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“I recommend we build a tracking database”

I am always reminded of this Dilbert cartoon whenever a customer has a large complex problem at work, and some genius suggests “We’ll build a database”. Or frequently, we’ll implement a replacement database because the old database product is 3 versions behind.

It’s 3 versions behind because we’ve not paid for product maintenance.

[...]

“What is this ‘Furphy’ you refer to?

Or when I stopped using Australian slang in international telephone calls.

May 22, 2003.

When the CA Unicenter Remote Product started up on Windows 98SE, it would do a network broadcast, looking for the computer name “PRESET.INI”. I mean, how dumb was that??? Looking for a INI file as a computer name.

So [...]

“It is better to have and not need, than need and not have.”

As I said to the boss the other day when he asked if we wanted a final backup of the Windows 2000 Server we were decommissioning. Now where I first heard this saying, is lost in the mists of time. If pressed, I’d say some sort of security briefing.

Regardless, it expresses what I [...]

International Women’s Day 2010

“So how do you feel about working in a male dominated industry?”

‘Who said you were dominating me?

- overheard at a recent lunch

In the mid 1990’s during the time we were actively encouraging women in IT:

“Where’s Sharon?”

‘She’s at the Bimbos in Business Luncheon”.

I think this was one of [...]

Ecclesiastes 1:9

as I said to a co-worker, applies.

The problem?

We were running out of network drive space. The network drive, where our 2000 customers store their roaming profiles, had 80MB left. Roaming profiles, very simply put, are copies of your “My Documents” and “Desktop”, which “roam” to every computer you logon to. To do [...]

“What do you do for a living?”

“Not IT, no sir-ee. I shuffle papers for a living. See the shine in the seat of my trousers? Don’t leave my chair all day”

That’s the story most people get when I’m asked.

Only IT Workers and Doctors get the truth when they ask.

If you’re a doctor, and I’ve seen a few [...]

Backup mistakes I’ve made.

Confessions can be good. Here are mine around backup mistakes I’ve made.

Copy “new” backup disk over the “old” backup disk. The “new” disk was blank! I (almost) “lost” 5 years of irreplaceable photos. Fortunately I found an “old old” backup. What it cost me: 100+ photos / 4 hours. Production server: Disk to [...]

Tape backup, reliable? Never ever!

Or how tape backups have failed my customers over the years, and wasted our collective time, because of customer stupidity.

Melted tapes The school which stored their entire backup tape set next to their server. One office fire later, “No, we can’t restore your melted tapes.” Old tapes The schools which refused to [...]

Leaving Geocities:

With Geocities shutting down, I had to move the CTOS Faq site.

CTOS, my friends, was an kick-ass operating system which was released in 1979, and was supported for 20 years.

It was a big thing in the business community. But Unisys stopped supporting CTOS at the end of 1999. I documented [...]

The mighty IBM 3800

Laser printers use two types of fusion to fuse toner to paper, hot fusion, and cold fusion.

I’ve only seen cold fusion used once. StorageTek used to make mainframe printers with cold fusion technology. You’d take paper off the printer, and it would be icy cold. Cold enough to burn you.

On the [...]

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