Re: Have you ever lost anything you wanted back
"But I can confirm that it will be in the last universe in which you look."
Of course it will, why would you keep looking once you had found it?
5770 publicly visible posts • joined 29 May 2007
Oh, I thought they were referring to the desire to give the previous techie a smack in the chops for creating such a mess, perfectly understandable in my book.
I agree that the path chosen to fix it all was a bit immature, but then if he was more experienced he wouldn't be a sole techie in a small company in the first place most likely :)
"If someone worked for me with that attitude they'd get the sack PDQ! "
You mean if someone actually cared about sorting out your systems properly that they would feel frustrated enough to express this kind of sentiment you would sack them? In that case you are probably the person who hired the initial fuckwit who left the mess, you obviously can't tell the difference between venting and a real life threat.
"I mean how are we going to encourage more women to work in IT if they have to worry about this type of nonsense."
Why would a woman worry about this type of thing? They probably wouldn't have left such a mess behind in the first place if my experience of women in IT is anything to go by. Cowgirls they are not.
"El Reg, you should be ashamed of yourselves for this article, even if it is tongue in cheek!"
To steal from your own thread title, grow up.
I was on a trading course a few years back and their internet connection went down.
Now ok, this was a smallish firm, but ALL of their money was made from these trading courses, which need an internet connection oddly enough.
Since I was on the course I offered to take a look - no promises. Turns out that their router was plugged in to a UPS which was plugged in to an extension lead and for some reason the UPS wasn't on. They probably had a power outage at the weekend and they had been running all morning from the batteries. Powered on the UPS and everything rattled back into life and they thought I was some kind of magician.
Considering the rats-nest of kit in the broom cupboard which was their IT room I recommended that they get someone in to sort it all out (they couldn't have afforded me :) ) - to the best of my knowledge it is still in the same configuration now.
Cheapskates.
When I bought my first gen i7-920 I never bothered OC'ing it. I took it out of the cupboard a few weeks back and bought a cheapo water cooler system and it's running quite happily on a smidge under 4Ghz and is now the happy owner of some kick-arse DDR3 OC'd memory - the whole thing is now my ESXi host with a VM container that represents the old OS that used to inhabit it.
Nothing to it - there are loads of guides out there to prevent you going too far wrong. Don't go mad (unless that's your thing) and you can get a lot more use out of older kit with OC'ing :D
I'm still waiting for the local burger van to comply with my request for a 'spinal chord in a bap'.
I've always liked Chris's attitude to life, and Partridge is a legend. The trailer made me laugh out loud, so it certainly has lots of promise!
The only character that Partridge played that I could never really get on with was Steve Coogan - he seemed so dull in comparison.
"Not much of a profit margin in selling standardised nuts and bolts tho."
You'd be amazed though at some of things you can do to secure an environment with the basic tools and a decent process. Unfortunately the skills to do this cannot be taught in a 5 days 'Cisco God' course ;)
I'm seriously thinking about becoming a herbalist and building a lab in the garden shed :)
Basically something as far away from IT as I can possibly get - although I will probably keep my hand in by rigging up solar/wind/battery backup solution to make sure my potions experiments don't get ruined mid-way!
"They offer you all of these at-your-desk training/certification sites but nowhere to book the time, so the client account gets slugged with the cost"
Technically known as fraud. Whenever I am made to book time to a customer that didn't involve work for the customer I make a special note of it and make sure I get an email from someone saying I should just do it. It's come in handy a couple of times now.
Went on once at a paintball site back in the 90's.
We were supposed to 'hole up' in these huts and protect the hostages using effective communcation.
My leadership skills were questioned when I shot the hostages* in the head and told everyone we should go outside and lay an ambush for the idiots thinking we would still be in the huts.
*mannequins were hurt during the making of this anecdote.
"As long as you can see the players and the ball clearly, do you need to be able to identify individual blades of grass?"
If you ever watch any of the old classic games from the 70's you will notice that you actually see more of the players than you do with the current 'shot from a passing satellite' view that seems to be the norm.
"complained that the controversial outfit is “being treated as the offender, and the criminals who attacked the company are not”."
Well Boo fucking Hoo.
Is this guy really so deluded to not see why he is being treated like the villain by people who find his behaviour reprehensible (even if it is technically legal)?
He is a disingenuous turd-bot that's out of control.
"Not unless they have a useless accountant"
The more people there are taking the piss (aka the low hanging fruit) the better.
I try not to take the mickey and cross my fingers I don't get audited, because no matter how well you try and run your accounts they are bound to discover some rule infraction (or at least make your life hell whilst trying to find one if rumours from people subjected to an IR35 audit are true).
"but how many contractors pay employer's NI?
Most pay themselves the tax free allowance as salary and take the rest as dividend or leave it in the company until they fold it."
Citation required.
I pay myself a 'normal' wage and pay employers NI and tax etc. Anyone leaving money in a company until they fold it is probably breaking the law, tax evasion at the very least? ianal of course.
Don't most contractors pick up contracts through the jobsites which involve an agency? The agency take a cut so the end customer pays a lot more for the contractor than if they dealth with them directly.
Doesn't this limit the amount you can be undercut? Also, if you are employing people on a fixed salary (and not salary+dividend) aren't your labour costs lower? (I know you have pension contributions etc. to cover so I understand the differences aren't cut and dried).