Wow, just wow. Update on my WTF. So I am in over my head on some email work, as stated in my previous post. Rather than create havoc again I figure I better call on an expert whose focus is email servers. We get on the phone, remote in, my expert is a confused and a little surprised that the mess I had inherited works at all. Anyways we get to making changes, and suddenly nothing is working right. No email flow. We try to revert changes, still not working. Over an hour poking into every setting under the hood. Come to discover, the company I contract with to handle spam filtering was having technical difficulties, and all email was being queued. Years of no issues, only to have a tangential service error, at the exact time I am trying to do a major reconfiguration! What are the odds.
Remember to schedule this kind of stuff... and to really really dig around all the pieces involved in the thing you are touching. Where I work, there are at least 6 pieces involved in just the schedule of process executions... any one fails, everything breaks XD
There was a great WtF yesterday, at which I probably should not have laughed as much as I did. It was a coffee shop, and this woman was there with her infant child of maybe 1 year. The baby had his own food in the form of a pot of puree which he promptly swallowed, plus a massive bottle of milk which he was guzzling frantically. As anyone who's spent much time around babies will know, there are certain consequences to such dining habits... It was the mother's reaction which said it all: "Awww, he's being sick. Oh... Oh! Oh, my god!" He was a junior Mr Creosote - it would not stop! Thing is, he was a wearing a bib with one of those bowl shapes molded into the bottom to catch any food he might drop. This quickly filled up with vomit and began overflowing. She was delicately dabbing at his face with a wetwipe with a look on her face like the baby had puked raw sewage, and handled the bib full of puke like it was a fuel rod. I'm sure the baby felt a lot better after all that.
Background: LDAP-profiled file system (each user is assigned a group, which enables read/write/execute in defined paths, different per group), this is a standard computer security feature so people can work compartimentized within servers. Incident: User unable to see content by using a tool (only that user has such problem). It is a normal user, not an Operator, nor a Developer, etc... Complication: User has 95 different groups. He literally has ALL the groups for that server... Solution: the tool has a 4kb limit on the amount of data it can read for groups. Removing 32 groups from the guy made it work again for him... Explanation: in that server, the manager decided to have certain people rotating weekly among the different working groups. Since taking groups up and down gets managed by an external contractor, and can take up to a week, they just kept adding groups... WTF moment: why the hell do we have compartimentalization in the data if some people can see everything anyway (with no bussiness being able to)...
Pretty classic: based on a why, define a what, apply a how. Works until business admit that the why they provide is not the real one (or that they didn't understand that they don't want what they asked in the first place).
I ate at White Castle yesterday for the first time, we got to our hotel after midnight and there was a 24hr one next door. Oh My God. The food tasted alright, above average fast food tbh, but the effect on our digestive systems had been rather explosive. I was farting so much throughout the night that I'm fairly sure we didn't need the AC to keep air flowing throughout the room. At times I could have auditioned for membership in a brass band based only on the deep, brassy rumbles emitted from my guts. I've not been this excessively flatulent since I had my Mum's vegan lentil soup! It's now nearly 11am and I'm still delivering air biscuits on a regular basis! Never again!
I have a tape measure in my office I use to measure things, some ancient thing left over from the previous occupant. It is not often I have to measure things in my line of work, but sometimes it comes in handy. Today I was using it, and noticed for the first time, that the tape measure is marked at feet, and at 1/10th feet. Now the imperial measurement system is dumb enough, but mixing imperial and decimal? What madness is that!? I am sure there is some industry where that makes sense, but for the life of me, I don't know what.
The Brits of the forum may find it easier to relate to this one. Without revealing too much information, I sold an item on eBay to a guy whose surname is Bermingham. If he actually lived in Birmingham, that would be too perfect. Unfortunately, he doesn't.
Even in Europe you find stuff which is meassured in Inches, pipes and fittings for example. Then there are military cooperation stuff which are done in Europe and alot of Nato stuff which had been leading by the USA came with imperial meassurements on the technical drawings (always funny to give them to other trainees). I have worked in a company that had done maintenance for US military vehicles like Oshkosh Hemtt ( realy had fun driving that thing on the company areal), so i had a double equiped toolbox with metric and imperial wrenches and other stuff. The other thing such a tape measure was rather usefull when i started playing in the GW Universe. 40k had Inches as measuremnt while Battlefleet Gothic was in metric, so i just needed to carry one tape measure.
I guess I wasn't clear in my post. The tape measure doesn't have inches and centimeters. It has markings for Feet, 10ths of a foot, and 100ths of a foot. No inch markings, no metric markings. Ten divisions per foot.
In my industry, we use decimal inches all the time, but decimal feet...that's a new one on me. But it does remind me of an ongoing WTF here at work. My company ships product to both the US and Europe. Our European orders, understandably, have size requirements in metric. For some-odd number of years, we've had only English tools, so when the work order goes to the floor, the centimeters are translated into inches. Unfortunately, the conversion was done badly and we were throwing away material that, looking back, was probably acceptable. There's a simple solution here: Do the conversion correctly (and we're implementing that, obviously). My teammate in that area of the plant, though, wants to not do the conversion at all. Keep the measurements in cm, and simply get some metric tools. Most of the quality team agrees: insert as little opportunity for error as possible. One person does not agree and is fighting tooth and nail against getting metric tools. He's the guy who's responsible for calibrating all of our shop tools. His concern is that people are dumb and will grab the wrong tape measure and record something that should be 72" as 182", and he will not accept any attempt at error proofing (like just making the two tape measures different colors). Boss overrode this guy and filled out the requisition. Dude goes to the company president and tells him "we don't really want those" and has the req cancelled. It was...unreal.
Ok, i looked it up and asked some elders and its an USA thing of sort. I heard it was / is used in some areas like Surveying, architecture and engineering, as it is proably easier to programm with decimals than fractions and it would be easier to up- or downscale. They had been used in boat building till the 70s they switched to metric system at least in Europe. This guy may be right. The more foolproof you do something there will alwyas be a better fool by nature. I had a work mate who just finished his training as a tool maker, so trained for doing high precision stuff. Its a 3,5 years education in germany. Had to do some inner diameter turn manufacturing using this sort of calipers cause standard 150 mm ones were to small. End result was all inner diameter meassurements were 10 mm off, cause he forgot to deduct the tip of the calipers.
Maybe replace that guy with someone who isn't so damn lazy as to want to calibrate some sets of different tools. He clearly has no respect for his colleagues or his superiors.
So GenCon is great but Indiana sucks I'm sure all of you are at some level familiar with "Florida man" memes, where someone from Florida, usually a funny looking redneck, does something silly and we all laugh at them. The reason for this meme's existence is something called the "Sunshine Law" which makes all government documents (like police reports and even government salaries) public and accessible to anyone that asks for them. My girlfriend is a section chief in the county and anyone that felt like it could literally look at every email she has ever written at work. To the point: other states have just as much silly shit, and I would venture to say even more (I'm looking at you Alabama and West Virginia) but they have privacy laws that prevent people from simply accessing any police report, whereas any journalist having a slow day can literally browse Florida mugshots and pick a suitably clownish bubba to ridicule. I write all this because after milling around Indianapolos for about half a week I have seen more ridiculous shit and downright decay than living in Florida for 12 years Thank you for coming to my TED talk
Not to dispute your point, but I feel like there is a good chance GenCon artificially inflates the occurrences of crazy buggers.
