After ten hours at a desk all day I just stopped caring because all the other happy robot people were so insulting by smiling at me and saying why don't you just run?
By sheer virtue of knowing the difference between 'The Computer' and Windows I've found myself wearing the IT hat in a small business. I multiple small businesses.
When the mission critical server falls over. It's me that fixes it. When someone can't get on the network, it's me that fixes it. When the wordpress site needs to be kicked to do something unusual - I get to do that. When all company data gets nuked because someone set up the RAID array on the server as RAID 0 rather than 1 - and the controller let the smoke out - I fixed that too. And saved the company. I'm the one who knows the difference between what a public and private IP is - what subscriber NAT is - and why that piece of hardware wont work with that network operator.
I built an excel tool to automate what I actually do - turning a manual job that can take hours into one of fifteen minutes. It's really just a conglomeration of multiple rules of thumb formed more by accretion than by any actual factored design process. It used to break regularly in ways only I understood - often silently giving a wrong answer only obviously wrong to someone who knew what the right answer should've looked like. It's gotten more reliable and defined as it got used.
It's now become the company's first "app". Eventually an actual software developer will get to see it to turn it into a fancy jolly rancher icon and personal data snaffler. I expect them to run screaming in horror at the undocumented melange.
All it does, is the job I normally did from Monday to Friday. Nobody bothered me about my job on Saturday because it was obvious that, yeah, I wouldn't be in work on a Saturday.
The first time it popped out from beneath the company veil and met an actual user, I got a call on a Saturday. Because they wanted to use it NOW and couldn't log in, (A user error, not a program error - it worked as I intended). It got fixed anyway.
Eventually, when it filters out into the wider world, I'll get more calls. Asking me to fix the automation on Saturday - when the same people would've happily waited until monday morning for me to do the job.
This is basically the market segment we pitch at in work.
Tough. Reliable. Functional. Efficient.
We're about 10-20% more expensive than the market bottom - which is basically none of these. And we're well below the market top. We get more work from the market top than bottom.
We refuse to go to the bottom because it's an utter hellhole down there. The only way anything actually succeeds down there is by having basically zero technical support, and selling things that have no chance of working in reality, but that sound really good on paper. They'll have FEATURES!! that sound good, but on the other hand when you utterly dig into the spec you realise how utterly shit the result is.
It's basically like the oak table from China.
We're in the position of having more people regret not buying from us, than who actually do buy from us because going with the cheaper competitor led to the whole thing breaking and failing to work - in the exact way we told them it would. But people are just caught up in the cufflinks of the salesman and the idea that they're getting a 'bargain'
It looks like Oak. It has texture. It has grain. It even feels like Oak to someone who doesn't really know what Oak is. It's fucking heavy too and resonates when you knock on it. And for a few weeks after you sit it in a kitchen it's happy and people love your new oak table until, one day, a few weeks in, you spill your tea on it.
And wiping the tea off, some of the painted on wood-grain comes off on the cloth too.
As time gooes by, the texture plastic surface that pretended to be oak grain starts to bubble and delaminate, revealing the mixture of wood-shavings and PVA glue beneath. And the lead blocks buried inside that gave it the sense of weight.
That's Chinese Oak. And the moment you realise you've bought Chinese Oak, you realise you've bought utter crap.
Linkedin is full of people like that. They look great on the surface. They make themselves look great on the surface. And Linkedin is the condensation of these people. It's where they all congregate to get noticed. That's their sole skill, because that's the only real skill that's required in the modern day environment. That's what actually gets you hired by HR.
Maybe I'm being bitter. But the only time I've ever had any sort of success with job interviews is where I spoke to the people who actually did the work, rather than the HR department.
At least in spirit. Because this probably isn't the first time it's happened.
The hardest thing in work to do is put down the phone and let customers lie until the office is open. It might take two days. It takes a certain level of entitlement to expect an immediate response, RIGHT NOW when these operations might not have been able to do it. Being the person trying to answer now nearly led to burnout in work for me.
Because, you know, people do deserve to have lives. They might have sold you something, but giving them a hundred quid doesn't mean you own them.
And I've taken those calls. From people who're really pissed that slavery was outlawed so they just sort of treat anyone that's had the gall to charge them for a service as their own personal rental slave.
There've been plenty of times, and plenty of people, to whom I would love to have done something similar.
An yes. I'm sure I'll get modded troll for this. I don't care. I specifically recovered my account to say it. This sort of absolute customer entitlement in the modern era really pisses me off. Business is much easier for everyone when there's a level of mutual respect.
Did that in work to pay for a bit of software for the company website, since the vendor used paypal and the company credit account already had a paypal account associated with it - which was innaccessible for *reason that doesn't matter*.
Didn't realise the plugin would be tied to my personal email until after buying the bloody thing.
The problem with thinking independently means that when it all goes bollock-up, it's youre fault for ignoring best practice..... even when best practice is bollox.
People may know better, but honestly, would anyone take the risk?
My RX8 has a 'feature' that protects the engine from being overheated by being rev'd while not under load.
Conveniently it makes performing the high-idle part of most emissions tests impossible because the car forcibly cuts itself back to idle halfway through most tests.
Most car manufacturers are fiddling the books in some way.
I honestly had no idea how it actually backed up, it was a function within the accounts application itself to generate the backup. Which it did, to a local disk. I then had an automatic scheduled upload of that backup to the server.
Ultimately, like I said, I'm not really an IT guy - I was the one with google and enough patience to fuck about until things worked again. We didn't have one. We did pay one company a hundred quid a month for a while in case something went TU, but we stopped paying him six months before the final death just to make the dead plane glide those few hundred yards further.
The most IT thing I've done is run a simple website off my own desktop at home, and maybe the whole make a datalogger work with remote internet access.
The total cost was actually weet FA in numbers terms, but I think I put the final nail in the company's coffin.
My first 'job' was a jobbridge internship with a 'small' company. Small enough that I was literally person number three on the employee roster. The company worked in the renewable energy sector, and had been hammered pretty hard over the last few years by The Recession as domestic and corporate purse strings were pulled tighter and tighter.
I was taken as an Engineer, but rapidly found myself wearing a wide range of hats from Sales, to Customer Support, to System Design, to Project Management, web development in PHP, and finally, IT Support.
Because, one day, I managed to figure out why one of my colleagues couldn't log in to the server upstairs, and corrected the problem.
I will say, the Server was the problem.
It was a dinosaur. It was 14 years old - twice as old as the company - and had been bought second hand. It was a monstrous beige tower with a pentium II processor and God Knows What else inside. It ran Windows Server 2000, and was solely dedicated to serving the company accounts and acting as a networked file storage. Inside the case where four HDD's.... A pair of 9GB ones for the OS and programs, and a pair of 32GB ones for files. Both pairs were mirrored in RAID 1. It had a pair of lockable Zip disk drives still fitted though the keys long lost, along with a floppy drive and a CD Drive with no write ability. Or ability to read DVDs.
It creaked as it worked, then fumed, whuffed, whirred and occasionally burped. And it sat there, creaking away for years without thought or consideration to its well being or security. Until I came along.
By this stage, it was obvious the company was dying - the Titanic had hit the iceberg a long time ago, and everything that was happening was just a desperate attempt to bail it out. We might've slowed the sinking - from two months, out to six, even buying a full year - but the abyss of liquidation always loomed.
So, any suggestion of upgrading the server hardware was met by 'With What Money?'. At the same time, everybody knew the server was the lynchpin. If it broke, that was it - company gone. A suggestion that I use a spare computer from home was quietly discouraged - in case the company went under by surprise and someone decided to liquidate it to pay a creditor rather than give it back to me. Or we turned up to find the doors locked.
The best I could do was schedule a backup of the accounts and a few other critical systems, and have it go somewhere offsite. I asked our webhost if we could use our spare space for it, and they were happy to let it happen, provided we didn't cause them problems. So, I set it to run the backup every Sunday morning - 1am or so. Each successive backup would overwrite the previous because there just wasn't the spare space to hold two (No money to pay for it)
I figured even if the server went pop, or we had a building fire or some other catastrophe, at least those copies would survive. I'd figure out what to run them on afterwards.
Someone, somewhere, should see the potential problem in this. In my defence, I am not, nor ever was, an IT professional. The software education I have is more related to the engineering side of things - making machines and robotics work with a view towards industrial automation, rather than the maintenance and setup of IT infrastructure and data security.
I just did what I thought I could to keep the Titanic afloat.
So, one Monday morning, I come to the office and am met by shrill sound of metal screaming against metal and a high speed. There's a heart-in-mouth moment as I realise that it's coming from the server cabinet.
But, we have backups, I assured myself. The disks are mirrored in RAID 1, so if one drops out, the other should still be clean and working. If that fails, I've my own little backup too....
Unfortunately - that only works if the damaged disk decides to drop out of the array.
I did something a bit odd for my desktop, since I wanted a media system more than a gaming monster. It's a year old and is currently running an Apache on a Linux VM to host a website, among other things that've gone far beyond its original design brief. It'll even play Crysis. Well, Crysis 2. The A10 has really impressed me, - better than a crippled Intel and a budget graphics card anyway - and I'm curious to see what happens with the next the next FM2+ products
Fast RAM and an APU go well together. Even if the 7850k wasn't available when I built it.
All the exhaust backpressure can either wedge them out of place, or cause the retaining springs to overheat and push the seal out of its groove. If it clips a port, that's game over.
The difference between a $300 cat, and a $1500 one is the $300 one will physically melt at the exhaust temperatures it'll be exposed to.
The old business I interned with used a Windows 2000 server until December 2013 - when the business finally folded. The server outlasted the business that owned it - having been bought second hand sometime in 2006/07, already near 8 years old.
That server was a Pentium II machine, with a whopping 128Mb of RAM, a pair of 9GB disks in RAID 1 for the OS, and a pair of 32GB in RAID 1 for the data. It also came with a pair of lockable Zip-disk drives for which we'd long since lost the keys, an unmatched DvD-rom drive that was added sometime in the last decade.
And it kept plodding along right up until November 2013 when one of the Data disks failed and decided it wasn't going to drop out of the array - completely nuking the company's accounts folder on the mirror.
There were other reasons why the company failed - but I suppose having the accounts for the last 7 years smeared across the platter in a headcrash was just another nail in the coffin.
The Machine itself was still running when the business was shut down for good. It's probably still working now too, doing God Knows What for God Knows Who? It's built like a bloody tank and did exactly what was asked of it for 14 years.
Slashdot Mirror
But you know what.
After ten hours at a desk all day I just stopped caring because all the other happy robot people were so insulting by smiling at me and saying why don't you just run?
I sleep. I work. I wait to go to work.
Ain't that hateful.
This is not just an excel thing.
By sheer virtue of knowing the difference between 'The Computer' and Windows I've found myself wearing the IT hat in a small business. I multiple small businesses.
When the mission critical server falls over. It's me that fixes it.
When someone can't get on the network, it's me that fixes it.
When the wordpress site needs to be kicked to do something unusual - I get to do that.
When all company data gets nuked because someone set up the RAID array on the server as RAID 0 rather than 1 - and the controller let the smoke out - I fixed that too. And saved the company.
I'm the one who knows the difference between what a public and private IP is - what subscriber NAT is - and why that piece of hardware wont work with that network operator.
I built an excel tool to automate what I actually do - turning a manual job that can take hours into one of fifteen minutes. It's really just a conglomeration of multiple rules of thumb formed more by accretion than by any actual factored design process. It used to break regularly in ways only I understood - often silently giving a wrong answer only obviously wrong to someone who knew what the right answer should've looked like. It's gotten more reliable and defined as it got used.
It's now become the company's first "app". Eventually an actual software developer will get to see it to turn it into a fancy jolly rancher icon and personal data snaffler. I expect them to run screaming in horror at the undocumented melange.
All it does, is the job I normally did from Monday to Friday. Nobody bothered me about my job on Saturday because it was obvious that, yeah, I wouldn't be in work on a Saturday.
The first time it popped out from beneath the company veil and met an actual user, I got a call on a Saturday. Because they wanted to use it NOW and couldn't log in, (A user error, not a program error - it worked as I intended). It got fixed anyway.
Eventually, when it filters out into the wider world, I'll get more calls. Asking me to fix the automation on Saturday - when the same people would've happily waited until monday morning for me to do the job.
I really didn't want to get into IT for a reason.
This is basically the market segment we pitch at in work.
Tough. Reliable. Functional. Efficient.
We're about 10-20% more expensive than the market bottom - which is basically none of these. And we're well below the market top. We get more work from the market top than bottom.
We refuse to go to the bottom because it's an utter hellhole down there. The only way anything actually succeeds down there is by having basically zero technical support, and selling things that have no chance of working in reality, but that sound really good on paper. They'll have FEATURES!! that sound good, but on the other hand when you utterly dig into the spec you realise how utterly shit the result is.
It's basically like the oak table from China.
We're in the position of having more people regret not buying from us, than who actually do buy from us because going with the cheaper competitor led to the whole thing breaking and failing to work - in the exact way we told them it would. But people are just caught up in the cufflinks of the salesman and the idea that they're getting a 'bargain'
You know what a Chinese Oak Table is, right?
It looks like Oak. It has texture. It has grain. It even feels like Oak to someone who doesn't really know what Oak is. It's fucking heavy too and resonates when you knock on it. And for a few weeks after you sit it in a kitchen it's happy and people love your new oak table until, one day, a few weeks in, you spill your tea on it.
And wiping the tea off, some of the painted on wood-grain comes off on the cloth too.
As time gooes by, the texture plastic surface that pretended to be oak grain starts to bubble and delaminate, revealing the mixture of wood-shavings and PVA glue beneath. And the lead blocks buried inside that gave it the sense of weight.
That's Chinese Oak. And the moment you realise you've bought Chinese Oak, you realise you've bought utter crap.
Linkedin is full of people like that. They look great on the surface. They make themselves look great on the surface. And Linkedin is the condensation of these people. It's where they all congregate to get noticed. That's their sole skill, because that's the only real skill that's required in the modern day environment. That's what actually gets you hired by HR.
Maybe I'm being bitter. But the only time I've ever had any sort of success with job interviews is where I spoke to the people who actually did the work, rather than the HR department.
Tired of driving?
Stressed out from all the traffic?
Take a Kalashnikov to the office today!
At least in spirit. Because this probably isn't the first time it's happened.
The hardest thing in work to do is put down the phone and let customers lie until the office is open. It might take two days. It takes a certain level of entitlement to expect an immediate response, RIGHT NOW when these operations might not have been able to do it. Being the person trying to answer now nearly led to burnout in work for me.
Because, you know, people do deserve to have lives. They might have sold you something, but giving them a hundred quid doesn't mean you own them.
And I've taken those calls. From people who're really pissed that slavery was outlawed so they just sort of treat anyone that's had the gall to charge them for a service as their own personal rental slave.
There've been plenty of times, and plenty of people, to whom I would love to have done something similar.
An yes. I'm sure I'll get modded troll for this. I don't care. I specifically recovered my account to say it. This sort of absolute customer entitlement in the modern era really pisses me off. Business is much easier for everyone when there's a level of mutual respect.
Did that in work to pay for a bit of software for the company website, since the vendor used paypal and the company credit account already had a paypal account associated with it - which was innaccessible for *reason that doesn't matter*.
Didn't realise the plugin would be tied to my personal email until after buying the bloody thing.
The problem with public transport is that it's full of the Public.
The problem with thinking independently means that when it all goes bollock-up, it's youre fault for ignoring best practice..... even when best practice is bollox.
People may know better, but honestly, would anyone take the risk?
My RX8 has a 'feature' that protects the engine from being overheated by being rev'd while not under load.
Conveniently it makes performing the high-idle part of most emissions tests impossible because the car forcibly cuts itself back to idle halfway through most tests.
Most car manufacturers are fiddling the books in some way.
Never said you were. And such is the way in small companies. You have to do work outside your specialty. That's part of the fun.
I honestly had no idea how it actually backed up, it was a function within the accounts application itself to generate the backup. Which it did, to a local disk. I then had an automatic scheduled upload of that backup to the server.
Ultimately, like I said, I'm not really an IT guy - I was the one with google and enough patience to fuck about until things worked again. We didn't have one. We did pay one company a hundred quid a month for a while in case something went TU, but we stopped paying him six months before the final death just to make the dead plane glide those few hundred yards further.
The most IT thing I've done is run a simple website off my own desktop at home, and maybe the whole make a datalogger work with remote internet access.
I wasn't the I guy either. I just had enough of a head to google shit that borked and try figure it out and make it work again.
The total cost was actually weet FA in numbers terms, but I think I put the final nail in the company's coffin.
My first 'job' was a jobbridge internship with a 'small' company. Small enough that I was literally person number three on the employee roster. The company worked in the renewable energy sector, and had been hammered pretty hard over the last few years by The Recession as domestic and corporate purse strings were pulled tighter and tighter.
I was taken as an Engineer, but rapidly found myself wearing a wide range of hats from Sales, to Customer Support, to System Design, to Project Management, web development in PHP, and finally, IT Support.
Because, one day, I managed to figure out why one of my colleagues couldn't log in to the server upstairs, and corrected the problem.
I will say, the Server was the problem.
It was a dinosaur. It was 14 years old - twice as old as the company - and had been bought second hand. It was a monstrous beige tower with a pentium II processor and God Knows What else inside. It ran Windows Server 2000, and was solely dedicated to serving the company accounts and acting as a networked file storage. Inside the case where four HDD's.... A pair of 9GB ones for the OS and programs, and a pair of 32GB ones for files. Both pairs were mirrored in RAID 1. It had a pair of lockable Zip disk drives still fitted though the keys long lost, along with a floppy drive and a CD Drive with no write ability. Or ability to read DVDs.
It creaked as it worked, then fumed, whuffed, whirred and occasionally burped. And it sat there, creaking away for years without thought or consideration to its well being or security. Until I came along.
By this stage, it was obvious the company was dying - the Titanic had hit the iceberg a long time ago, and everything that was happening was just a desperate attempt to bail it out. We might've slowed the sinking - from two months, out to six, even buying a full year - but the abyss of liquidation always loomed.
So, any suggestion of upgrading the server hardware was met by 'With What Money?'. At the same time, everybody knew the server was the lynchpin. If it broke, that was it - company gone. A suggestion that I use a spare computer from home was quietly discouraged - in case the company went under by surprise and someone decided to liquidate it to pay a creditor rather than give it back to me. Or we turned up to find the doors locked.
The best I could do was schedule a backup of the accounts and a few other critical systems, and have it go somewhere offsite. I asked our webhost if we could use our spare space for it, and they were happy to let it happen, provided we didn't cause them problems. So, I set it to run the backup every Sunday morning - 1am or so. Each successive backup would overwrite the previous because there just wasn't the spare space to hold two (No money to pay for it)
I figured even if the server went pop, or we had a building fire or some other catastrophe, at least those copies would survive. I'd figure out what to run them on afterwards.
Someone, somewhere, should see the potential problem in this. In my defence, I am not, nor ever was, an IT professional. The software education I have is more related to the engineering side of things - making machines and robotics work with a view towards industrial automation, rather than the maintenance and setup of IT infrastructure and data security.
I just did what I thought I could to keep the Titanic afloat.
So, one Monday morning, I come to the office and am met by shrill sound of metal screaming against metal and a high speed. There's a heart-in-mouth moment as I realise that it's coming from the server cabinet.
But, we have backups, I assured myself. The disks are mirrored in RAID 1, so if one drops out, the other should still be clean and working. If that fails, I've my own little backup too....
Unfortunately - that only works if the damaged disk decides to drop out of the array.
It didn't.
I find th
I did something a bit odd for my desktop, since I wanted a media system more than a gaming monster. It's a year old and is currently running an Apache on a Linux VM to host a website, among other things that've gone far beyond its original design brief. It'll even play Crysis. Well, Crysis 2. The A10 has really impressed me, - better than a crippled Intel and a budget graphics card anyway - and I'm curious to see what happens with the next the next FM2+ products
Fast RAM and an APU go well together. Even if the 7850k wasn't available when I built it.
APU: AMD A10-7700k
Motherboard.: MSI A88xm-E45
RAM: 8GB Kingston Hyper-X 2400Mhz
Cooler: Something that works
PSU: Corsair CX600M Modular
SSD: 128GH Samsung 240Evo
HDD: 1x320GB + 1x1TB salvaged from 'somewhere'
Case: Fractale Design 1000 USB3
BD-RW drive.
It's got basically 500 days of contant running on it. And only the ten year old HDD has ever given issues.
All the exhaust backpressure can either wedge them out of place, or cause the retaining springs to overheat and push the seal out of its groove. If it clips a port, that's game over.
The difference between a $300 cat, and a $1500 one is the $300 one will physically melt at the exhaust temperatures it'll be exposed to.
It's 1500 quid for a new one and it's emissions exempt, that's why not.
And a failed catalyst quickly causes failed seals.
As an RX8 owner, I'm probably responsible for at least half that total.
With the catalyst gone out the tailpipe it smells like a refinery fire going up the road. A very fast refinery fire.
Widely Employed by a brutal Imperialist power as it cuts a swathe across the world.
Is Comcast a real company, or just an Onion-like parody of one?
Really. The Eqyptians?
Surely there're countries that'll pay far more for this information than Egypt? And be able to do far more interesting things with it.
Sitting here, watching it, I'm reminded of how awesome the trailer was for Episode 1 a long time ago and the reaction it got.
Whichever one's left
Vivacious Velociraptor.
If they dont use V* Velociraptor I will personally wrrite a strongly worded letter deploring them for their utter lack of humour and sense of awesome.
The old business I interned with used a Windows 2000 server until December 2013 - when the business finally folded. The server outlasted the business that owned it - having been bought second hand sometime in 2006/07, already near 8 years old.
That server was a Pentium II machine, with a whopping 128Mb of RAM, a pair of 9GB disks in RAID 1 for the OS, and a pair of 32GB in RAID 1 for the data. It also came with a pair of lockable Zip-disk drives for which we'd long since lost the keys, an unmatched DvD-rom drive that was added sometime in the last decade.
And it kept plodding along right up until November 2013 when one of the Data disks failed and decided it wasn't going to drop out of the array - completely nuking the company's accounts folder on the mirror.
There were other reasons why the company failed - but I suppose having the accounts for the last 7 years smeared across the platter in a headcrash was just another nail in the coffin.
The Machine itself was still running when the business was shut down for good. It's probably still working now too, doing God Knows What for God Knows Who? It's built like a bloody tank and did exactly what was asked of it for 14 years.