From losers to winners
There were so many examples of trainee humiliation that we eventually had to call a halt and let you vote for the winner from our shortlist to receive the Backbytes champagne prize.
So, here’s how we do it.
Our first finalist, who you may remember from last week, was Helen George. When she joined ICI she was put in charge of breeding flies in the basement, and found a seething squelching two-inch-deep carpet of maggots in the dark when she went back to check on them a week later. If you want to vote for her, email us with the title ‘Humiliate Helen’.
Our second finalist is Julie Dearsley, of Brunel University, who admitted in public for the first time that when she was 16 she had queued for 20 minutes at Victoria Post Office for a ‘Punch Card Operator’s Licence’. Well done Derek Hammersley, who sent her there. To vote for her, email us with the title ‘Humiliate Julie’.
Our final finalist is Alex Bailey, one of many trainees caught out by the Post Office Telecommunications tradition of sending newbies to the stores to ask for a ‘long weight’, and weighted, sorry waited, all day until he was told they had run out.
Email to vote for this one with the title ‘Humiliate Alex’. Closing date for votes is 2 August. Results next week.
Nokia into next week
The quest for the Nokia Man goes on. Who knows, the winner may get to play Nokia Man in the
live-action Hollywood blockbuster. This week we bring you two more wannabes. In the case of Timothy Gray (below, left), working in IT Support at Airbus, he really doesn’t want to be, so his great pal Chris Vincent resorted to scanning in his site pass to show us. Meanwhile, Andy Dobson, at Honda, sends this excellent picture of Scott Sykes (right), the voice support and IBM Websphere administrator. ‘Scott has had this haircut for the nine years we’ve known him,’ he says, so that none of you think he was doing it for a bet. One more week of candidates and then we select the final four! Isn’t this exciting?
To Llewellyn back
Some of you just can’t get enough of a good thing. Ed Grant reckons he’s even found a lookalike for Andrew Tweddle – the Nokia man lookalike we featured a fortnight ago. ‘Forget Nokia man,’ he says.
‘I think Andrew is a dead ringer for Jim Reaper.’
For the uninitiated, Ed informs us that Jim Reaper is a character played by Robert Llewellyn in the Red Dwarf episode in which Kryten (Llewellyn) is to be replaced by an updated model.
To back up his argument, he suggests typing Robert Llewellyn into Google images, and looking at the last image on the first page.
Pots of fun
Distracted by waiting for drops of pitch to fall, we’ve been neglecting your fine examples of boring webcams. Mik Towse, at ATB, recommends the Lobster Cam, where you can watch an empty lobster trap (‘This will be dark at night and muddy when the ocean is really rough…’). They put pictures on the site to show you that at least once in 1999, something happened: http://www.thelobstercam.com/.
Also try the webcam at FS Hot (‘Turning dreams into reality’), which looks across a boring street to a boring house. We shouldn’t encourage these people, but if you have time on your hands, watching http://fshot.co.uk/ will fill you with self-loathing. Thanks to Anthony Ashton, at Sherrington Law.
Glass roots
Several of you write to tell us that Jonathon Allport’s point that glass is a fluid is a myth.
‘The reason that the glass in old windows is thicker at the bottom is to do with the process used to manufacture them,’ says Gavin Sinclair. ‘One end was always thicker than the other and it makes sense to install the thick end at the bottom. The glass itself isn’t flowing anywhere.’ Which is a relief.
‘It’s estimated that it takes about 10 million years for the glass at the bottom to be just five per cent thicker,’ adds Barry Wickett, at Techniquest.
‘Windows that are thicker at the top have been found, probably because the workers put them in upside down,’ says Ricky Paltz, at Microdec – which just goes to show that even hundreds of years ago, the best and the brightest didn’t install windows for a living.
Waxing lyrical
We don’t usually cover PR company-inspired surveys except to make fun of them, but we’ll relent and give an airing to last week’s Training Camp survey on what music IT people listen to.
It seems database administrators like the Smiths (Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now); Microsoft professionals like Britney (Oops, I Did It Again); project managers like Pink Floyd (Comfortably Numb) and Linux people like Orb (A Huge, Ever-growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre (Of The Ultraworld)).
Does anyone else have any song titles that match their jobs particularly well?
Trial by dial
In positively the last word on computers with a rotary dial, several of you point out that the EDSAC computer had this particularly archaic input device.
‘I remember the EDSAC at the Cambridge University Maths Lab, where I had the privilege of working from 1955 to 1956,’ says Henry Goodman. ‘The main input medium was five-track paper tape, but the dial could be used for inputting items such as runtime parameters.’
Which begs the question: after nearly 50 years, has the EDSAC actually come up with your answer yet?
Green with envy
The competition to find the person who looks most like the green plasticine Nokia man just moved up a gear. This week, the telephone rings, and someone at Nokia makes us an offer we can’t refuse: they’d like to offer the winner a Nokia Communicator 9500, complete with a Bluetooth headset.
So here’s what we’re going to do: two more weeks of lookalikes after today, then our selection committee will pick the four finalists for you to vote on. And then the winner gets a Communicator, Nokia gets a photo opportunity, and we get the satisfaction of knowing that there is almost nothing you won’t do for a free handset.
So keep sending those pictures: all entries by 29 July please.
Thorough bread
Meanwhile, back to the freakshow, sorry, the competition. This week we are sent to www.engrish.com, the web site of unusual Japanese translations, to find a non-human Nokia Man lookalike with a bizarre message for network managers everywhere.
‘I seem to recall it had something to do with a bread exhibition,’ says Paul Price, who found him.
As many of you point out, unlike our four other nominees to date, he’s not called Andy. More Nokia man lookalikes from your offices please.
Unwilling joke
You see, this is what we have to put up with. Last week we make a silly joke about integrated freebies being licence auditing software plus a Get Out of Jail Free card.
So this week we get a mail: ‘Further to the comment from Chris Moore at Ignaware suggesting that Microsoft offers licence auditing software. ActivAeon XA has been developed in conjunction with the Microsoft Service Provider Licence Agreement. ActivAeon XA automates licence activity data collection and generates a range of real-time licence usage reports…’
Calm down ActiveWhatsit! It was a joke! We’re not even slightly interested. Show it to someone else, we’re the column you write to when you’ve eaten the most pizza.
Flies in the face of reason
It’s the last week for the employee humiliation nominations this week, and already we’re tingling with excitement, because soon we will be compiling the shortlist and requesting your votes.
This week: ‘In the summer of 1976 I was on a temporary assignment at an ICI crop and plant research centre – I was assigned to the cellar, where they grew cockroaches and Arabian flies,’ says Helen George, who now no longer does this job, surprisingly.
She was shown how to catch flies, sex them and breed pupae, and left to get on with it.
‘A week later I was sent to check on my maggots. It was dark and the light switch was half way into the room. As I walked there, I felt a squishy feeling underfoot. When I reached the light I discovered I was on a two-inch-deep carpet of maggots, with a waterfall of maggots flooding from the bowls on to the floor.’ Yes, it was a joke they liked to play.
She spent the day cleaning them up, and now works in database software. Next week: we pick three finalists, and you get to vote.
Plumb the depths of toilet humour
As we’re raising the tone this week with stories of maggots, we return to John Clifton, who put a photo of his empty desk on the intranet, claiming it was his office webcam.
‘John Clifton’s tale reminded me of a great joke to play,’ says Gary Clinton. ‘Using a camcorder, you film your own empty toilet for 10 minutes and put the rewound tape into your VCR. When someone goes to the toilet you play the tape just before he or she returns, then you all look at the TV and laugh. They will think you’ve all been watching from a hidden camera! Has anyone got the nerve to try this at work?’ Only very stupid people. But then again, this is the stupid person’s column of choice.
...and then you can watch paint dry
Many of you were fascinated by last week’s item on the funnel of pitch, which has dripped eight times in 70 years.
‘If it has taken that long for pitch to fall from the funnel, how long did it take for Prof Parnell to pour it into the funnel?’ asks Howard Yates, at EDS. Oh, and we said that the eighth drop was about to fall. Actually it fell four years ago as Andrew McGuinness points out, so you missed it. But at least you’re in good time for the ninth.
And then it gets really weird. ‘Glass is also a fluid,’ says Jonathan Allport at CML Group. ‘Very old windows will by now be much thicker at the bottom of the pane than the top. Does anyone know of a webcam pointing at a 16th century window?’ Point us at it!
Playing bar games
‘You sneer too soon at David Rodrick for suggesting the Solidac may have been used to randomise the bars of a piece of music by Mozart,’ says Mike Glendinning. ‘In fact, there is a “musical dice game” musikalisches Wuerfelspiel) often attributed to Mozart that consists of separate bars of a minuet to be combined depending on throws of the dice.’
Actually we weren’t sneering at David. We were saying that whether it was Mozart or Solidac that got to it first, what is the point of doing it? A question which, if programmers asked it more often, could halve the size of the internet overnight. But then again, what would we write about?
They cam, they saw...
For those of you who have been looking for practical applications in the pages of Backbytes, don’t despair: we’re here to serve.
‘On 1 April this year, I took a digital photo of my vacant desk from a high angle,’ says John Clifton, at Keltec. ‘I put a link on our intranet called “IT Webcam” which pointed to the photo, suitably doctored to make it look grainy, like a webcam picture.
‘I suggested that staff checked the webcam to see if I was at my desk before calling with problems or queries. The number of calls decreased instantly, and I now have time to write emails such as this.’ Well go on, try it for yourselves. No need to thank u
Dropped in it
In the category of boring-yet-interesting webcams, we bring you the Pitch Drop experiment, courtesy of Clive Taylor, at North Devon Healthcare NHS Trust. This immortalises, almost literally, the work of Professor Thomas Parnell, begun in 1927. Rush immediately to: http://www.physics.uq.edu.au/pitchdrop/pitchdrop.shtml
Parnell wanted to show that pitch (the tar-derivative used by boatbuilders, which can apparently be shattered by a hammer), has the properties of a fluid, so he poured some into a funnel. More than 70 years later, the eighth drop is about to fall. Don’t miss it.
Booming dangerous
This week, the newbie humiliation takes a cruel and dangerous twist.
‘Back in the ‘60s at EMI Electronics, a favourite trick with new apprentices was to sit them down to do some soldering at a bench, under which had been placed a really beefy electrolytic capacitor connected to a raw AC supply,’ says Richard Anderton.
‘After about 20 minutes the capacitor would heat up enough to blow off its end cap, making a truly deafening explosion. Many apprentices were known to run off in sheer terror.’
We understand this just enough to know that lots of you will write in to tell us just how terribly dangerous this is. ‘No doubt today the Health & Safety Mafia would disapprove of this character building exercise,’ says Anderton. With good reason, it seems.
Meanwhile, an anonymous informant writes to tell us the humiliation meted out to a colleague who wasn’t even a trainee.
‘His van had an extra wire run in from the brake lights to the horn,’ he says. ‘We all heard him trying to negotiate a crossing, traffic jam, and traffic island, before coming back strangely irate,’ he says.
One more week of stories, then we’re going to pick three finalists, and you can vote for the most exquisitely humiliated employee.
Nokia, Nokia! Who’s there?
Yet another reader with a separated-at-birth resemblance to the Nokia IT man emerges this week.
Thanks to helpful colleague Ian Lonsdale, we bring you Andrew Tweddle, an IT support engineer at Universal Building Society. Is someone selling silly wigs?
Memo random
Simon Smith, at Outokumpu, received this worrying memo from his IT department: ‘Forthcoming IT actions: a major group-wide project is being undertaken, due for completion in summer 2005... A standard format means that some users will require modification.
A member of the Help Desk team will contact those that require changing to arrange a suitable time.’
‘It has some of us a tad concerned about how we will be modified,’ he says. If anyone has been modified to fit in with Microsoft’s format, perhaps they could let us know what changes they underwent.
Rock me Amadialus
More of you write with exciting tales of computers that used a telephone rotary dial as an input device.
‘In the early 1960s my uncle Tom O’Beirne – chief mathematician at Barr and Stroud – built a computer called Solidac with his friends at the University of Glasgow,’ recalls David Rodrick, at the NHS Information Authority.
‘This also had a telephone dial as
an input device. As far as I can recall, Solidac’s main claim to fame was that it made an LP (predecessor of the CD for those too young to remember). It used a random number generator to order the bars of music Mozart wrote – with the original idea of using dice to produce a sequence of bars – and then played them. The result was intellectually interesting, though sonically somewhat pathetic.’
A computer to randomise Mozart! Almost as useful as a telephone dial as an input device. We suppose no one told them that the notes were written in a specific order for a reason.
A message from beyond the grave
New Scientist reports this week that Robert Barrows, of California (where else), has filed a patent application for a grave headstone with an LCD touch screen, that has an internal computer designed to broadcast messages from the deceased.
It draws electricity from the lighting system at the cemetery.
We’re improvising now, but we assume that in the future we’ll all be recording messages such as: ‘Oi! Watch where you’re walking’; ‘Call that a bunch of flowers?’ and ‘OK, you can let me out now!’ Or maybe that’s just us.
Do not pass go, do not collect £200
Chris Moore, at Ignaware, has an idea
for this week’s integrated freebie. He suggests a CD-Rom containing licence auditing software from Microsoft and a ‘get out of jail free’ card from FAST.
Have a banana!
Come on, own up! Which of you bid £1,650 on eBay to win a banana skin signed by GMTV presenter Kate Garraway?
She bit into the banana and signed it ‘lots of love Kate G’ live on air to raise money for charity. But it’s a perishable item, and could shrivel – so that could be £1,650 for a banana signed by ‘LOG’.
Green and bare it
More look-alikes for the Nokia green man who has security issues. ‘Check out Andy Hughes (below left) who used to work for us as a support technician,’ says Rod Wallace, at Teignbridge District Council. Andy has now gone on to Devon County Council, and part-time modelling for Nokia.
But if we’re looking for the full body double, Lee Bustin, at Portman Building Society, nominates his colleague Andy Williams (below right). Any more? Note: the real Nokia man is on the top left.
Living in a box, living in a cupboard box
More interesting finds in the cupboard. For example: ‘When I started work in my current job I opened my desk drawer to find my computer, a ZX81 complete with the extra 16K RAM pack,’ says Chris Carter, at the University of Nottingham.
‘Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the mini printer that went with it, and so was unable to use it fully and had to ask for a new PC.’ Does anyone have the tiny printer to help Chris?
When Roger Taylor, at CSC, worked for a daily newspaper in Holborn, one of his jobs was to clean out the programming office’s new cupboard: ‘I climbed inside with a can of Pledge and a couple of J-cloths.
It wasn’t long before the office joker closed the doors on me. By coincidence, a man from one of our software suppliers arrived exactly at that moment. My team members told him they would check to see if I was in.’
When they opened the cupboard, Roger got to invite the confused salesman into his new ‘office’. So we’re modifying our request: clean out your cupboards, and tell us who you find, as well as what.
Lost in the cloud
More trainee humiliation: ‘When working in a super secret military organisation looking at negatives of vertical photography, the standard jape was to send a very junior member of staff to the stores to get a bottle of cloud remover to allow us to see more of the target,’ says Andrew Pooley.
Even more trainee humiliation, again from Alex Bailey’s Post Office Telecoms days. ‘From the same telephone exchange that sent me for “a long weight” another apprentice returned empty-handed at teatime from the cake shop to guffaws of laughter with the explanation: “the woman behind the counter said tell them at the telephone exchange that we’ve run out of pregnant tarts, but they have a fresh delivery of hot cross buns”.
Stop sniggering! Some of these apprentices are running BT by now.
More dial dialogue
Colin Marshall had a computer with a telephone dial input device, but he did build it himself in 1963.
‘We begged several thousand germanium transistors, “acquired” the wire and solder, scrounged an old
packing case as the case, but by the time we’d bought enough resistors and tag panel, we hadn’t enough funds left for I/O systems,’ he laments.
Fast forward to 1967, and Alan Cooper joined Barclays as a trainee, was sent to Woolwich Polytechnic to learn about computers, and was shown their computer, with its telephone dial input.
‘It was made by Standard Telephones & Cable (STC), better known for its telephone exchanges, hence the dial,’ he says. ‘I believe it was STC’s only foray into computers, though later it did acquire ICL.’ Doesn’t that count? Maybe not.
But why invent a rotary dial when we already have a keyboard? Hugh Hulme, at CommonTime, has a theory: ‘The dial-in device was presumably designed so that trainees could say “IT Phone Hoooome!” as some sort of hilarious pun.’
The latest ideas and projects
Jason Higgs invites anyone who still has the latest HP Ideas magazine for June 2004 to take a look at the front cover.
‘At the bottom they have a picture of a Compaq business notebook “+” an HP digital projector “=” wireless printing on the go. Call me old-fashioned, but surely you need a printer to print, whereas a projector projects?’ Maybe they mean paperless printing, too.
This could be Rotterdam or anywhere
Finally, our first batch of boring webcams.
John Coe supplies www.mirimgs.com/webcam/paint.html, which is a cam that watches paint dry.
The best ones, however, are those that someone genuinely thought were exciting. Check out the Port of Rotterdam cargo division webcam, as discovered by Nick Smith: www.port.rotterdam.nl/webcam/wcvcb/
Our favourite is www.planetary.org from Peter Moss, at Tinius Olsen. It’s a sundial at the South Pole, so there isn’t even any sun at the moment.
More please. Mark the email ‘boring’ so as not to get our hopes up.
Got your number!
Remember Martin Pill, who pointed out that you could reattach the bit of paper that keeps your PIN secret in the letter that comes with the new secure chip-and-PIN card by licking it?
'My concern was not about the lack of security, it was why would you lick the bit of plastic and then stick it down again,' wonders Anthony Drew.
Meanwhile:' I wanted to see if it was possible to read the new PIN without removing the diffusive background.' says Jay Schlackman.
'It took me a few minutes of holding the letter at various angles, to the light, but I was able to read it successfully before even touching the tamper seal.'
So that's two ways to secretly read your mate's PIN. Any more?
Putting the fusion into confusion
Uh-oh!' read yout piece on the RSA tokens containing a Lithium ion battery and the possibility that they contain some sort of nuclear fission device, 'says Graham Scott.
'This is extremely unlikely because the stability of atomic nuclei (as measured by blinding energy) increases with increasing atomic mass up to about mass 65. Hence the elements iron, cobalt, nickel, copper and zinc, which have atomic masses 58.9 to 65.4, all have very stable nuclei. Above this level blinding energy and therefore nuclear stability decrease blah blah blah.
'Putting all this into the context of the disappearing Lithium means that the battery is more likely to have some sort of fusion reaction going on - it is therefore possible that RSA has succeeded in discovering "cold fusion". I hope this adds to your confusion.'
Stop! Can somebody really tell us where the Lithium goes in a Lithium ion battery?
