Posts by Andy the ex-Brit

Re: A dim view

"Time to move on and this is why I don't have any sympathy for people that get sacked for thinking that policies don't apply to them."

Illegal policies, like illegal contracts, do not in fact apply to them.

In high school (age 16 or so) the PCs in the computer lab ran something DOS-like and were used mostly to write and run BASIC programs, which everyone stored on floppies. I wrote a program that just showed the C:> prompt and watched for a disk to exist in the A drive. Then it showed a growing row of dots . . . . . . . followed by FORMAT COMPLETE while reading the A: drive to make the appropriate sound and blinking light.

Then it started POKEing random memory locations so that the computer would lock up and nobody could see my code. I'm sure I caused a few moments of panic.

I'm hearing a "ding" every few seconds right now. Colleague is not at his desk. Where's my hammer?

Re: "reducing contingent labor to 12% of headcount"

I read it as reducing the portion of their headcount that is "contingent" -- meaning not permanent, full-time employees -- to 12% of the total. So if it's e.g. 15% now, they'd reduce by 3% to get down to 12%.

Re: Don't we all have an ex-boss we never want to meet again?

I had one absolutely terrible boss. I never realized until reporting to him that me and the rest of my high functioning team were actually slackers who were lucky he didn't fire us. He eventually got shunted off somewhere else and things got better.

Another reorg, and I heard they he'd applied to supervise the group that most of us would be moved into. I went to the manager and said "if he's my boss again, he won't be my boss for more than an hour." I was completely prepared to walk. Luckily he didn't get it, and actually got laid off shortly after. Good riddance!

I currently work for the best boss I've ever had in well over a dozen bosses in my 25+ year career. No bachelor's degree, he worked his way up from a technician job.

Unfortunately, he retires next month. I just need to last about 28 months with his replacement, then I can too.

Looks like a good "On Call" story.

Re: "better insurance rates"

I think each car costs me maybe $200 per six months, so it's close to a 10% discount.

Re: consuming no more than 1,977 calories a day

I'd literally starve. I'm a very healthy weight (161 lb / 74 kg at 5'9" / 1.75 m) and with the amount of exercise I get I'm burning an average of 3000 Calories a day. There's no way he can get enough exercise to keep his cardiovascular system healthy and not lose weight.

I spent hours reducing some physical formulae (flow equations) in combination with some other processing to get a vastly simplified one that was just one line and took far less time to compute, but really wasn't recognizable. My comment was "trust me."

Re: bullshit detected

An RJ-11 fits into an RJ-45 way better than a DE-9 "fits" into a DE-15, or a DE-15 "fits" into a DE-15, but the wrong way up. Both of which I've seen.

LMGTFY

As it turns out, it entered the OED in 2015.

https://techcrunch.com/2015/08/29/opening-pandoras-dox-the-unintended-consequences-of-an-internet-that-never-forgets/

Re: Not impossible, just ludicrously unlikely

I find it ludicrously unlikely than anyone with the technology to travel interstellar space would then crash on Earth. Even our own planes don't crash very often (it's only a daily occurrence because we have LOTS of planes in the sky.)

Re: Ahh BOFH time again

Like a little piggie.

Re: "Brewer moved to Montana under a new identity"

It was already a federal crime if even one of his "investors" was out of state.

Re: A fitting epitaph

In the case of FSD, we'd also need them to spend time outside the cars, repeatedly walking into the road as the car approached, or riding a bicycle in the lane. Safe for the occupants ≠ safe.

Re: Then how will they reach me about my car's extended warranty?

My car is a 2005 model, and I still was getting those calls last year.

Also, I already have an extended warranty.

My car doesn't even have an alarm, as far as I know.

Re: Why?

My employer has been using it for a couple of years now. It is, indeed, terrible, but I actually like it because what we had before was even more terrible (a cobbled together combination of Lotus Notes applications, IBM mainframe applications in a terminal window, emailed PDFs. and actual paper.)

Re: Proof of Funds

This doesn't seem terribly uncommon, even for an investment as pedestrian as starting a Dunkin Donuts franchise.

https://www.dunkinfranchising.com/faq/#startup_cost

Re: A4 or Letter?

"Not even in the USA the Letter format is being used anymore for all I know."

Nope, we still pretty much all still use letter size / A / 8-1/2 x 11" / 216 x 279.5 mm.

Re: "They even asked for a physical description of the caller"

"How VERY dare you?!"

Re: Waah

My first thoughts were Popehat or Legal Eagle.

Re: I can imagine the instructions....

Surely "boxed mats" or "un-unboxed mats?" Or is "boxed" used in a similar manner to "shelled" or "pitted"?

Re: point of order

I learned FORTRAN in high school in the late 1980s. By then I had already taught myself BASIC, Pascal, and C. The assignments in FORTRAN were really easy, but I hated the editor, so within a couple of weeks I was using an editor I wrote for myself in FORTRAN. By the end of the semester, half the class was using my editor.

When do we send in the cane toads?