Posts by DJV

"Kildare"

In a hospital?

I see what you did there...

"Google was a word in a dictionary not many people had heard of"

Google was never a word in the dictionary until Google came along as a misspelling of "Googol."

More vicious feathery bastards!

Back when I were a lad and living in the wilds of Norfolk, the geese at the farm around the corner were afraid of absolutely nothing. One old but not-quite-retired-as-yet lady who needed to get from her house to the local bus stop every day would rather clamber across wet fields than attempt to pass the geese when they had decided to annex the road. They even refused to get out of the way of buses and lorries, and would always gave the driver a good honking when he was trying to do the same to them. Often, the farmer who owned them would have to attempt to round them up before traffic of any kind was allowed to pass.

"If your head's not in the cloud, you're not in the right place"

Use the cloud for what it's good for but don't EVER totally depend on it - therein lies dragons.

If your head's totally in the cloud, you're in the right place to fail.

"Memory prices to dive in late 2022, says Gartner."

So, given the accuracy of Gartners usual wafflings, the chances of memory prices diving has just dived to zero.

TPM / appraiserres.dll

Microsoft try to restrict you, then someone comes along a shows how to bypass their stupid pointless tricks: https://www.askwoody.com/forums/topic/bypass-tpm-secure-boot-check-on-win-11-install/.

I'm running 11 in VMWare Player and got the dreaded TPM 2.0 requirement when trying to upgrade to 22458 - the above fix (deleting appraiserres.dll) worked for me. I didn't even bother to replace it with the Win 10 version. Of course, YMMV.

A one off

Sir Clive was definitely a one-off. I remember the adverts for his hi-fi in magazines like Practical Electronics long before he branched into computers.

The fact that the retro market continues trying to replicate his old systems (though never at the same price!) is a testament to the man's vision.

RIP Sir Clive.

And then there's the complete opposite...

...when an unexpected call from a REAL company sounds completely suspicious. I had that earlier this year with $PENSION_COMPANY

I'd had an arranged online meeting to discuss pension arrangements with $COMPANY_PERSON1 which all went ok. $COMPANY_PERSON1 didn't indicate that I would be getting a follow-up call regarding how the meeting went.

Then, a few days later, I had a call on my mobile phone with the number withheld (alarm bell 1 goes off) from someone (let's call her $COMPANY_PERSON2) who claimed to be from $PENSION_COMPANY. She wanted to talk to me about my "recent contact" (very vague - alarm bell 2 goes off) with the company. She then asked me to provide answers to security questions. I refused and asked her to prove that she really was from $PENSION_COMPANY and why was she calling from a withheld number when this is now extremely frowned upon if not actually illegal now. I thought it reasonable to ask her to provide me with either one of my policy numbers or some digits (and their positions) from one of those numbers. She refused saying it was personal information and, after getting in a bit of a strop about my refusal to do what SHE wanted, in the end hung up on me.

I immediately contacted $COMPANY_PERSON1 and told her about my experience. She agreed that it sounded very suspicious and asked if I wanted to officially report it, which I agreed to. She took the full details and said I would be hearing from someone in a few days.

A few days later I received a call from $COMPANY_PERSON3 from a number that was associated with $PENSION_COMPANY and, as he had details about the "rogue" call and other things that only someone from the $PENSION_COMPANY should have possessed, I was happy to talk to him. He apologised as it turned out that the "rogue" call HAD come from someone employed by $PENSION_COMPANY who was working from home but hadn't done as she should have and routed the call via $PENSION_COMPANY's normal phone network. We spent some time discussing ways in which $PENSION_COMPANY could improve their ability to prove their own identity when asked for it (mainly the same as I'd asked $COMPANY_PERSON2 to do, which he thought was a reasonable way of going about things).

Then he asked, "Is £75 compensation for all the hassle ok?" Having not expected anything of the sort, I readily agreed. This was duly paid into my bank account a few days later and, also around the same time, I received a package containing a written apology along with 2 bottles of wine and a box of chocolates!

So, I think the lesson there is, if you complain properly, you can actually get good results and a proper company will learn from its mistakes. I do wonder, though, what sort of reprimand $COMPANY_PERSON2 got!

What!

You mean Amazon might be doing something naughty?

Well, that's never ever happened before, has it?!

/s

one impressively packed taskbar

It looks a bit like my Quick Launch bar! I'm hoping that someone (Open Shell?) will definitely be able to bring that back before Windows 11 is forced on us. My screen isn't wide enough to use the taskbar for the number I've got stacked across Quick Launch!

Idiocracy

It wasn't meant to be a documentary, was it?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/