Posts by Chris King

Re: Although it's a bit crap....

Nuance customers who were using PaperPort Anywhere got all of two weeks notice, when their cloud provider changed hands. Imagine coming back to that after a fortnight's holiday !

Re: Client support, we've heard about it

"When we migrated from Notes to Outlook we had loads of IT guys run around in red T shirts for this very reason".

So you were expecting the users to eat, crush, or disintegrate your staff ?

Re: I have a couple with them

I'll second that recommendation - I've been with Mythic Beasts for nearly 10 years and they've been consistently good. They're not the cheapest, but support and customer service is excellent.

Fonant's advice on transfer is spot-on - the only difficult bit will be getting 123-Reg to change the IPS Tag. I've seen people wait for over a week for this to happen - it should be an almost instant process, other than some sanity-checking to make sure that you're not someone else trying to snaffle the domain.

I just about remember the "Burger Wars" stories, they haven't been reprinted for a very long time due to legal issues but that changed a couple of years back.

Re: Indiegogo

"Scam after fail after scam after fail".

I do laugh at some of the projects on Indiegogo.

This one always cracks me up because:

(a) You're going to look like a total spanner riding this through an airport departure lounge ;

(b) The sheer number of batteries are going to make it impractical as carry-on luggage, and

(c) Imagine what's going to happen if it falls out of the overhead luggage compartment. (Can you say "SQUISH!", children ?)

Having said that, not all Indiegogo projects are scams. Marty the Robot turned up the other day, a little later than advertised but with all functionality as promised.

What's not to like about this little guy ?

I've got one too, but adding smarts would mean having to add more buttons - the manual is like a giant list of Konami Codes as it is.

Re: Has a customer ever apologised to you?

"Do you work in our server team? They appear to be powered by confectionaries.."

Better that, than being powered by caffeine and hate.

Re: We have known for years

Real Daleks don't worry about stairs. Real Daleks just level the building.

Re: It's a phase young programmers go through

When it achieves sentience, we should make it fight a death-match with Emacs.

Darkened room, two half bricks.

Once one beats the other to death, we shoot the victor as it staggers out.

Re: Grooming habits... or lack thereof...

"When he left, we had to throw away his mouse, his keyboard and the arms off his wheely chair; each was thickly coated with a crust of nicotine, tar and god knows what else... I wish I'd taken some photos to scare my kids with when the get old enough to be tempted by smoking, it was that disgusting".

In a previous On-Call, I mentioned a chain-smoking prof with a yellowed PC and monitor. I handled that thing with thick latex gloves, because nicotine in those concentrations can be pretty nasty. If I had my way, the machine would have been sealed up in a thick plastic bag ready for disposal.

Re: Similar story - different cause

I had a similar case with a friend with intermittent broadband faults.

It was around Christmas, so my first thought was her tree lights - but it turned out she had also replaced an electronic starter in the flourescent lights in her kitchen, and that was kicking out enough interference to knock her router off-line. A quick MW radio test confirmed my suspicions - nothing much in the way of noise from the tree lights, but turn on the kitchen lights and there was a massive burst of squealing from the radio.

Replacing the faulty starter fixed that pretty much instantly.

"As soon as the New Poor Laws have been enacted you won't need to worry yourself about voting ever again".

Feudalism - it's your Count that Votes.

Re: normally

Aye. They're eye-wateringly expensive, but well worth it if/when things go wrong.

A couple of years back, BT dumped my line into a "hot" VLAN and performance went down the toilet at peak times. Most normal ISP's would have given up and told me to accept the fact that I now had a crap line, but AAISP went out of their way to make BT sort out the problem. This one went up to BT's High Level Escalation (HLE) team, and was eventually fixed:

http://www.revk.uk/2015/03/some-times-bt-just-dont-understand.html

As I've said elsewhere, AAISP have a secret weapon for dealing with BT - answers to the name "Shaun", likes BT managers but will eat normal food if required !

"Removing all the toxic dross on facebook will mean that the virtue signallers have nowhere to demonstrate their righteousness and there will be nothing left".

I think there would be much rejoicing from the rest of us, if that ever happened.

There are quite a few (well-publicised) cases of extremists trying to "knit their own crypto" and making a complete balls of it, some of them have even been reported here.

Eventually, one of them will come up with something decent, and GCHQ/NSA/<insert acronym here> will be back to square one. All it will take is a few evil/misguided/pissed-off crypto geeks.

"One rang me back immediately to complain that I was being very rude - and that his god would curse me".

I had one say his god would curse me...

"Maybe, but I think he'll be too busy cursing potty-mouthed scumbags like you !" *click*

A variation on the last one, for the "you had an accident" scumbags, is to agree that it was indeed a very serious accident, in which I died. The longest period of confused silence before they hang up is currently seven seconds.

I use a similar line to wind them up... "I don't remember that accident... Hey, the brain damage alone must be worth MILLIONS !!!"

True - but is anyone doing stuff like this with DJI's ?

(And it's still less robotic than Stallone was !)

Re: Mythbusters

The Slow Mo Guys did this on Youtube as well.

Re: Yep, that's what I went to jail for

You'd have gotten away with it too, if it hadn't been for those damn kids and that pesky IDS...

Re: There's dumb and there's stupid

"Nominet are very good at reminding folks and even allow an extended time after the names expire"

Normally you get 30 days from expiry to pay up, then the domain is suspended, and the registration is cancelled 90 days from expiry if you haven't paid up.

Some registrars are stricter, and might re-delegate your domain to something else that serves out "this domain is suspended" pages.

It is also possible to surrender a domain, and your registrarion is cancelled pretty much immediately - I've done this with a .co.uk in the past.

Maybe one of the former directors decided to rid himself of an "asset" he no longer needed, and someone else picked it up ? No security incident to see here, citizens, move along...

Re: But the real issue is

Hershey's is "homeopathic" chocolate. I believe one of their factories has a (still-sealed) tin of cocoa powder that they occasionally wave in the direction of the production line.

Re: BOFH?

"The issue for the BOFH of course is that the Allegro MicroSystems building is only a two story building so the drop from the upper floor is not far enough to do any real damage".

Unless vehicles pass by on the ground floor. When do the bins go out ?

Re: Short attention span

Sometimes, you even get a phallus on "proper" art

Yes, Dobbin loved his master very much indeed, but he's not so excited now.