(no subject)

[pikaporeon.livejournal.com]

LGA775 push pins piss me off, especially when you realize you need to flash four BIOS and need try and replace the tiny 45nm heatsink with a massive one for your P4 lying around, in which the pins are so atrophied and maligned that it makes you cringe.

Open discussion about random superflous aspects of computing / tech that could be made so much better?

What.

[twigathy.livejournal.com]

So apparently wine is now good enough that a windows virus will work in it. Don't ask how this happened, because I'm not entirely sure myself.

Apologies in advance to 56kers for the Huge Image.

Does Not Fit

[ravenofdreams.livejournal.com]

I was called in to fix a networked printer that's not on the network any longer.  Printer is on, no error lights, so I go to check the cables going to the wall - and it's black.  ...Strange - in an effort to make our lives easier, all our network cables are blue.  I lean down.... and it's the USB cable, somehow crammed into the wall jack.

...Bwha? 
I don't know where they got the cable from, where the network cable went, or which one of them got that USB cable to stick in there, but damn, someone has a ton of stubborn and not so much brains.  (I got back to my desk and my coworker asked if the wall jack was at least USB 2.0.)

Looking at a second-hand 'puter...

[reynardo.livejournal.com]

and the social list at my husband's work listed one at $400 (Aus). But when my beloved told me about it, all I could hear was uncontrollable laughter and the sad sad words:

4 8 6

No, I'm not buying that antique.

Well.. I never...

[gotica.livejournal.com]

[06:27] Gotica: rarr rarr rarr
[06:35] SO#2: rarrr
[06:35] Gotica: oh my farking fod
[06:35] Gotica: err
[06:35] Gotica: god
[06:35] SO#2: what?
[06:35] Gotica: I googled an error for one of our internal systems on the off chance that there would be something out there...
[06:36] Gotica: I farking found GOLD... GOLD I tell you
[06:36] SO#2: *giggles*
[06:36] Gotica: Another airline has all their IT documentation open to the outside world.
[06:36] SO#2: wow nice
[06:36] Gotica: Including their internal forms and details on their servers, proceedures etc.
[06:36] Gotica: and it helped solve my problem XD...

Obviously I'm going to do the right thing, drop their manager an email (or call, the phone numbers are published too) and find out if they're aware of their faux pas.

But before I do, I'm collecting anything that will help me in my job (is that bad?).

Dear Coworkers.

[laptop-mechanic.livejournal.com]

Its great that you want to take vacation. However, when you leave me one of your "problem child" machines to finish for you, please take the time to DOCUMENT YOUR FSCKING WORK (which you should be doing anyway). Now I have a pile of parts that used to be a Sony VGN-SZ650 (which is Sonyspeak for "pile of epic fail engineering that only our designers could come up with", and a subject of a whole 'nother rant altogether), a bag of random screws, and no idea what the hell you were doing with it. 

So instead of spending the morning getting caught up on MY work like I had planned, I now get to drop everything and get this junkpile sorted out.

Please...oh please stop

[polarbee.livejournal.com]

I am sitting here just wanting to shoot myself.

CompanyA is a hotel. Their reservation program relies on Pervasive SQL. They have ten user licenses for Pervasive. They also happen to have somewhere between eleven and fifteen users that need to use the reservation program. Plus one user license has to be kept free at all times so that people can reserve rooms on their website.

See the problem?
Yeah.

Now, for whatever reason, they've never had a problem in the past. Most of the time they don't go over nine people using the reservation program at any one time. But sometimes they do. They've never encountered any errors before. Two days ago, they started running into problems, most noticeably people being unable to go to their reservation site.
I call the tech support for the reservation program and am told that the error message we are receiving is related to them going over their user licenses in Pervasive. Makes sense to me. Now they have two options.
1) Buy more Pervasive user licenses
2) Get their tech to sit on the phone and argue that they've never had a problem in the past and therefore they shouldn't be required to buy more licenses now.

Guess which one they decided to go with?

Yeah.

Someone shoot me.

Reservation Program technician? I am so very, very sorry.
(Hold times are usually a couple of hours with this company so I'm just sitting here waiting.)

Insanity/Incompetence

[wxgeek.livejournal.com]

"My internet is broken. It says cannot display the server...in the page...what does this MEAN?"

possible theories:
"It means you're retarded."
"It means you can't read."
"It means I ought to hang up on you and have you return to KINDERGARTEN where they teach you to sound OUT EVERY WORD and point at it WITH YOUR FINGER."

"...it means there's probably just a little problem we can take care of right quick; can I have the phone number on your account?"

Guess which of these I got to use? =\

And nobody ever noticed this?

[captpackrat.livejournal.com]

My Hardee's receipt gave me a bit of a chuckle this afternoon.   ' is valid XML, but not valid HTML.