Monday 26 Jul 2010 by Orphi the AweKid.

Oh no, wait, actually it was a message from Dell. It’s easy to mix the two up though, obviously.

Yes, Dell sent me one of those “Dear valued customer (who’s name we don’t actually remember), please could you spare just ten minutes to fill out this 80,000-point questionnaire (which we won’t look at anyway). Thanks for wasting your time on us.” Pointless, eh?

Well, just for giggles, I did it. I don’t suppose anyone at Dell will be in any way concerned that they got back one reply where everything was rated 3 out of 10 at best, but here’s to hoping. Of course, simply writing some numbers doesn’t to justice to just what a bad supplier Dell is to work with, so for anybody who hasn’t had the misfortune of dealing with Dell, let me explain what’s so bad about them.

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Friday 04 Jun 2010 by Orphi the AweKid.

Well, I’m back at work today. 206 unread emails (plus 9 emails [correctly] classified as junk). Woo, me.

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Friday 10 Jul 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

OK, so check it out. One of the fans on a Dell server stops working. But we have a support contract. So we just contact them and they’ll send us a replacement fan. Right?

Well, you’d think that’s what we paid tens of thousands of dollars for, but no, apparently not. I have just wasted my entire morning going round and round and round Dell’s so-called “support” website trying to find the button that lets me request some God-damned support. I still haven’t found it.

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Thursday 02 Jul 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

And so today, for no specific reason, I’ve come to work in my casual style rather than my usual formal shirt and trousers. I’m wearing my Burton denim jeans, my crumpled white shirt with the black pinstripes, and I even spiked my hair. (Although, given that I did all of this in kind of a rush because I was late, the hair didn’t come out so well.) With the heat we’re having, I’ve got the sleeves rolled up and buttoned. And I’m wearing my black Sketchers.

No particular reason. I just wanted to be different.

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Friday 13 Mar 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

So last year, we moved premises. We had a new fiber optic link put into our newly constructed building, we moved in, and then we had the line to the old building ceased.

Our site manager send innumerable emails to BT asking whether they wanted their network equipment back. No reply was ever received. We even asked the installation engineers while they were on-site. “Not our department, guv” they said.

And so, the demolision crews came in and flattened the building. With BT’s network equipment still in it. Too bad for BT, eh? I guess the equipment has no value to them or something. I figured that would be the end of it.

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Monday 05 Jan 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

And so, another year has begun. And once again I find myself sitting at my desk on another Monday morning. Yay for me.

And again, as is traditional, I have another random problem that I can’t solve. One of my servers has decided not to allow full backups any more; any attempt to perform one results in a BSoD and a reboot. How helpful.

Still, I have my CV prepaired. I just need to draft a covering letter and get it into the mail. It’ll probably be ignored as usual, but we’ll see. I also have plans for next week, but we’ll see about that…

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Monday 02 Jun 2008 by Orphi the AweKid.

I was asked to set up some software for talking to one of our temparature loggers. When we connected up the second temparature logger, we made a small discovery: you can’t change COM port. The software lets you change it, but the change doesn’t actually take effect, and if you open up the options section, you’ll see it’s changed straight back to whatever it was before.

Well let me see now. How much do you want to bet that this is a security issue? I’ll bet where ever it is that this dinosour program stores its configuration settings is only writable by an administrator, which is why normal users can’t change the settings. *sigh*

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Thursday 08 May 2008 by Orphi the AweKid.

On one hand, I’ve just had a whole morning of people asking me when all our systems will be working again. That kinda sucks.

On the other hand, I just used the RED phone number. I think I woke our Director of IT. He certainly sounded sleepy anyway. But then, it’s 5AM where he is. Muhuhuhu!

[For some reason, none of the remote systems can authenticate us. I notice some strange name resolution going on, so I’m guessing that’s the cause. But hey, it’s Somebody Else’s Problem now. Oh, the power!]

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