Posts by Stevie

Re: family

Daughter: We need a new lawnmower.

Me: What? Why? What's it doing?

Daughter: Well, I was cutting the grass and I worked until the blue smoke started coming out as usual when ...

Me: BLUE SMOKE???!!! The mower does not make blue smoke "as usual"! It makes blue smoke when the grass is too long and too wet and you try and make it cut the lot in one go! Blue smoke means the engine is overheating and burning oil!

Daughter: Do you want to know the problem or not?

Me: Go on ...

Daughter: When I click the lever only one wheel turns.

Me: So the mower works (apparently yea unto the gates of death). Your problem is that you have to push it by hand. Right. I will fix it, you will cut the grass more often and take more time to do it.

Daughter: (Rolls eyes).

Turned out that it needed a pair of front wheels to replace the ones with stripped gears. $18.

New mower of similar type? $500+

Re: The only time clutching a clipboard is acceptable

Or if you are James Bond attempting to gather intelligence on the goings-on inside the desert lab of Willard Whyte.

Re: family

Typical scene - I get in wife's car, start it, flames shoot out of the windshield defroster vents.

Me: "How long has it been doing that?"

Wife: "Doing what?"

Minimum requirements for Windows 95 were 4MB / 8MB

But Stateside, most of-the-shelf PCs were sold with 16mb if they came with Win95.

And they all did.

Re: z-fold? (4 cocnuthead)

Agree.

Bloody 90s era grads. Not enough they make OOP confusing by using stupid names for old concepts, they are trying to subvert the proper naming conventions for continuous stationery now to make them sound more clixby.

Horsewhipping too good, fought two wars, Mafeking, rationing, etc etc etc.

Re: [LHC] emergency-stop button

If you press the emergency stop button on the LHC France and Switzerland change places.

That's why it is labelled "Emergency Stop: NEVER USE".

Re: But I didn't touch nuthin!

- Developed Business Synergies resulting in an Holistic Re imagining of the Relevant Verticals.

Re: The magically levitating disc pack

Airborne? As I recall the only button on an EDS would cause the heads to retract with a click and the drive to power down (or the disc to spin up and the heads to pop out in their trademark "sticking out the tongue" search for the pack directory).

There was a big red "FAULT" light, but I never saw it lit and it wasn't a button (though it looked like one). I was told by an operator that when that lit a disc might go walkabout, but I didn't believe him. He was full of such tall tales.

I've even seen an EDS 60 with the lid lifted from the back while it was running so the engineer (clad in the ICL trad carpet slippers) could do stuff with a scope. No disc packs left the cabinet.

There must've been a later model, fitted with a "launch disc" button.

Re: Oh. Again?

*shrugs*

Turns out Space is hard, not at all the doddle it is on the TV.

Every man and his dog can do that

Off you go then. Don't forget the GoPro footage. "Pictures or doesn't happen" and all that.

Re: It's behind you ...

Sorry, chuBb, I was enjoying your story but you let your rage become your master.

Punctuation. Paragraphs.

If your story is good enough to tell, why obliterate it with one long run-on sentence no-one would read on a bet?

Re: Interesting, but another which is closer to "on call" than "who me?" - perhaps "why me?"

That was because they discontinued the free T shirt for a story scheme.

could't find a spare plug

So much $$$ computer equipment.

So few $ sockets labelled "for janitorial staff use ONLY".

"accident" looking for a good time to happen.

It’s always the cleaner.

Nah, though that's what I guessed for this one.

I had a print server in a remote location that went offline and rebooted three times a day. That one was sited next to a coffee machine ...

I had another that went offline every night at around 7pm. Turned out that the socket was wired inline with the light switch per NY code ...

Then there was the time an entire building filled with data centers went offline because the building owner decided to remove a partition wall and the sawzall made short work of the wall and the forearm-sized bundle of optic fiber wiring inside it ...

And around the same time another building not far from that went dark, then caught fire when the electrician called in to install a circuit decided to drill a new cable access hole in the breaker box without pulling the main breaker, demonstrating just how much electricity is needed to set light to the fizzing corpse of an electrician ...

it never even sounded even remotely plausible

Not without the inclusion of a free shoulder-surfing autonomous selfie mini-drone it didn't.

Re: Downgrading OS/2 to Windows 3, really?

A former boss of mine - nice bloke - lost a CIO position at a large multinational because he was an OS2 evangelist and it turned out IBM weren't after the budget was spent.

Re: Timing is off..

Good LORD, man, stop CAPITALISING to show EMPHASIS because it makes READING your fascinating stories TEDIOUS as I IMAGINE you leaning in and RAISING your voice to MAKE your point a-la Clive JENKINS.

Re: Oh so special's

whole==while

it's == its

dammit.

Re: Oh so special's

The "in" crowd, Tonto-sorry-Jake. I can't help it if others were such unwhacky vacuous glooks they neglected to obtain a nice velvet jacket. I pulled like a quasar in that jacket (and my 9 foot crocheted white scarf thank you gran).

But they only worked with collared shirts I'm afraid. All the coolness ran out if improperly accessorized.

As for T-Shirts, my "Trust Me" T featuring a lecherous goblin was a firm fave until some git swiped it from the D block drying room in Suffolk Terrace. I recently found a pic of myself as a handsome youth wearing a Caravan shirt in Sheffield (I was there for a halloween party) that must've gotten swiped in '75 too. Happy days. I was thin, the music was great and all the girls were gorgeous.

Re: SPARC burn?

Nah. New York wires were cooking off.

Re: SPARC burn?

Pah! Last night I removed a socket from my house's wall that had been arcing internally and partially melted due to pass-through current draw from a socket upstream (kettle).

How it didn't burn us all to death in our beds I don't know. Stank like old cat food though. House reeked.

Re: Oh so special's

I had a friend a the University of Climategate who did that! He was at a debutantes ball and was approached by a pretty young thing whole he was sitting on a walled fountain smoking his pipe. Realizing he was about to Make Contact he placed his pipe in the side pocket of his green velvet jacket (we all had them in '76 - mine was midnight blue/slate grey depending on the direction of the light). He was, in his own words, "doing well" when he realized his jacket was on fire, and he leapt into the fountain to effect fire suppression.

All this was revealed when I ran into him at term start and noticed the gaping burned hole in the jacket, and it's somewhat bedraggled nap. I'd have disbelieved it from anyone else, but this chap was utrterly believable.

Re: Oh so special's

Well where's the fun in that?