Posts by Anonymous Custard 2797 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jul 2008
At the incident review, the team said the wording could have been read two ways - and mine was the wrong way!
Given a 50:50 chance or choice, in such situations you'll always lose...
That's a statistical law even stronger than million-to-one chances coming up nine times out of ten.
From analogous experience you then not only get flack from the customer, but you also get "friendly fire" from your own sales droids and manglement for missing out on some dollars.
Even when it's categorically proven from experience that the net income of (profit from contract - expenditure to try the work and then clean up the mess) is negative.
Been there, done that, told the sales droids that if they ever sell something like that ever again (especially after committing me and my team without even consulting me about it) then they're the ones who will support it and I will refuse to have anything to do with it...
From experience of working on a large open source project (and its associated wiki), the issue would probably turn out to be the number of people who complain about it and are willing to help put time and effort into fixing it, as opposed to just the complaining part, would be a depressingly small fraction...
And some more here:
1) a couple of network monitors, showing connectivity and status of various items on my network (which to be fair is displayed via either a Pimoroni Blinkt or a Unicorn pHat, so is indeed turning LEDs on and off).
2) At least 3 media players around the house, plus my travelling one which is currently in storage.
3) My VPN server for when we're allowed to go travelling again.
4) My internet radio that's providing the background music whilst I type this.
5) My PiHole network ad blocker
6) My general purpose server, running Calibre, Plex, Node Red plus file serving.
7) My magic mirror/desktop info display.
8) The "play" box that my kids use for Minecraft, Python, Scratch, web browsing and all sorts of other stuff.
So slightly more than lighting an LED or two from the GPIO pins.
I always make the point of asking our FE's when I'm training them on troubleshooting techniques to identify the three most powerful metrology/diagnostic tools that they have available to them.
A depressing number aren't able to answer that one correctly (the answer being the two mark 1 eyeballs just above their noses, and the couple of pounds of grey mush directly behind them).
But not quite as depressing as the customers who spend two weeks trying to fix a tool issue by endlessly looking over data and test runs etc before calling you in on an "urgent machine down escalation to top management", but haven't actually left their desks and gone and looked at the damn thing (often to then find the cause in minutes when they notice something visibly amiss).
Somewhat similar, we had a customer (now no longer in operation) who would insist that all we vendor engineers came on site in shirt and tie. Meanwhile of course their engineers could wear more or less what they liked (jeans and t-shirt usually).
Now bearing in mind that I'm talking the semiconductor industry, meaning that we wear cleanroom bunny suits all day (at least when in the cleanroom) so had to have said shirt and tie on underneath those.
Those things aren't exactly comfortable if you've just got t-shirt and trousers on underneath, but with shirt and tie they're unbearable.
In the end it finally got relaxed when someone actually fainted due to overheating and we persuaded our sales droids to basically inform the customer that if it didn't no-one would set foot into the cleanroom to support their equipment ever again.
Our (europe-wide) place has gone quite the other way.
We have bi-monthly (as in every other week) "formal" meetings for all-hands in which everyone is on mute (enforced) and senior manglement present, but we also have on the alternate weeks regional local office meetings.
And in those we're actively encouraged to bring kids, pets and whatever you want and it's run as almost a social get-together to keep team spirits up and engender community and mutual support (kinda water-cooler meetings) and let everyone get to know everyone else and their wider family better.
Have to say it is actually working very well, was most pleasantly surprised given how some of our manglers used to seemingly consider anything like sociability and working from home as a major threat to their little control empires.
Sadly there is one thing we're still not allowed, at least officially --->
Maybe they should ask (Baroness) Floella Benjamin for a lesson in how to count?
Along with perhaps Big Ted, Little Ted et al...
My favourite variation on that one was when one of the drones on the helldesk I had the misfortune of managing sent an email to a user to let them know he'd fixed their email.
It could be worse - they could have been sending it to inform everyone that the mail system was down...
It didn't last too long, as senior manglement weren't too impressed by more or less the whole building having an enforced four hour coffee-break on the first Monday morning of every month.
A new AV product was fairly rapidly procured, and this one more carefully configured not to gorge on processor cycles.
We humble minions on the other hand generally put on a stoic face and got busy doing nothing except coffee and gossip about the weekend/football/telly/whatever...
Similar experience here (this time from the userland perspective) back in the day where our lot used to schedule a full monthly anti-virus scan in the same way.
Problem was, that due to the *ahem* spec of our laptops and how things were configured, the AV software basically grabbed as much CPU capacity as possible and everything ground to a halt whilst it trawled through the hard discs of each machine poking its nose in everywhere.
Most people had reasonably large drives (for the time, we're going back a bit here) and all were spinning rust, so it wasn't unusual for the scans to take all morning, and on some where the disc was majorly full the whole day. And whilst it was going on, basically all you had to work with was the phone and the coffee mug...
I don't think this accounts for it. There definitely was that problem, but what stopped the US, say, from building their own version which would conveniently have been deemed sufficiently quiet to evade the bans? I think that lack of demand stopped them.
That would probably be the Boeing 2707?
It did begin to happen, but got canned due to funding, environmental and a few technical issues before it became an actual thing.
rather than Concorde's distinctive, and allegedly greenhouse-smashing, "Boom-Boom",
Or maybe it was Basil Brush with a half-brick?
I still smile at my WD elements drive, connected to a WD MyCloud NAS box on my network.
Every time my mouse rolls over their system tray app, it reports that the drive is 217% full. Now that's what I call data compression...
We have certain customers who like to insist on face to face (or mask to mask, as they're now being called) meetings. Seemingly they think that if it's via some online remote media they won't be able to harangue, harass and generally shout at us quite as well (whether it's deserved or not).
Oddly enough we insist on remote meetings, generally for much the same reasons...
Discussions like this always remind me of the peach flan that I was once served on a domestic BA flight back in the day (at least a decade ago). Looking at the ingredients list started off something like:
Apple (30%), Peach (25%)...
Which always made me wonder why they called it a peach flan? Although to be fair when you ate it, that was what you actually tasted (due to low cabin pressure or whatever).
That said they did used to do a semi-acceptable breakfast on that flight (Gatwick to Edinburgh), set you up reasonably well for a days work once you got there.
Some feel that the redesign was rushed without any real consultation.
And therein lies the rub. Once again looks like they're just trying to be "trendy" and catering for an audience that basically doesn't exist (those who code and suchlike on a phone or similar sized screen). Was nothing learned from the whole Windows 8 debacle?
We know what we want, and it doesn't line up so well with what you somehow think we want. Ask us and we'll tell you - not the other way about.
Anyone would think they were Microsoft! Oh, wait a moment...
Oxygen actually liquefies at a slightly higher temperature than Nitrogen does, so you can use one to create the other (either deliberately or accidentally). So there is still some small risk, even if you use L-N2.
Back in uni days it was one of the (many) demonstrations we used to do on school (and prospective student) open days. Take a large metal coffee jar (the kind that caterer supplies come in) and mount it at an angle using a retort stand. Fill it with L-N2 and after a while you'll get L-O2 condensing on the outside and dripping off the bottom edge. Stick something around the upper rim to deflect the N2 outflow forwards, and put a candle underneath the dripping L-O2. It's quite a nice demonstration of stuff like distillation and liquification.
Did something akin to that back in the day when staying in hotels for business.
One particular one seemed to like to charge (an inordinate amount) for printing stuff out for guests, but I found out that for some reason were happy to accept faxes for self-same guests.
So as this was the dial-up era, ended up faxing the file I wanted to print out to the hotel's fax machine and used it as a cheap printer. Not the highest quality, but it did the job well enough for the needed purpose.
I just decided that rather than being nice and giving the correct number, I'd just tell the callers to contact the company back and complain that they're giving out the wrong number.
That way as they'll be getting multiple people per week telling them rather than just me, it might actually get sorted.
Either that or I'll get HR to have an official and formal chat with ABTA or whoever the relevant body may be about it as I'm sure like others have said it could be an open goal to phish for personal and banking details.
My office desk phone direct dial is one digit different from a local insurance company.
Unfortunately a national airline/holiday company is showing their usual (in)competency and has decided to start giving out my number instead of the insurance company one to some of their irate customers who want to claim back on cancelled flights and holidays.
Even after alerting them 3 times to it, I'm still getting the damn things (the last one about half an hour ago). Particularly irritating when you're on a Zoom/Teams/Skype/Webex (we have all of them for the convenience of various customers) conf call and you get interrupted by one.
It is certainly becoming very tedious indeed...
Challenge accepted. Off the top of my head:
Crew - Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins.
Flight directors - Gene Krantz, Chris Kraft
CapCom's - Charlie Duke, Jim Lovell, Ken Mattingly, Bruce McCandless, Bill Anders, Harrison Schmidt
Geologist Adviser - Gene Shoemaker (as in the comet).
There were certainly more of each of the directors and CapComs (4 or 5 shifts overall, with one or two for each). But those are the ones that spring to mind.
Admittedly I can only remember the CapComs as they're all Astronaut heroes in their own right, and Chris Kraft as he died not so long ago (and got a decent amount of his due credit during the recent anniversary) and was almost as much of a dude as Gene Krantz is.
So after years of ignoring or putting the phone down on cold calling call centres trying to spam us with crap or other scams, the Govt now seriously expects people to start answering the phone to random callers who are telling them they have been in contact with someone infected?
Shirley it doesn't take a genius to work out how well that will go down, or indeed how long it will take for all of these scam peddlers to start the impersonation game and use this as yet another way to hook the gullible and vulnerable (given that iirc it's actually started already even before the contact tracing has)?
Would you trust a cold call on such a subject?
@keithpeter - nope, I've got the paper bound book copy on the shelf behind me, and I'm sure if I dig around somewhere I might have an electronic copy somewhere. In the worst case, it's more or less a text file with some now non-processed mark-up.
But as it was 22 years ago (eeek!) I must say it's not something I've really ever gone back to...
Remembering that in some irredeemable cases, the right position is at worst not in your organisation, and at best with a competitor.
It reminds me of a comment I got when I was leading an install team once and was a man down. The leader of the larger team working at a nearby customer offered to lend me one of his engineers (who wasn't the most useful tool in the toolbox), and one of the other straight-talking Scottish engineers in his team came back with "don't do that, then he'll be two men down!"
Suffice it to say, we made do with who we had until my engineer returned.
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