Re: College Tech Support
Some places I've worked, people would be queuing to service that machine!
Posts by Shooter
236 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jul 2009
Do not touch that computer. Not even while wearing gloves. It is a biohazard
Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks
Please install that patch – but don't you dare actually run it
You don't get what you don't pay for, but nobody is paid enough to be abused
Control Altman delete: OpenAI fires CEO, chairman quits
BOFH: Monitor mount moans end in Beancounter beatdown
How is this problem mine, techie asked, while cleaning underground computer
Saturday 23rd September 2023 19:11 GMT
Re: Nasty IT places
By far the nastiest place I ever went to was a rendering plant. In high summer.
For the uninitiated, a rendering plant takes in all the leftovers from butcherings (sometimes roadkill as well, but not this place) that had no value on it's own. Think fat/tallow, guts, blood, beaks, feet/hooves, etc. That stuff then gets "rendered" (processed) into commercially viable by-products. The smell alone is enough to knock you off your feet, and there's a coating of rancid grease over pretty much everything on the plant floor. Including the electronics. Covers helped, but not much - you still need ventilation!
BOFH: Ah. Company-branded merch. So much better than a bonus
Florida folks dragged out of bed by false emergency texts
Thanks for fixing the computer lab. Now tell us why we shouldn’t expel you?
Techie fired for inventing an acronym – and accidentally applying it to the boss
Cop warrant orders Ring to cough up footage from inside this guy's home
What's up with IT, Doc? Rabbit hole reveals cause of outage
Canadian owes bosses for 'time theft' after work-tracking app sinks tribunal bid
BOFH: The Boss has a new watch – move readiness to DEFCON 2
Saturday 15th October 2022 18:09 GMT
Re: Savages, savages I say!
Puts my OCD into overdrive!
I compromise by leaving the switches that I see most frequently in the DOWN position when off. Then I try to avoid looking at the switch that's UP when off. Works well for the cellar lights, and acceptably for the outside lights (controlled from the front door and the garage entryway).
Senior engineer reported to management for failing to fix a stapler
Fixing an upside-down USB plug: A case of supporting the insupportable
Datacenter migration plan missed one vital detail: The leaky roof
Saturday 24th September 2022 14:19 GMT
Re: worse yet
This is actually the origin of my handle on El Reg. I was widely known as the guy who would "shoot down" idiotic management ideas before they were implemented.
Nowadays, those same types of plans are thought up several management layers (and often several states) away from where us lowly plebs have to implement them.
BOFH: You want presentation layer, but we're physical layer
Keeping printers quiet broke disk drives, thanks to very fuzzy logic
Saturday 17th September 2022 15:34 GMT
Re: Carpets are nothing compared to tobacco smoke.
I think I've told this story before...
About 25 years ago - back in the days when we still had such luxuries as in-office admin people - we had a PC with a CD drive for our office gal, who was a fairly heavy smoker (the smoking was heavy, not the gal herself). Eventually the CD drive stopped working, and the IT department was consulted (at that point I was industrial service, not IT).
In due course, a new drive arrived at our office. No IT tech, no instructions, just a drive in a cardboard box. The office gal was aware that in a previous life I had "done something with computers", so asked me for help. No problem! Until I opened up the PC's case.
I could barely make out any of the innards, as everything was coated in a nasty mixture of carpet fibers and sticky nicotine residue. The computer was unplugged, taken out the back door and cleaned with compressed air before being (carefully) vacuumed. That at least made it possible to replace the CD drive. Everything else was wiped as clean as could be while in place, the PC was buttoned up and returned to service.
A short time later the law was changed to forbid smoking indoors, and sometime after that the lady in question moved on to greener (or not, as the case may be) pastures.
Icon for required PPE -->
BOFH: It's Friday, it's time to RTFM
Saturday 10th September 2022 18:23 GMT
Re: This brought back nightmare memories ...
I remember reading about a young officer at his first posting who had written a report chock full of TLAs.
His superior promptly returned it to his desk with the letters "UNA" scrawled across every page.
Perplexed, the young officer asked what UNA stood for.
"Use No Abbreviations", came the reply!
Enough with the notifications! Focus Assist will shut them u… 'But I'm too important!'
Saturday 6th August 2022 16:00 GMT
Re: Does your neighbour have kids?
Makes a certain amount of sense in this particular use case - a battery too drained to power the car's drive motor would still have plenty of juice to operate a few LEDs and a speaker.
On the other hand, it's not like Junior is driving a Tesla through Death Valley. No big deal if the toy car just grinds to a halt.
Rejoice! System Administrator Appreciation Day (SAAD) is nigh
British intelligence recycles old argument for thwarting strong encryption: Think of the children!
No more fossil fuel or nukes? In the future we will generate power with magic dust
Saturday 11th June 2022 16:54 GMT
Re: "some of the daylight that the sun carelessly drops in our direction and is just going to waste"
"a Cambridge physicist calculated a few years back that, given the typical density of UK housing estates (20+ dwellings per acre), geothermal heating would not work except for the few, as there wouldn't be enough to go round."
Holy crap!
My house sits on a one-acre lot, and I sometimes think my neighbors are *still* too close for comfort. I can't imagine living with 19 other homes on the same size plot.
(I know - I'm privileged.)
Switch off the mic if it makes you feel better – it'll make no difference
Thinnet cables are no match for director's morning workout
Have you tried restarting? Reinstalling? Upgrading? Moving house and changing your identity?
Why should I pay for that security option? Hijacking only happens to planes
Saturday 22nd January 2022 20:43 GMT
Re: Would they ever...
This reminds me of the only time I ever managed to put a blemish on my mortgage payment history.
Back in the day (about the turn of the century) I had the habit of spending my Saturday mornings paying the upcoming bills. Writing actual checks by hand, as I wasn't yet comfortable with internet banking and bill-pay. Then off to the post office to drop them in the mail, and continue with the rest of my Saturday chores.
Then one day I had a phone call from my mortgage company, letting me know that my payment was a bit light that month. Turns out that I had inadvertently put the check for the electric company in the mortgage envelope and vice versa. I immediately called my bank, to be informed that the electric company had already deposited my mortgage check. So I then called the electric company to ask why they had done that, and ask for a refund. The electric company said they thought I "was just making an advance payment", even though the check wasn't made out in the name of their business. And was roughly twenty times the amount of my normal bill (budget plan - same amount every month, adjusted annually. Makes it easier to plan the bill payments).
I immediately wrote a new check to the mortgage company, but I didn't have enough money in the bank to cover it until the electric company returned the over-payment, which took a LOT longer than it did for them to cash the check in the first place. By the time the mortgage company received my new check, it was past the grace period, so I was charged a penalty and got a black mark on my payment history.
I don't blame the mortgage company - after all, the initial screw-up was all my fault. Nowadays, I make sure I have enough funds in the bank to cover several months of bills in case of any problems, but at the time I was freshly divorced and things were a bit tight. And I've learned not to pay the bills until AFTER the first cup of coffee!
Software guy smashes through the Somebody Else's Problem field to save the day
Reg reader returns Samsung TV after finding giant ads splattered everywhere
Oh! A surprise tour of the data centre! You shouldn't have. No, you really shouldn't have
Try placing a pot plant directly above your CRT monitor – it really ties the desk together
Ah, I see you found my PowerShell script called 'SiteReview' – that does not mean what you think it means
Tuesday 13th July 2021 23:00 GMT
Re: Dangerous sites?
Way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and there were more than two major cell phone operating systems, I was researching which system I wanted to invest my electronic future in.
Let's just say that when googling for Symbian, you *don't* want to leave out the "m".
Glad to have made that particular error at home, and not at work!
BOFH: Where there is darkness, let there be a light
A real go-GETTR: Former Trump aide tries to batter Twitter by ripping off its UI
Sunday 4th July 2021 18:37 GMT
Re: Litigiousness.
A good example is the suit filed by the Dominion voting machines folks.
They are suing *specific* people for *specific* statements that Dominion claims damages their reputation in a way that harms their business. They are not suing over general remarks made by random people. That is generally covered by freedom of expression clauses.
Will Dominion prevail? I have no idea - there is a ridiculous amount of legal mumbo-jumbo from both sides to be sorted out by the judge. But I can guarantee that whoever loses will be appealing the case as far as possible. This will drag on quite a while.
Radioactive hybrid terror pigs have made themselves a home in Fukushima's exclusion zone
Saturday 3rd July 2021 13:59 GMT
Re: Domestic cross breeding is the real problem
I spent the early '80s in the army, stationed in SE Georgia (the state, not the country).
Feral pigs were quite a problem, enough that we would sometimes stop patrolling and circle up when the pigs were checking us out at night. Got bad enough that some of us would carry a magazine of live rounds (as opposed to blanks, and carefully segregated from them), or personal sidearms. It was a well-known secret, and officers/NCOs never made an issue of it. The pigs did not seem particularly impressed when we shot blanks, but artillery simulators made them scatter!
I suspect things might be different these days.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
