Re: Water cooker
Could be worse, you could have an old geyser hanging around in your kitchen...
4260 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2010
We had a similar thing happen with one of our clients - big rail travel provider - who we used to send performance figures to every month for their public facing website, page views and click-throughs and so on, which they based their ongoing strategy on. This is in the days before Google Analytics was a thing, and we had been using Webtrends to gain the metrics, but the client decided they didn't want to pay Webtrends prices, so they asked us to switch to ClickTale.
The following month, the results were completely different and bore no resemblance to the historical results from Webtrends - as I suppose Clicktales' algorithms were different to those used by Webtrends. This caused much consternation, and lots of angry emails as to why the website was no longer getting the same traffic as it used to.
If they had looked at actual online ticket sales, they would have seen that not much had changed, but it took a lot of explaining.
What's the difference between a radio controlled plane or helicopter and a drone?
I think a primary difference is the amount of skill required to operate them. RC model planes and helicopters require a certain amount of skill to get them up into the air and stay there - helicopters more than planes - whereas most "drones" (mostly quadcopter designs) have built in automated stability and flight characteristics which require much less skill to operate.
And then there's the cost, too, fully flyable off the shelf quadcopters can be had for very little money.
Had a similar runaround when my ex-wife died. We had been divorced for more that ten years, but as the surviving parent of our children it was up to me to sort out the resulting mess (she was single when she died). However, trying to prove that I had any right to be managing her affairs was a nightmare, the usual proof of address wasn't much help, as I haven't lived at her address for years, and she had reverted to her maiden name.
I live in what is the third in a row of seven terraced houses - so the centre of the row.
In the bad winter a few years ago, we made the discovery that whilst the rest of the terrace gets their water fed from the rear of the properties, mine, inexplicably, is fed from the front, and so whilst all the others had no water as the pipes froze up, mine was fine, thank you... :)
I think I've posted this before, but it seems relevant:
Back in the early eighties, I worked on communications links for radio repeaters for public utilities and emergency services radios.
We had a rural repeater site on top of a hill, which had a microwave link to another repeater site on another hill about ten miles away. in between the two were a number of other ranges of hills, but all just low enough that line-of-sight was maintained.
This microwave link worked fine for a number of years, and then suddenly began to fail intermittently but always around the same time on a Thursday afternoon. It didn't happen every week, but say every two weeks.
After a lot of investigation, and a complete replacement of equipment at both ends, it was discovered that on one of the intervening hills was a small country lane which went over the brow of the hill more or less in line with the line-of-sight link.
Off that lane was a sort of lay-by or turning circle, which was used by the local bus service to turn round at the end of one of their routes.
The buses would drop off at their last stop lower down the valley, and drive up and turn round, and then wait for half an hour before starting the next run.
Turns out that most of the time, they used a single decker bus on that route, but Thursdays were market day, so they used to put a double-decker on the route on that day. If it happened to park at a certain spot in the lay-by, it used to neatly break the line-of-sight between the two repeater towers.
The only reason we found out about this was that we set up a temporary intermediate link (a van with a couple of dishes on it) in that lay-by whilst we were testing, and the bloke saw the bus come and park up whilst he was there, otherwise we could still have been looking!
The microwave antenna on both of the masts was at the very top of the mast, so couldn't be raised, but we managed to build an extension for the antenna on the other mast, and re-align the path just enough that it would be above the possible obstruction.
However here's a couple of thoughts:
The reality is for any large organisation, that there will be a change management process which has to be followed, and that process can take some time.
There must be a risk management process, and setting up an agreed maintenance window, and notifying users that the forum will be offline.
It's not just a single bloke in his mum's basement, who can decide to do the upgrade when he wants.
Secondly, VBulletin is notoriously fickle, and if you have any customisations or add-ons then upgrading to the latest version can really screw things up. To do that without any testing would be fatal, and obviously testing takes time.
Given they had five days notice, I'm not surprised they hadn't yet patched it.
Arthur C Clarke wrote a short story of a supercomputer which was built to run military battle simulations, but the General in charge of the project had pissed off the computer scientist who was programming the machine.
So come the day of the big switch on, the computer would happily run through mathematical problems, but if it detected a military scenario, it would output a rude message about the general, instead of the expected answer.
And if you think the paranoia's bad now, imagine what it'll be like next week after the PFY and I pop up to the users' office later this evening with a couple of heat guns and melt everything plastic within 1 metre radius of the domestic units..
Brilliant Simon, just brilliant! You owe me a new keyboard, but I owe you several pints, so let's call it quits...
You may be old enough to remember how the charity "Spastic Society" was renamed due to people using the word "Spastic" in a negative light.
And can't you see what's wrong with that? Spastic is the correct medical term for those suffering with various muscle related illnesses, and yet because the term was used in a derogatory fashion, it's original usage is now frowned upon.
In the same way, black as a description of colour is now considered incorrect, which is just stupid, and spade to describe a digging implement, and slope for a gradual descent, even dyke, to describe a retaining wall is now considered improper.
It is ridiculous that words which have been co-opted for abusive or derogatory use should no longer be acceptable in their original context.
Antlers are basically muscleless, jointless legs.
Really? And there's me thinking they were secondary sexual characteristics of certain cervids. Yes, they are bone, but they are discarded and regrown every year.
Moose antlers are even described as palmate.
They are described as palmate when they take on a flattened and spread out appearance, just like a human palm - or for that matter, the broad leaves of a palm tree.