Posts by Boris the Cockroach

Must try

this one on my boss... although going by previous , he's happy enough enough to burn other people's money. or keyboards

But I'm not happy............ interviews for a new PFY next week..... as if I didnt have enough to do already......

No comment

33K for that list of qualifications?

UK government being a bunch of skinflints.... again

I wonder

if they outsourced the building of the capsule to the russians and that one russian guy they have decided to hammer the valves in upside down.... he has previous form in doing that....

Think Proton and an inertial guidance platform that has a big arrow and a sign saying "fit this way only"........

Kiddie porn? how noble

Give it 2 years after introduction (we'll not worry about "kiddies on the beach" pics getting you on the sex offenders register .. and your house burnt down.. with said kids inside) and China will come along with "Give us access to the app on Chinese iphones or your can kiss goodbye to your chinese profits"

And instead of kiddie porn , the pictures searched for with be anything along the lines of "free Hong kong" with the resulting offender taken away for re-programming in the benefits of communist party rule...

Still its nice to know my Nikon D330 photos are safe from scanni.. oh I'm using windows to store them

Alright alright I confess

to what happens when you take 4 bored apprentices, a couple of very good power supplies and a bunch of large electrolytic caps.

To be honest, we thought they'd go off in sequence.....

We spent the rest of the day saying "WHAT!" to anything said to us....

Someone elses

problem is now your problem

"It doesnt work" wails the guy with 3 yrs experience(claimed) "I've tried and tried but it keeps losing the file when I hit compile"

The mangler arrives

"I want it up and running NOW!", followed by his more usual song "Fix it Fix it Fix it Fix it Fix it Fix it Fix it Fix it Fix it Fix it Fix it Fix it Fix it Fix it Fix it Fix it Fix it Fix it Fix it Fix it Fix it Fix it Fix it Fix it Fix it Fix it "(until the PA is called upon to drag him away to do something more productive... like .. sit in this wood chipper until I switch it on..)

An older wiser eye casts a look

"Does help if you compile it to the shared program directory instead of your home directory.. especially since the networked communication PC can only see the shared directory"

Y 'all forgetting one thing

This is a tech orientated site, and most of the readership is fairly techie, so for us repairing some gizmo is a bit of a no brainer, gimme the replacement part, a box of tools and a bit of time... oh look my broken old phone has a spiffy new USB socket that works(and battery too)

Again for my day to day job, I'm liable to rip out a sensor switch, wire in a new/repaired one, make sure the thing works and off we go again.

However, that does'nt work with 90% of the population who have not a clue when it comes to 'techie' stuff which means everything comes down to cost

So if you've spent 25 000 on a car and fixing it is going to cost 500..... meh fix it, but if you've got a 400 washing machine and its going to cost 500 to fix...... may just as well throw it out and buy a new one and it that comes with a 2 year warrenty

Its not just the cost of the part , its paying someone to fit it so its no good having a washing machine drum bearing that costs 50 when its going to cost 4 hrs labour to get it in there

What happened to

'Jim' ?

I must know otherwise another innocent keyboard will be sacrificed.....

Ahhhh such dedication

to be able to come up with an accidental boss replacement tool and yet no trace of how the foul deed was done

We are learning so much here it defys belief.

Now if only he could teach us the best way to protect our keyboards....

although on the subject of teaching, our work experience guy left today, an older and wiser man, for although he never wants to have anything to do with the likes of us robot wranglers again, he has learned that in any future employment to seek out the oldest grumpiest employee and offer him coffee in the morning, then sit at his feet and learn the wisdom from him. And especially run any new idea past his eye and wait for the possible reactions:-

1. laughter : forget about your idea and go get more coffee

2. 'The look' : run away if you want to live and return after 30 mins with more coffee

3. The raised eyebrow : your idea has some merit , fetch more coffee, notepads, pens, drawing equipment, laptop, CAD station, another coffee, a full cost analysis of your proposal and how best to sell it to the manglement.

View from the ground floor

There is a reason for the systemic failure of government IT projects

Perhaps a discussion among el-reg regulars would reveal a couple more , but the primary cause is 'mission creep' (something us engineers suffered from when I were a civil servant in <redacted>)

What would happen in our case is that some non-technical mangler would try and keep up with us techies by spouting "wouldn't it be a good idea if such and such was implemented" after reading our prototype report.

To which our most respected team leader (science qualifications coming out of his ears) would answer "f*** off, you dont know what you are talking about, the design is fixed"(he taught me so much.. )

of course software is a different kettle of fish when outside contractors are doing it, because "sure it can be done, lets stick a varience in the contract and away we'll go, subject to the extra time taken to implement it" is the standard answer, and if delivery is in 9 months time, and you are retiring in 6 months... who cares anyway

repeat after a change in government, followed by the comittee(a great way of avoiding responsibility for cock ups)approving yet another change , and you can see why a simple job to display the time on a display in the house of commons lobby takes 5 yrs and 40 million quid.....

I'm off

clubbing and socialising tonight... no mask... Boris said its was all ok

And Boris would never lie to us would he? would he? .... would he?

Actually bozo the clown has made this pandemic worse with his mixed messages, failure to cancel sporting occasions last year , failure to close borders, failure to ensure isolation measures were followed... and spending money like a waterfall on entirely the wrong things(but gave his ministers companies a fair amount of cash).

And with the latest 'freedom' day bozo will ensure that covid casulties among the younger and poorer generation go up as 'who needs them anyway.. they'll never donate 10 million to the tory party in exchange for a knighthood and a 1 billion pound bung to their company.'

Same old windows 10

Rebooted my Linux file server into windows 10 to check something.

Then hit the reboot button to get it back to being its usual self.

Please wait windows updating.... ok time to go cook anyway

Come back 30 mins later "Please wait windows updating".. F.you , power off and boot it into Linux

I have bitter memories of win10 doing that at work and wasting a whole morning when our CAM system 'updated' (and me getting a kicking from the boss too )

Quote

"I can see the PFY reaching for the workplace accident report form, but I shake my head slightly ..."

That line would have destroyed yet another keyboard.... had work experience guy(who to say the least, is one of the nicest people I've ever had to teach/corrupt ) managed to throw a plastic sheet over said keyboard thus preventing my lunch time pre pub coffee from coming into contact with it.

Maybe a full afternoon session in the pub will have some effect on him.... but must teach him to art of turning off the phone first. cant have the boss calling up and disturbing the lessons...

It wasn't just Amazon

£5 for a roll of low grade toilet paper at the height of that shortage....(self induced shortage by stupid people that is)

But there were plenty of copies of The Sun to go round and being covered in shit instead of full of shit improved the paper no ends..

Hang on.. its monday

And I haven't done anything to the work experience guy... apart from make him dispose of 2 keyboards

Although he did scream "it burns it burns" when he disposed of the one the former PFY left me

Was'nt quite in the board room

But lunch time for me on the night shift was a wander to the local refreshment center (that closed at 11pm) to partake in a light snack (liquid)

The pub had 2 bars and you could see from one into the other.

Ordered lunch, glanced into the other bar... then pointed out to the barman that the man in the blue shirt would be paying for lunch.

The man in question was the owner of the business I attended. needless to say, he came storming round to where I am with "WTF you doing in the pub while you should be at work" and "I'm not paying for your lunch"

"ok" I responded "I'll just walk back to work without my lunch, and when I'm back there, I'll call your wife with the news you were in the pub with a lady and your tongue was so far down her throat I'm sure you were tickling her vocal cords...."

I find blackmail such a dirty word, I prefer "Performance enhanced gift giving"

We have still

much to learn from the BOFH, partly on adding extra clauses to our contracts, but especially where to insert said clauses

Speaking of inserting, the departed PFY left me a present, all boxed up neat as you like and sealed in plastic... on unwrapping it I'll only use the word 'keyboard' for it as its rectanglar and has a USB lead hanging off it... dried up coffee and hobnob bits are the least of the things in there.

On the bright side though, we have a work experience guy starting monday so rather than calling Porton down's biological warfare department to get rid of the thing, I'll use work experience guy on monday... baptism of fire and all that..

Will this approach

write code for my robots?

Or will it spit out reams and reams of simple code that could be covered by a far more readable simple macro.....

With

some of our stuff, the operators could just hit e.stop and then turn off the plant/robot/machine at the isolator before ending the shift....

When the PC based machines started appearing , it took ages to persude them to do a proper shutdown of the machine from the control interface rather than walking around to the isolator and pulling the nuke lever... why... because the proper shutdown saved all the in use data files to the HDD ready for the reboot... pulling the plug leaves the machine in a indeterminate state because the controls only seem to save to HDD every 10 mins or so....

Anyone for a 2 foot long tool spinning at 7000 rpm and the machine beliving its a tool only 3 inches long..... and people wonder why I keep a spare set of underwear at work..

2 happening occur to me

1st one was when I were a young and keen apprentice at all things CNCery... we had a spiffing 5 axis mill, the hallowed area of the gods(well the guy with 5 years experience of loading punch tapes anyway), one bit of it was water cooled for some reason, trickled through and then dumped. until the maintance guy decided "whats this pipe here? " and cut it off.

Luckily we never started the machine as no one could get near it due to the stench coming out of the drain pipe where the water was dumped into the street sewer.

The other was a few years ago, when the alledged mangler could'nt get the HP coolant circuit running after the coolant tank was cleaned, however he had seen me prime the pump by loosening a hose fitting on the HP circuit when the pump was replaced..... and we all know that this one ends up with the coolant tank being emptied in about 10 secs by a 300 PSI pump .... was impressive how far it went too ...

If only he'd listened... loosened.. and not while the pump was running....