation?

Potty Professor
FAIL

AA failures

I am disabled and suffering from Diabetes.

I was on a trip to collect something I had bought on eBay, when I had a puncture. Fitted spare wheel and continued. On the way back, only about ten miles from home, had another puncture, but of course, no spare now. Phoned the AA and gave them my location, right beside a phone mast on a bridge over an A road. "we'll be with you in ten minutes".

To cut a very long story short, three and a half hours later the van pulled up - on the hard shoulder of the A road fifty feet below where I was on the bridge. The driver then took a further quarter of an hour to navigate the back roads to reach me, where he put on his universal spare wheel and followed me the ten miles home. As I hadn't had any food for over six hours, I was feeling extremely wobbly by the time we got there.

Complained to the AA, but their excuse was that it was a Bank Holiday Saturday, and the changeover weekend between two different Half Term weeks, so the traffic was heavier than usual. If they knew that, why did they keep on telling me they would be with me in ten minutes?

Potty Professor
Angel

Dropping your aitches

A relative (by marriage) of mine always used to drop her aitches - except when there was no aitch, in which case she would invariably add one. Thus, when we went "on 'oliday" to a camping site in Wales, she asked me to help her "put up the Hawning on the caravan".

Potty Professor
FAIL

Send three and fourpence, we're going to a dance.

Send reinforcements, we're going to advance.

So much for CAPTCHA then – bots can complete them quicker than humans

Potty Professor
Joke

Re: What next for security now?

"I think the younger generation is" But at 75 years old, does that make me one of them?

Lock-in to legacy code is a thing. Being locked in by legacy code is another thing entirely

Potty Professor
FAIL

Remote sensors

My daughter was once returning home from her university some 100 miles away, and when she arrived in town in the wee small hours, the traffic lights refused to sense her 125cc motorbike, it didn''t contain enough iron to trigger the sensor. She waited and waited, and eventually had to dismount and push it across the pedestrian crossing after pressing the button to announce her presence.

Tesla steering problems attract regulator eyes for second time this year

Potty Professor
Childcatcher

Re: I have had power steering fail in an ICE car

Well, I was only 16 at the time, and as noted in NXM's post, I was shitting hot bricks as I fought not to hit anything on the way through the village. My father said afterwards that he felt a huge surge of relief when he saw me reach for the ignition switch.

Potty Professor
Go

Re: I have had power steering fail in an ICE car

I once nearly crashed my GF's father's brand new 1964 Pontiac Catalina. It had only done about 1000 miles, and he had never opened it up whilst running it in. He offered me a drive in it as I was well impressed, and suggested I open it up to see how well it would perform.

As I pressed the gas pedal, the linkage jammed wide open, and I went through Sutter, Illinois at speeds of up to 110 MPH with my foot firmly on the brake pedal and black smoke issuing from the drums. Eventually I switched off the ignition (no steering lock in those far off days) and started to slow down on compression.

Then I did a silly thing, I knocked it into Neutral, so no power brakes or power steering. I was then confronted with a left/right zigzag under a railroad bridge, but managed to bail out through a field gate and across the field. The cop who was chasing me was not impressed, a .38 looks HUGE when it's only inches from your nose, but GF's Dad, who was an ex-Mayor of Sutter, defused the situation by saying "It's OK Bubba, put your pop gun away, this young man has just saved my life".

Popped the hood and unlocked the throttle linkage, had to ask GF for a Bobby Pin to replace the missing split pin, and was rewarded with a Police escort back through the town to the Dad's farm.

Potty Professor
Boffin

Re: I've rebooted my 2021 Audi's electronic systems

I had a mysterious and sudden power steering failure on a 2006 (VW) SEAT Ibiza. Had to continue driving the 103 miles home, it was OK in a straight line or on gentle curves, but maneuvering was a bit heavy on the handlebars. Eventually traced the fault to a broken connector in the wiring loom, I can only assume that it had been struck by a stone or some debris thrown up under the front of the car. Once fixed, all was perfect again.

Nobody would ever work on the live server, right? Not intentionally, anyway

Potty Professor
Boffin

Re: Shouldn't people tell him there was a problem?

I once got a serious belt from the HT side of a 5kV - 240V step down transformer that I had been assured could not be back fed - it could and was. In my agony I managed to scream hoarsely "Switch the ***** thing off" and one of my co workers dived across the board and killed it before it killed me. This led to an in-depth investigation as to why, but I missed that because I was off sick for a week to get rid of a nasty case of the shakes. When I returned to work, I always shorted anything out before I touched it, sometimes with spectacular results.

Potty Professor
Boffin

Some day my prints will come...

...was the refrain frequently heard in the drawing office where I worked back in the early 70s.

A room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor? Take a closer look

Potty Professor
Boffin

Condensation

When I was living in Kentucky back in the 60s, the house we rented did not have air conditioning. My father removed the front panel of the gas furnace in the basement, reversed the connections on the room thermostat to run the fan when the temperature was high, and turned off the gas supply. He then opened one of the ground level windows on the North side of the building and strung a net curtain over the opening. The air coming in from under the adjacent bushes was relatively cool, the net curtain condensed the moisture, and the resulting cool air was circulated through the AC ducts throughout the house. The condensate was collected in a plastic planter trough and disposed of daily down the laundry room drain. When the weather turned colder in the autumn, he reverted it to a central heating role, which was how he left it when we returned to the UK.

The choice: Pay BT megabucks, or do something a bit illegal. OK, that’s no choice

Potty Professor
Holmes

Re: Location vs language

When I was on "Detached Duty" for my employers working in Finland, I wanted to listen to Classic FM over the Internet as I had when at home in Blighty. Unfortunately, the website detected that I was not in GB, so wouldn't let me in. It asked for my Post Code, and once I had entered my home address' code, it was quite happy to let me listen. Of course, there was a 2 hour time slip, but I could live with that.

Auroras – the solar system's universal light show (except Neptune... sorry, Neptune)

Potty Professor
Holmes

Re: Magnetic field ?

...and an atmosphere? I understood that the light show was produced by excitation of gas molecules by the incoming electron stream, so no atmosphere should mean no aurora, or am I whistling in the dark?

Bizarre backup taught techie to dumb things down for the boss

Potty Professor
Facepalm

Re: Chartered Status

Sorry, brain fart there, he was actually FRICS, Fellow of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, but the comment stands :-)

Potty Professor
Headmaster

Re: Chartered Status

I have never understood why the Headmaster of the Technical High School I attended in the early/middle sixties was a Fellow of the Royal Institute of Chartered Accountants. (He was known to one and all a Herbie)

Potty Professor
Angel

Re: Training?

When I was working in the Drawing Office of a large manufacturing company, HR sent us a new trainee to be trained as our Filing Clerk. Each of the major types of product we produced were allocated a specific filing system, and the filing systems were in separate filing cabinets (A0 size drawers to take our largest sheets). After she had been with us only a few days, it became obvious that she was completely innumerate, and had stirred the contents of each cabinet to such an extent that no-one could find anything. We sent her back to HR, who complained that we were being overly picky, so we had to get them to come and see the carnage she had wrought. They next moved her to the Mail Room, but it only took her a week to trash their system as well.

She was then moved to the Catering Department, but whenever she entered the shop floor with the tea trolley, all production ceased as the machinists and fitters stood and ogled this exotic creature that had suddenly appeared in their midst. Finally, she was deployed to push her tea trolley around the Front Office, where the staff were mainly female, and she did not have such a disruptive effect.

She was still happily pushing her tea trolley around the office block when I left three years later.

Turning a computer off, then on again, never goes wrong. Right?

Potty Professor
Facepalm

Re: My grandfather could not wear wristwatches

Same here. When I was a kid, I was given a "Space Watch". It was a conventional wristwatch but the crystal was replaced with a stainless steel cover with two viewing windows, and the hands were replaced with two numbered discs. I put it on, and it stopped. Took it off, it started working again. On = stopped, Off = starts again. Perfectly repeatable. Other members of my family had no trouble, just me. Watch was given to my sister, and I inherited my grandfather's pocket watch. I was the only kid at school who regularly wore a turnip.

Fast forward many years, and I was given a self winding watch as an engagement present (one of a pair, SO had the other). Again, would not work on me, but would on the mantelpiece or anyone else's wrist. I now just keep a cheap mobile phone in my pocket with no SIM and Night Clock running on screen.

What's up with IT, Doc? Rabbit hole reveals cause of outage

Potty Professor
Devil

Re: F Big Cat

We used to have an F Big Cat, he was the runt of the litter but grew enormous. If there were any of the local moggies in our garden when Mickey sauntered around the corner of the house, they all suddenly remembered that they had pressing engagements elsewhere. He lived to be 16 years old, but kidney failure ended his reign. RIP Mickey :-(

Hacking a Foosball table scored an own goal for naughty engineers

Potty Professor
Boffin

Re: Artform

Several of the students at the college I attended (not me, I hasten to add!) kept a sixpenny piece with a length of fuse wire soldered onto the periphery so that they could fish it out of the coin slot after releasing the balls. The wire was only soft soldered on in case the coin went too far down the chute and couldn't be pulled back past the mechanism. If that happened, the wire would unpeel from the coin and no evidence left behind.

Potty Professor
Alien

Re: Blank coins

At a place I worked many years ago, the fag machine took two 50p coins to dispense a packet. One enterprising machinist took a length of tungsten bar from the raw material rack and use the copy lathe to copy an actual 50p coin to give it seven sides. He then parted off several discs that were exactly the same thickness as the 50p coin, and used them to "buy" free fags, When the owner of the machine turned up to empty the coin box, he found several blanks, and complained to the management about these "worthless" coins. The Company had to reimburse him to the tune of the corresponding number of 50p coins, but no-one calculated the actual cost of the Tungsten or the machine time spent making them.

Potty Professor
Boffin

Free calls

A mate of mine when we were at college in the Midlands laboriously worked out the sequence of local codes from there to his home near the south coast by driving along the shortest route and noting down the codes in the order of the telephone kiosks he visited along the way. I don't remember how many digits he had to dial, but it took him a seriously long time to dial home.

Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris

Potty Professor
Boffin

Re: All your QWERTY belong to us...

When I was working for a large electrical manufacturer producing manuals for the equipments we built, we had occasion to do so for a Swedish customer. I loaded the Swedish keyboard driver, but we only had QWERTY keyboards, so I printed off a sheet of Swedish keycaps and stuck them onto the keys with Pritt Stick so they could be easily removed when the contract was completed. We all became quite fluent in technical Swedish for a while, but it soon faded afterwards.

You may have heard about AI defeating voice authentication. This research kinda proves it

Potty Professor
Unhappy

Re: "need to have access to their target's voice"

Although I've never been anywhere near Australia, any recording of my voice appears to have a strong Aussie accent :-(

Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson

Potty Professor
Black Helicopters

Major

When I was in the Royal Observer Corps. our Crew Officer was Observer Officer Major (but Jenny to her friends.

Amazon Prime too easy to join, too hard to quit, says FTC lawsuit

Potty Professor
Stop

Re: There is a way to sign up for Prime in two clicks?

I got out of Prime by cancelling the associated Credit Card, so they suspended my membership due to "Financial Irregularities". I had previously jumped through all their hoops to cancel, but they still took the £8.99 per month anyway. I complained, and they said that they'd sort it out, but _still_ took the money the next month, A visit to my bank eventually was the only way to stop the payments, and Amazon retaliated by cancelling my account. Their loss, not mine.

Florida man insists he didn't violate the law by keeping Top Secret docs

Potty Professor

Re: Orange man,

Update - Apparently Eastern Airlines operated until its dissolution in 1991.

Potty Professor
Black Helicopters

Re: Orange man,

When I was living in the States in the 60s, there was an advert on TV that said "Be the man with the Florida tan". I think it advertised an airline or similar, perhaps it still does? (Icon because no aeroplane icon)

Cunningly camouflaged cable routed around WAN-sized hole in project budget

Potty Professor
Boffin

Gutter connection

When my eldest daughter was at Uni in Bradford, she lived in a "Student House". There were more students in the house next door but one, so in order that they share the cost of a network connection, they ran a coax cable up the wall of one house, along the shared gutter, and down the wall of the other house. This was done with the full knowledge and permission of the owners of the house in between, and the system worked for the whole four years my daughter was in that house, and still is for all we know.

Page: