Posts by Chairman of the Bored

Most effective flag officer I ever met...

...would show up in business casual, have his uniformed staff pin down the O5's, O6's, public affairs droids, strap hangers, sycophants, sociopaths, etc in 'urgent' sidebar meetings and somehow escape from the handlers. He would then walk the halls, buy lunches, help with labor... whatever people seemed to need he would just fall into doing. He would treat everyone he met with respect, and just listen. People would talk to him, and he would act on a somewhat clearer picture than possible from the wheelbarrow loads of crap that had been prepared

Sadly leaders like that are an endangered species.

Two questions...

(1) WTF is a "federal vertical"?

(2) What Air Force civilian employee is about to get a nice position @ Nutanix or the channel partner? $45M is probably too small to bag a cushy sinecure for a flag officer; seems like a good place for a GS-15 to land though...

Can we please dispense with the term 'fake news'

When I was growing up we called this sort of thing bull$hit. I even have a brown BS flag I can throw on the field

See? Thanks! CB

I want an electromechanical system built...

... into every workstation that reaches up and slaps offenders in the face with a rotten fish, when the offense is one of the following:

(1) idiots that 'reply all' telling idiots doing a 'reply all' to a group email that they shouldn't 'reply all'

(2) guys who 'reply all' to emails I BCC'ed on and out the fact I BCC'ed

I take some responsibility for (2); I no longer simultaneously use Bcc and Cc list, too risky

My introduction to percussive microwave engineering

I was sent to study what a tech was doing to tune a waveguide manifold for a radar antenna feed. Picture a rectangular pipe ... machined to incredible precision ... with a large number of branch lines coming off, each fed through a carefully designed and calibrated slot. Opposite the slots are dozens of little screws (with lock nuts) that partially protrude into the guide for tuning. Tens of thousands of $, and hooked to hundreds of grand worth of test equipment

And the tech? Carefully filing off all the exposed cal screws and brazing the stubs to render useless. He has a stick with quarter wavelengths marked off and is industriously beating divots into the E plane with a ball peen hammer or crushing the guide with a C clamp on H, with his beatings or bulges aligned with the quarter wave marks. He's concentrating very hard on the network analyzer display while beating the hell out of the guide.

Me: "why dont you just use the tuners?"

Tech: "you gotta eliminate any adjustment. Leave a screw head exposed and some sailors gonna turn it and fsck up everything "

Tech: "do it my way and she stays tuned forever"

.

.

.

"Tech: what happens when you give a sailor three large ball bearings?

Me: ?

"Tech: ones gonna get broken, ones gonna get lost, and ones gonna get pregnant "

And so I shut up and learned f

And in the middle of the Venn diagram...

You've got the intersection of the "stupid" and "HR" sets.

One of the guys in my office is missing an arm, and one fingerprint on the remaining hand is badly distorted. HR and security weenies still occasionally call and ask him why he doesn't have a full set on file. If this keeps up, at some point people will get some knuckle prints...

Please no v5, stay on v4.x.x forever?

I've said it before... if the numbers are meaningless then have a heart and do not step the major number.

The reason I say this is there are a great many long-suffering customers trapped in craptocratic organizations in which a major version step requires a whole new accreditation process.

Goes without saying...

...if you've got a medical issue, document it! If you need to take more than an absolute minimum number of sick days, make sure you keep your receipts and scripts in order. Small pieces of paper, but make sure enough to cover your whole a$$. Definitely saved mine.

Feel for this guy, esp since the wife has been doing offshore drilling and navel exploration with the partner. Usually doesn't end well.

Agree the salary is decent

But we are talking about Detroit. In addition to my salary I want hazardous duty pay, foreign post differential, and a uniform allowance so that I can upgrade my shooting leather...

Absolutely not IT...

...but great use of available tools. Worked in a pretty high security installation, and couldn't help but notice a huge amount of police activity at a gate.

Turns out a lady driving alone felt she was being followed by a couple of guys. This had been going on for a number of turns, and they had already "bumped" her vehicle. Decided to drive to a public place to see if they would back off, saw our gate, and went for it. Don't know if she realized it had armed guards, but good move!

Idiots behind her followed her in that last turn; probably realized they screwed up but were boxed in by everyone else entering the gate. Ended up looking down the wrong end of some fine Beretta and Remington products. With very excited men behind them.

Relax.

In all other respects FBI has had an absolutely horrible week. Let 'em have one uncontested and relatively harmless press release...

WTF did they eat??

Mid-September, 2011. Washington, D.C. At the General Services Administration building, toilets *exploded*, injuring two employees.

You cant (ahem) make this $#!t up.