We have a whole department full of duct tape developers, writing Business Objects reports and other BI-type code. They can't write efficient database queries to save their asses. As one of the production support DBA's, I get the pleasure of debugging/tuning their crap after it hits production and won't run. Just yesterday, after one of the production Oracle machines fell over, we discovered a query that was piping a whopping 2.4 PETABYTES of data through a SELECT DISTINCT clause. Considering the database itself is less than 300GB, we found this rather interesting. When challenged, the developer responsible for the query says "It should only return about 10 rows". True, if it ever finishes applying the DISTINCT.
Back in the mid/late 90's, we had a Btrieve-based app running on our Novell network. The client app ran on each local workstation, Win95 at the time. One of the resident computer experts (helpdesk guy) discovered a "tool" that would allow him to send the ping o'death to any machine on the network. He amused himself merrily, randomly crashing machines for nearly a week. Problem was, each time he crashed a machine, the Btrieve database would get corrupted or records would be left locked, requiring intervention by me to get things working again. Once I figured out who was doing it, I warned him to stop. He didn't, so I reported him to senior management. He was fired immediately.
Where do you live? I want to make sure never to drive there...
Just last week, I followed a kid for about 3 miles of my morning commute. During the entire time, he had a cellphone clutched in one hand, holding it above the steering wheel. Multiple times he crossed the center line. Multiple times he wandered into the bike lane. Twice I had to tap the horn to wake him up at a green light. The highlight came when we reached a point where the road narrowed (the bike lane ended), and he promptly bounced the left-side wheels off the curb. I think that got his attention, because he put the phone down and put on his seat belt.
I understand kids do dumb things. Hopefully he (and you) will live long enough to learn how dumb this truly is, without killing someone else along the way.
I do the same thing, but with Google Voice. The only reason I have a home phone is because my satellite receiver needs it. I have that number forwarding to Google Voice, which acts as a spam filter for my phone. The few calls that do get through, I can block manually. Blocked callers get a "number not in use" message.
My dog, somehow, knows when we've ordered pizza. My wife's a pizza nut, and between her and the two teenagers, we order pizza at least once a week. Somehow, our dog knows when pizza is on the way. She'll sit on the couch, staring at the driveway, and as soon as she sees the pizza guy coming down the street, she goes nuts. She'll ignore every other car that drives down the street. We don't order from the same place every time, ordering from whoever we have coupons for. I don't know if she can distinguish between a car with a sign on top vs. one without, or how she knows, but somehow she does. It's weird, but funny as hell to watch.
I have the same basic hardware, quad-core, 4GB, fast video. I'm dual-booting between Vista and XP. The performance difference between the two is utterly amazing. Vista runs well, but XP is lightning fast on this box. Not advocating one over the other, but there IS a significant performance difference.
My daughter doesn't use her phone to talk, with her it's texting. 23,000 text messages in one month. Luckily, our plan includes unlimited texting for all phones.
I *am* on the DNC... I'm using a broad definition of "telemarketer". I get calls from various charities seeking donations, "we'll be in your neighborhood tomorrow". I get scam calls telling me that my car warranty is about to expire, or trying to get me to subscribed to my local newspaper. There was the election spam during the month of October. The list goes on and on, but the bottom line is, I used to get a LOT of annoying, pointless phone calls - those all stopped thanks to GrandCentral.
I'll admit it - I still have a landline phone in my house. My satellite receivers require it, my DSL service requires the line, I feel better knowing it's there in case of an emergency, AND it keeps my teenagers from using up all of our shared cell minutes (the boy used 2700 minutes all by himself last month). In spite of these reasons, I was growing to hate that phone. We get maybe 2 legit calls on that phone a month, the rest are all telemarketers, a dozen a day sometimes, almost always between 6:00pm-9:00pm. It was driving me nuts.
Along comes GrandCentral. Now, my home number is call-forwarded to GrandCentral. From there, I've whitelisted the numbers that are allowed to call us. Some of those numbers ring my cell, some ring my wife's, some ring both. Everything else goes to voicemail or is blocked as spam. Blocked callers hear a "number not in service" message. Voicemails are sent to us as emails.
Very slick, VERY convenient, and it's removed a serious annoyance. Bliss...
This post made me laugh out loud. I've had this work-issued laptop for three years. The first 2-1/2 years, it was fast, speedy, no problems. Six months ago, corporate rolled out Symantec Endpoint Something-Or-Other, and ever since, the laptop has become extremely sluggish, bordering on unusable at times. The hard drive runs constantly, "rtvscan.exe" is always at the top of the task list, claiming 10-15% of the CPU. Hell, there are times that the machine can't keep up with my keystrokes, I'll type several characters, then watch them display, one by one. Norton/Symantec stuff is crap.
I landed my current job (production support DBA) partly because two of the guys interviewing me knew I was active in some online SQL Server forums. Manage your online identity properly, and it can be a great tool. If you have idiot friends using MySpace/Facebook/Twitter/whatever, be very careful what you give them to work with, or find new friends.
If you go into a casino thinking you'll do anything BUT lose money, you're a fool. A trip to the casino is no different than a night out with an expensive dinner and a movie - it's an entertainment expense, nothing more. Occasionally you'll get lucky and come out with more money than you started with, but you have to go in looking at it as an entertainment expense.
Same here, but I also know that I sometimes get legitimate calls from unidentified callers (doctor, wife's office, etc). For me, the following works perfectly:
- home phone is call-forwarded to a GrandCentral number - GrandCentral is configured to send certain callers to my cell phone, wife's cell phone, or both. Unknown callers, "spam" calls, blocked calls, etc., just never ring through. - an added benefit, voicemails get delivered via email
"I had to start the car once at -24F this year" - only once? I remember two consecutive mornings (SW metro) back around mid-January when the thermometer in my truck said -24 at 9:00am.
I just finished the switch from Comcast to Qwest (20Mbps DSL went live last Friday, dropped modem off at Comcast this morning). I too have had short, random disconnects with Comcast, annoying when gaming or VPN'd to the office. I had daily disconnects at 10:30am, modem wouldn't lose sync, but I would have 100% packet loss for 20-25 minutes. The connection was also weather-sensitive - during the last two extreme cold snaps here in Minneapolis, the connection was essentially useless.
Qwest was a snap - placed the order with a few mouse clicks, the modem showed up 2 days later. Ran their QuickConnect install, plugged my router in, and I was up and running. Ping times are roughly half of what I saw with Comcast (27ms vs. 47ms avg, measured with Smokeping). More importantly, it's consistent. Looking at the 30 hour graph for Comcast, the line looked like a sine wave. The equivalent graph for Qwest is perfectly flat. Gaming seems MUCH smoother, web sites are much more responsive (using OpenDNS, did the same on Comcast).
It's only been a week, but I'm a happy Qwest customer so far.
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We have a whole department full of duct tape developers, writing Business Objects reports and other BI-type code. They can't write efficient database queries to save their asses. As one of the production support DBA's, I get the pleasure of debugging/tuning their crap after it hits production and won't run. Just yesterday, after one of the production Oracle machines fell over, we discovered a query that was piping a whopping 2.4 PETABYTES of data through a SELECT DISTINCT clause. Considering the database itself is less than 300GB, we found this rather interesting. When challenged, the developer responsible for the query says "It should only return about 10 rows". True, if it ever finishes applying the DISTINCT.
Ship first, tune later, I love that philosophy...
Get a FREE paperback book from PaperBackSwap.Com, then put it back into circulation when you're done.
Back in the mid/late 90's, we had a Btrieve-based app running on our Novell network. The client app ran on each local workstation, Win95 at the time. One of the resident computer experts (helpdesk guy) discovered a "tool" that would allow him to send the ping o'death to any machine on the network. He amused himself merrily, randomly crashing machines for nearly a week. Problem was, each time he crashed a machine, the Btrieve database would get corrupted or records would be left locked, requiring intervention by me to get things working again. Once I figured out who was doing it, I warned him to stop. He didn't, so I reported him to senior management. He was fired immediately.
Where do you live? I want to make sure never to drive there...
Just last week, I followed a kid for about 3 miles of my morning commute. During the entire time, he had a cellphone clutched in one hand, holding it above the steering wheel. Multiple times he crossed the center line. Multiple times he wandered into the bike lane. Twice I had to tap the horn to wake him up at a green light. The highlight came when we reached a point where the road narrowed (the bike lane ended), and he promptly bounced the left-side wheels off the curb. I think that got his attention, because he put the phone down and put on his seat belt.
I understand kids do dumb things. Hopefully he (and you) will live long enough to learn how dumb this truly is, without killing someone else along the way.
I do the same thing, but with Google Voice. The only reason I have a home phone is because my satellite receiver needs it. I have that number forwarding to Google Voice, which acts as a spam filter for my phone. The few calls that do get through, I can block manually. Blocked callers get a "number not in use" message.
Married, actually. A girlfriend like that wouldn't last long.
> dropped the third one in the toilet trying to answer it when I was taking a piss
Because calling them back wasn't an option? I wish I got important phone calls like this...
My dog, somehow, knows when we've ordered pizza. My wife's a pizza nut, and between her and the two teenagers, we order pizza at least once a week. Somehow, our dog knows when pizza is on the way. She'll sit on the couch, staring at the driveway, and as soon as she sees the pizza guy coming down the street, she goes nuts. She'll ignore every other car that drives down the street. We don't order from the same place every time, ordering from whoever we have coupons for. I don't know if she can distinguish between a car with a sign on top vs. one without, or how she knows, but somehow she does. It's weird, but funny as hell to watch.
My TomTom will do this out-of-the-box, it's called "Find POI Along Route".
>> I want pounds and inches you insensitive clod!!!
I got yer pounds and inches right here...
I have the same basic hardware, quad-core, 4GB, fast video. I'm dual-booting between Vista and XP. The performance difference between the two is utterly amazing. Vista runs well, but XP is lightning fast on this box. Not advocating one over the other, but there IS a significant performance difference.
It's almost as hard as trying to prioritize enhancement requests that users submit for our internal applications...
My daughter doesn't use her phone to talk, with her it's texting. 23,000 text messages in one month. Luckily, our plan includes unlimited texting for all phones.
I *am* on the DNC... I'm using a broad definition of "telemarketer". I get calls from various charities seeking donations, "we'll be in your neighborhood tomorrow". I get scam calls telling me that my car warranty is about to expire, or trying to get me to subscribed to my local newspaper. There was the election spam during the month of October. The list goes on and on, but the bottom line is, I used to get a LOT of annoying, pointless phone calls - those all stopped thanks to GrandCentral.
I'll admit it - I still have a landline phone in my house. My satellite receivers require it, my DSL service requires the line, I feel better knowing it's there in case of an emergency, AND it keeps my teenagers from using up all of our shared cell minutes (the boy used 2700 minutes all by himself last month). In spite of these reasons, I was growing to hate that phone. We get maybe 2 legit calls on that phone a month, the rest are all telemarketers, a dozen a day sometimes, almost always between 6:00pm-9:00pm. It was driving me nuts.
Along comes GrandCentral. Now, my home number is call-forwarded to GrandCentral. From there, I've whitelisted the numbers that are allowed to call us. Some of those numbers ring my cell, some ring my wife's, some ring both. Everything else goes to voicemail or is blocked as spam. Blocked callers hear a "number not in service" message. Voicemails are sent to us as emails.
Very slick, VERY convenient, and it's removed a serious annoyance. Bliss...
This post made me laugh out loud. I've had this work-issued laptop for three years. The first 2-1/2 years, it was fast, speedy, no problems. Six months ago, corporate rolled out Symantec Endpoint Something-Or-Other, and ever since, the laptop has become extremely sluggish, bordering on unusable at times. The hard drive runs constantly, "rtvscan.exe" is always at the top of the task list, claiming 10-15% of the CPU. Hell, there are times that the machine can't keep up with my keystrokes, I'll type several characters, then watch them display, one by one. Norton/Symantec stuff is crap.
Well, that joke went over like a Lead Zeppelin...
I landed my current job (production support DBA) partly because two of the guys interviewing me knew I was active in some online SQL Server forums. Manage your online identity properly, and it can be a great tool. If you have idiot friends using MySpace/Facebook/Twitter/whatever, be very careful what you give them to work with, or find new friends.
You know that you can whitelist domains with OpenDNS, right? Or just not block the "webmail providers" category?
You could send a couple of them my way, for, ummm, safekeeping....
If you go into a casino thinking you'll do anything BUT lose money, you're a fool. A trip to the casino is no different than a night out with an expensive dinner and a movie - it's an entertainment expense, nothing more. Occasionally you'll get lucky and come out with more money than you started with, but you have to go in looking at it as an entertainment expense.
Same here, but I also know that I sometimes get legitimate calls from unidentified callers (doctor, wife's office, etc). For me, the following works perfectly:
- home phone is call-forwarded to a GrandCentral number
- GrandCentral is configured to send certain callers to my cell phone, wife's cell phone, or both. Unknown callers, "spam" calls, blocked calls, etc., just never ring through.
- an added benefit, voicemails get delivered via email
"I had to start the car once at -24F this year" - only once? I remember two consecutive mornings (SW metro) back around mid-January when the thermometer in my truck said -24 at 9:00am.
"all traces of George W. Bush disappeared from the White House website"
And this is bad, why?
I just finished the switch from Comcast to Qwest (20Mbps DSL went live last Friday, dropped modem off at Comcast this morning). I too have had short, random disconnects with Comcast, annoying when gaming or VPN'd to the office. I had daily disconnects at 10:30am, modem wouldn't lose sync, but I would have 100% packet loss for 20-25 minutes. The connection was also weather-sensitive - during the last two extreme cold snaps here in Minneapolis, the connection was essentially useless.
Qwest was a snap - placed the order with a few mouse clicks, the modem showed up 2 days later. Ran their QuickConnect install, plugged my router in, and I was up and running. Ping times are roughly half of what I saw with Comcast (27ms vs. 47ms avg, measured with Smokeping). More importantly, it's consistent. Looking at the 30 hour graph for Comcast, the line looked like a sine wave. The equivalent graph for Qwest is perfectly flat. Gaming seems MUCH smoother, web sites are much more responsive (using OpenDNS, did the same on Comcast).
It's only been a week, but I'm a happy Qwest customer so far.