Under starter’s orders
As spring turns to summer, every year we mark the passing of time by Backbytes readers rediscovering their rare talent for nit-picking.
Antony Hawkins, at the University of Sheffield, is confused by the message he gets when Windows XP installs. ‘Please wait while Windows prepares to start’, it tells him.
‘First, I have no choice but to wait,’ he says. ‘Second, how does one prepare to start? Surely as soon as you start preparing, you have started. Or should the sign actually read: “Windows has started preparing to start, please wait while it finishes preparing to start then starts starting”?’
Pass the password
Matthew Justice, from Reading, recently tried to purchase some CDs from 101cd.com, when he found his password had been changed. So he sent an email to the company asking to have it resent.
‘You are receiving this email as you have requested your password to be emailed to your email address. Your password: 432***,’ the reply said. ‘For security reasons we have starred the last three digits of your password.’
Which left him none the wiser, as he had no idea what was under the three stars. ‘Please can you actually send me my password so that I can place my order?’ he asked.
‘Thanks very much for your recent enquiry to 101cd.com. Your password is: *3268*. For security purposes, please replace *s with appropriate characters,’ was the reply. So he gave up and worked it out by a process of elimination.
Combining pastimes with passing away
We can’t do any more road signs, but not until we’ve told you about this one. ‘On a back road, somewhere in the Birmingham area, is a signpost directing you to “Cradley Heath Crematorium and Leisure Centre”,’ warns Jackie Charman, at Stonemarket.
Just make sure you don’t go in through the wrong door when you’re using the sauna.
The heat is on
The agonising about hot kettle warnings goes on. Ian Spurrier, at Wellington College, popped into the Infosec show a few weeks ago, and liberated a free mug from Mirapoint with heat-sensitive writing on it. This gives him an idea about the kettle’s warning sign.
‘If the warning sign on the kettle was painted in such magic stuff, it would only show up when it was actually hot,’ he says.
‘Of course, unless you had a sign “This kettle is cold” that disappeared when it was hot, when you saw it without any sign you wouldn’t know if it had a warning sign or not, so you wouldn’t know whether it was hot or not, and you’d take care anyway.’
Or, logically, if you didn’t write on any kettle in the first place, then people wouldn’t know if it was hot, and be careful. Which is sort of what we have today, without heat-sensitive writing or signs.
A slap in the head
We usually don’t publish spam these days, because it only encourages them, but we sympathise with David Cartwright, at Korana Technology, who received some spam last week with the subject line: ‘Get your hand clock repliacs todday baldy’, which as a sales pitch, isn’t all it might be. ‘Personally I’d have preferred “receding”,’ he writes, sadly.
Who do these Bluetooth users think they are?
More interesting insights into the technology used by Daleks.
‘It must be Bluetooth when you think about it. When you see someone wearing a Bluetooth headset in the car the first thing you think is that they must be controlling some kind of mega-empire, not that they’re a self-important show-off,’ says ‘Mike’, who is too eaten up by bitterness to tell us his second name.
‘I don’t know what communications technology the Daleks use, but I am sure they have in-built Unix compatibility, using X-term Inate,’ says Dave Beattie, at Eurodata Systems.
Getting a bit sick of the username
We’re getting to the end of the username thread, but there are still a few more to get through. At Phone Service UK Business Process Outsourcing, Gordon Markus reports that the surname-plus-initial convention didn’t work so well for Daniel Stone and Sophie Ball.
And Rik Mannion, at Sloane Hospital, tells us: ‘Our email system uses first initial then surname, which is a shame for Shema Pugh.’
Please do not feed the bears
More ridiculous and unnecessary signs. First, we go out on the roads of the UK, where Michael Pickett saw the following sign on the road into Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire: ‘Road bears right ahead’. Quick. Someone get them out of the road.
Best stick to the railways instead. ‘South West Trains has introduced some new carriages with many announcements, some of which are genuinely helpful,’ writes Andrew Miller. ‘When trying to fall asleep on the commute home, it is annoying to be woken up repeatedly by “For your comfort and convenience, we have set aside quiet areas on this train, marked by labels on the windows”.’
Meanwhile, back in the office. ‘We have a strange notice on the outside of a first aid kit, that reads: “Important: Please ensure that any missing items are replaced after use”,’ says Roger Jenkins, at Setsquare.
‘This has kept us guessing for years. How can we use the missing items so that we can replace them?’
If that’s giving you a headache, at Bay Networks the humour is not quite so metaphysical. ‘One store cupboard proudly stated: “This is a stationary cupboard”, while the one next to it displayed: “This one moves a little”,’ says Miles Esterson.
Spot the ball
Back in the mists of time – that’s the 1970s to those of you out there old enough to remember – Backbytes has a dim recollection of BBC programme That’s Life filming some dogs playing football – Esther Rantzen and Cyril Fletcher obviously having had their fill of mad pensioners and odd-shaped vegetables that week.
Well, time and technology stands still for no man, and this week the BBC’s web site gave us robot dogs playing footy, using cameras on their noses to seek out the ball, and using a wireless network to communicate with each other.
Organisers are already planning a human versus robot football game. We can only hope the programming doesn’t go haywire, although looking at Robbie Savage, it already has.
Wipeout
We are passed a memo from a large company on the promise we will not reveal who it is. But someone is reading this, and you know who you are.
The memo reads: ‘Two members of staff have privately expressed to me their alarm at the regular fouling of our tea towel. The tea towel is on a hook (usually) on the filing cabinet in the kitchen area. It is swapped weekly for washing. It is to be used ONLY for drying washed (and hopefully clean) mugs, glasses, cutlery and plates etc. It is NOT please, to be used for wiping various parts of one’s anatomy or general detritus on tables or the carpets. Should anyone require further guidance please form an orderly queue by my desk.’
You just can’t get the staff these days.
Move in Indian file
More advice on what speed to work at: gazelles are so last week.
‘While I was in the army we were often encouraged to move at the speed of a tall Indian,’ says Rob Enomy.
Why? No one ever told him, and we assume that if you are in the army, and being told to move at that speed, it’s the wrong time to ask.
‘We assumed that this was because a tall Indian, being a larger target than a small Indian, had to move faster by necessity,’ he suggests.
Can any of our military readers clarify? Any more speed exhortations?
Hot under the collar
Actually, we do have a proper office-based sign to share, too.
‘Until recently one of the old kettles at work had a sign on it that said: “Warning! Hot”. Of course, it wasn’t always a valid warning as the kettle was only hot if it had recently boiled,’ points out Jill Lockwood, who has the incisive mind of an IT person.
‘If it was indeed hot then either you’d boiled it and therefore knew it would be hot, or you hadn’t boiled it, in which case you didn’t know if the sign was valid or not at the time. Either way, I think we all know that kettles (for making cold water boiling hot) have the potential to be hot, don’t we?’
This rather suggests that Jill hasn’t spent any time in technical support lately. More office signs, please.
2-4-6-8 motorway
This week we give over the silly signs slot to those of you who plough up and down the country’s motorways – we can picture you reading this in some miserable service station somewhere.
‘On the M27, just after junction 2 on the westbound carriageway, there is a large red sign with white lettering which reads “NO RIGHT TURN FOR 10 MILES”. Underneath, in smaller white lettering, it reads “Except at next junction and at Rufus Stone”.’ Well, obviously. Thanks to Paul Freeman-Horsfall for that.
Bryan Hay, at Project Express, submits: ‘Use Both Lanes’ (‘I’ve tried as hard as I can but my car simply isn’t wide enough’) and ‘Slow Old People Crossing’, because, as he points out, there’s never a sign for the fast ones.
But our favourite this week is supplied by Colin Butcher, at XDelta. ‘My favourite is in Stoke-on-Trent. I had to drive around the block a couple of times so that my American colleague could take a picture of the sign that said: “Humped pelican crossing ahead”.’
Lamb’s tales
More usernames. ‘Our usernames are made up from the first four letters of the surname plus initial, so mine is simply grand,’ reports Dave Grant-Wilkie.
Sadly, not everyone is so lucky. ‘In my computing class at secondary school our usernames were the first four characters of our surname, then the first four characters of our first name, unfortunately so for Stewart Lamb,’ writes Chris Northedge, at Ford.
‘And many years ago we had a US-based Honeywell mainframe. The application was fully international, and was fine for most of us. However we also had users in Spain.
‘Usernames were forename initial + middle initial + surname, in the US fashion. But in Spain the family name is actually the middle name, and the last name is not the surname but the mother’s maiden name.
‘So our dear US colleagues, by converting the middle name to just an initial only, completely lost the identification of who the user was.’
Survival of the fittest
You are as confused as we and Matt King were about how to complete a project ‘at the speed of 1,000 gazelles’, compared with the speed of just one of them.
‘My advice to Matt King is to move at the speed of any of the leading 999 gazelles of the 1,000 in question,’ says Anthony Hawkins. ‘Maybe this is a new way Matt’s managers have devised for shedding staff without paying redundancy?’
We look forward to the wildlife documentary series, showing IT staff in the wild, eating unlimited pizza, blowing up things in microwaves, that sort of thing.
As a sort of corollary, we were asking last week which animal we should compare to IT staff, if not the lean, perpetually active, speedy gazelle. ‘Definitely the “bodger”,’ says John Pringle, at Balkan Holidays.
Fright of the Navigator
Finally, this week’s example of progress. ‘I have just been trying to install “Time Navigator”, a disc backup system,’ says Clive Page, at the University of Leicester.
‘To do this I have to agree to the licence conditions, which tell me that before I can install it I must back up the entire disc system – using some rival software product, presumably. I wonder if they can recommend one?’
Mr Grimsdale, Mr Grimsdale
Last week’s story about the need for a UK knowledge minister causes Danny Budzak to remember a recent knowledge management conference he attended.
‘The keynote speaker announced that they had just come back from the US, and met one of the first ever “Chief Wisdom Officers”, at which point a wag from the back shouted out “is his name Norman?”’
Somehow, we don’t think Danny took our story completely seriously.
Extermination by Longhorn
Last week, we were musing (entirely uselessly, but what’s new) about what wireless networking protocols Daleks would use.
‘I don’t know exactly which protocols the Doctor uses, but surely they must involve time-domain multiplexing?’ suggests Paul Frost, effortlessly outnerding us.
‘I’m not much of a Dalek expert but doesn’t the name “Dalek” stand for Don’t Av Lan-Enabled Kabling?’ asks John Hamling, at P N Lee Statistics & Computing. No, is the answer we’re looking for there.
‘Do Daleks use Bluetooth or WiFi?’ muses Mark Brennan. ‘How could they possibly use anything so advanced. They’ve only just mastered how to climb stairs.’
Finally, someone who can shed some useful light on the general subject: ‘I can advise that the space station in episode two of the new Doctor Who series appeared to run on Windows XP, as the Doctor saved the day by finding and using the “system restore switch”. Alarmingly, this had to be reached by running a gauntlet of deadly pendulum thingies. I just hope that no one from the Longhorn development team was watching,’ says Roger Thomas, at Words About Media.
Who said IT was a dead-end job?
‘I noted an advert with the headline: “help us move from good to great”, writes Michael Barwise, at Computer Security Awareness.
‘I turned to the page it advertised, but found no such list.’ As he points out, this advertisement was from the Department for Work and Pensions.
On an unrelated note: ‘I remember going to a jobcentre a while back and searching on the computer for IT management vacancies in my area,’ he adds. ‘The only vacancy the search returned was for a mortuary attendant.’
Dalek wireless requirements
‘I have just one question for Doctor Who,’ says Michael Bond, at Sterling-Bond. But sadly, with the Doctor being fictional and all, he has to ask us instead.
‘When it comes to controlling all their technical gubbins, starships and so on, do Daleks use Bluetooth or WiFi?’
Frankly we have no idea, and we aren’t going to waste a second thinking about it – we have you to do that for us. Opinions please.
Unacceptable wastage
Dave Brookes, at Kirklees InTech, has a sign in his office toilet that says: ‘Please do not put blue paper towels down the loo.’
‘We sit and ponder: what colour would be acceptable?’ he says.
John Culley reports a sign from Arundel, which says: ‘Swimming pool – Pedestrians only’, so watch where you are driving.
And finally, we’re a column that freely gives space to nit-picking foreigners, because we believe in giving them a chance.
‘As a non-Brit, I am intrigued by the road signs which say “Unbridged Ford”,’ says Murray Grainger, at Elizabeth Finn Homes. ‘If there is a bridge then it isn’t a ford, and if it is a ford then there isn’t, by definition, a bridge.’ More signs please.
A distinct lack of vital signs
More pointless signs, and this week, some to really make your brain hurt. First, back to hospitals, where you may recall hot taps labelled as containing hot water.
‘We have notices above our hot taps, too,’ says Scott Watson, at George Eliot Hospital NHS Trust. ‘I have noticed that several of them, underneath the warning that the hot water is hot, say “only on Thursdays”,’ which doesn’t exactly resolve the issue.
‘We have a number of doors labelled “office” that are in areas not accessible to the public because they are office areas,’ he adds. ‘Are these to remind us what we are supposed to do in them?’
Shoot the Messenger
We’ve been asking for technology improvements that were nothing of the sort. This week Crispin Keable, at HPC Solutions, nominates MSN Messenger.
‘When I installed it, it asked me if I wanted to block pop-up windows. Of course I did,’ he says. ‘What did it do when a web page tried to pop up a window? It blocked the pop-up, and popped up a window to tell me it had done so. I have now uninstalled it.’
Dodgy usernames, part 94
We’re slowly working our way through the enormous emailbag of submissions, some frankly clearly made up, for our thread on amusing usernames. We bring you the merest flavour this week.
‘I fondly remember sending emails to Roy Slicker, now the chief executive of Pegasus Disk Technologies, when the policy was the first letter of the first name followed by the surname,’ says Dave Evans, at Captiva Software.
‘Our username scheme is the first five letters of your surname and the first two letters of the christian name. One of our repair team employees is called Colin Thickett,’ says Steve Kesterton, at HomeZone Housing.
My dutiful launderette
This is the sort of thing you usually find coming out of the US or Japan, but now Spain is joining the rush to IT-enable our household appliances.
A Spanish designer has come up with a washing machine called Your Turn, which uses fingerprint recognition technology to ensure this particular household chore is shared. A sensor recognises the user’s fingerprint and will not allow the same person to use the machine twice in a row.
The only way to override the system is to crawl around the back of the machine, unplug the sensor and reprogram it – more hassle than doing the laundry.
There’s only one drawback. The same person can still load the machine again because the fingerprint sensor only controls who starts the programme.
Backbytes can think of a couple more. What happens if you live alone? And you will still have to do the ironing.
Cake decorating? Have a heart
‘Because we are cheapskates we bought a cake with plain icing rather than having one specially made for a 50th birthday,’ says Geoff Lennon, at Engelmann & Buckham. ‘One of my colleagues was looking for icing templates so we could decorate the cake in suitable fashion and stumbled across the following web site’: www.theyrecoming.com/extras/pumpkinfest03
Backbytes warning: don’t look if you’re squeamish. On the other hand, we’d like to know your policies on birthday cakes, and to hear about any that can compare with this one.
Over-herd in a meeting
‘At our recent project review meeting we went through the usual “congratulations on our success so far, but...” speech,’ says a cynical Matt King at Axon Solutions. We suspect some of you can remember him when he was young and idealistic.
Anyway, says Matt: ‘Many faces showed confusion when the “but” turned out to be “but please complete all outstanding issues by the end of the week, at the speed of 1,000 gazelles”.’
His problem? ‘None of us know if this is any faster than the speed of one gazelle.’ Do gazelles slipstream each other? Are herds (packs? shoals?) of gazelles suited to completing IT projects? Is there a better animal with which to compare IT staff?
