Spoiled Sports!...

[vortex.livejournal.com]

OK, since some people insist on spoiling it for the rest of us...Maintainers should make a rule that when a Noob posts a "real" Techsupport question, everyone must wait at least 5 hours before even mentioning to them that this is the wrong place to ask Techsupport questions...OR YOU GET KICKED OUT OF THE CLUB!

--) This post took no more than 20 minutes (-- for someone to spill the beans and the fun was out of the sail before everyone even knew it!

Maintainers, Please make it happen.

I'll post this again during the weekday afternoon when everyone is at work surfing the Internetz so everyone can see it...

Haunted Tandon

[the-hunter.livejournal.com]

Following a couple of the previous posts I was reminded of an incident some...oooh, fifteen years ago...

I was living in Sandbanks at the time and...

[Wibbly *This is a flashback* effects]

I frequently used to get called to help a neigbour, who I had nicknamed Bungalow Bill, because...well, he had nothing up top. He had an annoying habit of buying new tech, and having no idea how to use it. The CB radio which stopped working because rather than wait to get a proper antenna he just plugged it into the TV aerial. The Betamax video recorder, which sat alongside the lazerdisk player and the Philips System 2000 video system...you get the idea?

He'd bought an Amstrad 8086 machine, and although he had no use for it, even then, had upgraded to a Tandon 286 VGA machine, with *gasp* 4 meg of ram and a 10m meg hard disk! I had gone and installed it, and connected up the Star 9 pin dot matrix colour(!) printer...and then he had gone out and bought a sound card.

He was round my house one Sunday morning, and I was showing him some shareware I had on disc, a very modern (for the time) DTP program, and he wanted a copy. I told him that we could go over to his place now, and install it.
"Oh no! Me and the wife don't turn the computer on, on a Sunday!"

I was bemused. I knew Bill didn't have a religeous bone in his body. I asked if he'd *seen the light*

"No! Um, when we turn it on, on Sunday mornings, it preaches to us, and sings hymns!"

Well...be fair, in my shoes you'd've been over there in an instant, wouldn't you?

We went over. We turned it on. He turned on the hifi, into which his soundcard was plugged. Bugger me! He was right. His computer was in the middle of a jaunty happy clappy hymn...

The solution was simple, but I was so tempted to leave it as it was. At least I would get one day a week free....However, instead I removed the speaker wire that he was using to connect the card to the amplifier, and swapped it for some shielded that I had from my days when I sold CB radios. (Yes,I sold him the York JCB 863 that he blew up. No, I never did get round to replacing the power transistor. Life was quieter with him off the air), and then popped round to the episcopal church just up the road, and told them their PA system was bleeding all over the local radio spectrum.

This fixed it. But, you know, I almost wished it hadn't. I do so like the idea of a quitely devout computer.

*sigh*

[cjkline83.livejournal.com]

Dear Wendy's:

If you ever pull that shit again when I'm on call, I will fly to alabama and kill you myself. I explicitly told you NOT to boot up the replacement server until you called me direct so I could walk you through swapping hard drives out. Only AFTER you booted the server up and your store CRASHED AND BURNED did you call me and go "It's not working?"

You're very lucky that you didn't merge YOUR database with the existing database in the replacement server, or you would have lost ALL sales totals for today, and I would have had to spend even more time rolling back your database to last night's backup.

And, sorry it took about an hour to figure out why I couldn't get PCAnywhere to connect to you.

But, still...

DIE IN A FIRE.

- Curtis