Posts by Chris King 1153 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Feb 2009
Back when the Doctor Who Experience was still open in Cardiff, I attended an event at the nearby Norwegian Church...
"There are no fire alarms scheduled for today, so If you hear the fire alarms, please assemble by the TARDIS"
A little voice (not me) pipes up...
"How big a fire are you expecting, if we need a TARDIS to get away from it ?"
As Pascal says, you have a very short window of time to stop a fire before it takes hold, but once that happens, hit the alarms and get the hell out. Hardware can be replaced and software/data should be backed up.
Save the heroics for people who are trained and equipped to deal with burning stuff on a large scale. Unless you're a fireman, that isn't you, Mister I-Did-The-Annual-Fire-Safety-Training-Course. Blundering into a burning data centre with the wrong extinguisher is going to earn you a roasting and two lungs full of Halon/FM200.
I once had to call out an "away team" to fix a microwave link in rural mid-Wales.
Contractor reports back "WORK ABANDONED DUE TO UNDESIRABLES AT BASE OF TOWER".
I wasn't having any of it... "It's in the middle of nowhere, and it's on the top of a hill. If I find out those 'undesirables' turned out to be nothing more than a flock of sheep, I WILL be escalating this call !"
"A course in assertiveness is the answer."
I was doing a HR course, and there was an Assertiveness course running in the room next door. We noticed that the other course had better food than us, so we nicked theirs (leaving our more meagre fayre in its place) before they broke for lunch.
So what could they do about that ? Ask for it back ?
"The categories are bollocks."
But it's STILL more accurate than MBTI, and less likely to destroy morale in a workplace. I've seen people treat their "Four Letters of Doom" as gospel, and write them on their whiteboards so other people will know how to deal with them. I wanted to fill a super-soaker with whiteboard cleaning fluid to "reset" the department.
(Icon, because I'm a Diplomat With Nukes)
"Psst! Pass it on: Jesus is coming. Look busy!"
"Fox is more likely to be angling to score a directorship with Huawei"
He'll have plenty of company there:
All supposedly chums of David Cameron, too.
While Nord requires systemd it is put into the category of "cannot be trusted".
A lot of folks don't trust systemd because of complexity. I don't trust it because it's too unreliable to entrust with something like a VPN connection.
I've had many punch-ups with systemd over the years, but last weekend was more like the Freezer Ambush in terms of property destruction. And it didn't even stop to answer the telephone.
Depending on location, you may have a choice of BT or TalkTalk backhaul. TalkTalk Wholesale is actually quite good, because they don't over-commit, filter or throttle connections to death like their retail arm do - and either way, you don't have to deal with BT or TT call centres. A&A take no prisoners when dealing with either of them !
I was with Nildram around the same time. The deterioration in service was very sudden, with things like DNS suddenly blowing up at random and e-mail bouncing higher than a cheque on the wrong side of pay day. Funny how UK-based tech support disappeared around the same time !
"Claranet... Now that is a name that brings back the memories of a bygone era..."
...an era where the MD would ring you on a Sunday lunchtime to personally apologize for a billing cock-up that maxed out your credit card, and to offer mucho compensation for the inconvience.
Nildram also squeezed apologies out of BT Wholesale when my ADSL went phut on a Saturday night. I've no idea what they said to BTW, but it got me a grovelling apology on voicemail the next day, along with a priority fix.
Sadly, this was just before the Tiscali take-over, and every support call became "Have you turned it off and on again ?"
"No point. YOUR DNS servers are DOWN, that's why I'm calling YOU"
TalkTalk - the company that claimed IPv6 used six-byte addressing (seriously, this was on their domestic support portal) before accidentally blocking access to said portal with THEIR OWN content filtering system. I wish I'd kept the screenshots, that's a level of muppetry that has to be seen to be believed !
AAISP can still give BT and TalkTalk a good kicking if either of them mess about.
"some news sites simply won't allow a change of email address, would you believe it"
Not just news sites - and the worst of it is when "support" takes a month to tell you that they can't actually change the e-mail address associated with your account anyway, then waste even more time trying to delete it.
Well, that would have made all those "eyes in the dark" fight sequences in the original series even more one-sided - and they did a lot of them to keep the costs down.
The new series updated this old trope with Greenback shouting "Fools ! I have night-vision goggles !" then asking Stiletto to turn the lights back on so he could find them.
(Yes, I also watched the new Clangers as well - growing OLD is compulsory, growing UP is a different matter)
Sooooo, all a pr0n website has to do to avoid doing age checks is to put up two thirds of their content as "not adult". Regardless of your opinion on age checks, you've got to admit that's one big loophole right there
AKA the old "I only read Playboy for the informative articles" defence.
"And one chemistry lesson came to an abrupt end when the Bomb Squad rolled in"
Bah, you've never had the Fire Brigade turn up (unannounced) in hazard gear to collect a Strontium 90 ** sample, have you ?
(** EDIT: Someone told them it was a -90 sample, but it was actually a lump of the naturally-occurring stuff that ISN'T terribly radioactive)
Been there, seen that, got the t-shirt.
Buying up multiple domains and pointing them at the same content is as lethal to your search engine ranking as stuffing pages full of irrelevant META tags. Yes, people still pull this "SEO" crap, then wonder why they only appear on page 30 of Google's results.
I've also had to chase down former employees to get domains renewed/transferred. As I've said before, they're assets, and should be treated as such. Keep track of them, and don't let random people register them on your behalf - or at least get them to transfer such domains to you before they leave.
Actually, that's what JANET does with .ac.uk domains. Even though the application process is web-based these days, all applications go through a Naming Committee and the applicant has to justify why they want a particular .ac.uk domain. They can be quite fussy about what they'll accept, but no money changes hands until the application is accepted.
They also have a specific rule for "Generic" domain names - from their Eligibility Policy:
"Generic domain names, which could be applicable to a number of eligible sites, must provide evidence that they have the backing and approval from the majority of relevant members of the UK academic and/or research community, in order to be permitted to have that generic domain name".
This mostly covers domain names based on a single dictionary word, but anything which could be legitimartely claimed by multiple sites can also come under this rule.
As I recall, the Orange ROMP pretty much died the death when Orange changed hands from Hutchison to France Telecom - the point at which most of the technical innovations like Line 2, Fax and Wildfire got canned.
But hey, we got the "Animal" tariffs and discounted cinema tickets/pizzas, right ? Yay for mediocrity.
I was with Demon from 1996 to 2000, on Tenner-a-Month and back in the days when they were still technically competent. Anyone remember the Orange ROMP for mobile users ? 9.6K ISDN-like dialup on GSM mobile (HSCSD), before the days of GPRS - hideously expensive (10p/minute) but being able to check e-mail on the move with a Psion 5MX and Ericsson SH888 was quite something back then.
Demon as I knew it died years ago - I remember a colleage migrating to ADSL to keep his static IP, and having no end of problems. By then I was was on Nildram (another name long gone) and eventually migrated to AAISP.
Not many ISP's left from the early days...
Demon - pretty much a shambling zombie in the hands of C&W and then Vodafone, and about to be put out of its misery ;
Pipex - ended up as part of Tiscali, and eventually died as a brand with TalkTalk Business ;
Nildram - ditto ;
EasyNet - originally sold to Sky, but has had a procession of new owners since then ;
ZetNet - went bust and was picked up by Breathe ;
EntaNet - still around, but part of City Fibre ;
Force 9 - merged into PlusNet ;
Elite - still around, but more business-oriented ;
Freeserve - became Wanadoo, then Orange Home, then EE Broadband and eventually part of BT.
Zen are one of the few survivors from that era, along with AAISP and ClaraNet (but they're more business-oriented now).
Back when Dilbert was published in the Today newspaper in wobbly EddieShahVision, we used to have a "Dilbert Rota" for pinning the latest strip on the notice board if it that day's strip was relevant.
The other guys on the rota were a fair bit taller than me, so I had to take a running jump at the board to pin it at a suitable height.
Boyzone.com was another one that caused some hiliarity - some of the students would hit it instead of the boy-band's URL, and get more in the way of flesh tones than they were expecting. I even had a couple dob themselves in for making the mistake, I toild them not to worry about it but don't make a habit of visiting regularly because other students would just point and laugh at them.
I had a similar experience once, just by missing out a hyphen.
It wasn't just URL's that were affected. An over-enthusiastic regex test in SpamAssassin (FUZZY_XPILL ?) would trigger if people used "Oxon" instead of "Oxfordshire" in a snail-mail address in their signature - stick the postcode straight after it (OX whatever), and you got flagged as pink-and-porky for peddling pills.
That made dealing with JANET and Travelodge... Interesting... for a while.
"So everyone not in IT thinks it was all a ruse by IT techs to get paids loads".
I didn't get paid an extra bean. They even chained up the door to the computer centre just in case the heating control system set fire to everything, that's how confident they were. (I did point out that this was the same type of heating control system that covered student halls, which were still occupied by a few overseas students over Christmas)
Just after midnight, I quickly checked the most critical systems, said "Meh, my stuff's fine, everything else can go whistle" and went back to partying like it wasn't 1999 any more.
Some sites turned EVERYTHING off, just in case. Some of them then discovered that leaving stuff powered down but still plugged in won't necessarily save it from a nearby lightning strike. Just when you think you've covered all possibilities in your disaster recovery plan, Mother Nature says "Hold my beer".
"Forget professors and lecturers - if you get on the good side of secretaries, security, storesmen and technicians (including syshacks) you can get absolutely anything done and in an amazingly short time".
Oh hell yeah, and I bet this earned the Prof a "Laser Stare of Doom" for a long time afterwards !
(Icon, for a Prof reflecting on bad life choices)
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