I want one!!!!!!!

Please????????

any beancounters left ?

Another truly inspired creation.

Keep up the good work :D

Now to find our old UPS.....

...and test it outside EMC.

Mines the one with the IBM logo ;-)

Although I don't use the tube, is to spooky that the Jubilee Line had a power cut last night?

Excellent story ...

I wonder if your readers would be interested to know of a device called a MagStim that does basically what the PFY's equipment does - discharge capacitors through a coil to produce strong (>4 Tesla I think) transient magnetic fields.

Medics use it to trigger nerve firing in the brain without cutting people open. I wrote software to control one - but you won't see me near one running at full blast...

Oh please someone post a "how to make your own pinch." There's a sun mail server thats "going to take a year to export to exchange" and few novell servers that are "impossible to get to talk to a 2003 server"

Plus it would mean that a few people that put 'MSCE (NT4, 2000, 2003)' after their name on their emails would be getting a much disreved p45.

Brentonian

A Pinch please i have an intresting use for it. Top BOFH

PLEASE!

"There's a reasonable chance no one parked along the north wall will be driving home tonight."

Had me laughing out loud. Luckily I know better than to drink anything while reading the BOFH

This piece brought up a gripe i have with the London underground...

No damn vending machines on platforms! The only close thing you get is like 2 or 3 stations which have shops on the platform, but that's it, atleast for all the places ive traveled to. Where is a geek supposed to get his fix! :P

bit late for the first of the month...

That's right we need a pinch, just what the Department needs to leverage a pay rise and nuke the company back to the dark ages for a little while.

Truly think this is the best BOFH yet.

You lucky. lucky bastard!

Whenever I visit London and play the vending slot machines they usually just swallow my dosh and look smug.

is on a dangerous path. He's getting to know too much "sensitive information"... Ignorance (i.e. approving IT budget without asking unduly questions) is the key to a long life expectancy.

Many many years ago when I was a wee lad studying at Caltech, one of the guys in the student residence (a native of Texas) was fond of playing obnoxious country music on his radio at top volume with the door to his room open.

Another denizen was something of an electronics whiz and was using a nearby storeroom to build an RF induction heater for some company in the LA area. About a kilowatt, iirc. Old school electronics with *big* vacuum tubes and a largish induction coil.

Eventually the scenario arose where the music lover would do his thing and the electronic whiz kid would simply tune his induction heater until the radio was jammed. Music lover would retune to another station, shortly to be followed by the jammer.

Highly illegal, I s'pose, but I don't know the range of the jammer. We all had a good laugh at Mr. Music.

There is nothing new under the sun.

"In Japan you can't walk 100 yards without finding a vending machine - ahhh that was the life."

Especially as vending machines in Japan dispense useful stuff like, say, tiny bottles of scotch.

I once knew a genius-level, self-taught electronics expert. He told the story of living in the dorms of a Midwestern megaversity, when "my HiFi rig is louder than yours" was all the rage (this is looong before iPod earBud hearing destructors came on the scene). He would politely knock on doors and ask that the volume be turned down ... which of course resulted in it being turned up even higher.

So he retired to his lab and built his ODKD (Omnni Directional Klingon Disruptor). *High* amplitude pulse tuned to the frequency of delicate, critical, expensive-to-replace components in the stereo systems of the day (analog, of course).

>knock< >knock<

"Yeah?"

"Could you please turn the volume down? I'm trying to study"

"Eat shit and die, dweeb" >SLAM< [music turned up to 12]

Back in the room ...

>snap!< ....hmmmmmmMMMMMMMMMM... 3..2..1.. >CLICK!<

And all stereos in a 100 meter radius go quiet.

Ah, silence is golden!

Exactly my thoughts!!! Can't believe I've been (lucky enough to be?) inconvenienced by the PFY...

Rocked up to the Jubilee line last night to be told there was a suspension due to a "local power failure" - affecting the line between Stratford and Finchley Rd. For all you non-Londoners, that's over 80% of a 36km line - quite how you define that as "local" I've no idea...

Damn that PFY!!

Next time you're in a large-ish bookshop, wander along to the electronics section and take a peek at the '..... Devices for the Evil Genius' books for projectile weapons and EMP guns!

IMHO should be kept on top shelf in plain packaging, typically for less than £100 (much less in some cases if you can scavenge some components) you can build some amazing toys.

Still not finished building any, YET, but never ever break into my shed without really thick insulated bodysuit - you have been warned!

BEWARE THE EVIL ELECTRICIAN

Haven't we had a number involving a bastardised vending machine before?

It's not like Simon to not be in on such a deal... or isn't he? I'm wondering if the little rampage plan might not have been intended to divert the PFY's wrath away from Simon's... investment.

"the life expectancy of a Brazilian electrician"

Muito boa, essa... I just hope his loved ones do not read it. :O)

It doesn't take a lot of power, certainly not 1 KW for stereo jamming. You really just need to create a field, at roughly the same power level at the antenna of the receiver, as the broadcast station does. Since most broadcast stations run between about 1 KW and 10 KW, but since electromagnetic fields go as the inverse square of the distance, that usually means that under a Watt is sufficient for any radio within hearing distance. 4 Watts could take out the better part of a college campus (Ask me how I know! ;-) ). 1 KW would probably take out the front end of the receiver, and probably a good portion of the rest of it, if it's anywhere close.

Dave

P.S. Mine's the one with the lightning bolts on it.

At last! The BOFH is back in destructive fullness! I noticed a while ago that he seemed to have lost his killing streak, but I can see it's getting back into full swing again. :) More senseless killing, just like in the good old Striped Irregular Bucket days!! It's truly what sets him apart from the other IT writings.

Another good one. Things have been a bit patchy over the last year or so (I too have read them all) but the last couple of weeks have been a real return to glory.

All we need now is a lime pit, a cattle prod and the excuse calender.

@Rob: this Boss knows his Sun-Tzu "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer!". He might just live a little longer that way

Did the same during school years, but smarter. You tune the oscillator to the IF frequency, knowing that most commercial radios don't screen that well, and blot out *every* station in the one go! Not very legal admittedly...

Or 100 or 110 , the vending machines in my underground station respond with a status check, or "hello" message.

Is it just me or has the current boss been passivily agreeing with and knowing of the evil plans of the BOFH and the PFY? This is not a normal BOFH-boss relation anymore. Something is rotten in the state of that company...

Paris, since she has as much a clue about anything on earth than I have about where this boss is going to end and why/how his end will be.

and it was so funny...

the debouncing features, the arrangement with the vendor, the laughs they had at pfy's experiences :P

Been a long time bofh fan, since 1997.

God it helped me survive being an isp tech support, for a company that didn't want to deal with problems it caused, just get the damn customers on and off the phone fast.

jeez lol...

keep the laughs rolling on!

Any of you guys drooling over wanting a pinch so you can wipe out deserving targets stop to consider that a pinch would not do the task?

Considering that not even the 100-foot diameter, 20-foot tall z-pinch at Sandria can belt out enough EMP to affect more than the most sensitive electronics, I'd say that a portable pinch wouldn't stand a chance.

The only portable device capable of producing the requisite EMP is a small thermonuclear (or nukular) bomb. The "briefcase nuke" beloved of terrorism movies could do it but sadly it's a one-shot device and likely to be detrimental to the person placing it.

</geek mode>

Sorry to spoil the fun.