Sing song merrily on mince pies
Welcome, for the last time this year, to the Stack where we are having our Carol concert special. Feel free to sing along.
It has been a pleasure to read your emails this year; please keep them coming in 2008. Now to the carols.
To the tune of Hark the Herald Angels Sing:
“Help!” the IT users sing
Lots of work for us they bring.
Peace no more, the place is wild
Assets rarely reconciled.
“Fix the keyboard” are the cries,
“Lots of crumbs from our mince pies”,
Everybody’s is the same,
Festive foodstuffs are to blame.
“Help!” the IT users sing,
All the phones just ring and ring.
(John Butler, Merton Council)
To the tune of When a Child is Born:
A ray of light flickers on the screen
A tiny flash, and then no more is seen.
All across the land, faces are forlorn;
This comes to pass when Vista is born
A silent wish sails the internet
The winds of change but it’s not working yet
Getting started guides, crumbled, tossed and torn
All come to pass when Vista is born.
And all this happens because the world is waiting
Waiting for one operating system, Windows, open source, no one knows.
But Vista will be installed, and turn hope to tears
Joy to hate, calls to support and everyone going open source.
(Nick Clarke, NC Consultants)
And our champagne winner is Greg Ownes. Congratulations to you, Greg. Send us your address and we’ll send you some Stack house champagne. Meanwhile, everyone join in to the tune of Little Donkey:
Pressed the wrong key, coding in C,
Now my app won’t load.
Got to keep on plodding on but
can’t debug my code.
Been a long time, at my PC,
Through the winter’s night.
Don’t give up now, who knows maybe,
This build will be right.
Smash up my Dell tonight
Bang my head, Bang my head.
Eff, star, star, star. Such strife!
Bang my head, Bang my head.
High on coffee, and without sleep,
Now it’s nearly day.
Boss awaiting the deliv’ry
But there’s just no way!
A spark of pretend passion
We asked for your racy IT stories, and Andy Simpkins has a reader’s true confession for us.
“I used to work for a small telecoms equipment manufacturer. We had one customer based in Switzerland doing adult teleconferencing services,” he writes.
Several times they returned blown DSP cards, so Andy had to visit the customer, where he discovered a room full of mature women employed to sigh and groan to premium-rate phone callers, while they read books and smoked.
At the malfunctioning PC, Andy found the source of the problem – an operator who wore nylon stockings without shoes, spent a long time brushing her hair, and then reached out to touch the server box.
As the spark zipped from the end of her finger to the server and blew another DSP card, she picked up her book and went off to read while she waited for support to arrive.
“Moral of the story: users will go to extraordinary lengths to break things if it means that they don’t have to ‘work’ – or in this case moan down the phone,” Andy points out.
Degrees.K
“In your article last week you described the decision to replace ‘K’ with ‘,000’ in job advertisements as very admirable. I suggest it was done for purely economic reasons,” says Kevin Clarke at Foster Yeoman.
“Anyone who accepts an employment contract in an IT environment for £45K could presumably insist that it was in the notation used in IT, and so claim a salary of £(45x1,024), or £46,080.
Has anyone tried this in their salary negotiation? If so, tell us how it went. We assume the answer is not very well.
Who’s who in IT
“Sir Tim Berners Lee, at 52, is not the oldest second-generation programmer,” points out Richard Sarson.
“But he is probably the most distinguished. Both his father, Conway, born 1921, and mother Mary worked in the development team of the Manchester Mark 1 computer, where they met Alan Turing.” And that might just be the best bit of trivia we have carried all year. See you in 2008!
One small step for The Stack...
Peter Cawkwell at Cawkwell ITS has a new angle on who we should ban from The Stack.
“Surely The Stack is a virtual pub,” he says.
“Therefore anyone coming in for a pint is able to choose their virtual personality. If someone is going to choose to be anything connected to IT they should be instantly banned.”
His argument is that if any of us turned up as an IT person it shows a lack of imagination.
“The Stack should be filled with Arctic explorers, astronauts, rock stars and movie directors,” he says. “Anyone failing to come up with a truly interesting persona should not be allowed through the door.”
A virtual pub? Astronauts? We’re banning Peter Cawkwell.
Thigh-tech
In case any of you think that life as a helpdesk operative isn’t very exciting, we have an anonymous contribution this week that will make you reconsider.
“Asked by a friend why her mouse occasionally stopped working, and having tried the usual – replace the mouse, try a different USB port, and so on,” he says (don’t worry, it gets better), “I found out that her habit was to lie on the sofa and run the mouse on her thigh. “It stopped working when she wore black PVC jeans.”
Thousands of helpdesk jockeys will sleep feverishly tonight.
“If your readers have discovered similarly interesting materials on which optical mice fail, it would be a great help to the support community if we were told about them,” he says.
Deep and crisp and odd
We ring your virtual doorbell this week with Rod Main’s version of Good King Wenceslas.
“Bill from Microsoft looked out
For Service pack releases
Though the code went round about
The drivers were in pieces
Brightly shone the screens that night
Debugging was so cruel
‘We can now release it, right?’
‘No you can’t you foo-oo-el’.”
Keep your Christmas carols coming in: we have one more Backbytes this year, and we’d like to make it a carol concert special. You have less than a week.
Champagne for the best one published, which will give you something to toast the new year – Christmas post willing.
Nurse, the screens
If you’re visiting Russia and a nurse asks to borrow your mobile, lend it.
Last week Shelehov in northern Russia was plunged into darkness by a power cut, just as 22-year-old Rima Pivovarova was about to give birth.
As any of you who have experienced the process will realise, childbirth in the dark isn’t straightforward, so the quick-thinking medical staff rounded up the available mobiles, and delivered the baby by the light of the screens.
As yet, no nurse has posted the MMS video on YouTube, but it can only be a matter of time.
Special K
We receive reports from a reader who prefers to be called “Pete ,000” for reasons that will become clear.
He came across a magazine that had the bright idea of making its job advertisements more accessible by replacing the “K” in salary offers with “,000”. So £45K becomes £45,000.
Very admirable. But, for any other publication thinking of doing this, it’s best not to do what Magazine X did – by doing a search and replace on the letter “K”.
Otherwise you will run advertisements offering “Comprehensive benefits pac,000ages if you had the right s,000ills”.
Monkey business
Patrick Ruane at IR Security Technologies admits to a pretentious job title.
“For several years I have received Computing with the job title of ‘IT monkey’.
“However, in the past couple of months I seem to have been demoted to the role of IT manager! Does the Computing subscription department see these titles as interchangeable?”
In short: yes.
Code of honour
Dan Davies’ recent directory listings joke (B:\forMutton, R:\forMo etc) seems to have historical pedigree.
“It appears Dan has found one of the variations of a code used during World War Two in North Africa, which baffled the Germans,” says Nicholas Russell at Cambridge Printers.
Of course nowadays anyone can create undecipherable communications – just switch on predictive text.
