Snuffman posted:

An unexpected conference call suddenly came in.

Company got gutted and IT got the chop. They're outsourcing! Whee!

Time to find a new job.

Potato Salad posted:

A ticket came in...

Subject: "Excel files wont open"

User was having trouble opening excel files from her predecessor. It turns out that there are two decades worth of tax-related spreadsheets manually named with .xlw as the extension instead of .xls. Looking at the previous user referring to all his files as "Excel Workbooks," it seems he believed the proper extension was .xlw -- which is really an Excel workspace and pops up an confirmation dialogue upon opening stating that the file could be corrupted.

Thing is, there were 4,600 file in this folder, and many of them were legitimately *actual* .xlw files.

User was informed that it would be necessary to either spend a lot of time confirming each file's actual filetype and rename each, write a funky script to try to tell the difference between binary-format .xls and .xlw files, or just deal with hitting "OK" each time she (rarely) had to refer to one of these documents.

User pretended not to understand what I was saying. User holds a recent MS from a good school in a difficult field of study, yeah right. It wasn't until after I occupied her desk for fifteen minutes going through file after file opening, confirming the file type, and closing / renaming each until she gave up the chirade and said she'd rather just put up with the prompt.

Yeah, it's trivial to play chicken with a user. I wasn't behind on deadlines, however. I'm pretty sure their entire department is.

Asmodai_00 posted:

larchesdanrew posted:

A wondrous state-wide road trip came in.

Apparently over the last few months, all of our various weather cameras from around the state began failing one by one.

I was not made aware of this. My supervisor was and, being him, decided to ignore the issue.

Out of 30+ cameras, we now have three sort of functioning.

Thus begins the adventure of driving from town to town checking out weather cameras. Every camera is located on top of some random building. One is on top of a retirement home that used to be a giant hotel 70 years ago. One is at a golf course. One is on top of a Hilton. One is literally just on a stick in the middle of loving nowhere.

Today we tackled golf course and Hilton. Get to golf course and camera can not be located on the network. Climb on top of, I wish I was joking, the golf cart charging garage and power cycle it. It boots up and looks like it's functioning fine. All the equipment looks to be in good order. Why isn't it on the network? Let's look at the cable... oh... it's been cut and is just sort of hanging out. Apparently the golf course was bought by a new owner and he sent some woefully underqualified lackey to clean up the mess of wires in the building, so he just cut them all. Welp. Gotta go run a new cable tomorrow.

Get to the Hilton in the next town and climb up on the godforsaken roof in 100 degree weather. Camera is functioning. Modem is connected. Router is routing. Plug into the router and check out the settings, and all the ports are still set correctly. Try to access the modem but fuuuuuuck Comcast and not letting you access modem settings. Turn on DHCP, go to xmyip, and... that's not our IP. They changed our static IP without notifying us. Thanks Comcast.

Two down, like, 28 more to go or something. At least I got some baller mexican for lunch.

Where will we go next? Who knows!

spankmeister posted:

Meanwhile, at larchesdanrew's:

http://i.imgur.com/SHFfnhM.gifv

Jeoh posted:

Anything that breaks in the next 14 months is because of your code.

MrMojok posted:

How long has Cryptolocker been coming in through Flash vulnerabilities?

divabot posted:

I'd have thought it was a circle. I remember seeing my sister's PC a few years ago and immediately, intuitively understanding how it could be that 25% to 50% of PCs were botnetted. I think my brother-in-law had never seen a piece of crapware he didn't like. The hard disk was full because the recycle bin had never been emptied. Toolbars. THESE ARE THE PEOPLE iMACS WERE MADE FOR. The only thing saving them was they were on dialup (in 2010). Though they've since got broadband, so my mother (who also got broadband for this one use case) could Skype her grandchildren.

Ursine Asylum posted:

Ironic you should say that, given that I just got to spend a day trying to recover a month's worth of code from a developer who forgot that the "distributed" part of Bitbucket repositories doesn't mean "you never have to push or pull".

Volmarias posted:

Everything on the show is either theoretically possible or already done, although there's a bit of hand waving for narrative reasons.

I do like that they had to water down the explanations for the PM to the point of uselessness, which is pretty real to life.

nielsm posted:

Windows not-Server does in fact raise the priority slightly of the process that has the current active window.


However on Windows 3.11, the system was running with cooperative multitasking meaning there was barely a concept of "process", and every program had control of the CPU until it voluntarily released it back to the OS.

Ghostlight posted:

We've had an increasing amount of novelty ways of delivering the same spam in the last two weeks, but by far my favourite so far is the "PayPal Update" email.

It's the same regular "your account is restricted! Click here to give us your password!" email you'll all be familiar with, but instead now the email has a completely empty body because it's attached as an HTML file to get around content filters. That's not all though, because I opened it in notepad to see if it had any elaborate js/flash vulnerability poo poo going on (it doesn't, it's just the standard phish with new paint) and this beautiful anachronism is in the code:

code:

<!-- 
  ______   ______    _______   _______  _______     .______   ____    ____         ___      .__   __.   ______   .__   __.  __       _______..___  ___.      ___      
 /      | /  __  \  |       \ |   ____||       \    |   _  \  \   \  /   /        /   \     |  \ |  |  /  __  \  |  \ |  | |  |     /       ||   \/   |     /   \     
|  ,----'|  |  |  | |  .--.  ||  |__   |  .--.  |   |  |_)  |  \   \/   /        /  ^  \    |   \|  | |  |  |  | |   \|  | |  |    |   (----`|  \  /  |    /  ^  \    
|  |     |  |  |  | |  |  |  ||   __|  |  |  |  |   |   _  <    \_    _/        /  /_\  \   |  . `  | |  |  |  | |  . `  | |  |     \   \    |  |\/|  |   /  /_\  \   
|  `----.|  `--'  | |  '--'  ||  |____ |  '--'  |   |  |_)  |     |  |         /  _____  \  |  |\   | |  `--'  | |  |\   | |  | .----)   |   |  |  |  |  /  _____  \  
 \______| \______/  |_______/ |_______||_______/    |______/      |__|        /__/     \__\ |__| \__|  \______/  |__| \__| |__| |_______/    |__|  |__| /__/     \__\ 
 
 -->

I was half disappointed there wasn't a MIDI embed.

EAT THE EGGS RICOLA posted:

git bisect is the way to fix this (if it has ever worked before), but I'm terrified to ask whether this is in version control at all.

deimos posted:

What year is this?

larchesdanrew posted:

Supervisor's catch-phrase is alive and well.

One of our creative designers came down to pick my brain about backup options for their department. I suggested Synology if they wanted something in-house, or a cloud service like Google Drive or AWS. We were discussing their options when supervisor walks by and has his little ears prickled by the sound of someone making a decision without his input. He blasts into my office and immediately starts bellowing as I was mid-sentence.

"You're currently using about 8TB of space so-"
"What are y'all talking about?"
"We're discussing backup options for the Promotions department.
"What are you telling him?"
"I suggested a Synology for in-house storage and a few cloud options. It'll depend on what their budget is and how they want to use the data."
"You don't need all that. We'll just get you a Buffalo! They're really cheap!

At this point, the creative designer and I both broke out in simultaneous raucous laughter. He, due to the absurdity of a Buffalo NAS unit for data retention, and I because my mind has finally snapped and I am beginning my slow decent into madness.

Regardless, we literally laughed him out of the office.

It was beautiful.

frogbert posted:

My guess is there is a radio/phone sitting on/near their mouse cord and the interference from a radio signal is causing the computer to think the mouse wheel is in use. GSM phones will do this.

larchesdanrew posted:

CE Doesn't Understand Lightbulbs and Also Suffers From Extreme Paranoia:

He came back and asked me why I turned the lights off.

larchesdanrew posted:

I'm freeeeeeeeeeeee

Judge Schnoopy posted:

All Mr.Coffee's come with built in botnets that hijack Keurigs on the same network and force the lcd screens to read "gently caress you"

Jerry Cotton posted:

I wonder how easy learning Dutch would be since I already know English, some Swedish, and a bit of German. Then again I don't know what I'd do with Dutch personally or professionally

Inspector_666 posted:

I poo poo you not. They were enormous, too, since they were using 3.5" drives arranged side by side.

KARMA! posted:

Tangentially, when did people decide to drop the first period when vocalizing a url? "Hello this is bob. Please go to double u double u double u


*tumbleweed*


*several people are born*


thewebsite dot com! If you've said a dot you would be done faster! Gah!

J posted:

Yup. Microsoft published a research paper about it. Essentially, it costs scammers very little to send out their scam attempts to lots of people, but once a mark actually responds to the scam, the scammer has to spend time interacting with each mark that responds. If the mark ultimately gets suspicious and backs out, that time wasted is expensive for the scammer. As a result, they use really bad english and terrible looking scams to ensure that the people who do respond are the most gullible and most likely to hand over money.

Asmodai_00 posted: