Posts by DiViDeD

Re: So...

The sun is not "generally recognised as dangerous"

Absolutely. If it were, the Orange One would not have his medical experts looking for a way we can stuff sunlight up our arses to cure COVID-19.

Honestly, some people with their scaremongering!

Re: Time Clocks

In my current contract, I'm paid a daily rate (I know, but it's a pretty generous one), but also required to fill in attendance timesheets.

After my first week, I carefully entered all my hours, including breaks, and hit "Submit", only to see warnings flash up on every number stating I needed "special permission from your manager" to work additional time.

The result is that now, whatever time I spend working, the time recording system requires me to enter exactly eight hours per day, regardless of whether I've pulled twelve hours one day and compensated with a four hour day elsewhere.

I can't believe this 8 hour a day fiction isn't being encountered across business. It's like the old days in merchant banking where all us contractors got an extra long holiday over Christmas so that management could report zero contractors in their end of year figures.

Re: Huh?

This is the bane of my life at filling stations. My Spider has some sort of high tech design that somehow recovers vapour from the tank and feeds it into the engine (no. I have no idea how or indeed why it does that). As a result the filler cap is around 17cm long and perfectly round, so wherever you put it it will roll onto the ground and under the car.

The only method to avoid this is to hold the filler cap in your hand until you've finished filling and put the cap back in before paying.

But then it is Italian, so the filler cap, like anything not directly related to performance, was designed on a napkin over a particularly boozey lunch

Re: Not all have printed characters

Who in their right mind wants flashing or strobing keyboards?

Well, I do. But I do have to concede that I'm not in my right mind.

Re: PS2 interface

My Spanky new (built last week, manufactured Feb 2020) Strix B250H gaming motherboard has 2x USB and 1x PS/2 sockets for keyboard and mouse. Some things never change!

Re: @Coward.

They just steal their designs from the Western Nations

Not for many years now. China trains more scientists and engineers every year than any other nation on earth. Or do you think Huawei stole the technology for 5G from Cisco?

Re: @Doctor Syntax

... you wouldn't be as harsh if this were Obama ...

95% of the world has no partisan interest in either major US political party. But we can still recognise a self destructive clown when we see one.

And we see one.

Re: exports TO China from the US

Yes, but if those Chinese made ventilators (or medical imagers, or whatever) need dual use components from the US, then those ventilators (etc) are simply not going to be made and therefore unavailable to the US. What price "That'll fix the commie bastards" then?

If these police drones get within 30 metres of anyone, can we report them to the ... police?

Re: fitted with lights, speakers and sirens

first they came for the terrorists

At the moment, they're coming for the people sitting in the sun in Centennial Park, at least 10 metres from anyone else, on the grounds that they're not shopping for essentials or exercising.

And the Fun Police Division is stopping traffic on the M1 in case they're secretly intending to undermine democracy by driving up to the Central Coast. I can see my drive home on Friday is going to be filled with excitement! Although I don't think even NSW Police can mistake a 2 seater Italian sports car for a caravan full of ne'er do wells. We shall see.

Looney theory? that's noy a looney theory ...

I thought I would share one of the outlandish conspiracy theories I have read recently

You missed out the fact that, as of today (in Arsetrailer it's already tomorrow), all electricity has been turned off all around the world because of ... illuminati ... NWO ... vaccine or whatever.

In fact, I don't even know if this comment will get through - or how my Black Widow keyboard is still lighting up, for that matter. Must be infected with 5G! Oh noes! And me without any tinfoil!

Re: Then after...?

Who decides when the emergency is over and tracking ends?

But of course, the emergency is never over!

Case in point: Americans are still taking their shoes off at airports, despite it being over 10 years since the last shoe bomb attempt.

And we are still giving up our water bottles, even though the liquid bombs were only ever a plot device in a Hollywood action film.

Re: Excel hate?

The Excel "Oh look, it's a date. I'll format that for you" issue becomes more of an issue when dealing with that stupid bloody US date format and an imported CSV. We get:

1/11/2018 - Oh, that's easy. 11th Jan

31/05/2018 - No idea. I'll just make it text

You end up with a Date column where 2/3 of the dates are readable and correct but need converting back into proper numbers and 1/3 are rendered as dates, but the wrong bloody dates

I wrote an import macro to capture and sort out that bollocks, which had me thinking - If I can build that in a couple of hours, why hasn't Microsoft done it in the last 30+ years?

It doesn't help that their help files for handling dates tend to use 1/1/xxxx as their example for date formats!!

Re: Trying to teach...

Did that for a concrete company in South Wales many moons ago. Had an invoice page in the workbook microadjusted to fit their preprinted, non standard size, 3 part invoice/Delivery note.

The office people loaded the orders into an Excel form and confirmed as the orders were loaded (in the concrete business al lot of orders get cancelled or adjusted depending on weather, Eric digging the hole too deep/shallow, Brian not being fully trained on the art of the measuring tape, etc) and the driver picked up his printed documents on the way out of the yard. Big improvement on typing all the orders onto the 3 part forms and giving them to the guy on the gate, then him having to rip em up and collect replacements when things changed.

It could even handle drivers yelling out "Can we have an extra half tonne?" while they were loading.

EDIT: Almost forgot. It also added any confirmed orders to the daily export sheet that was loaded nightly into Sage Financial. That's how long ago it was!

Re: Gets calculator out to add up column of figures.

More common than you'd think. showing a senior sales director at $$major merchant bank$$ how the Sum function works in Excel was a major revelation to her. To her, Excel was simply an electronic scratchpad for storing her numbers.

Project much?

those from age 70 to age 105, still use checks (cheques) and like stuff mailed to them, because, they missed the computer age, but are still alive

Those between 70 and 105 didn't miss the computer age, they bloody created it, designed and built the very algorithms and switching circuits that make computers go.

Just because people could swipe right before they could read doesn't mean they have the faintest idea of what complex processes have to take place between them tapping their card against their phone and a pizza arriving at their front door.

Monkey see, monkey do is no substitute for discovering how to do what no monkey did before.

And get off my bloody lawn!

Re: To be fair

"Muscle memory" also plays a part

Muscle memory played a big part in a serendipitous job I got with Lloyds Bank shortly after they got taken over by Royal Bank of Scotland. It turned out that the RBS form for opening a new account needed exactly the same information as the old Lloyds one, but with all the fields in a different order.

I happened to be opening a new business account at the time, and I was watching as the poor girl entering the data backtracked and reinput almost every field.

One simple overlay later and they were back to "salutation <tab> firstname <tab> lastname <tab> <tab> and so on, just as they'd been doing for the past 10 years.

Re: In pre-computer days people were used to memorize sequences....

... go for "First Time Right Didn't actually break anything major"

There, FTFY

You're welcome

Re: Technical management tips

My preferred manager type asks me to do something, let’s me get on and if there are any issues I let them know.

That kind of management style can bite you in the arse sometimes. At a previous team, I was used to telling people what we needed and when, and then only being consulted if they needed clarification, had encountered a problem, or needed someone outside the team to have an anally attached rocket lit.

When we were assigned to a newly acquired subsidiary to drag their systems out of the Victorian Era, I found myself, when the deadline for a particular set of works arrived being treated to variations on "well, you didn't ask me about it so I assumed it wasn't important"!

It seems some people need reminding 20 times a day just what it is they're supposed to be doing!

Although I guess it explains how they got bought up by a rival so easily.

Re: Technical management tips, best manager

Some years ago, I worked under a similar manager, who also held to a couple of additional tenets:

a) At mismanagement meetings, he would take the blame for any shortcomings, missed deadlines or mistakes, unlike most of his peers who would regularly throw an underling onto the sword they themselves should have fallen on. Don't get me wrong - he would tear a new one for the poor sod who'd put him in that position, but that was a team thing - not to be shared with executives.

b) Money saved on projects was put into an entertainment pool, which would be periodically spent on hiring a hotel in a picturesque area overnight where the entire team would get treated to what we used to call, in those days, a slap up meal before getting royally pissed (this was the late 80s & early 90s - that's what people did back then) as a reward for cumulative effort.

Cheques

... making that claim for at least the three decades that I've had a chequebook.

Funnily enough, it must be about that long since I actually had a chequebook.

Yes, early 90s sometime. Bank used to send me a chequebook every 3 months, so I'd cut up and dispose of the previous unused one in the kitchen drawer and replace it with a new one. Rinse and repeat for a couple of years until they finally stopped sending them out.

On this side (west) of the pond, it's "check"

In this far flung corner of the lower pacific ocean, it's called "What? Like a piece of paper and you write the amount on? And it takes how long to clear? Fsck that for a game of soldiers - don't they have paywave?"

Re: International treaty banning the militarization of space.

Well, yes, there is. But obviously it doesn't apply to the US, It's simply there to stop all those Bad Actor Nations (apparently an inclusive term applied to anyone who isn't the US) building orbital research facilities an shit that might put them even further ahead of the US than they are already.

Re: First Learn to Walk and Talk Tall Tales that Effectually Run and Infect and Affect All Systems*

Did he just accidentally let slip that there are aliens waiting to attack??

More likely that he just confirmed what the rest of the world already knows - that murica regards any country, anywhere in the world, that doesn't have US interests as number one priority in all it's policies, or doesn't obey every edict of murica unquestioningly and without hesitation (or worse, asking for some sort of supporting evidence) is, by definition, an "adversary".

Re: statements with embedded plausible deniability

I don't think the Orange Buffoon(tm) thinks deeply enough for that. Remember, he said a few months ago that COVID-19 was no big deal and would be eradicated in the US within a couple of weeks.

He followed this up a few days ago with that "It's a pandemic. It's serious. I always knew it was serious. I was calling it a pandemic before the medical experts did. I'm so clever, people are amazed how I know so much about everything. Yadda Yadda" speech.

He's one of those politicians who realises that his supoorters have no memory and simply believe what he says right now. He doesn't need plausible deniability because he can change history at will.