Posts by cam

11cm per year. Oh wow. That's 34 feet in 100 years. I guess we won't notice.

Bought a Corsair K90 about 5 years ago. If I never have to change keyboards ever again, I'll be a happy little clickity clacker.

No phone here.

Best of luck with that plan.

You can only do what you can do.

- Close all unused avenues of approach.

- Keep systems patched and updated.

- Keep users access limited to minimum necessary

- Double down on password practices and policies

- Have all IT Sec folk aware and up to date on what's what

You know. The usual stuff that hopefully works, until it doesn't. ;)

No Two Toolbars are the Same

A PC user in my office used the MS Office Toolbar to open Word. Nothing else. One day it didn't load, and for some reason it had been disabled as a start-up task.

I offered to create a shortcut on the main taskbar, next to 'Show Desktop' and one or two other shortcuts.

"It's one click, with less stuff in the way, near your start button, so easy to find. It'll take up less resources than the Office Bar, so your machine might be a fraction faster, and best of all, it shouldn't disappear in future."

"No, just give me the thing I had before. I just couldn't operate if I had to look somewhere else for Word."

"Sigh"

Some people get far too set in their ways.

Floppy...stiffy...zip...jazz...flash...

There's a pervert in charge of removable media naming.

"Maybe because we actually did write web pages by hand, in notepad, we also felt obliged to really think about what we were creating. All that I know is that using the Internet has become a chore, not the delight that it was two decades ago."

Still using Notepad, although did upgrade to Notepad++ along the way. My simple site works fine, images aside. I got quite savvy with trimming down a few wordpress templates for a while, and managed to get jquery almost speedy. My site calls an html5 file, a css file, and that's it. The only external content is Google Analytics for simple stats. Pages are in the 50K to 150K range, with images.

I think the 'chore' to which you refer is 33% cloud services, 33% one size fits all websites with poor secondary web dev efficiency (thinking wordpress templates, jquery, multiple css calls), and 33% ads and spam.

The Internet is now a war between ad makers and ad blockers. Between those forcing useless content ahead of those struggling to get their useful content out there. Ok, so there are sites that force ads if you want to use them, but getting spammed video ads just for visiting (every time) is beyond the pale. The Internet was created for info sharing, and those willing to give their info freely have been drowned out by those that want to make a living from it.

Online news sites are no different. A couple of years back, I did a small survey of all the major new titles and the requests of all but a couple were more than 50% ads or trackers. If ads, spam and adult material disappeared from the Internet for a week, the lack of traffic would make the Internet a place of wonder, and we would demand it permanently banned when it resumed (well maybe not the last one...I'm not completely naive :D ).

"You had enough, or do we break out the Watership Down and Old Yeller collection?"

I'm ok. I have my anti-surveillance kit all in place.

- Tin Foil Hat (set to wide angle);

- SeeBackRoScope - In case a spy is sneaking up on you;

- Journey Randomiser -They'll never guess where you're going if you don't have a f***ing clue;

- Budget voice changer (a.k.a. ball-pein hammer) - two sharp hits to a fleshy area with guaranteed results

In addition, disable all Windows services. That way they can't possibly monitor your IT behaviour. Counting blue pixels is actually fun, and the rest of the world is a much nicer colour.

Bit of blow will sort it.

/gets coat

And IT Auditors get stick for being an unskilled, ineffective, waste of money.

Maybe pass the cert and compliance over to a compliance manager?

Just saying.

Sounds like a DPA breach to me. That data is being shared without patient consent outside of the organisation.

This time, 'Marty' will be a woman, cos why shouldn't women be into science, and play guitar, and travel back in time. Doctor Who is a woman, and women are busting ghosts. Make sense.

Waiting for a reboot of Larry Croft. :D

Download the Internet Twice a Day to Keep It There

Or read a book.

So is no one considering stopping buying these overprices kids' toys yet? Best solution.

The protectionists' whine is so sublime.

No 'Gas Panic!' ? Shame.

IT Policy led to pranks

Previous job in a large public sector org, the IT dept made a point of locking down 95% of all settings on standard PCs.

Of course, one of the locked settings was the volume control, and they had the volume turned way up. Suffice it to say, every day you could hear when people arrived at work, and their Win98 systems all went into a cacophony of Sci-Fi sound effects.

Most staff were wusses, and wouldn't complain to IT, but I did, and explained my role (partially IT) within the dept, and they relaxed my permissions, but whether by accident or on purpose, they also gave me admin pemissions to all the other department PCs.

The power I had. Mwahaha!!

(Not really.) If I blabbed about the power, someone in my department would have shopped me to IT, so instead I used the power to reduce the volumes, and claimed I had spent an afternoon 'dealing' with IT support to get 20-odd PCs sorted ("It's complicated stuff, ya know").

I ended up with a modicum of respect, and most IT issues got put past me first. IT support rarely got phoned thereafter. Everyone (including IT) was happy.