I used to love this when I was on a helpdesk...
on
Orwellian Tech Support
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· Score: -1, Redundant
A typical day at the Customer Sevice Center:
Monday ------ 8:05am: User called to say they forgot password. Told them to use password retrieval utility called FDISK. Blissfully ignorant, they thank me and hang up. God, we let these people vote and drive, too?
8:12am: Accounting called to say they couldn't access expense reports database. Gave them Standard Sys Admin Answer #112, "Well, it works for me." Let them rant and rave while I unplugged my coffeemaker from the UPS and plugged their server back in. Suggested they try it again. One more happy customer...
8:14 am: User from 8:05 call said they received error message "Error accessing Drive 0." Told them it was an OS problem. Transferred them to microsupport.
11:00 am: Relatively quiet for last few hours. Decide to plug support phone back in so I can call my girlfriend. Says parents are coming into town this weekend. Put her on hold and transferred her to janitorial closet down in basement. What is she thinking? The "Myst" and "Doom" nationals are this weekend!
11:34 am: Another user calls (do they ever learn?). Says they want ACL changed on HR performance review database so that nobody but HR can access database. Tell them no problem. Hang up. Change ACL. Add @MailSend so performance reviews are sent to */US.
12:00 pm: Lunch
3:30 pm: Return from lunch.
3:55 pm: Wake up from nap. Bad dream makes me cranky. Bounce servers for no reason. Return to napping.
4:23 pm: Yet another user calls. Wants to know how to change fonts on form. Ask them what chip set they're using. Tell them to call back when they find out.
4:55 pm: Decide to run "Create Save/Replication Conflicts" macro so next shift has something to do.
Tuesday ------- 8:30 am: Finish reading support log from last night. Sounded busy. Terrible time with Save/Replication conflicts.
9:00 am: Support manager arrives. Wants to discuss my attitude. Click on PhoneNotes SmartIcon. "Love to, but kinda busy. Put something in the calendar database!" I yell as I grab for the support lines, which have (mysteriously) lit up. Walks away grumbling.
9:35 pm: Team leader from R&D needs ID for new employee. Tell them they need form J-19R=9C9\\DARR\K1. Say they never heard of such a form. Tell them it's in the SPECIAL FORMS database. Say they never heard of such a database. Transfer them to janitorial closet in basement.
10:00 am: Perky sounding intern from R&D calls and says she needs new ID. Tell her I need employee number, department name, manager name, and marital status. Run @DbLookup against state parole board database, Centers for Disease Control database, and my Oprah Winfrey database. No hits.
Tell her ID will be ready tonight. Drawing from the lessons learned in last week's "Reengineering for Customer Partnership," I offer to personally deliver ID to her apartment.
10:07 am: Janitor stops by to say he keeps getting strange calls in basement. Offer to train him on Notes. Begin now. Let him watch console while I grab a smoke.
1:00 pm: Return from smoking break. Janitor says phones kept ringing, so he transferred them to cafeteria lady. I like this guy.
1:05 pm: Big commotion! Support manager falls in hole left where I pulled floor tiles outside his office door. Stress to him importance of not running in computer room, even if I do yell "Omigod -- Fire!"
1:15 pm: Development Standards Committee calls and complains about umlauts in form names. Apologizing for the inconvenience, I tell them I will fix it. Hang up and run global search/replace using gaks.
1:20 pm: Mary Hairnet from cafeteria calls. Says she keeps getting calls for "Notice Loads" or "NoLoad Goats," she's not sure, couldn't hear over industrial-grade blender. Tell her it was probably "Lettuce Nodes." Maybe the food distributor with a new product? She thinks about it and hangs up.
2:00 pm: Legal secretary calls and says she lost password. Ask her to check in her purs
because all the people who were thinking about buying a Mac to get the integrated package of computer, song manager, and player, now get all that on a Windows platform.
That's a good point. Apple still does get business in the form of computer buyers who wanted the integrated package, but were hesitant about making the platform switch or didn't want to spend the premium bucks for the full Apple setup.
I disagree. By passing up Napster (and its WMA licensed music) for iTunes; HP is accomplishing a couple good moves.
1-They are differentiating themselves from other computer makers.
2-HP is reducing their lock-in with MS (indirectly but it's still one less tie)
3-The iTunes / iPod combination is highly successful and therefore very visible, so this lands them a lot of brand recognition to ride on.
Very helpful suggestion. Well except that he'd need two hands for a pad of paper and pen. If it wasn't the case, he already said he'd use something like a PDA.
I was raised Christian (some of it stuck, most didn't); but one thing I can say with little reservation is that evolutionary theories have plenty of validity and yet they don't conflict in my mind with anything the Bible has to say about our own origins.
I'm not looking to start a theological debate here, but just make the statement that it bugs me when some of the more fundamentalist Christians outright oppose evolution in schools because they see it as a blasphemy. Same thing happened when folks were debating the planet being round or that it isn't the center of the galaxy.
I know your comments weren't on this extreme level at all, but it just made me think of others who have taken such stances.
Seems the server isn't dead; just slowed down a bunch:
'Uncanny physics of comic book superheroes' Posted on Sunday, February 15 @ 16:20:59 EST by bjs
Can you teach a physics class with only comic books to illustrate the principles? University of Minnesota physics professor James Kakalios has been doing it since 1995, when he explained the principle of conservation of momentum by calculating the force of Spider-Man's web when it snagged the superhero's girlfriend as she plummeted from a great height. "Comic books get their science right more often than one would expect," said the gregarious Kakalios. "I was able to find examples in superhero comic books of the correct descriptions of basic physical principles for a wide range of topics, including classical mechanics, electricity and magnetism, and even quantum physics."
From the University of Minnesota:
Professor to describe 'uncanny physics of comic book superheroes'
Can you teach a physics class with only comic books to illustrate the principles? University of Minnesota physics professor James Kakalios has been doing it since 1995, when he explained the principle of conservation of momentum by calculating the force of Spider-Man's web when it snagged the superhero's girlfriend as she plummeted from a great height.
Kakalios will describe a freshman seminar class he teaches, "Physics of Comic Books," at 11 a.m. Sunday, Feb. 15, during the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Seattle. His talk is part of the symposium "Pop Physics: The Interface Between Hard Science and Popular Culture," one of two symposia in the Science, Entertainment and the Media category.
"Comic books get their science right more often than one would expect," said the gregarious Kakalios. "I was able to find examples in superhero comic books of the correct descriptions of basic physical principles for a wide range of topics, including classical mechanics, electricity and magnetism, and even quantum physics."
Take, for example, the strength of Superman. To leap a 30-story building in a single bound, Superman's leg muscles must produce nearly 6,000 pounds of force while jumping, Kakalios calculates. The Man of Steel was that strong because he was designed to resist Krypton's powerful gravity. But for a planet with an Earth-like surface to have so much stronger gravity, it would need neutron star material in its core--a highly unstable situation. No wonder the planet exploded. Other topics considered in Kakalios' class include:
# Is it possible to read minds as Prof. X of the X-Men does? # If Spider-Man's webbing is as strong as real spider silk, could it support his weight as he swings between buildings? # Can the mutant master of magnetism Magneto levitate people using the iron in their blood? # If you could run as fast as the Flash, could you run up the side of a building or across the ocean, and how often would you need to eat?
"Once the physical concepts such as forces and motion, conservation of energy, electricity and magnetisms, and elementary quantum mechanics are introduced to answer these and other questions, their real-world applications to automobile airbags, cell phones, nanotechnology and black hole formation are explained," said Kakalios. "The students in this class ranged from engineering to history majors, and while not all were comic book fans, they all found it an engaging and entertaining way to learn critical thinking and basic physics concepts."
I could swear that somewhere in there is a bit that goes "Danger Mouse; Power House!!" but my memory sucks for that sort of thing. Time for a googling and an offtopic mod.
How many platforms have a version of tetris, not to mention all the various variants of the game?
The article mentions: Available on more than 60 platforms, including handheld games machines and wrist watches
I'd be curious to see the list that they used for that figure. I have a suspicion that this is refering to official releases of the game. If the various shareware and freeware versions were considered the number might be much much higher..
That's exactly it. It has a menu of "thousands" of games, but it's really 70 or so games listed a couple hundred times over. The thing itself is pretty shoddily built, and has mislabeled most of the games, but it's nice for a quick nostalgia fix...
I just know I'm going to pop into a conference room any day now and find one of these laptops taking up two seats at the table because the owner is worried about somebody bumping it. Worse still, I can easily imagine finding one of these plugged in at one of the handicapped desks without a permit.
I've never keyed a laptop before, but I guess I might be forced to start. Oh well.
I have the atari 10-in-1 and love it. My brother got me one of the bootleg 70+ NES games in one devices for christmas and it's pretty cool, but these official releases are a lot of fun. Only complaint is that you can't play the two player modes of some of the games.
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A typical day at the Customer Sevice Center:
Monday
------
8:05am: User called to say they forgot password. Told them to use password retrieval utility called FDISK. Blissfully ignorant, they thank me and hang up. God, we let these people vote and drive, too?
8:12am: Accounting called to say they couldn't access expense reports database. Gave them Standard Sys Admin Answer #112, "Well, it works
for me." Let them rant and rave while I unplugged my coffeemaker from the UPS and plugged their server back in. Suggested they try it again.
One more happy customer...
8:14 am: User from 8:05 call said they received error message "Error accessing Drive 0." Told them it was an OS problem. Transferred them to microsupport.
11:00 am: Relatively quiet for last few hours. Decide to plug support phone back in so I can call my girlfriend. Says parents are coming into town this weekend. Put her on hold and transferred her to janitorial closet down in basement. What is she thinking? The "Myst" and "Doom" nationals are this weekend!
11:34 am: Another user calls (do they ever learn?). Says they want ACL changed on HR performance review database so that nobody but HR can access database. Tell them no problem. Hang up. Change ACL. Add @MailSend so performance reviews are sent to */US.
12:00 pm: Lunch
3:30 pm: Return from lunch.
3:55 pm: Wake up from nap. Bad dream makes me cranky. Bounce servers for no reason.
Return to napping.
4:23 pm: Yet another user calls. Wants to know how to change fonts on form. Ask them what chip set they're using. Tell them to call back when they find out.
4:55 pm: Decide to run "Create Save/Replication Conflicts" macro so next shift has something to do.
Tuesday
-------
8:30 am: Finish reading support log from last night. Sounded busy. Terrible time with Save/Replication conflicts.
9:00 am: Support manager arrives. Wants to discuss my attitude. Click on PhoneNotes SmartIcon. "Love to, but kinda busy. Put something in the calendar database!" I yell as I grab for the support lines, which have (mysteriously) lit up. Walks away grumbling.
9:35 pm: Team leader from R&D needs ID for new employee. Tell them they need form J-19R=9C9\\DARR\K1. Say they never heard of such a form. Tell them it's in the SPECIAL FORMS database. Say they never heard of such a database. Transfer them to janitorial closet in basement.
10:00 am: Perky sounding intern from R&D calls and says she needs new ID. Tell her I need employee number, department name, manager name, and marital status. Run @DbLookup against state parole board database, Centers for Disease Control database, and my Oprah Winfrey database. No hits.
Tell her ID will be ready tonight. Drawing from the lessons learned in last week's "Reengineering for Customer Partnership," I offer to personally deliver ID to her apartment.
10:07 am: Janitor stops by to say he keeps getting strange calls in basement. Offer to train him on Notes. Begin now. Let him watch console while
I grab a smoke.
1:00 pm: Return from smoking break. Janitor says phones kept ringing, so he transferred them to cafeteria lady. I like this guy.
1:05 pm: Big commotion! Support manager falls in hole left where I pulled floor tiles outside his office door. Stress to him importance of not running in computer room, even if I do yell "Omigod -- Fire!"
1:15 pm: Development Standards Committee calls and complains about umlauts in form names. Apologizing for the inconvenience, I tell them I will fix it. Hang up and run global search/replace using gaks.
1:20 pm: Mary Hairnet from cafeteria calls. Says she keeps getting calls for "Notice Loads" or "NoLoad Goats," she's not sure, couldn't hear over
industrial-grade blender. Tell her it was probably "Lettuce Nodes." Maybe the food distributor with a new product? She thinks about it and hangs up.
2:00 pm: Legal secretary calls and says she lost password. Ask her to check in her purs
I'm wondering if light or other waves stored in such a fashion could be used as a battery of sorts.
That's a good point. Apple still does get business in the form of computer buyers who wanted the integrated package, but were hesitant about making the platform switch or didn't want to spend the premium bucks for the full Apple setup.
1-They are differentiating themselves from other computer makers.
2-HP is reducing their lock-in with MS (indirectly but it's still one less tie)
3-The iTunes / iPod combination is highly successful and therefore very visible, so this lands them a lot of brand recognition to ride on.
"Hey; I just installed the latest ManDash distro!!"
Well I think we can all agree that it's a good thing you're not the type of person to bitch about this.
...The Red Skull is quoted as saying "Rats? Ok whatever; just keep that damned 'Bucky' kid away from me."
I gave some of my friends these cards.
I'm not so sure about running it directly; but a quick googling came up with an emulator:
Here
Try some of these
as for getting permission to take off; money could probably ease that process a bit as well.
This seems to be what the BMP would look like.
I'm not looking to start a theological debate here, but just make the statement that it bugs me when some of the more fundamentalist Christians outright oppose evolution in schools because they see it as a blasphemy. Same thing happened when folks were debating the planet being round or that it isn't the center of the galaxy.
I know your comments weren't on this extreme level at all, but it just made me think of others who have taken such stances.
Well ok; so it's not ALL bad then.
Seems the server isn't dead; just slowed down a bunch:
'Uncanny physics of comic book superheroes'
Posted on Sunday, February 15 @ 16:20:59 EST by bjs
Can you teach a physics class with only comic books to illustrate the principles? University of Minnesota physics professor James Kakalios has been doing it since 1995, when he explained the principle of conservation of momentum by calculating the force of Spider-Man's web when it snagged the superhero's girlfriend as she plummeted from a great height. "Comic books get their science right more often than one would expect," said the gregarious Kakalios. "I was able to find examples in superhero comic books of the correct descriptions of basic physical principles for a wide range of topics, including classical mechanics, electricity and magnetism, and even quantum physics."
From the University of Minnesota:
Professor to describe 'uncanny physics of comic book superheroes'
Can you teach a physics class with only comic books to illustrate the principles? University of Minnesota physics professor James Kakalios has been doing it since 1995, when he explained the principle of conservation of momentum by calculating the force of Spider-Man's web when it snagged the superhero's girlfriend as she plummeted from a great height.
Kakalios will describe a freshman seminar class he teaches, "Physics of Comic Books," at 11 a.m. Sunday, Feb. 15, during the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Seattle. His talk is part of the symposium "Pop Physics: The Interface Between Hard Science and Popular Culture," one of two symposia in the Science, Entertainment and the Media category.
"Comic books get their science right more often than one would expect," said the gregarious Kakalios. "I was able to find examples in superhero comic books of the correct descriptions of basic physical principles for a wide range of topics, including classical mechanics, electricity and magnetism, and even quantum physics."
Take, for example, the strength of Superman. To leap a 30-story building in a single bound, Superman's leg muscles must produce nearly 6,000 pounds of force while jumping, Kakalios calculates. The Man of Steel was that strong because he was designed to resist Krypton's powerful gravity. But for a planet with an Earth-like surface to have so much stronger gravity, it would need neutron star material in its core--a highly unstable situation. No wonder the planet exploded. Other topics considered in Kakalios' class include:
# Is it possible to read minds as Prof. X of the X-Men does?
# If Spider-Man's webbing is as strong as real spider silk, could it support his weight as he swings between buildings?
# Can the mutant master of magnetism Magneto levitate people using the iron in their blood?
# If you could run as fast as the Flash, could you run up the side of a building or across the ocean, and how often would you need to eat?
"Once the physical concepts such as forces and motion, conservation of energy, electricity and magnetisms, and elementary quantum mechanics are introduced to answer these and other questions, their real-world applications to automobile airbags, cell phones, nanotechnology and black hole formation are explained," said Kakalios. "The students in this class ranged from engineering to history majors, and while not all were comic book fans, they all found it an engaging and entertaining way to learn critical thinking and basic physics concepts."
They're just a fad though; I don't think it'll catch on.
I could swear that somewhere in there is a bit that goes "Danger Mouse; Power House!!" but my memory sucks for that sort of thing. Time for a googling and an offtopic mod.
Perhaps; but that doesn't mean he didn't pay that much.
How many platforms have a version of tetris, not to mention all the various variants of the game?
The article mentions:
Available on more than 60 platforms, including handheld games machines and wrist watches
I'd be curious to see the list that they used for that figure. I have a suspicion that this is refering to official releases of the game. If the various shareware and freeware versions were considered the number might be much much higher..
That's exactly it. It has a menu of "thousands" of games, but it's really 70 or so games listed a couple hundred times over. The thing itself is pretty shoddily built, and has mislabeled most of the games, but it's nice for a quick nostalgia fix...
I've never keyed a laptop before, but I guess I might be forced to start. Oh well.
All that life saving goodness AND style as well. Way to go!!
I have the atari 10-in-1 and love it. My brother got me one of the bootleg 70+ NES games in one devices for christmas and it's pretty cool, but these official releases are a lot of fun. Only complaint is that you can't play the two player modes of some of the games.
How drunk were you when you gurgled out this ramble?
You might want to get out of that cave. GPS typically doesn't work well in such conditions, and we'd hate for that nice tech to go to waste.