Posts by Stevie

" I was always polite, patient (sounding) and gave them all the information they needed in a clear fashion in the original ticket."

Meanwhile, at the bank's robo-menu:

"Enter your account number and the last four digits of your social security number"

(an eternity going through options when repeatedly hitting "0" doesn't work)

Customer Service Rep: "Can I have your account number and the last four digits of your social security number?"

(an eternity discovering that he problem needs escalating to a different department, and a subsequent internal forwarding to wait musak)

Customer Service Rep #2: "Can I have your account number and the last four digits of your social security number?"

(Repeat until urge to be polite wears off completely).

Re: No idea what my username was...

I remember being slightly fascinated by the cultural difference in tone between Brits and Merkins in discussion groups, with the former being noticeably more polite and less inclined to robust language.

And yet the more polite set still throw around that tired old Internet Slur at the expense of those allegedly with more "robust" language.

Re: Jet Pack?

Made the Airfix kit years ago.

I always wanted the base-mode Wallis Autogyro, stripped of all that Q crap, like the one Rock Hudson flew about Mars on in the Martian Chronicles miniseries. Looked as cool as the stripped-down Lambrettas* my mares were riding in the early 70s, but could fly!

*A pipe frame, and engine and a seat, basically. Painted in bright primary colors. These were the very antithesis of the old Mod Movers.

Re: UEA

My experience of Office 365 is that it is so slow and useless I'm surprised whoever it was managed to compose the email and get it out in the first place.

"Mark all as read" frequently causes the system to become unresponsive for 30 minutes or more.

"Manage rules" pops up a freaking MODAL window at every stage, including the "updating server" message, so nothing can be done while it is deciding whether to hang or not.

Slow network doesn't help, but there were serious lack of smarts at work when the client processes were being "thought" out. Thunderbird is way more civilized when it comes to not locking up the entire application with unnecessary modal wiindows.

Re: That said, anyone using AWS or any other provider would do well to architect their backends

"architect" is the $44 billion word for "design" then?

Re: A USB drive will quite happily survive a trip through the washing machine.

I do not understand why clever young things think that getting unpowered circuit boards wet will hurt them.

Provided you take care drying them so that mineral deposits don't form between tracks there is usually no problem.

I was also once treated as a madman when I told a group of colleagues that I had washed an LP in water after finding it had been stored "carelessly" and was filthy and in danger of being scratched if a disc preener was used on it.

I decided not to tell them about the time I fixed a persistent back-skip with the careful application of a safety pin, and only had a small "pop" on one revolution afterwards. (Caravan, "Cunning Stunts", "Show of our Lives", damaged by idiots fiddling with the anti-skate and then leaving album playing unattended for an hour). But I'll tell you.

Re: It was previously good enough to use the traditional terms "hoax", "inaccurate", "false" etc.

But "Fake News" doesn't mean those things. It means "reported stuff that Donald Trump and those who follow his every utterance do not agree with".

In the "post truth" world of Trump, you can make facts go away by wishing it, even if you know them to be true.

The coal jobs are coming back. The wall will be paid for by Mexico. We'd all be better off if immigrants went home. {Pick your ethnic group} is demonstrably less human than my ethnic group. The sea level is not rising.

All these are easily falsifiable, but you can rest easy repeating them if you label the arguments against as "Fake News".

Re: Johnny Cash

The association I would be nervous about is the fact that Mr Cash did time ...

Re: I think Britain should dump Trident in favor of Tomahawk cruise missiles

But Trident is lovely, it's elegant, it's beautiful. It is quite simply the best. And Britain should have the best. In the world of the nuclear missile it is the Saville Row suit, the Rolls Royce Corniche, the Château Lafitte 1945. It is the nuclear missile Harrods would sell you.

What more can I say?

Re: Is it true they're thinking of renaming/rebranding themselves?

"Ringring" surely?

Re: Can an asshole with a button make every listening car in range panic brake?

What about a "Fad T" hotcar belting past with copper HT cables and a trad dizzy/coil ignition system? Or worse, carbon cables that have had their day and are now putting out so much EMR they generate a field strong enough to support a column of oil as it pours from the can down, then horizontally, before dropping into the rocker cover through the access port.

Verified experiment done a few years back with an old mini fitted with a flip-front, btw. I was able to actually get the oil to run uphill for a few inches as I moved the can over the driver-side front roadwheel and the river of oil flowed in a shallow "N" into the running engine.

Until the oil stream became charged enough to conduct, then there was an almighty CRACK!, followed by an almighty OOYAH! and some class three Words of Power, clutching of the right hand under the left armpit and a bit of hopping around the yard hissing through clenched teeth.

Re: stolen from the SKODA

Not quite.

The Panther was a reaction to Germans seeing the T34 for the first time (having been clued in by the amusement and disbelief from Soviet visiting experts on being shown the Pz II and Pz IV, who asked to see the real state of the art stuff please) and realizing they were behind the times in tank tech, and the Tiger was a pre-war design from sometime around 1936 as I recall, that involved a competition between MAN and Porsche and lots of politics and skulduggery.

The Porsche chassis was re-purposed to become the "Elefant" (also the "Ferdinand") Tank hunter/ Self-propelled gun and earned itself a place in history as one of the worst armoured fighting vehicles ever to venture onto the battlefield on account of it not having any AP weaponry. There are stories of commanders firing pistols down the barrel of the main (and only) gun, but I don't know how true they are.

In point of fact there was reportedly a superior prototype for the Panther design which was rejected in favour of the MAN design as it borrowed too much from the Russian T34 and was judged by The Loon in Charge to be "not German enough".

If you want to get a quick nitpicker's education on both Tiger and Panther, there's a pocket Jaynes Guide to Tanks of WWII (title from memory) and the excellent "Panther in Action" and Tiger in Action" books from Squadron publications. The "Panther in Action" book is a particularly fine thing and will have you pointing out the inaccuracies in movies, dioramas and wargames to the annoyance of all in no time at all.

By all accounts the Skoda import that made the most impact was the Hetzer, which most authorities hold to be kilo for kilo the best tank hunter the Germans had in the field in WWII. Lovely little mover and shaker, especially when you fired the gun on the ones that used the chassis to absorb the recoil of the gun, I'm told. The tank version of the Hetzer was also deployed, but was judged to be inferior to the other German tanks in various ways and the production lines were apparently turned over to All Hetzer, All The Time.

Re:It's not those sketches, it's the sketch where ...

In my head as I read:

"I understand you had your head nailed to the floor"

"Nahnahnahnahnah! Ole Dinsey wouldn't do that. 'E used to take flowers to 'is muvver did ole Dinsey."

"But the police have film of him nailing your head to the floor."

"Oh well, yeah, 'e did that, yeah. But ... etc."

Re: Vapourous clouds

"Google's architecture is space age. Gmail for instance encrypts and shards the database for your email across hundreds of servers across multiple geographically dispersed data centers. "

And then wads it all up and bins it apparently.