Posts by AustinTX

Give "us" an approximation...

"However at the time of writing – 00:15 MT Dec 21 – NIST’s status page states the Boulder site is experiencing ''Facility outages'' and a ''< 4.8us clock error.'' That’s about four microseconds."

NOOOOOO, hahahaha. That's about FIVE microseconds!

That's what it is

I mean, that's essentially what in-house imaging is like. You wait and wait and wait while Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, display a whirling thingie and then randomly prompt; "Do you want to continue or shall I abort? 10-9-8-7...."

Or, as a trained and experienced tech, you come in handy dealing with issues such as; "We had a minor problem trying this thing once... Nobody thought to offer a "RETRY" button... So press "Cancel" to cancel, press "OK" to cancel, or press "X" to cancel and then we'll shut the PC off just to be that much more annoying".

If you want to make it more entertaining, set up a whole mess of identical PCs and then start them all at once to marvel at how they all fall wildly out of synch after just a few minutes...

However will the ISP get landlord contact info?

For Baldur's sake, it's 2025! ISPs must not want landlord contact info!

Else they would put up an online form for tenants & landlords to fill out whereby landlord info is requested.

What is a filename?

I guess I would just treat the whole path as part of the filename, unless every email app under the sun insisted on grabbing C:\MAIL\MAIL.EXE hurr durr.

Temp Users Are Skum

I've worked temp jobs a number of times. People need temps to handle extra load caused by either their great success or their great failure. The clients are either really really nice, or just the worst people that ever lived.

I once overheard one of the client employees talking with another about running out of money to pay for the temps. That evening I was called to say I was fired for being "habitually late". I'd never been late. I faxed them both a few hundred pages of big black squares, but scheduled it to happen when I was personally in the office to pick up my last check (before caller ID).

At another job I was tasked with opening mail and delivering it, and accidentally saw my tempco's bill for my services. I was getting less than half what was being paid for me, of course. But I'm sure tempcos work SO HARD they deserved it more than me, right?

Back in the DOS days, I had the bad habit of using the root directory of my second partition as a temp folder. It would ordinarilly never have files in it, so clean-up was as simple as deleting any non-folders.

Well, one day Microsoft outsmarted me. Their installer finished adding the program, and then it just blanket deleted everything in that folder including itself, existing folders and the new program it had just installed.

In my defense, the installer shouldn't have assumed it was being run from a directory with nothing valuable in it, and if it was going to clean up files, it should have only deleted ones belonging to it.

I haven't even looked in root in years, so I obviously don't use it as a temp directory any more, but i'm sure I probably continued to do so after this adventure.

Illuminati Online, Austin TX

I was on the evening shift with one co-worker, and gone outside for a walk on my break. When I got back to the building I realized I'd left my key card inside. Cell phones were still luxuries, and I didn't own one. There was no security guard (or cameras) so I had no way of getting ahold of anyone.

Willing to try anything, I hiked about a block to the other side of the complex where there was a 1-story strip mall which physically attached to the side of our 3-story building. Our offices were on the 2nd floor, but the company was mostly in windowless rooms inside. Except that the building had originally been normal offices and they'd decided to put the servers in a room that had once been a nice windowed office.

I managed to get access to the roof by climbing up a hot, buzzing transformer, and made my way back to the office's server room window. I started making irregular rapping sounds on the glass with my car keys, knowing that even if my co-worker was wearing his headset and couldn't hear me, eventually he would go into the server room to do tape swaps and checklists. Fortunately, he heard me and saw me at the window. He gestured in the direction of the building entrance to let me know he would meet me at the door.

5 minutes later I was chatting with him while he took the opportunity to have a quick smoke break.

Guess who ALSO forgot his key?

He didn't have a phone either. With another 3-4 hours until anyone arrived to relieve our shift, we sort of panicked for a while there. We both had our car keys and thought about driving to another employee's house for help getting back in.

Fortunately, my co-worker had some knowledge of breaking into offices that I didn't know about. Our building's door was the type where you push a bar to exit, and just touching the bar released the magnetic lock. With a scrap of thin metal stuck through the crack between the doors, we touched the bar, and the door was open! The rest of the evening was quiet, and we hadn't even missed a call.

But I really need a better laptop!

During my stint with Kyndryl* a couple of years ago, the mgt above me saw fit to distribute my personal cell phone number as the new Help Desk number.

I wasn't asked first. It blew my phone up- using a number I mostly ignore because so many recruiters hammer it.

I still get occasional calls from B-level executives "requesting" early upgrades to their leased MacBooks.

I live in another state now so I just ignore calls from that area code.

*from their website:

"Kyn" comes from "kin." It represents the strong bonds we form with customers and with each other. Our people are at the heart of our business. "-dryl" is coined from "tendril," evoking new growth and connections. By working together, we are growing.

Always the same solution: constant surveillance

So once again, to "keep us safe" we are asked to submit to 24/7/365 audio surveillance. I'm SURE that can't serve multiple purposes after assurances otherwise?

How about, instead of AI or whatever constantly analyzing for impudent sounds, that safety valve be built to WHISTLE at a specific frequency which can be detected by dumb circuitry?

Installing programs from C:/

I'm not saying it was good form, but sometimes I was just too lazy to make a /temp directory to unzip a program installer into, so I ran it from C:/

Mind you, I wouldn't let pkunzip fill my root with scores of files; this would just be to uncompress a monolithic executable installer.

Until I met the one which installed it's payload and then cleaned up by deleting everything in the install-from directory. You know. Everything.

Must be a coincidence

One has to wonder why all of the leadership are ethnic Indians (with dots). Perhaps it's racism, perhaps they all just have established work ties and just need more time to integrate. Nah, it's racism.

I worked for The Cog at Faecebook HQ downtown. They weren't horrible bosses, but they were a bit inept. Mgt delegated mgt work to us gora (white people) so they didn't have to do any work. The worst part was that we were forbidden to participate in the FB employee chat rooms where people in our role (internal help desk) asked for help because they were afraid that it would show how poorly we'd been trained.

Now if we can turn the spotlight to another Indian-dominated subcontractor; HCL. I worked for them at NXP Semiconductor. My immediate supervisor was Latin, but passed quite nicely as an ethnic Brahmin. He told us he'd been invited to meetings until they found out he was Latin. At these meetings, ethnic Indians would speak English as it was a common language. They would laugh and joke about how nobody but Indians would be getting promotions or raises. But they were serious.

Ex Kyndryl Employee Here

I worked for Kyndryl in 2021-2022. I'm shocked they're still in business!

First of all, how do you market a company with a name like "Kyndryl"? Say it out loud. Bleh. Imagine the salespeople constantly having to explain it to their sales leads. Nobody had any idea what it meant, but you can google this precious POS:

[kyndryl.com/us/en/about-us] "Kyn" comes from "kin." It represents the strong bonds we form with customers and with each other. Our people are at the heart of our business. "-dryl" is coined from "tendril," evoking new growth and connections. By working together, we are growing." OMG.

Overall, it was a typical situation of a wildly dysfunctional employer. Red flags a-plenty. The Kyndryl technical documentation was wildly out of date and the employees siloed their knowledge. Slack was filled with people asking for help and getting no answers. My team members were cagey and irritable, and I had to "trick" them into giving me information. I had to wait weeks to get my laptop, and months to get access to ServiceNow, AD, a phone number assigned, etc. It seemed like Kyndryl didn't have an on-boarding checklist. They distributed my personal cell phone number far and wide.

I was working alone as the new "on-site" tech in an empty hi-rise office of about 500 seats. The client had planned to cancel WFH but employees weren't having it. A lot of them had moved out-of-state. The client was firing twice as many people as they were hiring. I had to process equipment returns, but they never let me know in advance. I'd get an angry email demanding why I hadn't prepped a PC for a new hire. Or, I would find a big box delivered to the lobby, addressed to the tech i'd replaced over a year previous. Several times a week, I would just suddenly find a sad-looking person standing at my office door, holding some items. I had to walk down to the street and take their access cards as they left the garage. I watched women cry. *sigh*

I gathered that the client gave up on ordering their staff back to office. Eventually, I got a call a Thursday afternoon telling me I was no longer needed. I gathered up all of my things, saluted the surveillance cameras, and biked home.

Mixed bag of rubbish

I worked for Kyndryl a couple years ago. I worked solo at my job site with 99% of staff working from home. Aside from some inventory and a PC refresh project, I had no idea what my responsibilities were and all of the documentation was out of date. The software library was an endless labyrinth of old versions and nonworking install guides. It took ages for them to set up my admin accesses. The client was expecting me to be a concierge who could do everything for them, and the CIO personally screamed at me for not getting a newhire's laptop shipped on time, though it was their own office manager's fault for ignoring my many requests for a UPS label. Several of my teammates were pretty cool, but the company was in complete disarray. The cool teammates quit. The other teammates were expert responsibility punters. I was also supposed to help nationwide customers remotely, but the network of the customer where I was hosted blocked access, and my management just treated me like an idiot who couldn't use tools.

"Fast Lanes?"

It blows my mind how nobody can understand that they're not building "faster lanes" for people who pay more.

They're slowing everyone's speeds down unless they pay more! It requires resources to impose the throttling!

And still ISPs operate at a 95% profit margin and yet whine that they must raise fees to keep up with expenses!

Why do the reports 2 months after activity has ended?

Why can't they just do reports monthly but just hold onto them to distribute 2 months later when they're expected?

Or do they need 2 months to fudge data from previous months?

Let's Check the Server Room Access Log

Someone is going to figure out that the problem started while these guys were in the server room and then later stopped when they went back!

My CSB

When I worked for Austin TX internet provider io.com, you could telnet in as guest and just browse the filesystem directories! You could go to /home and just harvest all of the usernames at that level, and often you could dip into customer's /home/%username%/mail folders to get additional mailbox names. You'd just send your spams to %usernames%@io.com.

How could you just telnet in, you ask? Well, they had a public telnet portal to log in and reset passwords, update PLAN and open help tickets. It was based on using LYNX browser as the shell instead of BASH. So, aside from failing to set permissions properly throughout the system, to keep customers from browsing outside their own account folders, they forgot to disable LYNX's file browser feature (press g, period, enter). Pretty sad, considering the staff liked to think of themselves as burningman_cybergods and the company was boldly claiming to run a "hardened network" and selling security products on that basis!

Search for io.fondoo.net on archive.org if you want the detailed story (which I added to the sidebar of my snapshot of the company's website).

Companies that jettison their UG never turn out to be the good guys

We've seen this before. I went through it with Fon.com community forums.

Companies don't just want to protect themselves from the release of sensitive information or surging complaints. Companies want to sidestep their inability or unwillingness to provide what the community wants. They want to declare what users wanted even if, said users wanted no such things. They can't do that with people who aren't under their control.

I can only conclude that some serious, unresolved probems are going down at Citrix, and they are moving to lock it all down. They would rather protect their value by sweeping things under the carpet than spend a little profit on fixing things.

I AM clicking on the screen!

While employed as CST at a glade/glen/vale based PC manufacturer, I got a call requiring assistance to improve a CRT monitor's display. They were able to press the physical buttons on the bezel to open the embedded menus, but could not select anything. Of course, because they were taking up the mouse again and trying to select with that. I was fairly sure my instructions had been to use the up/down, < > buttons on the bezel, but they probably thought they knew better. I'm ashamed to say how long that call lasted.

Browser makers maybe don't have to just accept holy poison gov certs silently

They could display prominent click-through messages announcing that the user is now "enjoying" the benefit of a non-negotiable government encryption certificate.

Add a few links about which legislators they can reach out to "thank" for this, links to organizations working to take this awful burden off the shoulders of our dear, overburdened government, etc. Just do things you're still allowed to do in excess of just accepting the holy poison certs silently.

They could have the browser shut down immediately upon getting one of these holy goverment certs. Might not be a great solution when the gov starts employing in "ads" that use their holy certs.

Add your clever solution below:

Are'nt Leaf blowers standard equipment?

I used to use a leaf blower to clean out my PCs all the time! Once or twice a year, I took them outside and gave them a good flush. While doing this, I placed them in the stream of a carpet-dryer blower to create an artificial breeze to carry away the toxic cloud. If I wasn't careful, I spent a day or two suffering from pollen allergies owing to the resevoir of crud within the case.

Another thing I did that I thought clever was to open a window about 6 inches, and set up my 12-core Dell T7500 workstation so that it backed up through this hole horizontally (padded on the sides with foam rubber blocks) which blew all of the hot air straight outside in the summer. In the winter, I flipped it around and it sucked in cold air directly from outside. I was able to do some serious SETI@home without concern for over heating. The poor beast had powerful fans, but undersized heat sinks inside and would ordinarilly never be able to run high loads continuously. Also, Dell had crippled the fan controller so that they would never ramp up in speed to respond to heat spikes. I used SpeedFan to manually turn them up as high as they would go. I would still do something like this in the summer, but it turned out that in winter, there was condensation and this led to rust on the case.