More shit that pisses you off: What does that say about the quality of your emails?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > More shit that pisses you off: What does that say about the quality of your emails?

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bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

This talk of external graphics cards is amusing to me because one of my first big 'upgrades' in PC gaming was getting the external expansion chassis for my Zenith Supersport 286 and plunking a VGA card in there so I could play games in 256 color instead of just the 4 color internal CGA. 8 bit ISA POWER!

# ¿ May 18, 2015 23:49

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 15:49

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

Tab8715 posted:

What the hell did this device look like?

It was about the size and shape of a small APC UPS and had its own power connection. It connected to the laptop with a pretty thick many pinned cable.

bull3964 fucked around with this message at 00:03 on May 19, 2015

# ¿ May 19, 2015 00:00

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

McGlockenshire posted:

We had to let our newest hire go. We told him that we were restructuring the department and the project plan and his role was being eliminated. That's not untrue, but it's not the whole truth.

Now he's hitting up team members for recommendations, references and endorsements. This is a problem because the actual reason we let him go is that he wasn't great at his job (we hired him for three things, he's adequate at one and sucked at the other two) and annoyed literally every single person he worked with here. Nobody wants anything to do with him and we can't tell him why, so there's no reason he's going to change, and that pisses me off.

That one is easy.

"Company policy doesn't let me do anything other than confirm you worked here. Sorry."

# ¿ May 22, 2015 18:42

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

My commute is 18 miles and I'm able to do it in 25 minutes like clockwork unless a fairly major accident or road closure happens. For half of my commute in the morning (later half) and half in the afternoon (first half) I'm running counter-flow to the normal traffic patterns which is great. On the way home I can silently gloat at all the people sitting in standstill traffic waiting to go through the tunnels while I zoom home at 70mph.

Protip. If you ever move to the Pittsburgh area, live north. Any other direction, you will hate your life.

# ¿ May 26, 2015 22:21

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

poo poo that pisses you off? UPS that tries to kill you.

A member of my team alerted me that there was an odd smell in the server room (just for the office, not our production network which is at a datacenter.) I go over there and instantly get hit with a smell right out of Satan's rear end in a top hat. Instinct tells me that it has got to be a UPS, but there are like 6 in the room and none are showing any odd lights.

Finally narrow it down to one suspect by smell (which I'm sure was wonderful for health.)

Pull the offending APC unit, took it outside, and pulled the battery pack.

It was almost completely jammed in there.

What was especially concerning is how quickly things were deteriorating. In the morning there was no smell in there at all, in a span of an hour or two it kept intensifying. I wonder how much longer it could have remained plugged in before something catastrophic would happen. Makes me shudder to think if this happened overnight.

bull3964 fucked around with this message at 23:01 on Jun 17, 2015

# ¿ Jun 17, 2015 22:53

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

Thanks Ants posted:

Who replaced the original packs with the non-APC ones?

Couldn't tell you, these may be older than my time here.

One good thing came of it though. My plan for replacing the batteries every 3 years proactively is being seen as forward thinking and good for safety rather than a waste of money.

# ¿ Jun 18, 2015 00:42

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

King's Quest 3 had a spell book that you needed to reference in order to progress past a certain point. I was bashing my head against the wall trying to figure out how to go past a certain point until my friend said "Oh, yeah, here's a companion piece that was copied." Ahh, the days of sneakernet.

# ¿ Jun 19, 2015 19:27

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

Whelp, I guess that answers that on whether or not a genuine APC battery would have fared any better as far as swelling and failure.

It's actually WORSE because it broke the case. At both ends.

No prior warning, UPS just gave up the ghost completely when a power failure happened.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2015 23:48

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

poo poo that pisses me off:

Local gas company just launched a new customer portal and not only is it balls slow and throws 500 errors half the time, I just noticed as I was setting up payment details that it's not even using SSL. Threw a Fiddler trace on it and plucked my credit card details right out of clear text.

The mind boggles. Needless to say I've switched back to paper billing.

# ¿ Jul 7, 2015 05:35

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

Right, I made sure that the SSL proxy was turned off first. All form submission details plucked from the POST body in clear text over HTTP.

What's really annoying is they have a cert on the site, they just aren't forcing traffic to HTTPS, not even the login page. So, it COULD be encrypted, but only if you manually type in HTTPS.

Of course, with an implementation as slapdash as that, I'm not about to trust that they are keeping any of that info secure once they have it.

# ¿ Jul 7, 2015 07:01

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

I have to say, that's the one thing my company is really doing right. We're less than 200 employees, I don't pay ANYTHING for my health insurance, and the plan has zero deductibles. It's pretty much all $25 copays and $100 to visit the emergency room.

# ¿ Jul 8, 2015 20:57

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

Mogomra posted:

I probably already had a meltdown in this thread, but the company I work for baited me with the free healthcare stuff, and then got rid of it the two weeks after I took the job.

I don't know why I didn't gently caress right off that very second. I'm in too deep now.

We're way less than 200 employees. They blamed it on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act making it prohibitively expensive. Thanks a lot, Obama.

Well, I've been here 7 years and the health insurance has actually gotten better over time (the most recent was after the ACA took effect.)

My sister actually works for the hospital network that provides our coverage and I have a better plan than her.

Of course, this is all completely lost on me as I've had occasion to use my plan exactly once since I've been here, but that's besides the point.

# ¿ Jul 8, 2015 21:41

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

Dick Trauma posted:

It's 2015 and people still get pissed off when you suggest a reboot as the first response for run-of-the-mill Windows glitches. No, I'm not coming down there to feverishly troubleshoot why the check printing software tossed up an error after successfully printing checks all day. Just restart and call me back if it's still not working.

If you are routinely rebooting Windows servers to solve problems rather than bouncing a service or figuring out what the root cause is, I would get pretty pissed off too.

# ¿ Jul 22, 2015 17:12

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

Sickening posted:

Weird that you picked up server from that when it seemed fairly obvious he was referring to a workstation.

Dick Trauma posted:

Definitely talking about workstations. My servers usually only get rebooted for updates.

Ah. Just the mindset of my environment creeping in. If that was a desktop level thing, I don't think anyone out here would file a ticket about it, they would just reboot on their own.

# ¿ Jul 22, 2015 20:37

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

Yeah, I've never worked in an environment where it was considered ok to duck out early on Friday. The business hours are business hours.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2015 18:03

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

Bob Morales posted:

Summertime. People duck out early all the time on Friday starting around 10am

Must be nice. That just doesn't happen around here or any other place I've ever worked. You want out early on Friday, you better be using comp time or taking vacation time.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2015 18:29

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

Well, the other thing is, work is never done. There's always another project. There's never an instance where I can say "I've finished all my work for the week early! Time to go home!" There's always something else to work on, always.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2015 19:35

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

Things NOT pissing me off. Finally dropped our new backend DB cluster into prod last night.

Old setup was two dell R620s, each with 8 core xeons, 256gb of ram, each connected with 4gb fibre links to an HP MSA2000 array. Each lun had around 6 10,000 RPM SAS disks.

New setup.

Two R630s
756gb RAM
Two 18 core Xeons each for a total of 36 cores.
Dual 10gb iSCSI links to a 24tb RAW PureStorage all Flash array over Nexus 5k switching.

From now on if anyone tells me the DB is the bottleneck for anything, I'm just going to set an auto-responder of "you're wrong" without any investigating of the issue.

# ¿ Jul 27, 2015 16:38

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

ratbert90 posted:

I worked for Micron a while back doing Linux kernel work for them, and let me tell you, having over a TB of memory in a server is annoying on bootup.

These R630s actually boot up pretty drat quick.

The more annoying thing is the cluster failover. It takes a little bit of time to purge all that ram in the process to cleanly shutdown the SQL instance. Not excessively so though, only about 30 seconds.

# ¿ Jul 27, 2015 17:47

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

ratbert90 posted:

Sure, its not that long if you only boot once every month to a year. It seems a lot longer when it's your fourth reboot that morning.

Also the fans spinning up full speed for the first 15 - 30 seconds was terrible as well.

Ah well, the fans are 15 miles from me so I don't really have to worry about that

.

Yeah, these will only be rebooted once a month at most and since it's a cluster the reboots are going to be more like reboot and forget about it since it will be the passive node.

# ¿ Jul 27, 2015 18:02

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

All of these server 'closet' horror shows are exactly why Dell crated their VRTX system. Barely bigger than a mini fridge and has a acoustical footprint to match other desktops so you can put it anywhere.

# ¿ Jul 27, 2015 22:32

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

Collateral Damage posted:

I think the idea with those machines is that you have a complete vmware cluster in a box.

Right. It's a completely self contained chassis with room for 4 of dell's blade servers and drives for shared storage. You get a VRTX with two blades, a few drives, and a VMWare essentials license and you can basically drop a self contained fully configured HA cluster under someone's desk to run the whole office, only having to plug in a few power and network connections. You can even get them with GPUs for VDI.

# ¿ Jul 29, 2015 15:54

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

As all things, I think people should be handled like adults on a case by case basis and it's dumb that the bike is not allowed.

However, given the actual responses, I can see that there may be a reason beyond "power mad" going on here. Yes, it's office politics, but it's also procedure and policy based as well.

At this point, they are at a decision intersection. If nothing is done, the implied policy is bikes are allowed to be stored in the office with no special conditions. That could obviously cause issues if people start bringing in full sized bikes.

So, some line has to be drawn. They could draw the line at getting prior approval or a criteria that the bike must stow under your desk. However, the option that provides the least friction in the long term is an outright ban.

It's dumb and it runs afoul of treating people like adults, but I can see why it's being done beyond being petty.

# ¿ Aug 6, 2015 22:21

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

Comodo

I want to loving burn Comodo to the ground.

They have a scanner that checks when your SSL certificates expire and if you are <90 days out they call 3 times a day "I urgently need to speak with you about your expiring SSL certificates!"

We run over 100 websites and a lot of the domains are managed by us so we manage the certificates as well. So, we are almost always 90 days out from some expiration so they constantly call.

Who does this work on? They have pretty much guaranteed I never ever ever do any sort of business with them my entire career. If I ever go to some place new and they use Comodo products, I'm going to make it my first order of business to transition away from them. Seriously, gently caress off and die.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2015 22:36

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

Hey, look at that, sales pissing me off again.

Cold sales email from Symantic asking for 15 minutes to talk about encryption and data breach solutions.

Subject of such email?

"Data breach"

That's it, nothing else.

You know what? You can just gently caress right off. You do not send me an email with the subject of "Data breach" over a cold sales call. That's borderline phishing and completely unprofessional for a company as large as Symantec. That's what I would expect from those overseas mailing list people, not a multi-million dollar security company.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2015 20:00

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

Moey posted:

No one ever download VMTurbo's free monitoring software. They will call you everyday, forever.

This is a universal truth for any free piece of software that requires contact info to download.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2015 22:39

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

I love it when "colors" for anything comes up in a conversation that I'm participating in since I shut that poo poo down really fast by reminding everyone that I'm color deficient (moderate red protanomaly so purples, browns, and oranges confuse the hell out of me.)

"So on this documentation we are going to differentialt the different departments by using blue, purple, brown, and green."

*raises hand*

"Yeah, I see two blue documents and two green ones, might want to come up with a better scheme."

Sudden thoughts of ADA run through everyone's head. "Ok, we're going to rethink that...."

On a related note, gently caress every piece of equipment that has a tiny LED that shifts between Red, Amber, Green, and Yellow to show state. Use blinks or wildly different colors, this poo poo isn't a fashion show.

bull3964 fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Aug 26, 2015

# ¿ Aug 26, 2015 16:28

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

Never run without hot spares with data you care about. Ideally you would also have pre-fail detection as well.

What sounds better? Having a drive fail in the middle of the night, not getting swapped until the next day with a several hour rebuild still to go before things are in a non-degraded state . All the while, your controller's CPU is pegged for parity calculations the entire time.

or

Array detects a drive is suspect in the middle of the night and starts to copy the contents of that drive to your hot spare, only hitting parity if it has an unrecoverable block. You wake up the next morning and see that your array properly removed the suspect drive, never even going into a degraded state, and did it a ton faster because it didn't need to calculate parity for the whole array.

Then you calmly call your support and have the new drive delivered in your 4 hour window, restoring full hot spare functionality.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2015 05:48

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

Why is it that everything internet, computer, and IT related comes back to cats?

# ¿ Aug 31, 2015 22:37

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

Dick Trauma posted:

Mimecast is melting down.

Aaaayuuup.

Been asked a few times "what our options are."

We have one, ride it out, that's pretty much it.

# ¿ Sep 21, 2015 21:06

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

Yeah, we've been on them for over 2 years and this is the first outage.

One of our users got hit with a SPAM bomb a year or so back that would have melted our exchange server and I can tell you we probably would have been down far longer than this outage to deal with that one, so it's all relative.

Not to mention all the phishing attempts and viruses that the service has blocked. It sucks when something is down and you can't do anything about it, but at the same time I can guarantee you we would have had more productivity lost in the past two years without the service due to other reasons.

# ¿ Sep 21, 2015 23:11

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

It seems as though things have improved somewhat. They say they've identified the issue and are mitigating it and are processing backlog. We're seeing a little more reliable mail delivery, but outbound queue is only send one message every few minutes with the rest getting deferred with various timeout messages.

# ¿ Sep 21, 2015 23:43

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

Humbug Scoolbus posted:

I'm interested to hear what happened.

No received email may have been lost, but we did have a few clients report to us that they got bounces during the day yesterday.

# ¿ Sep 22, 2015 16:49

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

95% of the voicemails I get are from Comodo wanting to "urgently talk with me about my expiring SSL certificate." (gently caress Comodo for ever and ever for sales tactics like this, you've just guaranteed that I will never do business with you if I can help it throughout my entire career.)

4.9% of them are other vendors I've never talked with before

0.1% of voicemails are actually actionable and usually they were followed up (or prefaced) with an email.

Seriously though, I hate the phone. It's just a time suck most of the time because most of the time it's unnecessary. Just this afternoon, I sent a Dell rep an email that we were going to execute on a quote they gave us the day prior. The response I got back was "I would be happy to do that, please call me at the earliest convenience." The reason? He wanted to verify that the shipping address was correct. That's it. That's something that could have been done in the original email.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2015 06:26

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

I was at my first job out of school for 18 months.

5 years at the 2nd job.

I'm 7.5 years at my 3rd job currently.

I'm no stranger of knowing when to bail, but that time hasn't come yet. Growth here has been explosive and the technology has been constantly evolving. I've also garnered 62% in pay increases since I started as well. Recent developments (we were purchased) could make me pause, but so far it's looking very good that I can leverage this to my advantage and that I may have fallen rear end backwards into the best opportunity I could have at this point. Until any of that changes, I don't have much reason to pull up stakes and go elsewhere.

# ¿ Nov 24, 2015 06:46

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

Here's what you do. You place a sign on the copier that says 'do not use' until you confirm with Bill (via email with proper people included) because right now the copier is a security risk. It would be trivial for anyone to pose as a tech and use a name as reference to get in there and compromise the machine.

Not a likely situation, but it gives teeth behind not doing things like that without being notified.

# ¿ Dec 3, 2015 20:09

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

Aunt Beth posted:

I hope they have the RAID adapter's rebuild priority set to OH SWEET JESUS GOD PLEASE HURRY.

It's not a time thing, it's a probability thing. With that density, it is very probable to have an unrecoverable read error on at least one sector during the rebuild. If could take 30 days or 5 minutes, it doesn't matter. The math doesn't work out in favor of a successful rebuild

# ¿ Feb 9, 2016 01:38

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

Farecoal posted:

Is restarting bad

No, but you shouldn't have to do it daily. I restart when there's patches, but very rarely otherwise.

# ¿ Feb 19, 2016 17:23

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

Recruiter just made the official permanent ban shitlist. I'm not even sure if he was calling trying to get me for something or wanting to recruit for any open positions I have (I don't have any open positions), but he called my personal cell phone at 8:05 am. I'm not even sure why he had my personal cell phone, but that's before I get up for work so I was still sleeping. The only calls I get this early in the morning is escalation from work telling me poo poo is hosed or if a relative died. So, thanks fucker for starting my day by making my heart leap into my chest. You have now earned a place on my carrier's block list.

# ¿ Feb 26, 2016 14:35

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 15:49

bull3964: Nov 18, 2000; DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.

The biggest reason to bypass ISP DNS servers is the fact that they hijack what should be NXDOMAIN responses and punt them to their own search page that they get affiliate click revenue from.

# ¿ Apr 3, 2016 23:50

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > More shit that pisses you off: What does that say about the quality of your emails?

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