* Posts by iwi

15 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Dec 2009

Cops visit school of 'wrong person's child,' mix up victims and suspects in epic data fail

iwi

not just the police

I lived in a house where road name and house number were the same as another house in the same local authority area in a different road with the same name about 2 miles away. The man who lived in the other house also had same name as me (unfortunately for him). He was quite ill by all accounts. We had 3 ambulances on 3 separate occasions turn up to take 'me' to hospital. So the London Ambulance Service clearly had dodgy data and never bothered fixing it. Whether the resulting delays getting him to hospital had anything to do with his death, I will never know. But when he died, the council then cancelled my council tax account, writing to me to tell me that they had done it because, well, I had died apparently. So even name and street address aren't unique, pretty sure he didn't share my date of birth though.

Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson

iwi

Re: Fancy pants surname

ahh, little Bobby Tables https://xkcd.com/327/

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

iwi

Shock horror. There are intergenerational language differences. Twas ever thus, daddio.

BOFH: Oh for Pete’s sake. Don’t make a spectacle of yourself

iwi

Re: Idiot-Sensitive Glasses

Me too. Worried I may end up like a vampire though. That would be depressing.

Who knew that hosing a table with copious amounts of cubic metres would trip adult filters?

iwi

Re: Inside joke?

one place I worked had a long running project called Common Finance Initiative. It needed its own helpdesk. But management didn't want it to be called a 'helpdesk'. They wanted something more cuddly. They went with the 'care team'. until they realised the helpdesk team would answer the phone by saying "hello, CFI Care"

iwi

Re: Inside joke?

Company I worked for in the 1990s DID extend/customise ARS and proposed calling it ARS-E until someone pointed out the obvious. At which point it became EARS

I don't have to save my work, it's in The Cloud. But Microsoft really must fix this files issue

iwi

query/amend/submit/repeat

I remember a couple of decades ago a business user entering many hundreds of monthly company car mileage records into an oracle database. Except instead of keying in a new one each time, he would enter it, then query it, change the reg# and the mileage value, then commit it and repeat. He was very disappointed after a day or two of long tedious effort to find he had keyed in precisely one record. We (IT team) trained the business team who then decided they could train the new starter without using the training materials we had provided them with. Oh, how he laughed!

Sorry friends, I'm afraid I just can't quite afford the Bitcoin to stop that vid from leaking everywhere

iwi

I'm sure the blackmailers only have simian heath concerns at the heart of everything they do. They want to save all those monkeys from being spanked.

75 years ago, one Allied radar techie changed the course of WW2

iwi

My grandfather worked on RADAR in the 2nd world war. I was told that his family thought he was an idiot who couldn't spell radio. Amazing that any reference to RADAR was allowed through the censors in letters home.

Kent Council cheerily flings about £100m at managed services bods

iwi

Re: Figures

"If you see a plan that says what they will do differently and how that will cost less, it might be OK." I totally agree with your sentiment but if they put that in the plan, then the council could just do it themselves couldn't they? Why would they need the outsourcing "partner"?

I always see outsourcing as an admission by management that they don't actually know what they are managing and have to get someone else to do their job for them. The only valid reason for outsourcing in my view is economy of scale. But even with that, multiple councils could get together and still do an effective job without outsourcing. It just takes good management. But it's easier to outsource and let someone else deal with the horrible 'doing stuff'.

Space elevators, vacuum chutes: What next for big rocket tech?

iwi

http://xkcd.com/1133/

up goer five

Mother faked ID to 'disappear' child from school waiting list

iwi
Joke

"data of birth"?

weight? time? maternity suite room number? midwife's maiden name?

Humax HD-Fox T2 Freeview HD receiver

iwi

no timeshifting?

Wake me up when I can get same functionality as my existing DVR.

Chip and PIN security busted

iwi
FAIL

@ Greg J Preece

It's 4 digits because that's all Mrs. Shepherd-Barron could remember ....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_identification_number

BA.com titsup

iwi

it's working fine

as subject