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guppy posted:Current big organizational priority: professional development. just wait for your boss to pass out photocopied booklets from "server 2012 for dummies"
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Feb 27, 2014 18:32
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My boss is actually not the problem, my boss is great. The problem is the complete lack of support from higher up.
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Feb 27, 2014 18:45
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This is me trying to sell an idea at my current gig. I'm Dlibert. http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2014-02-23/
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Feb 27, 2014 18:51
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guppy posted:My boss is actually not the problem, my boss is great. The problem is the complete lack of support from higher up. I hear you. A while back I worked at a place that was all "training!" except to them that meant £50 each per year.
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Feb 27, 2014 18:54
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guppy posted:Current big organizational priority: professional development. My company spent a lot of money on access for all employees to web based training on all sorts of technical stuff and encouraged us to take training classes on our own time. 2 months later they wondered why no one was taking training classes after they spent all that money.
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Feb 27, 2014 18:56
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slightpirate posted:just wait for your boss to pass out photocopied booklets from "server 2012 for dummies" Did that actually happen? Ouch... Right now, I'm sick of a Director of the IT/Engineering group in our org constantly getting himself new MacBook Pro's every six months, while I have employees that are sitting on 3+ year old Dell Optiplex boxes with 1280x1024 monitors.
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Feb 27, 2014 19:55
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I do not know who came up with the idea, but there are "things" that you can configure on iOS via bitwise or. In XML. Seriously, wtf? This isn't a slow wire protocol on some hilarious constrained device, this is full fat XML over 4G/WiFi on a platform that's more powerful than the desktops of 10 years ago.
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Feb 27, 2014 20:09
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pissing me off: trying to understand dudes who speak English with a very heavy Indian accent. Does anyone have any tips or methods for getting better at this? I have to talk to this particular vendor all the time and pretty much every tech has a strong accent. I feel like an rear end for having to get them to repeat everything all the time.
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Feb 27, 2014 21:18
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Bob Morales posted:We have DoD customers so we have to keep everything for 7 years Why are you spinning up mailboxes for applications that just send? Keep everything for seven years: capture it via journaling or some archiving with forced retention. Frankly if you're relying on, much less allowing, PSTs for keeping data then your org doesn't care. If they ever have to do e-discovery it is going to be an expensive nightmare which could result in sanctions if can't be done expediently. Your lawyers have no clue.
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Feb 27, 2014 21:25
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UFOTofuTacoCat posted:pissing me off: trying to understand dudes who speak English with a very heavy Indian accent. Honestly, it's just something that takes some practice. One of my college professors was Indian, but aside from stressing unexpected syllables sometimes (took me a couple months to realize he was saying "develop" instead of "devil up"), he didn't have too much of an accent. That still prepared me somewhat for my first grown-up job where a large proportion of the dev staff was Indian, but had really thick accents. By the time I left that job about four years later it wasn't a problem for me at all (it didn't take that long though).
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Feb 27, 2014 21:29
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UFOTofuTacoCat posted:pissing me off: trying to understand dudes who speak English with a very heavy Indian accent. Speaking as someone with an accent who's pretty goddamn hard to understand on the phone, I'm not at all offended when people ask me to repeat myself.
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Feb 27, 2014 21:32
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evol262 posted:Speaking as someone with an accent who's pretty goddamn hard to understand on the phone, I'm not at all offended when people ask me to repeat myself. Yea, just be polite and remember they might have just as hard of a time understanding you. Everyone I've ever talked to at Microsoft support has been very, very hard to understand.
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Feb 27, 2014 22:08
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Bob Morales posted:Yea, just be polite and remember they might have just as hard of a time understanding you. Everyone I've ever talked to at Microsoft support has been very, very hard to understand. Try vonage. India is too expensive for their call centers so they went with Manilla
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Feb 27, 2014 22:22
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Paladine_PSoT posted:Try vonage. India is too expensive for their call centers so they went with Manilla My ex-girlfriend was Filipino so I'm used to hearing her family talk (I mean yell) and I even picked up a little Tagalog.
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Feb 27, 2014 22:37
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UFOTofuTacoCat posted:pissing me off: trying to understand dudes who speak English with a very heavy Indian accent. Just be polite, and don't be afraid to ask them to speak more slowly. I'm very good at getting through thick accents, but even I have trouble occasionally. It can also be helpful to follow up with a nice email, which gives you an opportunity to ensure you heard things correctly, and lets the other person know you're a decent human being.
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Feb 27, 2014 22:44
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Paladine_PSoT posted:Try vonage. India is too expensive for their call centers so they went with Manilla
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Feb 27, 2014 22:52
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40MB PDF "manuals" that consist of: 1 cover page containing a huge image scanned at 600dpi 2 pages of legal bullshit in 3pt font 1 blank page to make the next section start on an odd numbered page (it's not a loving real book nobody cares!) 3 contents pages listing every single diagram, table, and sub-sub-sub-subsection 1 blank page to make the next section start on an odd numbered page 4 pages of marketing waffle about the company and their ISO 9001 certification 4 pages of contact information and how to obtain sales brochures 3 pages of static electricity warnings in 15 different languages 1 blank page to make the next section start on an odd numbered page 3 pages of actual content 2 blank pages marked "Notes:" 2 pages describing how and where to buy the product 3 page index
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Feb 27, 2014 23:13
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Alereon posted:I supported a customer that used an IVR system, rather than license a functional voice recognition system with fuzzy matching, the audio was piped live to reps in Malaysia who didn't speak English, but were supposed to type phonetically the sounds they heard and a text search would match the correct result and play it to the customer. What? A Mechanical Turk... for voice?! How much would that cost?
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Feb 27, 2014 23:13
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Westie posted:What? A Mechanical Turk... for voice?! How much would that cost?
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Feb 27, 2014 23:52
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Sweevo posted:40MB PDF "manuals" that consist of: loving this. I would pay (company) money to subscribe to a service that created and maintained an archive of searchable lightweight PDFs that stripped out all of that crap. 3 pages of actual content. Bam. 64k. Call it fixthisPDF.com and it would have two buttons and two boxes for user input: One marked "PDF upload" and one marked "search for PDFs". And a bunch of slaves on the back end that ran your PDF through the formatting chipper. Done.
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Feb 28, 2014 00:01
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Also one of the "3 pages of actual content" is a full-page diagram showing how to plug the power cord into the wall.
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Feb 28, 2014 01:03
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Don't forget that the content part which requires manual dexterity is a 3cm fuzzy diagram originally scanned from a bad fax.
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Feb 28, 2014 01:11
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Bob Morales posted:Send a file from one system to another? What the gently caress is ftp/scp, email it! Upload an image? That's too tough, email it! Oh my god, this. People would send me documents directly from the local shares instead of just the path to the file until I eventually got them to stop with enough message telling it was pointless, wasting bandwidth and I'm going to open the network version anyways because it's updated in real loving time, but that's only for me. Everyone still sends everything they possible can through e-mail which is filling up our e-mail server because most mail is cc'ed to about 5 higher ups, who all get the attachment too (and will never look at the e-mail, let alone the attachement). No one deletes e-mails or even sorts them and then they get annoyed when our 5Mbps connection takes too long to re-sync all 50,000 e-mails in their inbox. They can't delete e-mails though or archive them, all of them are important, including the thousands of automated message, or single sentance ones from 2003. No matter how often I remind them that they are using the shares on the network constantly already and everyone in the company can access them (outside of perms and all that), so they don't actually need to e-mail anything since it's already available they just look at me like I'm insane. People in the same room, who need to look over each others documents from the network will e-mail it to each other: Person A sends person B a document from <Local Share> to review via e-mail. Person B edits document and e-mails back changes to person A. Person A then reviews the edits, and then saves the file to <Local Share>, half the time as a copy of the original. So we end up with: Document A.docx Copy of Document A.docx Copy of Copy of Document A.docx Copy of Copy of Document A 2014-01-25.docx Final Document A.docx Copy of Final Document A.docx Then they get confused as to which is the real copy and since they've opened and re-saved them while checking just to ensure date stamps are useless. Tickets also come in asking why they can't send a 500MB file through e-mail... It just hurts my brain. 
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Feb 28, 2014 01:34
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A c E posted:Tickets also come in asking why they can't send a 500MB file through e-mail... Email is like a car. This email is like a piece of paper in a car. Comfortable, easy to load, drive to it's destination, and unload. Your 500MB attachment is not a piece of paper. It's a pallet of serrated lead dildos. Even if we removed the seats and depalletized everything and managed to squeeze them all in there, your fuel economy would be poo poo and no receiving department would even consider unloading it. Stop emailing pallets of serrated lead dildos.
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Feb 28, 2014 01:40
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I have to wonder why Microsoft hasn't figured out a way to automatically upload attachments larger than X to an FTP server and add a link in the message. Google manages to do it with Gmail and Drive.
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Feb 28, 2014 01:44
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scroogle nmaps posted:I have to wonder why Microsoft hasn't figured out a way to automatically upload attachments larger than X to an FTP server and add a link in the message. Google manages to do it with Gmail and Drive. Because they probably realised that people would treat it as permanent storage and expect to be able to retrieve 100mb attachments from 5 years ago. No joke, I found someone at work with 40,000 mails in her deleted items 
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Feb 28, 2014 01:58
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scroogle nmaps posted:I have to wonder why Microsoft hasn't figured out a way to automatically upload attachments larger than X to an FTP server and add a link in the message. Google manages to do it with Gmail and Drive. Drive is something Google owns and controls, some random FTP server is not something Microsoft owns and controls.
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Feb 28, 2014 02:00
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Sweevo posted:40MB PDF "manuals" that consist of: We had a vendor provide us a quote for a build once and it was literally a 90 page PDF that had 87 pages of marketing bullshit followed by 3 pages containing the actual quote. 
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Feb 28, 2014 02:17
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Install Windows posted:Drive is something Google owns and controls, some random FTP server is not something Microsoft owns and controls. What if it was a designated server/location on the same network as the exchange server? That way it'd be owned (and managed) by the company. How do they do it for office365 deployments?
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Feb 28, 2014 02:38
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Install Windows posted:Drive is something Google owns and controls, some random FTP server is not something Microsoft owns and controls. They do make IIS though, and tend to do a good job integrating their products. Yes, people would treat it like permanent storage and complain when something from 5 years ago goes missing, even with a disclaimer, but I feel like that's preferable to the current options of do the same thing manually or upload it to some cyberlocker service that will also delete it after a while or be taken down for DMCA violations.
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Feb 28, 2014 02:43
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An email came in... (I saw this second hand from a friend at work.) It was a screenshot of some error with our homebrew (read: crap) customer application. Someone had a question and emailed a few people. After a few rounds of email volleys, some damned idiot emailed a few DEPARTMENT-WIDE DISTRIBUTION LISTS in their reply-all. As you can expect lots and lots of "Please don't reply all!!!!" Emails were sent along with "Why am I getting this?!?!??" Emails. It went in for a few hours. This is Healthcare where the common sense doesn't matter and the policies are made up. I'm seriously expecting a few people to be fired or talked to by HR for this. By the end of the day it was over 100 emails in this chain.
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Feb 28, 2014 04:12
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So the company that borged us want photos so they can do us ID cards, fair enough. They don't state any requirements beyond "a photo" So me and my partner get the camera out and and take photos. Between her disabilities and my complete failure to look good on camera, this takes a couple of hours, and then it takes her an hour more to get it off the camera and process it in DPP. I send it off and tell them that I "am not sure what requirements you need, so I have been quite generous with the cropping and left the resolution quite high, so that you can edit it to suit your needs" six weeks later I get a response telling me that the photo was "unacceptable". I ask if they can tell me what's wrong, e.g. is it a technical issue or are you unhappy with the composition e.g. lighting, shadows, angle. The response "it doesn't work, try taking another photo". Great, really helpful feedback there, that's totally going to avoid repeating the same problem after the two of us waste another 3-4 hours at the weekend taking another photo. I guess it was my mistake, assuming that the people whose job it is to put photos on ID card would know how to, you know, work with images. I just sent them the same one cropped to a 35:45 ratio and shrunk a lot, hopefully that will work. If that fails, I'm sorely tempted to just send them a myspace angle shot taken with the company Nokia dumbphone.
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Feb 28, 2014 11:23
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Lum posted:So the company that borged us want photos so they can do us ID cards, fair enough. They don't state any requirements beyond "a photo" Sorry the card printing program only supports bmp. Or proprietary corel photo photos. But I dont know what that is so it just doesnt work with that jpg you sent me.
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Feb 28, 2014 12:20
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AlternateAccount posted:Is it not common knowledge that this generally saves money in support costs and increased productivity compared to people waiting 20 minutes every morning for their machine to catch up and log them in? I'm late to this party, but I have an answer to your question. Yes. Yes it is common knowledge. The problem is that directors and executives who have budgetary powers are royals, the nobility of the Information Age. They are not commoners, therefore they have no use for common knowledge. Lum posted:If that fails, I'm sorely tempted to just send them a myspace angle shot taken with the company Nokia dumbphone. Don't forget the un-flushed toilet in the background.
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Feb 28, 2014 12:26
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^^^ oh god, I remember that pic doing the rounds. Got a genuine LOL from me.SEKCobra posted:Sorry the card printing program only supports bmp. Or proprietary corel photo photos. But I dont know what that is so it just doesnt work with that jpg you sent me. TBH, I reckon that's basically what's going on. The photo I sent them was 2600x2700 and 1MB in size with the idea that they could edit to be however they wanted. He's probably just tried to load it unaltered into the card printing program and made it crash. Someone on IRC suggested that was well as sending them a myspace angle cam shot I should also do the duckface, only problem is knowing my luck that's the one they'll actually print on the card.
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Feb 28, 2014 12:27
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Lum posted:I guess it was my mistake, assuming that the people whose job it is to put photos on ID card would know how to, you know, work with images. We just did some of that crap and the person both taking the photos and making the cards is a secretary. Which I don't mean as a put-down, she's quite good at her job and very nice, but no, she absolutely would not be able to tell you what the issue was if her program wouldn't accept a photo. Lum posted:Someone on IRC suggested that was well as sending them a myspace angle cam shot I should also do the duckface, only problem is knowing my luck that's the one they'll actually print on the card. I'm not sure why that would be a "problem." That would be great.
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Feb 28, 2014 12:57
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Lum posted:[ID cards] They were probably using an off the shelf ID card program - all of which are terrible. It was probably a Windows 3.1 program that's been hacked to run inside a Windows XP compatibility wrapper. It probably supports 24-bit uncompressed bmp files and nothing else, and has small and completely arbitrary image size limits because it was originally designed to run on a computer with 4MB RAM.
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Feb 28, 2014 13:21
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guppy posted:I'm not sure why that would be a "problem." That would be great. I once worked at a company where my "official company photo" - admittedly in the on-line employee database rather than an ID card - was a 6 year old photo of me at Halloween, dressed as Mr T (complete with Mohican, beard, and "gold" jewellery)
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Feb 28, 2014 13:31
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ookiimarukochan posted:(complete with Mohican, beard, and "gold" jewellery) Wrong tribe. Edit: TIL Mohawk and Mohican are the same. How bout that.
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Feb 28, 2014 13:35
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Lum posted:^^^ oh god, I remember that pic doing the rounds. Got a genuine LOL from me. Oh, they would print that, they'd ask their tech savvy facebook friend to get the image to work, because you gotta help out a swag sister like that, yolo! Sweevo posted:They were probably using an off the shelf ID card program - all of which are terrible. It was probably a Windows 3.1 program that's been hacked to run inside a Windows XP compatibility wrapper. It probably supports 24-bit uncompressed bmp files and nothing else, and has small and completely arbitrary image size limits because it was originally designed to run on a computer with 4MB RAM. To be fair, my BIOS picture utility only accepts BMPs with specific color settings, which isn't documented anywhere. I just figured I'd match the settings that would make a picture look like a typical bios picture, and bam, worked.
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Feb 28, 2014 13:47
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