News: 1593760513

Is he any relation of Mondrian?

That's his Chinese uncle

Well, he pretends to be Chinese, or at least some sort of Asian, but really, he's just a washed-up, strung-out British actor.

Chinese fakes? Insurance company? It can't be a coincidence

Did the mouse mat weigh 83 tons by any chance?

https://www.businesstoday.in/current/world/biggest-gold-fraud-busted-in-china-83-tons-of-fake-gold-bars-used-as-loan-collateral/story/408497.html

Fake news, created by Holocaust deniers...

It's a type of small orange isn't it?

I'm sure I'm not the only one here old enough to have had to beat into users' heads the idea that the computer was the beige box with lights and slots and not the screen that was sat on top of it.

Nope, you're not.

Also see kicking out cables, pushing monitor power buttons with the back of the keyboard, pressing switches on power strips with shoes / handbags, replacing toner in printers / photocopiers, fixing the franking machine and swapping the fuse in the plug of the fridge in the office kitchen.

I've never been employed as first line support but apparently having a technical bent and being in proximity to anything with a power supply immediately makes it my problem...

I've never been employed as first line support but apparently having a technical bent and being in proximity to anything with a power supply immediately makes it my problem...

Indeed, my favorite was being asked to fix the coffee machine "because it has a log in code on it..."

Yup anything with a plug, I have started doing the "I have never used one of these before" especially if we havent supplied it.

I am to old to be interested in whatever crap people buy these days.

Definitely anything with a plug, many a morning I walked through the front door to be greeted by the cleaner "Alan, can you fix t'hoover it's not sucking again."

What happened to horizontal computer cases? They were much more practical than having a monolith from 2001 beside the monitor, sometimes so tall as to tower above it too, while the monitor itself is at the wrong level. Now, all that remains of them is [1]very niche product .

[1] https://www.checkmate1500plus.com/

What happened to horizontal computer cases?

Good point. I remember back in the late 80's/early 90's when we all had horizontal cases, it was quite the fashionable thing in my workplace to stand them vertically. IIRC this was an evolution of having the monitor sitting on the desk itself, and having the case (horizontal) off to one side...I think because it was considered to be a bit cooler than having the monitor atop the base unit in a conventional manner. The practice of then putting the base unit vertically was just to save desk real estate. None of the machines even had CD drives then so there was no worries about whether a disc would stay in place.

The amount of damaged drives from users putting their HP SFF's on the side and then knocking them over was annoying. Especially as I did buy the overpriced stands for staff who let me know they wanted it on the side.

Pretty sure it's to do with increased power demands and thus a need for better cooling inside the case - "desktop" cases are all well and good with passive cooling, but there isn't much potential for a decent flow of air.

Comes from too many movies where the "computer blows up" and the display produces a shower of sparks.

I always put it down to our user base at the time being used to having a terminal and a keyboard on their desk while the processing was done in a building somewhere "over there" in an air-conditioned room filled with magical boxes, spinning tape reels and the happy band of skilled acolytes servicing their every need. I could understand the assumption that all the user had to do was switch on the screen, log in and start typing. That understanding faded and lapsed into frustration by the time we got to Windows 3.11 and folk really should have started to get it without me reaching for the Clue Hammer.

Not forgetting that sitting on top of the "screen" would be a collection of soft toys and potted plants, which did wonders for the ventilation.

The results of an over-watered potted plant dripping on to an overheated CRT were usually quite spectacular.

Back in the days of CRT monitors in offices I Was once warned against Christmas tinsel bedecking monitors.

Something about static charge being gathered by metallic tinsel.

I was also given the line that CRT monitors give you spots. The screen does get charged, which produces an image charge on your face which attracts dirt.

SO spotty IT nerds may not be that much of a cliche.

"The screen does get charged, which produces an image charge on your face which attracts dirt."

That takes me back around four decades, to Apple ][s with crappy monitors which got very static and gave me a facial rash. Never had that with any other display before or after. Mind you we were posh, I think we had 48 k memory, way more than the base model of 16 k.

--> That time of week again.

Switching it off when the the software shutdown of W95 didn't.

Reminds me of finger print scanner/readers.

We'd always see them failing a bit more in winter mornings. Root cause was people putting on a load of hand moisturiser as soon as they got into the office and it was a bit reflective so the scanner could read the prints properly. Once we figured it out, we did have one person put in a complaint that it was discriminatory because it was affecting women more than men

Somehow I had learn't that the eject command would open the CDROM on an Ultra5 and it impressed the hell out of a senior sysadmin when I did it the first time since he hadn't seen it before. About the only time I ever got to feel smug.

All it needed was a symbolic link "opencupholder" and you'd be made for life.

A working from home colleague had recurring issues with her broadband connection which would die at random times of the day, IT support asked her to send a photo of the back of her home router so that a replacement could be ordered. The photo received showed the router with a large table lamp sitting on it and blocking the air vents on it's top surface, so the poor thing was overheating and shutting off, only recovering when it'd cooled down, and so on.

When asked why she'd placed a table lamp on top of the router, her reply was that there are vents on the sides and front of the router, so she thought it'd be okay.

As the old saying goes, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing...

I use to have to visit a customer who had a number of servers in an old kitchen with a small extractor and a desk fan for cooling. They kept the door closed as it was so noisy with all the server fans running on full.

Frequently our server would overheat, it'd also log all the internal temperatures. We showed the customer how hot it was running, their response was to find the data sheet for the mother board and show that it was within it's operating parameters. Fortunately my manager agreed with me that we should exclude heat related faults from our maintenance agreement.

Well, it wouldn't log temperatures when they were too high for it to run, now would it ?

"The photo received showed the router with a large table lamp sitting on it and blocking the air vents on it's top surface"

That's why so many of them were made with rounded tops or, as seems to be the preferred design now, to stand upright.

Reminds me of the user claiming that since my last software update the mouse was consistently moving in reverse: pointer moving left as the mouse went to the right, or up as the mouse was moving down. I asked her to demo this, and noticed she was somehow holding the mouse with the wire (no wrireless in the early 90s) towards her. A quick 180 degree turn of the offending rodent solved it.

I honestly did toy with the idea of introducing a software option that would invert directionality of the mouse, preferably switching on or off at random intervals for seriously annoying users (complte with undocumented key combination that would kill that behaviour), but I thought the better of it.

I can never understand how people put mouses back to front. Surely the crippling pain in their wrist and elbow would be some sort of signal that something was wrong.

I was thinking they ought to notice something was up(side down) when they tried to click a button. Apparently they lacked the ability to get the pointer on the required button when the pointer moved in the opposite direction to the mouse.

I had one had a boss who had some weird trait that meant that whilst up/down were normal she needed left and right to be reversed.. there used to be an option in the mouse advanced settings to allow you to flip just the x axis.. I was the only one who spotted that option in 2 years, guess who always got a call when she got a new machine even when I no longer worked for her.

I think my quickest fix was answering a call from a user and hearing a distinctive beep-beep-beep... so pretty much before she said anything I told her to move the file that was resting on the corner of her keyboard.

She was impressed I knew the problem without even seeing the computer!

Not had that problem for a while, largely since I developed a DMS so most of our docs are available online now.

I've walked into rooms where there's been a problem with a printer, and without touching or saying anything, the printer has started working. I've seen other people do it too, so I know it's not just my electromagnetic field (although I often turn street lights off when I walk past them)...

It's just the air of menace and the big hammer you carry. Equipment needs to know who's boss.

"Equipment needs to know who's boss."

YES! This! A thousand, thousand, thousand times this!

I have to explain to many staff that the reason the machine starts working when I do exactly what they did is because mine was the first hand to touch it and it knows I *will* slap it if it misbehaves.

And if anyone ever starts a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Computers, they may be subject to a Terrible Accident...

Hell's teeth!!

You mean it's not just me that has the street light thing happen??

This needs some serious research.....

I thought I was the only one! Always seems to happen when walking home after drinking my taxi money..

I learned the hard way about optical mice and their dislike of contrasting lines (including printed timber "grain" on table tops) , so I used a piece of cardboard as a mat. It was scratty enough to be ready to replace on the day that a supplier's rep walked through our office and recognised an opportunity for product placement. He opened his bag of shiny things and offered me a proper neoprene mouse mat with his company's logo printed where I would see it all day, every day. I told him that it was no good because of the high contrast graphics, then demonstrated why. The unhappy look on his face made me wonder how many mats they'd had printed. The mat worked fine after I turned it over.

The father in law gave me a very beautiful Chinese bird painting one. Had to explain that I couldn't use it for this reason which disappointed him somewhat. Now I just it as a picture on my desk and stick to using a grey paper cutting board that I've had for years (nice and stiff, really smooth and teflon mouse feet glide over it like a charm).

The first couple of generations of optical mice had problems with certain colours. A chap I worked with had a mouse mat with a red-eyed green tree frog printed on it. He swapped from a ball mouse to an optical one and retained the mouse mat. Every time the optical sensor moved over the frog's eyes, the mouse pointer went crazy. It took him a while to figure that one out.

Yeah until over ten years ago I just ordered those plain blue mousemats, my current mousemat is one of those larger gaming mousepads (Akasa Venom, but I find it works with everything. My old man actually got one as well, as for Autocad apparently loves it for detailed Cad drawings)

I learned when working in schools that if a headteacher tells you they can't log on you need to turn off the caps lock. Time to fix: about a second.

Well, a bit longer as you then need to reassure that that we all do it from time to time, of course you're not stupid and so on.

I have been caught out by that before and accidently changing the language (Left Alt + Shift) more than I care to remember.

"Well I won't say if I've ever done that, but there's a reason it's the first item on the checklist..."

Worse one for that was a version of VMware Fusion which would sometimes set the caps lock LED to the wrong state when you were using a VM - so it looked like it was off when it was on!

I turned the mouse the right way up - student was using it upside down as a trackball having never used such a device before. Funnily enough I usually prefer to fly a trackball myself these days (an "Expert Mouse").

I want a mouse I can move with my foot, giving me both hands for the keyboard.

Damn good idea, a giant trackball / foot rest, with buttons you can heal and toe like a Japanese racing driver.

"Damn good idea, a giant trackball / foot rest, with buttons ..."

There are actually quite a few models available.

When I had bad RSI I figured it wasn't the pointing with the mouse that hurt me, but clicking the buttons. So I got some foot pedals from a musical instruments shop and connected those to a mouse PCB - worked really well. Nowadays you buy units like that.