Wasn't this the start of Dead Like Me
(Except it was MIr's toilet seat)
Posts by Scott 26
344 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
NASA confirms Florida house hit by a piece of ISS battery pack
US 'considering' end to Assange prosecution bid
SharePoint logs are easily circumvented and Microsoft is dragging its heels
US broadband internet: Now with mandatory 'nutrition' labels
New Zealand to world: China attacked us, too!
Some 300,000 IPs vulnerable to this Loop DoS attack
Monday 25th March 2024 19:37 GMT
Years ago I worked for company A, and our division got bought by company B.
A let us still be onsite (it was a factory and our division's products were still manufactured by A, at least until we could find another manufacturer).
A set up an auto-fwder for all A emails to go to our B addresses.
Unfortunately they did this BEFORE B set up our new mailboxes.
So an email to A, fwds to B, B replies to A "doesn't exist", A fwds the reply to B.
Come in on Monday, need to check email from account managers/clients/etc... no chance. 1000s, if not 10,000s of "RE FWD RE FWD RE FWD RE FWD....." (why they rewrote the subject line, I don't know - I was a labrat back then and not in IT, praise Allah)
Britain enters period of mourning as Greggs unable to process payments
How to run an LLM on your PC, not in the cloud, in less than 10 minutes
They call me 'Growler'. I don't like you. Let's discuss your pay cut
Cops visit school of 'wrong person's child,' mix up victims and suspects in epic data fail
A visa to fill Australia's empty tech jobs is getting more expensive, but maybe better value
Self-taught-techie slept on the datacenter floor, survived communism, ended a marriage
Monday 19th February 2024 19:16 GMT
Re: Daily!?! RFC begs to differ
My daughter is a nurse, and the number of elderly patients they have to try and save is staggering - a good number don't survive the trauma of the recovery procedure. She's told her grandmother (my MIL) to get a DNR, but grandma took it poorly initially - I think she has seen sense since though. Sir Pterry's Choosing To Die should be mandatory viewing for all families who care about their elders' dignity.
Monday 19th February 2024 19:07 GMT
Re: Daily!?! RFC begs to differ
I got an email yesterday saying they had left me voice message....
(my work .sig says "please call via Teams" - I have patchy cellphone reception)
----
But in a previous life I was opening an email when I detected a shadow over my desk: it was the PM who had just sent the email, wanting to know if I had read it, and just in case I hadn't, he had a print-out of it in his hand........ twat.
Election security threats in 2024 range from AI to … anthrax?
RIP John Walker, software and hardware hacker extraordinaire
Tesla's Cybertruck may not be so stainless after all
Australia passes Right To Disconnect law, including (for now) jail time for bosses who email after-hours
Monday 12th February 2024 19:48 GMT
in East Australis we say "shit, we are seeing American-style politics here" and we mean Trump-style, not Biden-style.... we've just had change in govt (took 3 parties to form a coalition to get a majority) and each of the three campaigned on some pretty horrific policies (repeal of the smoke-free act???? ffs) and they still got in... and now the huddled masses are whinging "we didn't vote for this...." ... yeah, you did.
Back on topic: rushed policy = poor policy. No surprise it's going to be reworked. How was it worded? It was hardly going to be "you sent 1 email 5 minutes after I knocked off for the day... off to jail with you!" shirley! And as others have said: it's not going to be the top that cops it, even though they are responsible for creating the culture that requires middle managers to reach out to staff after hours....
BOFH: Hearken! The Shiny Button software speaks of Strategic Realignment
Please install that patch – but don't you dare actually run it
Sunday 11th February 2024 19:19 GMT
Re: Uptime
First IT job, supporting a company with a Project office... they purchased a few copies of AutoCAD for new office layout design purposes.... but it came with a dongle. A USB dongle. We ran NT4 workstations.... sigh. As if getting their SCSI-attached scanner to work under NT4 wasn't challenging enough.... they had to introduce USB to the fun and games.
I can't remember how we fixed it.... either we found some 3rd party drivers/hacks. Or put them on the fast track for the Win2000 workstation upgrade project.
Raspberry Pi Pico cracks BitLocker in under a minute
Techie climbed a mountain only be told not to touch the kit on top
It took Taylor Swift deepfake nudes to focus Uncle Sam, Microsoft on AI safety
ICANN proposes creating .INTERNAL domain to do the same job as 192.168.x.x
Psst … wanna jailbreak ChatGPT? Thousands of malicious prompts for sale
David Mills, the internet's Father Time, dies at 85
40 years since Elite became the most fun you could have with 22 kilobytes
Tech billionaires ask Californians to give new utopian city their blessing
Peregrine bows out with a bang as SLIM aims for Moon's rocky runway
WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager
Daughter of George Carlin horrified someone cloned her dad with AI for hour special
Sunday 14th January 2024 19:39 GMT
Re: Why use A-I? Because there's no other way to get anything close to the essence of Carlin.
"no I in team"
"yeah, but there's 4 in 'platitude quoting idiot'"
or
write out the word team in a font that is "balloon-like" (you know - fat letters, not just lines)... then colour in the bit above and below the crossbar of the "A" - "look, there's teh "I", right in the A-hole"
or
"So what? There's a fucked-up 'me' in 'team'!!" (FTFY)
generally find no-one quotes that asinine cliché around me ever again.
While we fire the boss, can you lock him out of the network?
Silicon Valley weirdo's quest to dodge death – yours for $333 a month
New year, new bug – rivalry between devs led to a deep-code disaster
Enterprising techie took the bumpy road to replacing vintage hardware
Monday 11th December 2023 18:53 GMT
Re: What is old, is new again
Similar to when I was working in London - we were slowly upgrading our network from TR to ethernet...
I had the job of swapping over the desktop NICs. I asked what happened to the old TR NICx? Oh - the desktop supplier swaps the ethernet NIC for the TR one for free. Oh... for free? Yeah, the supplier can onsell them to other customer who haven't made the jump to ethernet yet.... for huge money as they are scarce as hens' teeth.
Meta starts rolling out end-to-end encryption in Facebook Messenger
Law secretly drafted by ChatGPT makes it onto the books
'Return to Office' declared dead
Sunday 3rd December 2023 19:46 GMT
I chose to move out of a main centre and into a the countryside (pre-pandemic), and I had always planned to discuss WFH 1 day a week once settled. Then Covid-19 hit, and the whole thing became moot.
Last year I was doing 1 day a week in the office (fronting up to the client site - rah rah rah). This year I haven't travelled into the city at all (for work).
Potential sat-bothering cannibal coronal mass ejection slams into Earth's atmo tonight
Bank boss hated IT, loved the beach, was clueless about ports and politeness
Sunday 3rd December 2023 19:26 GMT
Had exactly this when on my OE in London - call came into the SD from the EA to #1 and #2 in the company.... problem with #1's new fandangled laptop (this was c 2000/2001 - laptops were a rarity even for the exec).
My Boss said "for some reason #1 has asked for you by name..... " (giving me a look of "what have you done", and "normally I'd send one of lackeys, cos I know they won't say the wrong thing")
I trundle over to head office (IT dept was in a separate building a street or two away - a casual 5 minute walk)... walk into #1's suite... "Ahhh Kiwi, I was showing Sir Herbert my new laptop but I can't get it to work"
I took one look at it and saw that they had plugged the modem cable into the RJ45 socket on the wall.... carefully eased it out with the blade of a letter opener, and then said "this goes into this kind of socket" and plugged into a telephone jack. "For the ticket resolution notes, who did it?" both of them quick as a flash both of them pointed at each other..... and laughed.
So I took my chance and asked why they asked for me, a casual contractor on his OE from NZ.... "cos you like rugby"
Musk tells advertisers to 'go f**k' themselves as $44B X gamble spirals into chaos
Plex gives fans a privacy complex after sharing viewing habits with friends by default
Wednesday 29th November 2023 20:22 GMT
Re: Why do companies think we care what anyone else is doing?
> I remember when Twitter was still new and not widely known. I took a look at it and it was basically just people literally narrating their life 140 characters at a time. I remember thinking something along the lines of why world+dog should care about your bowel movements or that you're getting something from the fridge.
I think my very first tweet was something literally like "banal comment about my life"
Biting the hand that feeds IT
