* Posts by Nusato

16 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Oct 2008

Carly Fiorina unleashes 'demon sheep'

Nusato
FAIL

No, they really are that stupid

Isn't this the same group ("the Californian voters") that let out-of-state groups of religious nutballs convince them to vote against equality under the guise of protecting marital hypocrisy and the divorce rate. They also wanted to secede at some point in the recent past, and despite being the source of large amounts of food, productive labor, and materials, managed to piss it all away in a series of insane gambles and idiotic ("Enron") choices.

Vote, vote, vote for Barbie the computer engineer

Nusato
Go

Clothing?

Engineers don't BUY clothing, we go to sponsored events and get free t-shirts.

Yes, you could sell me a Barbie with her own PDA and Bluetooth Headset. So long as I get matching HP/Microsoft/Dell shirts to go with it. In fact, everything she carries should have some sort of corporate stamp. From the CW backpack to the MS CD carrier (holding a stack of Debian distros).

German dentists develop 'painless' plasma tooth-blaster

Nusato

Remind me to praise my ancestors

For giving me a mouthful of healthy, powerful, cavity-free teeth. Generations of dentists have wept over my family tree. I mock your pain. In fact, I'm going to go call my dentist and make an appointment for a cleaning just so I can share your story and then laugh at him.

Trouser-bomb clown attacks - how much should we laugh?

Nusato
Heart

Can we get an icon specifically for Lewis Page fanbois/girlz?

That way we wouldn't have to type out how much we love, admire, and agree with everything he writes every time he writes a new article.

Virgin coughs up digital tech support for clueless users

Nusato
Thumb Up

How much to have Richard Branson come directly to my home?

I have some loose cables lying around.... strategically placed.... *evil giggle*

Philip K. Dick's kid howls over Googlephone handle

Nusato

Ok, just stop that....

No one sane in the US calls them anything other than French fries. McDonald's sells them that way, and that's good enough for everyone to live with. Last time I checked, the spineless nutjobs who made up the "freedom fries" nonsense didn't bother to boycott McDonald's or Burger King, or any of the other major French fry vendors none of whom were crazy enough to change their menus for a pointless fringe element. And that idiot Ney who got the name changed in the House cafeteria is gone and the names have been back to "french fries" and "french toast" since July 2006. Let it go already.

Ladies put off tech careers by sci-fi posters, Coke cans

Nusato
Stop

BITE ME (pointless angry rant follows)

You don't like my bookshelves filled with Shadowrun books side by side with the OOO programming books? Then have a hearty "F**K YOU" and stay out of IT.

I didn't get a job in IT so that I could spend all f**king day listening to a pack of wild bitches talk about their damn hair. I got a job in IT so that I could have some connection with my co-workers, however tenuous (freaking WoW players, ENOUGH! Play a real RPG!). I have nothing in common with the backwater dimwits who want "nature" pictures on the wall and I don't want to.

Also? I drink Pepsi. Regularly. And I have enough confidence in myself and my abilities not to need artificial reinforcement from a stupid motivational poster in the workplace. Of all the garbage research into "women" in IT this is the kind of thing that makes my blood boil. The reason those soft-skinned limp-wristed bitches don't work in IT is because they aren't any good at math, or science, or any kind of logical thinking. They don't understand computers, they want the world to be soft and fuzzy and to cuddle them.

GO WORK IN SALES.

I DON'T WANT YOU IN MY IT DEPARTMENT. I do NOT want all the men that I've taught to respect my abilities to suddenly drop me down into the "encouraged women in IT" group. GO AWAY. When you get a pair and learn how to install a hard drive with your bare hands despite the long nails, you can come back and try again. Or if you max out your Rogue. Basically, when you prove you want to work in IT, you can come here. Otherwise, f**k off and leave me out of your stupid pathetic little enabling world. EARN IT IF YOU WANT IT.

P.S. And stop trying to steal my romance novels. I use those plots for tabletop games.

Pig plague alert: Avoid missionary position

Nusato
Stop

Anyone who takes sex advice from Cosmo

Will get exactly what they deserve.

http://www.cracked.com/article/156_7-sex-tips-from-cosmo-that-will-put-you-in-hospital/

Their links are better than mine would be. Icy Hot, that's all I want to say. And now I have to go wash my brain.

Microsoft's Startup Whisperer enters Google Chocolate Factory

Nusato
Badgers

You misspelled "Electric Monk"

From: http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1298

The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.

From Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, by Douglas Adams.

Published by Simon Schuster in 1987

Does the Help Desk have a future?

Nusato
WTF?

@Kurt - Whut?

"As far as I can make out IT is going backwards rather than forwards. A lot of users know enough work arounds for their normal problems that they dont need to the helpdesks."

What users do you have? Can I borrow them? I have to deal with users who pay thousands of dollars for a specialized software package, and assume that means they now get to turn off their brains. These are people who can't figure out how to get past the Captcha to reset their passwords, but can speak four languages and don't want to be "patronized by some techie." These are people who get pissed off when we send them a KB article relevant to their issue - it has the exact error message that they reported in it and a verified solution - but they insist on talking to a person because their issue is obviously different! (No, it really isn't....)

As long as there are people who choose to be helpless, there will be a need for helpdesks.

Facebookers condemned to Hell Lite

Nusato
FAIL

@AC 15:53

Believe me, we can see the problem just fine. You may want to step back a bit, the mouth-breathing is obscuring the mirror. Can you see it now?

Helpdesk Heroes or unappreciated geeks?

Nusato
Badgers

Users are stranger than fiction

Worst IT memory:

- I was on call this one week in September a few years ago. Someone called me on a particular weekday morning to ask why they couldn't contact the NY office servers. I was staring at the news the entire time he was talking, wondering, just wondering, how to make this person connect with reality.

Of course, it's not all grim darkness. For every user who puts in a ticket that just says "I need help ASAP" with no detail, there's a tech who closes a really complicated ticket by entering "Problem solved." I keep a special LART around for those technicians.

Best IT memories:

Every time someone puts their music/video/picture collection on their work computer. :D

Funniest IT memory:

Pulling a user's computer out from under her desk by sliding it across the rug, opening it while kneeling on the floor, and leaning over to pull out some memory cards when I am stopped by a gigantic crackling noise so loud even the user turned around. Did I mention this was in December, and I was wearing a sweater and had my hair in a ponytail? The look on my face was apparently enough to make her not say anything for a second (quite an achievement!) and finally I just told her I would be replacing the entire machine and I would be right back.

Most heroic IT memory:

(This was a few years ago, you'll recognize it in a bit) In a petrified whisper, user calls for help. Her machine is frozen while trying to save the document she's been working on for hours (of course, hasn't saved, of course it's due tomorrow, and of course it's vitally important). Can we help her?

She was right around the corner, so I stopped reading the latest news on El Reg (this was my daily thing, I'm in the US and I love being the first to know about IT stuff across the water) and walked over to her desk.

Her hard drive is grinding away doing something, Word is open, Outlook is open in the background, and I can see the title of the last email she opened: "I love you."

I felt panic. Genuine panic. First, I disconnected her computer from the network. Then I asked: Did you open that attachment? It didn't even occur to her to ask how I knew that an email from a friend had an attachment to it. Of course she had opened it. Before she could even finish asking about saving her document, I ran back to find the Exchange admin. My manager, sensing something bad, followed me and listened to my panicked story about this brand new virus that was now loose on our system. There was this stunned silence, the Exchange guy ran to his desk to see the El Reg article that I had just been reading for himself and my manager went to go write up a virus alert. He hadn't even finished reading the article before he turned a funny color and just shut down the network. Since we couldn't email the warnings, we instead walked around and handed out flyers and told people not to open any attachments. The face to face worked, people were less ruffled about not having any email for hours, and we escaped with minimal damage thanks to my quick assessment of the situation. I got an actual "thank you" for that and a little bonus! How often does that happen in IT?

Stupidest IT memory (well, one of many):

"Hello, is this the helpdesk?"

"Yes, how can I help you?"

"Can you call me a cab?"

(pause.... assess... consider....)

"Certainly, ma'am. You're a cab." (click)

British troops get nifty techno-gunsights

Nusato
Happy

Was there an article?

All I saw where hot guys in uniform with sexy weapons. Oh those wacky hormones. I'll have to turn off images and go back and read it again.

Government claims on immigration ignore IT industry

Nusato
WTF?

I'm an American (I think)

You have failed the practice citizenship test.

Questions answered correctly: 13 out of 24 (54%)

Time taken: 02 minutes 33 seconds

But I qualify to have been born in the UK based on everyone else's comments!

Yang! tells! MS! to! buy! Yahoo!

Nusato

AT&T?

Why don't they just ask AT&T to buy them out completely? For that matter, if Microsoft buys Yahoo! what happens to the AT&T Yahoo integration?

Oh great and wise vultures, you need a blue Death Star icon for AT&T.

California train smash driver sent text seconds before disaster

Nusato
Stop

Math!

You do realize that an average freight train in the US will be over a mile long, right? And a passenger train of say, 10 cars, takes more than one minute to come to a complete stop. A freight train can take over a full mile to come to a complete stop. Quoting http://www.nysgtsc.state.ny.us/rail-ndx.htm#stop -

A 150-car freight train traveling 50 miles per hour takes 8000 ft. (or 1.5 miles) to stop - between 2-3 minutes.

An 8-car passenger train traveling 79 miles per hour takes 6000 ft. (or 1 1/8 miles) to stop - between 1-2 minutes.

A sudden, uncontrolled stop is what causes derailments.

One minute isn't enough time for a freight train to dodge a passenger train, at least not in the U.S. Even worse, the freight train was approaching around a curve....

That time data above I got from a friend who works for CSX. He doesn't use his cell phone while driving trains, by the way.