Posts by JimRoyal 19 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Oct 2012
You really need to sort yourselves out. I had a look at the picture in this piece and was horrified to see something green on the beans and tomato. No part of a proper English breakfast is green. And what the hell are those beans doing in their own dish. Poncey metropolitan gits.
Fried egg. 1 or 2. Scrambled is NOT an option.
Bacon. 2 rashers. Unsmoked, back or streaky.
Sausage. Cumberland.
Beans
Toast
I think after that you can add extras from a list of acceptable options
Tomato, mushrooms, fried bread, black pudding, fried potato (must be mashed)
Hash browns are an abomination from a former colony that has lost the plot.
I worked on one migration where we used BitTitan to get the mailboxes onto the cloud and it worked very well. Can recommend.
One gotcha that fell foul of was with changing the MX record. I changed it EXACTLY as specified by Microsoft and it failed to propagate. Lots of head scratching. Eventually called company hosting the domain records and found their system wanted ever so slightly different syntax on the MX record. They changed it for me and all was well.
From experience, I can tell you that bringing a data centre back online involves more than flicking the switch. For one thing, there will be drive failures. When you have drives that have been running for a couple of years, or more, cool down then some of them fail to spin up when the power comes back. The techs will all be praying that each failure is in a separate RAID array.
Always look out for 'Ability to manage changing priorities' in adverts. This is always a big red flashing light. In my experience, it means either 'we change our minds every five minutes' or ' every manager has a different idea of what is most important' or 'expect to get messed about on a daily basis'.
Small claims worked for me as well, but I would not bother with anything less than £500 because it takes quite a while to put all the paperwork together. And beware, if you are the claimant you will have to travel to the nearest Small Claims Court to the defendant. But you will be able to claim the travel costs back, if you win. I won and got expenses, but had to take a whole day out from work to travel the 150 milers for the ten minute hearing.
I would not have taken on this job in the first place, even though I used to work a lot with Novell. Just like I would not take the job I saw advertised two days ago. Project manager wanted for Windows 7 rollout. Seriously! Windows 7! in 2016!
Of course the other point is what happens between now and October next year? With the uncertainty of the future I would think that many of the best people would leave. The Met would then find it difficult to recruit replacements. So they would fall back on contractors, which will increase their staffing costs over the next year.
Please note, this is not a cynical view, it is exactly what I have observed at another organisation in a very similar position recently.
Customer: We bought this PR software package. It's fabulous. It does exactly what we want. Can you install it on a server please.
I.T.: OK!!!
Later.....
Customer: Why can't people access it on the Intranet?
I.T.: The software is client server, it does not work in a browser.
Later.....
Customer: Hello, Servicedesk! I'd like to log a call please. Please build us a web interface for our PR software.
Problem solved!!!!!!
And in another very similar situation, I.T. were unable to build a web front end for another customer bought system. A few days later the customer was overheard saying in a meeting "Yeah, we asked I.T. to web enable it but the too difficult light came on".
And don't get me started on 101 instances of "we've got this Access database that John wrote. John's left the company now and so you will have to support it"
Can't believe the amount of negativity about user's ideas. They do sometimes make relevant points or useful suggestions. In such cases they should be taken on-board.
Of course, you will claim that you had already thought of them and that the fact that your ideas are the same is indicative of the passionate customer focus you have. You can also praise the users creative thinking which means you will always have someone in the future to support any ideas you put forward.
Amazed to see in this article that a target is in the offing of 12 days from contact with BT to get an appointment. When I worked for BT in the early 90s we made appointments when the customer called. Single business lines were installed in 3 days, residential in 4.
So what happened to privatisation and competition being improving the market? I suspected then we would end up with nothing but a choice, a customer choice, of poor services.
Joined BE to get away from Talk Talk who took over what was originally a pipex account and then gave me terrible download speeds which they refused to fix, apparently 650k was within acceptable parameters.
Now need to leave BE to get away from Murdoch.
This is no bandwagon jumping, I've been refusing any Murdoch product for over a decade and intend to continue doing so.
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