Acronyms.

I am sick of acronyms. Acronyms are everywhere. Acronyms exist for almost everything, from Computer terms to washing powder, we cannot escape acronyms. Just for fun I will tell a story using acronyms. It's good therapy.

Once upon a time, there lived a CT dude who worked 24/7. He was given a pretty good salary of $12000 PFN for doing SFA. He was once a TA in an IT department of IBM. IBM told him to GTFO though, so he was back doing SFA IYKWIM. Right after they told him gfy, the PC started playing up. Damn! His HDD was RS and the RAID was USCWAP. His DDR SDRAM was causing BSOD's and the CDROM was cactus, leaving him with data that was N/A. The NTFS FS was stuffed too and so the whole OS was BS. Without the SCSI HDD's online, even with SATA or SATA2 there was NFW that it would ever work again. Even if he could IMG the OS, the new LCD had no working OSD and he couldn't find the S/N that was required to complete an RMA for a DOA claim. FM he exclaimed! Even the old CRT is FUBAR. If only I had a TWAIN CCD for the LCD on the MFP. then I could use USB or the ESATA on the MB to interface with the CF from the SLR to the SFF case next to the HUB on top of the TCPIP Stack. If he could only enter the BIOS on the CMOS of the DAE... Then he could U/L the contents of the SAN over the LAN without upsetting the LUN's. But just in case the DC power went AC, the UPS would have to be RAS'd via the ADSL. Only then would it BRB. OMFG, the DUN was down and the ISDN onramp was hit by a TS. But FTM, he would have to wade through loads of UCE (Spam) How simple... Why did he not think of that before? ROTFLMAO.

Pissed Off!

I just spent the past hour blogging to give you lots of useless information when the power went out. Grrrrr!!!! So I will try to give you as much useless information in as short of a space as possible this time. I was having a winge about corporate ethics (or the apparent lack thereof). Do we blindly accept what we are told to the point that they are filling our heads with so much crap that we don't see a con when it's staring us in the face?

Wow, you know there seems to be an accepted practice of truth stretching in our world. If we say an hour, we really mean over an hour. If we say a megabyte, we really mean 1 million bytes (1mb is in fact equal to 1024 bytes) Ever wondered why Windows says your 40Gb Hard Drive is only 37Gb??? Well I do feel sorry for all the suckers who bought into Dell's 1.5 Terabyte storage claim on their XPS gaming rigs. They will open up their windows disk manager only to be confronted with the disturbing truth that what they thought was 1.5Tb is in fact closer to 1.39Tb, One billion and one hundred million less bytes than they have paid for.

Sure it sounds like nit picking when its 2 or 3 Gb less on your 40Gb HDD, but we are talking in Terabytes! It suddenly starts to leave a bitter taste in your mouth. Yes folks, HDD manufacturers report the size of one mb by rounding it to the 1000, leaving 24 bytes unaccounted for. This accumulates to the point where storage space disappears at an alarming rate when the storage devices are increasing in volume. One Terabyte is one trillion bytes. Thats 24 billion bytes (or 24Gb) that are ommitted from the equation. Thats enough to fit the entire contents of the average computer user's hard disk drive. Enough music to fit on around 34 compact disks, or over 5 DVD movies or about 16,600 floppy disks...

So there you go. It's no wonder that people are confused about computer technology, when the very people they percieve to be in control of the industry misrepresent the products that they sell... I would have thought that we should aim to make computers easier to understand for the benefit of all humankind.

As slow as a wet week

Well today was slow, yesterday was slow, in fact the whole week has been pretty slooooow....
But at the first opportunity, I have taken some pics for you.

I love taking photos of scenes like these. There is nothing I find more relaxing than the enchantment of strolling accross a rustic old bridge with the country breeze gently lifting the stresses of life from my shoulders, a very romantic setting indeed.

Looking forward to a busier day tomorrow and with something more interesting to report back on my blog, I retire for the day. Hopefully to a nice refreshing sleep. Farewell until next blog. Sleep well and have a great weekend.

Great day for it.

Well today was good for just about anything. I had the car serviced,the kids entertained, and funnily enough, the house was reasonably ordered and tidy.

Perhaps it was locking the kids outside that made the difference. It was too nice of a day for them to be inside playing arcade games.



Hailey and Jacob played in the park and on the swings. (Hailey is dictating) And they played in the sandpit with a digger tractor thingo. And on the thing where they push you up. (I think she means the upside down see-saw thingie with the ropes that you hang on to). Hailey met her friend Holley as well (from day care).

Oh, and Amber's Shop is looking so good since Tom, Nic and Nathan gave us a much appreciated hand over the weekend. So another week is at it's end. What will next week have in store for us? Looking forward to work and might even get a few more pics for you all.

Anyway, its time to get these kids off to bed. More updates next week...

Stranger things have happened.

Today turned out to be ok, with a slow start however. A job in East Gippsland was in desperate need of attention and unfortunately held up by parts waiting to be received by courier In Melbourne.

There seems to be a problem with a particular piece of equipment in relation to it’s firmware version. Troubleshooting connectivity problems is the key to keeping internet dependent services online, but it is not necessarily an exact science. Sometimes it is a ‘suck and see’ type situation where you replace the most likely candidate for failure, before replacing other parts in a hierarchical order of importance in relation to a basic troubleshooting flowchart.

Such a troubleshooting flowchart goes this way…

If a thing has stopped working, thump it. If it still doesn’t work, kick it. If after a thump and a kick, it still don’t work, chuck it out and get a new one…
If the new one doesn’t work, it probably wasn’t the problem to begin with… (Perhaps you should consider asking someone that actually knows what they are doing). If it still doesn’t work, forget about it and give it to someone that you really don’t like (It is better to drive them crazy than to put yourself through the stress).

In the case of something that is low cost, forget about it. In the case of something like a plasma screen TV, even if it is out of warranty, consider screaming and yelling, hurling profanities at such opportune moments as peak time in the store, regularly drawing attention to yourself, calling for the store manager. It may in fact work.

On another note, I hope you like the photos I took today. They were fun to take in the little time I had in which to take them.

Throughout the day as usual, forces worked against me in my quest for supremacy in this ongoing fight against hardware failure. Even on returning home, I found that my darling wife had sabbotaged my efforts to blog solely about me, adding this little passage to the end of my blog:

"Oh and by the way, my wife is so HOT, with the best arse. She is a wonderful person and I love her dearly. I know I should do the dishes more often, put my dirty clothes in the laundry rather than on the floor, and cook dinner every night to help her out, but if I did, what could she possibly find to grump about as I think I am perfect in every other way."

Hmmmmm...... Not much to say about that really.
Till next time, Adios amigos.

Well, no pictures to blog tonight, but there again, not much to report on either. I can't think of anything to say that will amuse you at the moment, so I guess that I will not say anything other than what i say right here.

Not that you would know that I am saying anything other than what i am actually saying right here anyway: so if you can guess what i am saying without me actually saying it then let me know and i might even give a prize to whomever accurately predicts whatever it is that i am not saying, that i know that i want to say, without really saying it.

A close friend once said to me that the ability to understand wombats is an artform perfected by the elite. A select few truly understand the true nature of things. But without me elaborating on the subject, tell me of your wisdom on the subject. Leave me a comment oh enlightened ones...

A valiant effort.

Well folks, I've been busy selling my car on ebay and today was a really busy day at work. (at least for me anyway) But I'm sure that others appreciated the haste at which the jobs got done. I had this old Valiant that I referred to in a previous post. It sold for about $600. I tried to be totaly honest about the car and the fact that it has been sitting around not doing anything for a while. It's hard because there are always things that you would like to add to a description of a car when you list it for the first time. Especially when you are like me...not inclined to think things through with too much deliberation that is. So the car is sold, sort of, but there is no money yet. Time will tell as to whether he is a serious buyer or not. Anyway, work has been a bit slow, but I have still got a few snapshots to share with you. Some are from West Gippy, others from the Valley and some from places inbetween.

It seems almost fashionable to be as disorganised as me. Take today for instance, it seemed as though people were less organised and less able to understand what I was trying to tell them than they would ordinarily be. It left me feeling somewhat superior (in an organisational sense). I even had all of the information at my disposal, that was required of me to succeed in the job. All except one thing that is.... Reliable, available (and competent) assistance. It's not that I'm blowing my own horn here, but god only knows that the rest of the I.T world was doing today while I struggled with direction on things, left asking myself and the I.T gods/godesses questions like "Hi I'm here...um what do you want me to do exactly?", "Why am I here?" and the classic question I was forced to ask "would you like me to tell you what the problem actually is, rather than sending me back to this place to tell you that no, that's not it?" Crikey, sometimes it is so glaringly obvious that it can befuddle even the best and most conscientious IT guru.

Here is a printer that makes some people quiver with fear, others shake with excitement, blah blah blah. Reality suggests that these old crappers really do make the world go around. The OKI Microline 320Turbo dot matrix printer with the ingenious (but laughable) Quite mode. Printers like this make triplicates possible via impact printing technology. Tiny pins in the head hammer away at blistering speeds to produce that all too common and incredibly annoying noise that nobody should have to put up with (no matter how much they pay you). Bloody amazing.
Anyway, back to the job thing... I think that sometimes it helps to walk away from a job briefly, or to look at it from a different angle. It can be like one of those 3d coloured pattern pictures that we all had. You know the ones, the ones that people would sometimes pretend to get, even if they did'nt. The old "Yeah I see the dolphins now..." ploy. "Yeah that's fantastic" with a long pause. Yeah right. Then bam! They suddenly get it and try to act unsurprised. That was happening today. You know what I mean. People with too much pride to admit when they are wrong. "Oh, i don't know how we overlooked that..." or "Gee, sorry to leave you waiting for three quarters of an hour on hold"


I will be madly looking for more pics for the next post. Till then cya later and may all of your experiences with level 2 tech support be more productive, less boring and generally more pleasant than mine. Until then, my mind will be on these rolling hills... At one with mother nature, oh and the cows of course.
Speaking of cows, I read in the paper, that they have come up with a renewed (but genuine) interest in the recycling of cow manure for energy production purposes... Some may say that its just a load of bull.