Maybe I'm spoiled, but I've seen much bigger, denser datacenters. I have some pictures that I'm not suppose to have. This looked like a fairy tame facility, nothing I'd be impressed by.
Try Equinix Ashburn VA, Equinix Chicago, Level3 New York, One Wilshire Los Angeles, or a dozen others that I've been in that I don't feel like listing out right now. These pictures could have been out of any of dozens of mom and pop datacenters I've been in around the country. If you were standing in one section, and all you see is cages and densely stacked equipment in all directions, and 100 feet away there's a door that leads to the next section that's the same, followed by another door that leads to the same, then you're looking at a dense datacenter. If you look into a cage and just see an entire row of Cisco 8500's, that are feeding adjoining racks and cage space, plus transit fiber and in/out fiber, that's impressive. I was at InterNAP Seattle, which is a smaller facility, but the next cage space to the one I was working in was a row of maybe 15 racks, each stuffed with 40 1u SuperMicro servers. Behind that, 8 more rows exactly the same. Every one of them had drive and network lights blinking away. On the other side, across a row, 3 rows of 20 racks stuffed with Dell 1u servers. In the next room it was the same. In the next suite, WaMu sign decorated the doors, but secure access was required to get to through the door. Someone in the building told me they had toured the suite and it was floor to ceiling and wall to wall equipment. In a suite down the hall? Microsoft. They had a similar configuration. another suite down the hall, probably at least 10,000 sq/ft, they were building out new space for Microsoft. The building was shut down one day just so they could airlift air conditioners to the roof for the new space (I have YouTube video of part of the airlift).
In Los Angeles, I don't know who owned the space, but it was their laser printer room. They had blinds on the window (like, cheap residential blinds). I peeked through a gap and saw racks full of laser printers. It belonged to a bank, I just don't know which one. In the basement, heavily armed security escorted armored trucks in and out of a vehicle trap (double steel roll gates), so I never saw what was inside, and judging by the weaponry it was a bad choice to approach a guard while they were outside the gate. I kept my distance, and they didn't threaten me. That was just one floor.
One customer I knew of on another floor there started out with a dozen racks of 1u servers (stuffed 40u). Their hosting business grew. Then it grew more. I talked to them and they really knew what they were doing. A small staff that knew what they were doing, but a huge business, the perfect blend. Last time I was there, I walked the outside of their cage area and if I recall correctly, I gave up counting at a few hundred racks, each stuffed with 1u machines, except the occasional rack that held the redundant switches for that section.
If I had pictures of everything I've seen, that would make for an impressive display. Most facilities have strict "no recording devices of any sort" rules. No cameras, video recorders, cell phones with cameras, etc. It's probably fine to know that a huge hosting company is as big as they say, but what if you're told that you're hosting with a huge company, to find that their "datacenter" is just a rack at a mom and pop place, and their rack is populated by 1/2 dozen old desktop PC's stacked on each other? Intelligence gathered from a DC can be dangerous. Some places put stickers on with the hostname and IP of every unit. So, if Mr. Evil Hacker (not me, of course) knows X hosting has 4 xisco x500 routers and 8 xisco x590 switches, all labeled, and looking at the photos he can follow the cables through and sees that the routers at 1.2.3.4 and 1.2.3.5 (public IP's) are the only incoming connections so he start looking harder and fin
People are soft, squishy things that don't tend to shatter, except for the occasional hard bits inside.:) It would have been more like a 9mm gunshot wound (rough guess from the object in the picture). A bullet going straight through is going to leave a pretty small wound, while a bullet hitting a brick wall will leave a mark. Since bullets are lead, or copper jacketed lead, they squish more, and aren't traveling much over the speed of sound (depending on the load, caliber, and weapon). I'd guess this object was pretty hard, probably a piece of unobtainium from from an transdimensional intergalactic spacecraft. As a mental note, for those taking a spin in a transdimensional intergalactic spacecraft, make sure all the parts are properly secured.:) When traveling at c*12 before you do a dimensional slip to avoid a planetary body, it's always important to bring all your pieces with you.
Seriously though, since it wouldn't have (or obviously didn't) deform when striking him, it made a small entrance and exit wound, and hit the ground pretty hard. I don't quite get the 3" scar, unless it was at a really weird angle or the scar was from surgery when they were repairing the damage caused by it. I would expect it to be well over supersonic speeds just because of it's initial velocity. I don't know where they're getting the 30,000 mph from. It's probably forceably extracted from their rectum. I'm sure it had a tremendous entry velocity, since there's no way to guess at what forces had acted upon it prior to entering the atmosphere.
Here's some good pictures of two entrance and one exit wound from an accidental shooting with a.45 jacketed hollow point. (in the thigh, out the thigh, in the calf). And no, it's not me or anyone I know. I was just looking for pictures of entrance and exit wounds from firearms.
I'd reply with something intelligent, but you probably won't remember that you posted the original message. Now go take your Thorazine and stop calling me Billy.
I was really wondering that too. I didn't see it mentioned in the article. Did she look at a fecal sample in class (eww), or did she have a classmate stick something up her rectum to get it?:) Either way, it's not something I'd exactly expect to happen in a classroom.
Honestly, in any industry we all do that. I do IT work professionally, and work on friends and do a whole variety of other things (work on cars, fix houses), as well as light medical diagnostics almost always followed by "now go see the doctor."
Sometimes when you're closer to the subject, you collect more information and can give a better response. The girl in the article had a very intimate relationship with her patient (herself), so she spent lots of extra time on it, I'm sure.
I don't go to the doctor very often, usually because there's something really wrong that I can't treat, and I give a good educated rundown on what's wrong with me so they have a better chance at guessing. When I lived in Los Angeles, my ears had been ringing really badly. They've been ringing for a long time, but it had been almost unbearable for about 2 months. The doctor was a very nice guy, and he was honest. He told me, 99% of the time, patients can be sent off to specialists, spend lots of money, and still find that there's no discernible cause. I understood. He gave me a good look over anyways. He could see my eardrums were bulging because of pressure behind them, because my eustation tubes were blocked. I didn't show any other symptoms of being sick. We both had a good laugh about the air quality of Los Angeles, and then he gave me one prescription and two OTC recommendations. I was that 1% this time. The ringing settled back down to normal in a few days. I know they get irritated pretty easily, and it's kind of hit and miss when I fly. If I have any sort of upper respritory infection, it can be painful. Only once did I have an eardrum burst on a rapid descent. Now I only fly with pressure earplugs in.
The last time I was sick and went to the doctor, it's because I had to go. I couldn't breathe. When I woke up in the morning, it felt like I was drowning. I went in, told him the rundown of my symptoms with decent descriptions. He listened to my back, starting low, skipping to the middle, and then asked if I wanted prescriptions or to go straight to the hospital for pneumonia . He wrote me a stack of prescriptions that would make a druggie drool, and I was spitting out phlegm for the next two days. Not just a little. Entire mouthfuls every time. It was really disgusting, but I was happy I could breathe. I had already diagnosed myself, I just knew I couldn't get the right drugs OTC and I was running a risk of dying if I didn't get treatment. Statistically, he knew just about every patient with those symptoms needed those drugs to solve their problem, so there's no harm in that. Now the one patient that comes in with pneumonia symptoms and is actually suffering from lung cancer and didn't know, that's a bad thing. Should every patient be tested for every possible thing? Only if they're rich.:)
Hmmm. Airport on an island, that's prime for real estate development. The mayor decides to take it upon himself to shut it down. Ya, I smell well greased wheels.:)
Oh, the day I walked in, I was 100% professional hardcore IT guru. My manager was aware of my history, and gave me BS work for the first two weeks. A note to the CEO (she had requested updates) spelled out what I could do.
They were inflexible about almost everything. Problems existed from running unpatched OS's that were 10 years old, with ancient versions of everything. They continually ran into critical problems where even the vendors said "that was fixed in the next version, 8 years ago. Upgrade already.". They refused, and kept chasing problems that were unsolvable by any of their approaches.
Security was a joke. Live machines were exploited. There were even two machines in production with the only Linux virus I'd ever seen. I noticed it, found the fix, demonstrated the fix on a clone of the machine in-house (which I intentionally infected to disinfect), and it was at least 5 months later when they assigned someone else to research the problem. Research? I gave a clear concise "This is the problem, this is the solution."
The tip jar was very much tongue in cheek. I worked on everyone's problems, unless they were complete asses and their problem was clearly not in line with the business needs.
I left there for several months and then went back. Nothing had improved, but when I returned I was more business and less fun. Absolutely everyone in the company hated their jobs, and they all weren't sure if they were going to have a chance to quit before they were fired. Since the job market has sucked so bad for a while now, quitting hasn't been a very good option. Honestly, everyone would bitch to me about the work environment, how unprofessional it was (business and procedure wise, not office humor wise), yet management wouldn't do anything at all about it.
What would you do if 75% of your network was running RedHat 6.2, unpatched, as installed from the original CD? What if a critical issue lingered for years, and the fix was to pray and ignore it? Developers were ignored. QA was ignored. Even something that the developers and QA said was terrible and shouldn't be deployed because of strict legacy requirements that were unreasonable, was deployed. The customers hated us, but had invested so much in us that they weren't willing to go elsewhere. The whole company had more meetings than anything. The meetings were worthless circle jerks. There wasn't even ego fluff. They were vague concepts (I want a web site) with very little if any structure. Those who were experienced in particular areas (including myself) were ignored and pushed off to other tasks. For the last several months, I was doing PHP development. I'm a Linux SysAdmin. I make servers spin like perpetual motion tops. I was rewriting horrible PHP code for non-paying clients. Sometimes I'd be asked "Why did this break" (something outside of my control), and I'd explain in brief summary then explicit details. Obviously I was wrong, and they'd go find someone else who would "look into it" and never come up with a solution.
Really, if someone asked me to do something, I'd ask for the sufficient details. Sometimes that delayed them by 30 seconds, or months. People were shuffled between departments. SysAdmins were excluded from essential information, and left to wonder how things worked. There was only one SysAdmin, who was promoted(?) to another department, and he was the only one with sufficient access to manage the mail server.
I'm sure there are a few greased wheels in his history, but at least he hides it well. It's not like he started a war, and then hired his buddies to handle all the rebuilding with billions of dollars of contracts that were paid upon but not completed properly. Oh, I could go on, but the news has been covering it pretty well for years.
Sorry friend, I'm a born and raised American, several generations of Americans, with European heritage. I'm well versed in both domestic and international business and politics.
If you don't see it happening personally, pick up a newspaper, or read the news. If you read between the lines, you'll see this kind of stuff happening all the time.
The only exception that I've seen lately is the Obama administration, where I haven't seen such evidence of corruption. That's not to say it isn't or won't happen, it just isn't apparent at this time.
I have several. For some reason, at my last job we were all required to sign a paper saying we wouldn't bring our guns into work. I never did, nor threatened to, but hey, whatever. I only ever bring a gun on company property when requested to. It's happened twice ever, and I didn't need to pull it either time. When you have a crazy guy with a grudge call and say "I'm going to kill you all", its encouragement to get the guy with the guns to carry. It's one thing to have a slightly off SysAdmin with a concealed weapons permit owns large caliber handguns. People get nervous. But, they're more nervous when someone threatens them, and suddenly a danger becomes an asset. Who else can you tell "Hey, bring your gun to work, but keep it concealed and don't tell anyone else you have it." When you don't carry every day, it's a weird feeling to have a loaded and chambered 45 in your back holster. I find it much easier to conceal in a back holster under a loose shirt, rather than in a hip or shoulder holster.
Telling the stories of whats happened seemed to please most people at other jobs. They know I won't go postal, but the do know they're protected if they thing someone might. Then again, that makes me target #1 for the person going postal. Maybe I should carry more often. I was asked to show I wasn't carrying a few times at my last job though.
You know, I actually see that a lot (the account references). At my last job, our account guy loved me, because he knew I'd be detailed with anything I did. Explanations started with layman's terms, and went straight through technical. He wanted to know every piece of equipment deployed, so I told him every piece I knew about, with serial numbers. For the mystery machines, we went through his lists item by item, and found the missing machines, or machines that were mis-entered somewhere along the line. Some vendors were careless with serial numbers, and would use some other number on the equipment as the "serial".
My expense reports included every receipt and line items for everything. I apologized once, because out of something like 40 receipts on a business trip, one for something insignificant got misplaced. I was upset because my records weren't perfect. He was pleased that I wanted them to be right.
At an older employer, I was on a two month out of country job. I had every receipt, and turned in weekly reports on my spending in both local currency and American dollars. There was a certain level of trust there. Even though I had everything, I was reimbursed directly to my bank account, and handed him my receipt envelope when I returned home. I was making really good money then, so there were a lot of things I didn't report as an expense, like gas for the rental car and meals. I just wanted the high dollar things taken care of (2 months in a hotel, flights, 2 months in a rental car). I took care of business for them, and they took care of me. When I arrived in the country, I had no local currency, so I was handed the equivalent of $500 USD by our local guy. They knew that was less than I'd have as unreported expenses, so no one cared. The folks at the hotel must have thought I was nuts. I bought a small set of plates and silverware, and cooked most of my food in the microwave in the room. Housekeeping was given instructions not to wake me if the DND was on the door, because it was because I was up all night and was exhausted. Every time they came in, they found my dishes washed and drying by the bathroom sink, and my mostly organized desk. All they had to do was give me clean sheets and towels every few days. I was the perfect hotel guest.:)
You haven't been in the world long, have you? Bribery is the way things work. It works from the lowest levels with "performance bonuses" to the highest levels where an envelope stuffed with hundreds help grease the wheels to get your policy enacted.
Or as I prefer to say, "Cash bribes work best". You can take me out for wine, women, and song, but cash will buy me what I want, when I want it.
My insulation came in the form of paper trails. Most of his requests were verbal. All of my requests were via email, which I stored copies on my personal laptop. Daily "I need more information" emails, and daily verbal "I'll get it for you later" responses.
I was being set up. I knew it from the first day I was handed that. Shit hit the fan, and I had a magic shield protecting me from the splatter. Actually, when I was completed and it was refused because it wasn't on CD's with a printed manual, I spelled out that I had a paper trail, and I wasn't going to take the fall for his incompetence.
They found another excuse to can me a few weeks later. I was sick. Home, with a fever and a migraine where I couldn't see straight, I notified them a few minutes late. I was handed my walking papers that Friday. I left with a big smile on my face, which drove him absolutely nuts.:) I wanted an excuse to get busy on my own business, that would actually be run by professionals (myself and an excellent trained and practiced corporate officer). I know IT. He knows business. He won't question my IT decisions, and I don't question his business decisions.
Ever wonder what happens when you hook the handset of a phone to the mains? Not just the 120VAC at the desk. The main before the transformer. It makes a cool noise which overwhelms the screams very nicely. Kinda like lightning just before the thud. It does make an awful smell though, so I don't recommend doing it to anyone too close to your office.
And people wondered why there were signs posted throughout the office explaining how to dial 911 from the PBX.:)
It was the way to "encourage" non-priority stuff away. Most people in the office looked at it as a joke, but they knew we were way under paid, so a few bucks here and there helped. I only went to work there because my previous job had been outsourced, so I needed at least some sort of income. It didn't save my house, which was foreclosed on because I couldn't find a job anywhere near my old pay range. They played along, and would drop a few bucks in here and there, which was split between all the techs on occasion. They bribed us, we did their work a little faster. The people who laughed, wouldn't pay, and were demanding were always the ones that had their own personal "priority" which didn't line up with the company needs. Rather than spend a few minutes explaining to them that their priority wasn't a company priority (that speech was given several times, with blank stares and then the repeated demands), we simply told them "no tips, no priority service", which shut them up.
Between the techs, we could eat a free lunch at the cafe once in a while. It's not like it was a money making venture.
But since you obviously have no sense of humor, I'm glad I don't work for you. You're probably the guy who under budgets and over works every project, and then blames everyone else for not getting it done in time.
3x the required time? If it would take a few hours, I said it would take 2 weeks. Then the unreasonable requests come in. "I need this done now, how long will it take", without sufficient details to even guess at how long it would take. People don't like the answer "I have no idea, you haven't told me enough. Give me some details, and I can give you an estimate." I never got the details, but the expectation of "now" still applied.
They always ended up at the bottom of the pile, just after flirting with girls in the smoking lounge. Ah, who am I lying to, flirting with girls was way up on the list.
If someone laughed at the tip jar and didn't drop in cash, their request went to the bottom of the pile.
If I heard change hit the jar, they were just above the other.
People got smart. If they had something that needed to be done immediately, they'd show me the cash, and I'd watch them put it in. Priority was dictated by the size of the tip. And, for those who saw my shooting range target hanging on the wall by my desk, they knew better than to pull the money back out once it went in. You can run, it just gives me time to aim.:)
I was once anonymously tipped with two airline bottles of tequila. I wish I knew who did it, they would have gotten better service for a while. It's one thing to tip me cash. It's another to bring my liquid lunch to me.:) I had a sneaky suspicion who did it, and she was always nice to me, so she got good service anyways.:) I did get informally warned about it, but all I could say was "I didn't put it there, you'll have to find who did it."
Stand over me, laugh at the tip jar, and demand it get done now? Sorry, I won't be able to get to this until next week. I have other priorities that have to get done first (like checking my personal email, reading Slashdot, taking an extended smoke break, and maybe a nap).
The last place I was at, I was driven absolutely nuts with incomplete trouble tickets by people who had no clue what they wanted.
"I want an FTP account for a user in [city]."
So I'd reply, give me a hint of which server, what username, what password, and why you're requesting this. Each server had dozens of machines.
I had written up a very clear and concise list of what was expected in a ticket. That was overridden by middle management as unnecessary.
"Can you search the Apache logs for [customer]?" That would be a customer who had a presence in several cities, and each one had several sites. No hint of what was being searched for, the date(s) to search, what server, what city, or anything more than the customer.
And my favorite. "We need this project documented. You have 2 weeks.". That's it, no more real explanation. I'd never worked on the project. Had been categorically excluded from the project. Was not allowed to know anything about the project, and suddenly I was to recreate the project (document building each and every custom app from source), which the steps weren't documented and only vague ideas were given about any of it. I asked for information. I begged for information. I was told "This has to be done or the company won't be paid for the project." One week went by and finally information started trickling in. The last day of week 2, I had everything I needed (at like 5pm on Friday). I wrote up a 20 page document, included both sources and compiled versions, with an explanation of how things worked to the best of my understanding. I made ISO images, and put them on an internal server so the requestor could get them either that night, or Monday morning.
"What were you thinking? Why would you make ISOs. I wanted it exactly as we'd ship to the customer." Ahhh, well beyond spec, but reading minds was part of the job, right? I can read minds, and theirs are drawing a blank most days.
So I burnt the CD's, printed the document, put it in a FedEx envelope with a bogus shipping label, and put it in the managers chair, like it had just come in. He sat on it for two more weeks before handing it off to someone else in house to "test". A month later, he hadn't finished testing. Another week later I was told "You didn't include instructions on...." No shit, I didn't know anything about..... No one told me about..... You're only coming to me now to tell me..... exists. Why wasn't I told about this when I started, so I could complete your request. The truth? Because they don't know what they want, what any other middle manager has had someone do, or even what other departments are doing. Countless meetings all day long, and no one has a clue.
What happens when "middle management" applies to everyone from the CEO down to the managers?
Don't answer that. It was sarcastic. They'd fire me for it, but I was already fired. Now I have all the time in the world to work on my BOFH-isms.:)
"Hello BSA? What's the payout on an anonymous tip these days?"
"Hello DHS? What's the payout on an anonymous tip these days?"
"Hello IRS? What's the payout on an anonymous tip these days?"
"Hello FTC? What's the payout on an anonymous tip these days?"
Ahhh, we see a running trend. And one previous employer was worried about direct retaliation, either through DoS attacks, or a sniper posted within a mile of their front door (the sniper being me). I had more fun doing absolutely NOTHING to them. They were so worried about what I *could* do that they drove themselves nuts looking for my back doors, monitoring for my attacks, and watching for me behind every corner. I didn't even know this first hand. Word got back to me from other people over the years.:)
And for the record, I don't believe in back doors, because they could be a security hole while I'm there. A DoS attack just isn't worth my time. They'll always screw something up on their own, I don't have to help it along in the least. I don't believe in jail time either, so physical violence is out unless they provoke it. (i.e., show up to my house with a gun drawn, and see how long you last.)
Sometimes the best revenge is to do absolutely nothing at all. It'll leave them wondering what I'll do for years to come.:)
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Maybe I'm spoiled, but I've seen much bigger, denser datacenters. I have some pictures that I'm not suppose to have. This looked like a fairy tame facility, nothing I'd be impressed by.
Try Equinix Ashburn VA, Equinix Chicago, Level3 New York, One Wilshire Los Angeles, or a dozen others that I've been in that I don't feel like listing out right now. These pictures could have been out of any of dozens of mom and pop datacenters I've been in around the country. If you were standing in one section, and all you see is cages and densely stacked equipment in all directions, and 100 feet away there's a door that leads to the next section that's the same, followed by another door that leads to the same, then you're looking at a dense datacenter. If you look into a cage and just see an entire row of Cisco 8500's, that are feeding adjoining racks and cage space, plus transit fiber and in/out fiber, that's impressive. I was at InterNAP Seattle, which is a smaller facility, but the next cage space to the one I was working in was a row of maybe 15 racks, each stuffed with 40 1u SuperMicro servers. Behind that, 8 more rows exactly the same. Every one of them had drive and network lights blinking away. On the other side, across a row, 3 rows of 20 racks stuffed with Dell 1u servers. In the next room it was the same. In the next suite, WaMu sign decorated the doors, but secure access was required to get to through the door. Someone in the building told me they had toured the suite and it was floor to ceiling and wall to wall equipment. In a suite down the hall? Microsoft. They had a similar configuration. another suite down the hall, probably at least 10,000 sq/ft, they were building out new space for Microsoft. The building was shut down one day just so they could airlift air conditioners to the roof for the new space (I have YouTube video of part of the airlift).
In Los Angeles, I don't know who owned the space, but it was their laser printer room. They had blinds on the window (like, cheap residential blinds). I peeked through a gap and saw racks full of laser printers. It belonged to a bank, I just don't know which one. In the basement, heavily armed security escorted armored trucks in and out of a vehicle trap (double steel roll gates), so I never saw what was inside, and judging by the weaponry it was a bad choice to approach a guard while they were outside the gate. I kept my distance, and they didn't threaten me. That was just one floor.
One customer I knew of on another floor there started out with a dozen racks of 1u servers (stuffed 40u). Their hosting business grew. Then it grew more. I talked to them and they really knew what they were doing. A small staff that knew what they were doing, but a huge business, the perfect blend. Last time I was there, I walked the outside of their cage area and if I recall correctly, I gave up counting at a few hundred racks, each stuffed with 1u machines, except the occasional rack that held the redundant switches for that section.
If I had pictures of everything I've seen, that would make for an impressive display. Most facilities have strict "no recording devices of any sort" rules. No cameras, video recorders, cell phones with cameras, etc. It's probably fine to know that a huge hosting company is as big as they say, but what if you're told that you're hosting with a huge company, to find that their "datacenter" is just a rack at a mom and pop place, and their rack is populated by 1/2 dozen old desktop PC's stacked on each other? Intelligence gathered from a DC can be dangerous. Some places put stickers on with the hostname and IP of every unit. So, if Mr. Evil Hacker (not me, of course) knows X hosting has 4 xisco x500 routers and 8 xisco x590 switches, all labeled, and looking at the photos he can follow the cables through and sees that the routers at 1.2.3.4 and 1.2.3.5 (public IP's) are the only incoming connections so he start looking harder and fin
People are soft, squishy things that don't tend to shatter, except for the occasional hard bits inside. :) It would have been more like a 9mm gunshot wound (rough guess from the object in the picture). A bullet going straight through is going to leave a pretty small wound, while a bullet hitting a brick wall will leave a mark. Since bullets are lead, or copper jacketed lead, they squish more, and aren't traveling much over the speed of sound (depending on the load, caliber, and weapon). I'd guess this object was pretty hard, probably a piece of unobtainium from from an transdimensional intergalactic spacecraft. As a mental note, for those taking a spin in a transdimensional intergalactic spacecraft, make sure all the parts are properly secured. :) When traveling at c*12 before you do a dimensional slip to avoid a planetary body, it's always important to bring all your pieces with you.
Seriously though, since it wouldn't have (or obviously didn't) deform when striking him, it made a small entrance and exit wound, and hit the ground pretty hard. I don't quite get the 3" scar, unless it was at a really weird angle or the scar was from surgery when they were repairing the damage caused by it. I would expect it to be well over supersonic speeds just because of it's initial velocity. I don't know where they're getting the 30,000 mph from. It's probably forceably extracted from their rectum. I'm sure it had a tremendous entry velocity, since there's no way to guess at what forces had acted upon it prior to entering the atmosphere.
Here's some good pictures of two entrance and one exit wound from an accidental shooting with a .45 jacketed hollow point. (in the thigh, out the thigh, in the calf). And no, it's not me or anyone I know. I was just looking for pictures of entrance and exit wounds from firearms.
I'd reply with something intelligent, but you probably won't remember that you posted the original message. Now go take your Thorazine and stop calling me Billy.
I was really wondering that too. I didn't see it mentioned in the article. Did she look at a fecal sample in class (eww), or did she have a classmate stick something up her rectum to get it? :) Either way, it's not something I'd exactly expect to happen in a classroom.
Doc,
Honestly, in any industry we all do that. I do IT work professionally, and work on friends and do a whole variety of other things (work on cars, fix houses), as well as light medical diagnostics almost always followed by "now go see the doctor."
Sometimes when you're closer to the subject, you collect more information and can give a better response. The girl in the article had a very intimate relationship with her patient (herself), so she spent lots of extra time on it, I'm sure.
I don't go to the doctor very often, usually because there's something really wrong that I can't treat, and I give a good educated rundown on what's wrong with me so they have a better chance at guessing. When I lived in Los Angeles, my ears had been ringing really badly. They've been ringing for a long time, but it had been almost unbearable for about 2 months. The doctor was a very nice guy, and he was honest. He told me, 99% of the time, patients can be sent off to specialists, spend lots of money, and still find that there's no discernible cause. I understood. He gave me a good look over anyways. He could see my eardrums were bulging because of pressure behind them, because my eustation tubes were blocked. I didn't show any other symptoms of being sick. We both had a good laugh about the air quality of Los Angeles, and then he gave me one prescription and two OTC recommendations. I was that 1% this time. The ringing settled back down to normal in a few days. I know they get irritated pretty easily, and it's kind of hit and miss when I fly. If I have any sort of upper respritory infection, it can be painful. Only once did I have an eardrum burst on a rapid descent. Now I only fly with pressure earplugs in.
The last time I was sick and went to the doctor, it's because I had to go. I couldn't breathe. When I woke up in the morning, it felt like I was drowning. I went in, told him the rundown of my symptoms with decent descriptions. He listened to my back, starting low, skipping to the middle, and then asked if I wanted prescriptions or to go straight to the hospital for pneumonia . He wrote me a stack of prescriptions that would make a druggie drool, and I was spitting out phlegm for the next two days. Not just a little. Entire mouthfuls every time. It was really disgusting, but I was happy I could breathe. I had already diagnosed myself, I just knew I couldn't get the right drugs OTC and I was running a risk of dying if I didn't get treatment. Statistically, he knew just about every patient with those symptoms needed those drugs to solve their problem, so there's no harm in that. Now the one patient that comes in with pneumonia symptoms and is actually suffering from lung cancer and didn't know, that's a bad thing. Should every patient be tested for every possible thing? Only if they're rich. :)
Hmmm. Airport on an island, that's prime for real estate development. The mayor decides to take it upon himself to shut it down. Ya, I smell well greased wheels. :)
Oh, the day I walked in, I was 100% professional hardcore IT guru. My manager was aware of my history, and gave me BS work for the first two weeks. A note to the CEO (she had requested updates) spelled out what I could do.
They were inflexible about almost everything. Problems existed from running unpatched OS's that were 10 years old, with ancient versions of everything. They continually ran into critical problems where even the vendors said "that was fixed in the next version, 8 years ago. Upgrade already.". They refused, and kept chasing problems that were unsolvable by any of their approaches.
Security was a joke. Live machines were exploited. There were even two machines in production with the only Linux virus I'd ever seen. I noticed it, found the fix, demonstrated the fix on a clone of the machine in-house (which I intentionally infected to disinfect), and it was at least 5 months later when they assigned someone else to research the problem. Research? I gave a clear concise "This is the problem, this is the solution."
The tip jar was very much tongue in cheek. I worked on everyone's problems, unless they were complete asses and their problem was clearly not in line with the business needs.
I left there for several months and then went back. Nothing had improved, but when I returned I was more business and less fun. Absolutely everyone in the company hated their jobs, and they all weren't sure if they were going to have a chance to quit before they were fired. Since the job market has sucked so bad for a while now, quitting hasn't been a very good option. Honestly, everyone would bitch to me about the work environment, how unprofessional it was (business and procedure wise, not office humor wise), yet management wouldn't do anything at all about it.
What would you do if 75% of your network was running RedHat 6.2, unpatched, as installed from the original CD? What if a critical issue lingered for years, and the fix was to pray and ignore it? Developers were ignored. QA was ignored. Even something that the developers and QA said was terrible and shouldn't be deployed because of strict legacy requirements that were unreasonable, was deployed. The customers hated us, but had invested so much in us that they weren't willing to go elsewhere. The whole company had more meetings than anything. The meetings were worthless circle jerks. There wasn't even ego fluff. They were vague concepts (I want a web site) with very little if any structure. Those who were experienced in particular areas (including myself) were ignored and pushed off to other tasks. For the last several months, I was doing PHP development. I'm a Linux SysAdmin. I make servers spin like perpetual motion tops. I was rewriting horrible PHP code for non-paying clients. Sometimes I'd be asked "Why did this break" (something outside of my control), and I'd explain in brief summary then explicit details. Obviously I was wrong, and they'd go find someone else who would "look into it" and never come up with a solution.
Really, if someone asked me to do something, I'd ask for the sufficient details. Sometimes that delayed them by 30 seconds, or months. People were shuffled between departments. SysAdmins were excluded from essential information, and left to wonder how things worked. There was only one SysAdmin, who was promoted(?) to another department, and he was the only one with sufficient access to manage the mail server.
So, I'm glad I'm not there.
I've never heard about this one. Can you post a link to a news story on it?
I'm sure there are a few greased wheels in his history, but at least he hides it well. It's not like he started a war, and then hired his buddies to handle all the rebuilding with billions of dollars of contracts that were paid upon but not completed properly. Oh, I could go on, but the news has been covering it pretty well for years.
Don't worry too much about that.
[tappity][tappity]
They won't be modding people down much for a while.
[tappity][tappity]
And my pub tab is now paid off too. So nice of the moderators to assist. Ahhh, and it's just about lunch time.
Sorry friend, I'm a born and raised American, several generations of Americans, with European heritage. I'm well versed in both domestic and international business and politics.
If you don't see it happening personally, pick up a newspaper, or read the news. If you read between the lines, you'll see this kind of stuff happening all the time.
The only exception that I've seen lately is the Obama administration, where I haven't seen such evidence of corruption. That's not to say it isn't or won't happen, it just isn't apparent at this time.
I have several. For some reason, at my last job we were all required to sign a paper saying we wouldn't bring our guns into work. I never did, nor threatened to, but hey, whatever. I only ever bring a gun on company property when requested to. It's happened twice ever, and I didn't need to pull it either time. When you have a crazy guy with a grudge call and say "I'm going to kill you all", its encouragement to get the guy with the guns to carry. It's one thing to have a slightly off SysAdmin with a concealed weapons permit owns large caliber handguns. People get nervous. But, they're more nervous when someone threatens them, and suddenly a danger becomes an asset. Who else can you tell "Hey, bring your gun to work, but keep it concealed and don't tell anyone else you have it." When you don't carry every day, it's a weird feeling to have a loaded and chambered 45 in your back holster. I find it much easier to conceal in a back holster under a loose shirt, rather than in a hip or shoulder holster.
Telling the stories of whats happened seemed to please most people at other jobs. They know I won't go postal, but the do know they're protected if they thing someone might. Then again, that makes me target #1 for the person going postal. Maybe I should carry more often. I was asked to show I wasn't carrying a few times at my last job though.
You know, I actually see that a lot (the account references). At my last job, our account guy loved me, because he knew I'd be detailed with anything I did. Explanations started with layman's terms, and went straight through technical. He wanted to know every piece of equipment deployed, so I told him every piece I knew about, with serial numbers. For the mystery machines, we went through his lists item by item, and found the missing machines, or machines that were mis-entered somewhere along the line. Some vendors were careless with serial numbers, and would use some other number on the equipment as the "serial".
My expense reports included every receipt and line items for everything. I apologized once, because out of something like 40 receipts on a business trip, one for something insignificant got misplaced. I was upset because my records weren't perfect. He was pleased that I wanted them to be right.
At an older employer, I was on a two month out of country job. I had every receipt, and turned in weekly reports on my spending in both local currency and American dollars. There was a certain level of trust there. Even though I had everything, I was reimbursed directly to my bank account, and handed him my receipt envelope when I returned home. I was making really good money then, so there were a lot of things I didn't report as an expense, like gas for the rental car and meals. I just wanted the high dollar things taken care of (2 months in a hotel, flights, 2 months in a rental car). I took care of business for them, and they took care of me. When I arrived in the country, I had no local currency, so I was handed the equivalent of $500 USD by our local guy. They knew that was less than I'd have as unreported expenses, so no one cared. The folks at the hotel must have thought I was nuts. I bought a small set of plates and silverware, and cooked most of my food in the microwave in the room. Housekeeping was given instructions not to wake me if the DND was on the door, because it was because I was up all night and was exhausted. Every time they came in, they found my dishes washed and drying by the bathroom sink, and my mostly organized desk. All they had to do was give me clean sheets and towels every few days. I was the perfect hotel guest. :)
Famous quotes.
"Why yes, that is kitty litter, and no, that isn't a candybar."
Been there. Done that. User still has my hand print on the back of his head.
You haven't been in the world long, have you? Bribery is the way things work. It works from the lowest levels with "performance bonuses" to the highest levels where an envelope stuffed with hundreds help grease the wheels to get your policy enacted.
Or as I prefer to say, "Cash bribes work best". You can take me out for wine, women, and song, but cash will buy me what I want, when I want it.
My insulation came in the form of paper trails. Most of his requests were verbal. All of my requests were via email, which I stored copies on my personal laptop. Daily "I need more information" emails, and daily verbal "I'll get it for you later" responses.
I was being set up. I knew it from the first day I was handed that. Shit hit the fan, and I had a magic shield protecting me from the splatter. Actually, when I was completed and it was refused because it wasn't on CD's with a printed manual, I spelled out that I had a paper trail, and I wasn't going to take the fall for his incompetence.
They found another excuse to can me a few weeks later. I was sick. Home, with a fever and a migraine where I couldn't see straight, I notified them a few minutes late. I was handed my walking papers that Friday. I left with a big smile on my face, which drove him absolutely nuts. :) I wanted an excuse to get busy on my own business, that would actually be run by professionals (myself and an excellent trained and practiced corporate officer). I know IT. He knows business. He won't question my IT decisions, and I don't question his business decisions.
Oh, my mistake. I teach what I know.
Ever wonder what happens when you hook the handset of a phone to the mains? Not just the 120VAC at the desk. The main before the transformer. It makes a cool noise which overwhelms the screams very nicely. Kinda like lightning just before the thud. It does make an awful smell though, so I don't recommend doing it to anyone too close to your office.
And people wondered why there were signs posted throughout the office explaining how to dial 911 from the PBX. :)
1) Thank you, I take that as a complement. :)
2) You aren't the first to tell me so.
Would you like a tour of our server room? Be careful of the loose floor tiles. :)
It was the way to "encourage" non-priority stuff away. Most people in the office looked at it as a joke, but they knew we were way under paid, so a few bucks here and there helped. I only went to work there because my previous job had been outsourced, so I needed at least some sort of income. It didn't save my house, which was foreclosed on because I couldn't find a job anywhere near my old pay range. They played along, and would drop a few bucks in here and there, which was split between all the techs on occasion. They bribed us, we did their work a little faster. The people who laughed, wouldn't pay, and were demanding were always the ones that had their own personal "priority" which didn't line up with the company needs. Rather than spend a few minutes explaining to them that their priority wasn't a company priority (that speech was given several times, with blank stares and then the repeated demands), we simply told them "no tips, no priority service", which shut them up.
Between the techs, we could eat a free lunch at the cafe once in a while. It's not like it was a money making venture.
But since you obviously have no sense of humor, I'm glad I don't work for you. You're probably the guy who under budgets and over works every project, and then blames everyone else for not getting it done in time.
How about a dead fish in the back of one of their under-desk file drawers?
Or in the air duct blowing down on their desk?
Don't underestimate the power of rotting meat to regain respect.
Be sure to come in early, and smear some of the rotting meat juice on their keyboard, and migrate some maggots there.
Then there's always a live wire accidentally connected to their chair. In one butt cheek, out the other, is always a good way to liven up the day. :)
3x the required time? If it would take a few hours, I said it would take 2 weeks. Then the unreasonable requests come in. "I need this done now, how long will it take", without sufficient details to even guess at how long it would take. People don't like the answer "I have no idea, you haven't told me enough. Give me some details, and I can give you an estimate." I never got the details, but the expectation of "now" still applied.
They always ended up at the bottom of the pile, just after flirting with girls in the smoking lounge. Ah, who am I lying to, flirting with girls was way up on the list.
I had a system for this. It was a tip jar.
If someone laughed at the tip jar and didn't drop in cash, their request went to the bottom of the pile.
If I heard change hit the jar, they were just above the other.
People got smart. If they had something that needed to be done immediately, they'd show me the cash, and I'd watch them put it in. Priority was dictated by the size of the tip. And, for those who saw my shooting range target hanging on the wall by my desk, they knew better than to pull the money back out once it went in. You can run, it just gives me time to aim. :)
I was once anonymously tipped with two airline bottles of tequila. I wish I knew who did it, they would have gotten better service for a while. It's one thing to tip me cash. It's another to bring my liquid lunch to me. :) I had a sneaky suspicion who did it, and she was always nice to me, so she got good service anyways. :) I did get informally warned about it, but all I could say was "I didn't put it there, you'll have to find who did it."
Stand over me, laugh at the tip jar, and demand it get done now? Sorry, I won't be able to get to this until next week. I have other priorities that have to get done first (like checking my personal email, reading Slashdot, taking an extended smoke break, and maybe a nap).
The last place I was at, I was driven absolutely nuts with incomplete trouble tickets by people who had no clue what they wanted.
"I want an FTP account for a user in [city]."
So I'd reply, give me a hint of which server, what username, what password, and why you're requesting this. Each server had dozens of machines.
I had written up a very clear and concise list of what was expected in a ticket. That was overridden by middle management as unnecessary.
"Can you search the Apache logs for [customer]?" That would be a customer who had a presence in several cities, and each one had several sites. No hint of what was being searched for, the date(s) to search, what server, what city, or anything more than the customer.
And my favorite. "We need this project documented. You have 2 weeks.". That's it, no more real explanation. I'd never worked on the project. Had been categorically excluded from the project. Was not allowed to know anything about the project, and suddenly I was to recreate the project (document building each and every custom app from source), which the steps weren't documented and only vague ideas were given about any of it. I asked for information. I begged for information. I was told "This has to be done or the company won't be paid for the project." One week went by and finally information started trickling in. The last day of week 2, I had everything I needed (at like 5pm on Friday). I wrote up a 20 page document, included both sources and compiled versions, with an explanation of how things worked to the best of my understanding. I made ISO images, and put them on an internal server so the requestor could get them either that night, or Monday morning.
"What were you thinking? Why would you make ISOs. I wanted it exactly as we'd ship to the customer." Ahhh, well beyond spec, but reading minds was part of the job, right? I can read minds, and theirs are drawing a blank most days.
So I burnt the CD's, printed the document, put it in a FedEx envelope with a bogus shipping label, and put it in the managers chair, like it had just come in. He sat on it for two more weeks before handing it off to someone else in house to "test". A month later, he hadn't finished testing. Another week later I was told "You didn't include instructions on ...." No shit, I didn't know anything about ..... No one told me about ..... You're only coming to me now to tell me ..... exists. Why wasn't I told about this when I started, so I could complete your request. The truth? Because they don't know what they want, what any other middle manager has had someone do, or even what other departments are doing. Countless meetings all day long, and no one has a clue.
Am I ranting?
What happens when "middle management" applies to everyone from the CEO down to the managers?
Don't answer that. It was sarcastic. They'd fire me for it, but I was already fired. Now I have all the time in the world to work on my BOFH-isms. :)
"Hello BSA? What's the payout on an anonymous tip these days?"
"Hello DHS? What's the payout on an anonymous tip these days?"
"Hello IRS? What's the payout on an anonymous tip these days?"
"Hello FTC? What's the payout on an anonymous tip these days?"
Ahhh, we see a running trend. And one previous employer was worried about direct retaliation, either through DoS attacks, or a sniper posted within a mile of their front door (the sniper being me). I had more fun doing absolutely NOTHING to them. They were so worried about what I *could* do that they drove themselves nuts looking for my back doors, monitoring for my attacks, and watching for me behind every corner. I didn't even know this first hand. Word got back to me from other people over the years. :)
And for the record, I don't believe in back doors, because they could be a security hole while I'm there. A DoS attack just isn't worth my time. They'll always screw something up on their own, I don't have to help it along in the least. I don't believe in jail time either, so physical violence is out unless they provoke it. (i.e., show up to my house with a gun drawn, and see how long you last.)
Sometimes the best revenge is to do absolutely nothing at all. It'll leave them wondering what I'll do for years to come. :)