Sing a song of sixpence…
The IT-related songs can’t be stopped, and Chris Pritchard has the most obscure one yet. ‘An obscure David Bowie track from his 1972 Space Oddity album has a top track for Unix administrators. It’s called Memory of a Free Festival, lasting seven minutes. After four whimsical verses detailing an LSD experience, a refrain repeats: "The sun machine is coming down, and we’re gonna have a party".’
Well, you can see where Chris is going with this. ‘Download the track now and send it to users in place of the usual boring "due to routine maintenance…"’ he suggests.
And Jason Grube, who admits singing Thanks For The Memory while upgrading servers, also likes to listen to the Manic Street Preachers on his way to work singing: "you stole the sun from my heart". One day, he arrived at work and found the place had been robbed. Spooky.
Place the name
It’s not enough to write to us and claim you have the same name as a town if you’re called something like Dave Derby or Cathy Crewe. We aim higher than that. We might consider giving you publicity if your name is Bobby Knaresborough, though with a name like that you should really be a nightclub comedian.
But kudos to Simon Watts, at BT, who has used his imagination – and his directory search. ‘How about the two gents called Keith Lee in BT?’ though neither lives in West Yorks,’ he says. That’s the stuff.
Things that make you go, hmmm
We keep trying to think up silly ways for you to amuse yourselves and what happens? You out-silly us. Though we’ll never again plumb the depths of asking you to eat the cheesy puffs your computers are packed in, we’re pleased to acknowledge Andrew Boarder’s six-year-old daughter Emma, who, when Andrew had finished his Tesco.com order, asked him to search the site for bogies. So, he did.
It found Tesco crisp mixed salad 245g. ‘Now we know what makes the salad crispy,’ he says. Emma asked him to search for snot, which found John Smiths extra smooth 4x440ml cans.
After Emma went to bed, a search for cannabis offered Andrew Huggies Super Flex, and John Frieda Hair products are Tesco’s best suggestion for amphetamines and plutonium. Should a night out go with a bang, at least your hair will look good.
Mouse code
We don’t have any useful Dilbert lookalikes yet, but if we do get them, we have a prize.
‘Your correspondent suggested the winner should have the social skills of a mouse pad, so a good prize would be a mouse mat, but not just any old mouse mat,’ says Paul Manning, at Glow Safe. ‘My company makes mouse mats that light up as you move your mouse over them. How about one of those?’
So, it’s not true what they say: you actually can give them away.
Cruncha, muncha, luncha
And so to sandwiches. ‘I once knew someone who claimed that his brother liked to eat a grilled kipper between two slices of Madeira cake. Does that count?’ asks Ian Livingstone. Not unless we can produce the brother in question, or unless one of you wants to try it and report back to us.
‘A friend introduced me to strawberry jam and salt & vinegar crisp sandwiches; jam for the sweet flavour, crisps for the sour flavour, thus giving a perfect Chinese sweet and sour taste. The jam should be a smooth one,’ says Simon Casey, at the Portman Building Society.
Meanwhile, Ian Wedge shared flying lessons with a sandwich eater in 1974. ‘He didn’t so much munch his sandwiches as crunch them, due to the filling of mustard and sugar. Oddly enough, nobody else was tempted to try the recipe.’ More please!
On yer bike!
We asked for your suggestions for people who should be named and shamed, but as reader John Walker points out: ‘Naming and shaming debtors is illegal. The Administration of Justice Act 1970 makes it an offence to harass debtors. Harassment includes advertising a person’s debt.
‘So if someone owes you money and you advertise the fact, they could have you prosecuted. Or they could inform Trading Standards, which will write the culprit a threatening letter.’
You might want to hold off on that update to your web site.But John does have a suggestion to make: ‘Personally, I think people who ride bicycles on the pavement should be named and shamed. And have their bikes confiscated.’
We’re more concerned about people who insist on having beards without moustaches, but pavement cyclists are a good start.
Church bans mobiles en Mass
Here at Backbytes, we love mobiles – apart from in cinemas, the theatre, supermarkets, on trains etc.
So we appreciate the problems of Catholic priests at four churches in Mexico City. Continually interrupted by the number of mobile phones ringing during Mass, they have installed a mobile phone jamming system.
‘Our church was the first to use the technology, and now we are getting calls from all over the country asking about our system,’ said a church official.
Presumably not on their mobiles, though.
Your call is important to us…
And finally: our thoughts are with NTL, a victim of hackers – or maybe an ex-employee with a grudge.
Callers reporting faults to NTL were greeted with a recorded message, in a Geordie accent, that was strewn with
four-letter expletives. It was added to an interactive recording and stayed active for more than an hour until NTL staff were alerted.
‘Hello,’ it said. ‘You are through to NTL customer services. We don’t give a **** about you. We are never here. We will **** you about, and we are not going to handle any of your complaints.’ Ouch!
A Brum deal
Following our item on the bank that published the names of its debtors on the web in an attempt to make them pay up, Pauline Jones writes to us from the Dudley Group of Hospitals NHST.
‘My mother, a small shopkeeper in a poor part of Birmingham, used to threaten to put the names of bad debtors in the shop
window,’ she says. ‘The threat of exposure to the local community was usually enough to make them pay up – although the threat was carried out occasionally.’
Maybe we could extend the ‘name and shame’ policy? Anyone like to suggest a category you would shame on the internet? Pass them on at www.computing.co.uk/backbytes.
The singing directive
More song titles. Yes, more. ‘Systems/Information Technology down’ might not seem very familiar, but abbreviate it to S/IT Down and you see where Jay Joshi, a SAP developments contractor, is coming from.
The best this week: George Tripp writes from Northampton Borough Council to suggest the theme tune for anyone involved in scanning: John Lennon’s Imaging.
And you can’t stop singing. At ITC Alstom, Mike Butterwick reports hearing Dreamer by Supertramp sung as Schema by database designers, which is almost as irritating as his colleagues singing the name of the company’s accounting package (Millennium) to the tune of Ma Na Ma Na by the Muppets.
Lost in translations
Occasionally, we perform a valuable service for you, our loyal readers, by asking for translations of gibberish that have particularly confused some of you.
This week, the request comes from Neil O’Connor, at FD Learning, who found this on the web pages of software company Embarcadero: ‘ER/Studio 6.5 represents a significant value-add in how we see and leverage our data models by giving us much greater interplay between our business intelligence applications, metadata repositories, and other major ETL environments’.
To which he responds: ‘Eh?’ We’re sure one of you can help.
Playing ketchup
We go in search of a more palatable sandwich, and find a suggestion from Dave Brettellat, at Insider Technologies, for what he calls the ‘King of Fillings’, the PTS.
The recipe: ‘Take two buttered white bread crusts, the thicker the better. Spread approximately half a jar of Piccalilli (the chunky variety) onto one crust. Pour over ample amounts of Tomato Ketchup. Sprinkle with sugar to taste.’ Sugar?
‘Not only does this taste fantastic, but the various textures combine to make a sandwich-eating experience that changes
with each mouthful.’ From curiosity to nausea, perhaps.
We’ve had a request to publish a cookbook, but we’re enjoying this so much, that we’ll run it a few more weeks, then send out the sandwich recipes in one of our emails, so you can print them out and take them to your local sandwich shop. More fillings please!
Mass exodus
Derek Harding clarifies the problem of the Peperami and its pork. ‘Peperami is partially dried, while "native" pork contains a high proportion of water,’ he says. ‘In the same way that each bar of a well-known chocolate contains 1.5 glasses of milk in every bar, so a 50-gram peperami can contain what was originally 54 gram of pork.’
The same goes for his sandwich, he says. ‘Water in the bread and foodstuff has significant mass, yet is not listed in the ingredients on the wrapper.’ Yum.
‘Toon in, drop out
‘How about asking your readers if anyone knows a Dilbert lookalike?’ suggests Oluwole Kolawole, from K4Plus Systems.
‘All entrants must be two-dimensional and have "the social skills of a mouse-pad". Ninety per cent of all programmers should qualify easily.’ Catty.
We’re not adding his restrictions, but if your office has any Dilberts, or Dilbert characters, please send a picture to us at www.computing.co.uk/backbytes. We can’t promise a prize, unless another kind sponsor makes itself known.
Definitely knot
It’s not just Microsoft that has silly articles in its Knowledge Base. In the interests of fairness,) we offer you Symantec’s
support Document ID:2001111515162712, for users of PCanywhere.
It seems to be tying itself in recursive knots, if a knot can be recursive. The article in question: ‘Error: "Error loading error message".’
Payrolling in the aisles
‘I thought you’d be interested to know how cutting-edge modern payroll systems are,’ says Andrew Akehurst, who (for obvious reasons) is keeping mum about his new employer.
Despite having recently graduated, so being used to having no money, he says: ‘I was somewhat bemused when my first payslip arrived almost entirely blank.’
But there’s an explanation: ‘Closer inspection revealed they were informing me that my net pay for the period up to (but not including) my start date was £0.00’.
Anyone else care to share the secrets of their payslips? We’re sure it can give us valuable insights into your employers.
You say ‘tomato’, we say ‘banana’
Sometimes we like to help you out, and we think we finally have a solution to Carl Bennett’s soggy sandwich problem.
‘His problem with peanut butter sandwiches going soggy by lunchtime is attributable to the inclusion of tomato – a serious
mistake,’ says Martin Williams, who works in the public sector at Powys County Council.
‘A far better idea is to gently top the peanut butter with a smear of miso – it adds that extra savoury touch and a hit of protein,’
he suggests. ‘Alternatively, for the devotee of the moister sandwich, peanut butter and banana is a superb combination, which does not suffer the sogginess that inevitably comes from tomatoes by lunchtime.’
Meanwhile, David Lane, at BridgeHead Software, suggests this week’s filling. Known (to him) as the GBH, it contains gorgonzola, beetroot and horseradish. More fillings, please!
A village idiot by any other name
Now you are hooked... lots of you have written in to admit to being named after a village. Willy Brown’s email address is ‘brownwilly’, which as any West country rambler knows, is a hill on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall.
‘My son had a friend at school whose name is Jacob Stowe. There is a village in Devon near Okehampton called Jacobstowe,’ says Bob Irving. ‘There’s a Rogerstone in Gwent,’ says Roger, er, Stone.
‘I used to work with a guy called Dave Piggott,’ says Paul Caswell, at RBS. ‘We never discovered a Piggott village, but we did drive past Piggotts Bottom occasionally.’
Unfortunately, Paul doesn’t clarify whether he’s referring to the village of that name.
Doing the Cam cam
Having perused some pretty dull webcams for your benefit recently, we’re delighted to find one that’s been brought to our attention by Mike Unwalla, at TechScribe.
Last week, the webcam of the Cambridge University Botanic garden (www.botanic.cam.ac.uk/webcam2.htm) was telling the world: ‘We apologise for the incorrect date and time at the top of the image. This is due to a software problem with the camera, probably due to the very large numbers of people viewing the camera.’
Whether this was actually caused by visitors staring at the camera, or by some kind of emission by the large and scarily
triffid-like Titan Arum it was focused on, is unclear. But once they’ve resolved this issue, perhaps the Botanic garden’s staff could help with the internet’s recent infestation by worms.
Silly sausages
Clive Shearsby, who claims to be writing from Warwickshire and not the village of Shearsby in Leicestershire, can now explain to us why a Peperami sausage has 108 per cent meat.
‘The weight quoted on the packaging is taken from comparing the uncooked weight against the cooked weight. For example, 6lb of beef uncooked may be reduced to 5lb 10oz once any water is cooked off and fat runs out. So the amount of meat would be 96oz reduced to 90oz giving a value of 106.6 per cent.’
But what about the sandwiches that are less than 100 per cent? Has the Peperami fat reattached itself so some other food? There’s still a lot we don’t know.
Disloyal subject
Anyone with a BT internet account will know that BT has improved its spam filtering for email customers, so that now any suspected spam comes in with ‘*SPAM?*’ added to the title.
‘Today I received an email from the BTopenworld team offering me a good deal on soon-to-be available broadband,’ says BTopenworld customer Philip Storey.
Or, as the email he received says: ‘Subject: *SPAM?* Be one of the first to get broadband in your area and at a great price.’ As Philip points out, if anyone knows that is spam, it’s BTopenworld.
Look what they’ve done to my song, ma
And the tune army marches on with its favourite IT-related songs. ‘I’m sure most of us would agree with the Elkie Brooks song that Perl’s A Singer,’ says Geoff Gibbs. You see, in a changing and uncertain world, you know where you are with Backbytes.
Rachel Goldthorpe points out that ‘a good song title for any Unix administrator is Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’.
Talking of which, we asked for irritating songs, too. Columb Healy, at Siemens, points out that all his colleagues like to sing ‘Solaris’ to the tune of the Dean Martin classic Volare. And when Alex Gow worked for Associated Bulk Carriers servicing NT servers, he liked to sing ‘Downtime’ to the tune of Petula Clark’s Downtown. Now that’s irritating.
And when the ROT really sets in...
And that’s not all that is irritating, it seems. Our first nomination for most irritating colleague is nominated by Paul Hurley, at Sanofi Synthélabo, whose workmate used to use acronyms for everything.
As if that wasn’t bad enough: ‘He has lately taken to ROT13ing words he can’t turn into acronyms (ROT13 means move every letter forward by 13 places), so instead of saying Linux he says "Yvahk", as if everyone would understand,’ says Paul.
Smash and gab
Andrew Ball was struck by the irony of two news items relating to mobile phone use.
News item #1: Drivers continue to flout the law by using handhelds, and even sending text messages, while driving.
News item #2: traditional telephone boxes are becoming obsolete because more and more people are using mobiles, reported under the headline: ‘Mobiles kill off more phone boxes’.
‘Perhaps drivers are so busy texting they come off the road and smash into the phone boxes,’ he suggests. Mmmm!
Bunsen burners up the opposition
More from the Muppets. Not only do some of our readers look like him, but lab assistant Beaker and his boss Dr Bunsen Honeydew have been voted the UK’s favourite cult TV boffins.
According to the BBC, they easily beat Mr Spock and Dr Who in the fun survey, polling nearly a third of the votes.
We’re still on the lookout for Muppet lookalikes, but in the meantime, is there anyone out there who looks like Mr Spock, or would that just be too illogical?
Cyber house rules
We were thrilled by the exploits of Kelly Holmes and Matthew Pinsent in Athens – now get ready to cheer on the UK team in the World Cyber Games.
The BBC reports that 10 players will be going to San Francisco (flowers in their hair optional), seeking to improve on last year’s solitary silver medal.
They will compete at Counter-Strike, Unreal Tournament, Warcraft III and Project Gotham Racing – and it promises to be just as serious as the Olympics.
Let’s hope none of our team ends up sobbing by the roadside.
Sad but true
Another in our series of features on customer relationship management: this week, how to use the world wide web to communicate with your customers. Our tutor is the Meridian Bank in the Serbian city of Novi Sad.
Faced with 45 bad debtors and 17 companies defaulting on their loans, the bank failed to secure the assistance of public prosecutors to enforce the debts. So it decided to deal with the problem using the internet instead: it published their names and addresses on a web site.
Play that funky music, IT boy
And more song titles to entertain you. ‘We’re fond of playing Jammin’ by Bob Marley when the printers get stuck,’ says Jonathan Knight, at the University of Keele. And thanks to all of you who suggest Dire Straits playing Money for Nothing and Fleetwood Mac Go Your Own Way – two songs which in the minds of our readers have a pretty wide application. We’re most impressed this week by Mike Pugh, at HSBC, and his suggestion for anyone developing for the internet: HTML With Your Rhythm Stick.
Junk rocker
Chris Broad, at the UK Atomic Energy Authority, thinks someone is having a joke with his junk mail. ‘A few days ago, I received three identical envelopes fastened together. They were all addressed to me with the same reference number, but small variations on the address, and on the back was written: We kill spam,’ he sighs.
His next mailshot was for a product to remove unauthorised files from your network, to save ‘embarrassment, litigation and, of, course, hard disk space’. If he orders it, he gets a free USB-pluggable MP3 player. Is someone out there having a laugh?
Dubious toilet humour from a Munster
If you’re in Amsterdam, don’t read Computing in the loos of the Cultural Centre De Balie, where a computer has been installed to tell users if they are taking too long. It will also nag if you don’t flush or put the seat up, or if you smoke or use too much toilet paper.
It’s the brainchild of a man called Leonard van Munster, who has programmed the computer to have moods. ‘Sometimes he doesn’t say anything, but will then suddenly start to sigh,’ he says.
If a sighing computer wasn’t bad enough, once you have been in the loo for a while it starts to get sarcastic. ‘When someone is spending a lot of time in the little room, one can hear him make funny remarks such as: "Do you know that during these 50 minutes you’ve spent in the toilet, 50 people have died in wars all over the world?"’ boasts van Munster. That’s a funny remark?
Is the barmy salami telling porkies?
The mystery of what you are eating for lunch deepens. If you recall, one of our readers added up the percentage of food in the sandwiches available in his canteen and discovered it came to less than 100 per cent. Where, we asked, was the rest of his sandwich?
Nick Oates, at Windsor, has more. ‘While it is very worrying not to have a complete sandwich, how do the makers of the tasty Peperami sausage squeeze 108 per cent pork into such a slim thing, and still have room for flavourings and E numbers?’ he asks.
A handy innovation that won’t hurt a bit
Bored with the same old computer games? UK Haptics might have just what you need.
The BBC reports that the company has developed a virtual reality hand for nurses to practice injections. The hand has virtual veins, virtual skin and gives tactile feedback to nurses on their technique, just like the force feedback in a computer game. If you’re squeamish about injections, skip to the next story now.
‘You can feel the needle go through the skin; you can put it in the skin and lift it out,’ Gary Todd, of UK Haptics, told the BBC. ‘You can feel the soft skin and muscles, and you can scratch the bone if you put it in the knuckle.’
Village people
It took until noon on Thursday, an entire morning, for someone to write to us using the name Melton Mowbray. What have we started? From now on we’ll have to check every single name you send in, just in case it’s actually a town or village.
Mr (Ms?) Mowbray points out that Grendon Underwood has a brother called Grafton. Actually, it’s a brother village: Grafton Underwood is just east of Kettering.
‘Our financial director is called Ed Walton,’ says Adrian Richards, of Baldwin and Francis, which you might know is just outside Nottingham, near Ruddington and Colwick. No, we didn’t either.
Anyone else really, genuinely, sharing a name with a village?
The hurl of sandwich
Some of you have taken to suggesting your personal favourite sandwiches, which is a trend we heartily approve of, since it makes us into more of a lifestyle column.
This week’s sandwich filling is suggested by a correspondent who wishes to remain anonymous, from First Line. Why anonymous? You decide. ‘Banana, Marmite and curry sauce, all in the same roll. The effect is interesting, with all the taste buds firing at once,’ he says. ‘This is one for eating publicly, ideally for a bet.’
Musical truth
More songs for jobs. Dave Burston, at Fujitsu, becomes the first person to mention Fairport Convention in this thread, but it was only a matter of time.
‘The song Who Knows Where The Time Goes? is ideal for anyone involved in project planning, or indeed for anyone who ever had to fill in a timesheet at the end of the week,’ he says.
Michael Law suggests Fixing A Hole by The Beatles – no prizes for guessing which company’s staff he suggested it applied to.
Gary Young, at Manchester Mental Health & Social Care Trust, recommends some more lateral ideas: C# Dressed Man, by ZZ Top, for .Net developers; When I’m 64-Bit (The Beatles) for Windows developers; and our favourite: Seven Tiers, the Goombay Dance Band classic (?), an anthem for network engineers everywhere.
Major irritations
Mention of the Goombay Dance Band brings us to the subject of appropriate, yet irritating, theme songs for jobs. John Burnley, at HBOS, tells us he likes to sing songs about his mainframe jobs. So he sings STORMAN (Storage Management Userid) to the tune of David Bowie’s Starman, R.O.S.C.O.e (a CA Development Product) to the tune of D.I.S.C.O., and MIMAMIA (CA MIM and MIA Products) to, well, you can guess, the Abba song.
‘Sadly, I’ve been singing these ditties for years,’ he says, which gives you a clue about the age of some of his software.
Does this make John the most irritating workmate you could have? He might be in with a shout. Of course, if you have colleagues who have more irritating habits, or if like John you don’t mind admitting to your own irritating tendencies, let us know.
Anticipate to accumulate
We know how excited you all are about the contents of the snappily-named Windows XP Service Pack 2.
Luckily, we have people such as Warwick Varney (which isn’t a place name, we checked), at Groupama UK Services, to thoroughly read the documentation for us.
‘While reading through the weighty tome that is Microsoft’s Changes to Functionality in Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2, I came across this delightful paragraph describing the new wireless provisioning service in Windows XP/2003: “Note: This feature requires Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2003 to enable the user scenarios described in this section. Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 has not yet been released”.’
As Warwick says: ‘I think that’s called creating demand through anticipation.’
Anticipation being, in this case, getting what you thought you already had. Another service pack to look forward to. We can hardly wait.
Advertising is hell
Dave Brettell, at Insider Technologies, has issues with LogicaCMG – specifically, its recent advertisements claiming it is doing its bit to ‘enhance the military capability of the British armed forces’.
‘Is that why the troops shown in the accompanying photo are American, and are climbing into an ageing HU1E helicopter?’ he asks.
Vital statistics?
If you recall our recent story about the plans for an electronic births, marriages and deaths register, you’ll know that the project is codenamed ‘Dove’ – standing for the ‘Digitisation of Vital Events’.
Robin Wilson wants to nitpick, and frankly, there’s no column more supportive of nitpickers.
‘Vital means “necessary to the maintenance of life”,’ he points out.
‘So while I’ll grant that a birth would fall under this category, and maybe – at the time – my marriage seemed necessary to prevent parts of my anatomy from being removed, death would seem to be the complete opposite of this, and not exactly what I would describe as vital.’
