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It really saddens me how these days everything is a war. Politics. Employer/employee relationships. Sports. Landlord/tenant relationships. Religion.
I bring this up because mother-in-law just emailed me asking for a good dishwasher repair place. My immediate response was, "Er, you're renting. Why don't you just ask the landlord to fix that?"
And as usual, she's terrified of making waves and getting thrown out, so she'd rather just pay to repair someone else's property rather than legally request that the landlord fix the dishwasher.
It's so alien to me. I made it SOOOOOO clear to my tenants: "If anything breaks, call me, I'll give you the repair place I want you to use, and I'll pay for it."
Because why would I want the cheapest repairperson my tenants could possibly find working on stuff in the house that *I* own?
I dunno; I just seem to think longer-term than most.
EDIT: Yes, I was *that* kind of a landlord...
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A naked one? XD
I think you're definitely in the minority of 'honest landlords' with a common sense approach to handling things. We're so used to the scummy landlord stereotype, in no small part to rich corporations buying up all the real estate to drive up prices.
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Responses to two NH IT things...spoilered only for chunking it up and not having a big sprawling post.
This is complicated by the fact that you work from home, but it's not *that* hard to coordinate. But then again, I've also flat out asked you why you even have an IT department based on their responses.
But to actually fix it, I agree with Woran (and Drejk could also be on to something), and additionally need to check the event logs for any potentially useful messages that could help further diagnose.
Pros:
- You have fewer maintenance liabilities on your IT staff, allowing for focus on other things.
- When things go wrong, you get to blame the user and/or the vendor and there's nothing you really have to do other than make a phone call or open a ticket with the vendor.
- The user determines what gets backed up. (Going back to "blame the user".)
- Paying for the service is usually cheaper than paying the extra IT staff you would need plus continuously paying for the necessary hardware. Just like a home PC, you never just buy a server and you're done. This pro is really going to scale in importance as you look at smaller and smaller companies with less operating budget to work with. For many small businesses, going with the cloud service isn't just a good option, it's likely the only realistic option if they can afford it at all.
Cons:
- When it does go wrong (and it will) there's just nothing you can do about it. It's on the vendor. The user and user's management, however, is going to blame your IT department for it no matter what. The only thing your help desk staff are going to be able to say is "Yes, we know, but there's nothing more we can do about it. We have to wait on them. Yes, they're on a call about it right now. No, I don't have an ETA."
- Data breaches. How much do you trust the 3rd party cloud backup vendor? What kind of liability protection is in place? Securing data is hard, and it's a gigantic public trust hit when you screw it up, not to mention the legal issues surrounding such events. Won't matter to the public if it was another company that had the breach and your company was actually the victim. The public is going to be given the easily digestible headline of "Company A had their data stolen."
- The user determines what gets backed up. I don't know if anybody has noticed a theme with my work rants, but users cannot be trusted with string, and that includes all of you, who I genuinely respect as wonderfully intelligent individuals who clearly have talents beyond my understanding. But. From an IT perspective (specifically Security and Help Desk perspectives) not a single one of you can be trusted to tie your own shoes in the morning. It's just the way it works in my field. Seriously - Why do you think Microsoft went with forcing Windows Updates on people in Windows 10? Because users proved that as a statistical whole they weren't willing to do the updates on their own in Windows XP, ME, Vista, 7, 8, and 8.1. The instant IT says "that's up to you to decide" you end up sticking blueberry pie in the electrical outlets, and you will claim that you were just trying to make an omelet. IT will end up with a panicked email/phone call/IM/ANYTHING EXCEPT THROUGH THE APPROPRIATE METHODS that you are missing an incredibly important folder or file. Great, go to the cloud service and restore your backup copy. Oh. You didn't select that particularly critically important file or file location to be backed up. Well, no, there isn't anything we can do, because we don't do our own backups. What are you supposed to do at this point? Recreate the document from scratch, which we understand is the last 18 hours of your life that just got set on fire. Yeah, see, that's the kind of responses nobody likes from IT, but what else do we realistically have at that point? It's just safer to lock down the local hard drive of the computer, force people to save to a network drive, and back the whole thing up.
There's more pros and cons but for me, and speaking strictly from the corporate IT perspective, as much as the convenience and ease of cloud services sounds enticing I personally feel that they aren't worth it for big companies. For a major megacorp, I'd have to say that it's worth paying the extra people and overhead to have your backups inside your own network. There's a lot of responsibility that goes with that, but the less you expose your data the better off you are as a company. Just make sure to keep those backups offline so they don't get affected by the imminent ransomware attack that locks up every server in your network because some schmuck from 6 years ago put in a kludge of a fix and some user inhaled some road salt and decided to click that link in that Nigerian prince email...
It's too bad tomorrow is Thursday.
Eh, this thursday I am sitting in a virtual carrion crown game run under 2E to get a better feel for mechanics. That may be fun. And all so I can run Plaguestone with my DF set ups.
Or something.
I could use a couple of days off.
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A naked one? XD
I think you're definitely in the minority of 'honest landlords' with a common sense approach to handling things. We're so used to the scummy landlord stereotype, in no small part to rich corporations buying up all the real estate to drive up prices.
Yeah, there was just an article a week or two ago about some guy from Texas buying up THIRTY-FIVE buildings in the area.
Yeah, I'm sure he's going to be a great landlord!
(And yes, I have suggestions, but they're political so I'll shut up.)
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Today, we put the last few dollars we had in the gas tank. Half a tank of gas, we had, and while there's a paycheck coming on the 15th, we were freaking out on how on earth we're gonna make it until then. We don't live "in town", and so it would be three, four days tops, but Tala still has to get to work. Yeah, we had food stamps come in so we wouldn't starve, and we paid rent a week ago, and our rent includes utilities, so we wouldn't die, but we were terrified we'd be floating adrift until the end of the month.
I didn't really know what to do. I tried and tried, but I just couldn't find a solution. I mean, her job isn't gonna just be fine if she says "I can't come in until I get paid to put gas in the tank".
And then my last check from my job that fired me came in a week early today.
As well I found out I have three interviews this week!
I'm rather glad to have such a relief.
Thanks for the hopes and prayers and thoughts and feelings and plus ones and everything else, friends.
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Responses to two NH IT things...spoilered only for chunking it up and not having a big sprawling post.
** spoiler omitted **
** spoiler omitted **...
Entertainingly, you know who I work for. On the cloud backup side we're going from a third party to our own internal stuff.
But exactly as you say. With the third party stuff, I just clicked, "Back up the My Documents folder" and it did it, and I knew that was my one backed up folder so I put all my work in it.
With the new "solution", I have to manually do all my work in a networked drive, dropping my productivity by at least 10-20% due to network lag (try working on a Microsoft document that you've opened on a networked drive some time. Even on gigabit ethernet it's horrific) or I don't get anything backed up.
"We don't copy anything any more. You just have to use OUR slow-a$$ network drives."
On another note, tomorrow my younger brother turns 30. He is not looking forward to it. I remember 30 not being so bad, but I also remember that my ex-wife planned me a nice party and...nobody showed up. Seriously. My friend's wife, and my wife's friend, out of all the people invited. It was pathetic. And it really is a sucky memory to have such a monumental date be just flubbed like that. I mean, it's no Captain Yesterday Birthday, but it was pretty awful.
And my brother, who matters more to me than *almost* anyone in the world, short of Tala and the Infantite and my mom, is already regretting his is coming.
I wish I could think of something to help him feel better about it. He's not one to open up and talk about stuff, like me. He's pretty old-school machismo, you know? I know his girl is planning him a surprise party a few days later, but until then he's feeling like crap. I tried to talk to him yesterday, just to see in general what's up, but he just didn't feel like talking at all. Odds are he'll have radio silence tomorrow.
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Honestly, I've found when I don't do anything for my birthday they're pretty sweet.
Basically what I do now is come home from work with pizza or takeout, a cake, and then play videogames the rest of the day.
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"You gave her rocket launchers!"
"It's impossible to build a robot without them, Terry! They're load bearing".
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Yeah, my favorite birthday in AGES was my 50th, where I hopped in the Celica at 5:30 am, drove to Yosemite, went hiking 'til I dropped (YOU try going up 8800' in a single morning and then trying to do a 12-mile hike with a 40-pound pack on!), and pretty much avoided everyone I knew for the entire day.
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Responses to two NH IT things...spoilered only for chunking it up and not having a big sprawling post.
** spoiler omitted **
** spoiler omitted **...
Entertainingly, you know who I work for. On the cloud backup side we're going from a third party to our own internal stuff.
But exactly as you say. With the third party stuff, I just clicked, "Back up the My Documents folder" and it did it, and I knew that was my one backed up folder so I put all my work in it.
With the new "solution", I have to manually do all my work in a networked drive, dropping my productivity by at least 10-20% due to network lag (try working on a Microsoft document that you've opened on a networked drive some time. Even on gigabit ethernet it's horrific) or I don't get anything backed up.
"We don't copy anything any more. You just have to use OUR slow-a$$ network drives."
Yes, network performance is an issue, as is everybody hitting the same NAS or file server(s) all the time. Hence, you have to spend some serious money on your infrastructure if you're doing it this way, and you have to upgrade that hardware on a regular schedule.
Your company easily could. And as for you as an individual user, you know what you need to back up and have chosen the appropriate location. Most people...I just can't trust them with string. We've gone from personal folders on network drives to forcing them to use One Drive instead. A year later and they still won't do it.This morning I had a manager put in a ticket for one of their employees. Great! The person, working from home since March, could not get signed into the VPN. Called them up, heard the symptoms, looked at his account and went "Yeah, your password is expired." His response: "Now how am I supposed to know that??" Well, you get notifications in the lower right every day for two weeks. Every day for two weeks you get an email telling you the exact time on the exact day your password is going to expire, and you should change it before that happens. "I don't have email!" Yes you do, and I know this because I'm the one that created your mailbox. I personally gave you the instructions on how to access your email on three different occasions.
So I get his password changed, get him signed back into the computer, get him to change his password again, etc, etc, etc. Fine. 20 minutes of my day shot because this guy can't be bothered.
Later in the afternoon I'm bouncing between an outage call and an information gathering project that should not have been an emergency, but the person needing the info didn't inform me until 2pm that it was even a need and she had to have the info by the end of the day for an 8am meeting tomorrow. Ah. Thanks for that. While I'm doing this I get an email from that same manager from the morning saying that same user is having the exact same problem this afternoon.
No, he can't possibly have another expired password. This is something different. Please put in another ticket and stop emailing me directly about user issues, that's what the ticket system is for, and one of my techs (or myself when I'm available) will handle it.
My best tech happens to get the ticket. He IMs me after he's done and says "Yeah...um...you mentioned [username] would be having a ticket come in? His girlfriend tripped over the power and ethernet cords, ripping them out of the PC, the wall, and the home router flew across the room."
So...he told his manager he couldn't log in again?
"Right."
And we had to spend time telling him to plug the shit back in and reboot it all?
"Yeah."
Please tell me you're just f'ing with me.
"I'm really not."
How long?
"40 minutes to get him to plug in both ends of the power cord, one end of the ethernet cable, and reboot his router. And then to get logged into the computer was another 7 minutes after he booted it up."
I think you all know from my rants by now that this sort of stuff are NOT ISOLATED INCIDENTS. It's every single day. We can't get them to handle the absolute minimum by themselves. Telling them they get to decide what folders and files to back up on their own? That way lies madness.
Waiting for the plumbers to put in their gas lines, so probably won't make a lot of progress today either.
Plumbers still aren't here, I think co-worker might start hyperventilating if he doesn't have something to do pretty soon.
I'm torn between trying to figure out something to keep us busy and taping it so I can post it on YouTube.
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And thus begins a day of fixing "errors" identified by boss that were not highlighted anywhere in the source material.
But so be it. Bills get paid. Gaming supplies get bought. Dogs get fed.
So say at least me.
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Plumbers still aren't here, I think co-worker might start hyperventilating if he doesn't have something to do pretty soon.
I'm torn between trying to figure out something to keep us busy and taping it so I can post it on YouTube.
I'm not sure this has to be mutually exclusive.
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Aaaand... Woran and Vanykrye both "win": The event log (I didn't even know Windows 10 had one) shows that every time I lose network connectivity, the system's trying to access the proxy script. (When we're on VPN, we need a proxy to get out of the corporate network, and instead of hard-coding the DNS we grab a script that can be dynamically updated as needed.)
So I can at least tell my IT department, "Hey, this proxy script is failing every 5 minutes. What gives?"
In the meantime I'm going to turn it off and stick to internal connections and see whether things suddenly work.
Ah, well.
I turn off the proxy script. Things work great for about 10 minutes. Then some internal IT process re-enables the proxy script and I'm hosed again.
I totally understand IT's point of view. The sheer number of people saying, "I connect to my VPN and then I can't get to my Google mail," is mind-boggling. So yeah, they implemented a, "We're going to fix your network settings every 10 minutes so you can't possibly break them and bug us," script.
I appreciate it.
But since the network settings seem to be the problem, er, I'd like to turn that script OFF, thanks!
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It will be very, very bad if Oracle wins this case.
In no way do I think Google farts rainbows and moonbeams, but the API is there for a reason. If you think software interaction is a problem now, just wait for the fallout if Oracle wins this.
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It will be very, very bad if Oracle wins this case.
In no way do I think Google farts rainbows and moonbeams, but the API is there for a reason. If you think software interaction is a problem now, just wait for the fallout if Oracle wins this.
So for me there are two issues at stake:
(1) Oracle is trying to claim copyright on API, which would indeed be very, very bad.(2) In addition to copying the API, Google lifted 11,000-12,000 lines of code. Er... you're not allowed to do that.
So I wouldn't be bothered if the court ruled that Google's code-lifting was illegal and damages were owed. If the court rules that Google violated Oracle's API, we're in for a nightmare of incompatibility for the foreseeable future.
It will be very, very bad if Oracle wins this case.
In no way do I think Google farts rainbows and moonbeams, but the API is there for a reason. If you think software interaction is a problem now, just wait for the fallout if Oracle wins this.
So for me there are two issues at stake:
(1) Oracle is trying to claim copyright on API, which would indeed be very, very bad.
(2) In addition to copying the API, Google lifted 11,000-12,000 lines of code. Er... you're not allowed to do that.So I wouldn't be bothered if the court ruled that Google's code-lifting was illegal and damages were owed. If the court rules that Google violated Oracle's API, we're in for a nightmare of incompatibility for the foreseeable future.
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*sigh*
So.
Another meeting today.
My boss has alienated my staff almost completely to the point they don't feel like speaking out anymore, or even talking to me. Two people are planning on leaving for different reasons, but I think we can all agree what the initial impetus was. I doubt the third will stay much longer.
And then it will be just me and maaaaaaybe one other person, working part time.
I'm upset at myself for not defending my staff more, doing more, getting it all right. I'm upset with my boss for being my boss. I'm upset with how the coronavirus based lockdown has affected my job(s). I dont know if this is going to lead to something more or not, but right now its just leading to madness.
Y'know what's really refreshing?
To get an IT guy on the phone, have him talk to you for two minutes, and then have him just say, "Yeah, OK. You know the drill. Go ahead and run the manufacturer's update software to update your BIOS and firmware drivers and let me know if that doesn't fix things."
In other words, "I have spoken with you and determined that you have a brain, and I am therefore trusting you to take care of this on your own and then let me know how it goes. Thanks for saving me time."
Yeah, I've run a few BIOS updates in my lifetime, dating back to the old, "Put it on a 3.5" floppy and boot from the floppy" days..
Hello, John!
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Well, *that* is irritating.
After being utterly stumped, I finally filed an IT ticket and the guy said, "Ignore the fact that Windows says all your drivers are up to date. Run the manufacturer's update tool and let it do whatever it wants. You have my complete permission."
So it updated the firmware, the BIOS, the drivers, etc.
And yeah, the behavior still isn't *quite* perfect, but a half-second glitch once every half hour is WAY better than a 4-5 second glitch every 5 minutes.
Things have improved...
As a final pre-lunch note, it's always interesting to me how quickly the human body adapts to the conditions around it.
My first summer in Davis was miserable, because starting in May it breaks 90°F and doesn't typically drop back below that until early November. By my second summer I was completely accustomed to it.
So, I know that every winter if it manages to hit 60°F outside I open up the entire house to take advantage of the "warm" day to air out the house. And 60°F seems like a perfectly reasonable temperature to me.
But today, after three 90+°F heat waves in a row, I saw that it was 60°F outside so I opened up the windows...
...and it feels downright chilly!
It's just what your acclimated to at the moment, it seems.
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There certainly were no other dutch people, except for MrT, and he is not young. Or a woman. So it must have been me! Was it at MrSlankie's game? With Pirate Rob and the gang?I was there in 2017! And I remember there being a young woman from the Netherlands in one of the games I was playing. I wonder if we actually gamed together?I was supposed to go to PaizoCon this year. I don't get to cons often, but when I do I like the gaming, and I like to hear from designers, etc. Plus, it's always fun to see Paizo folks.
All the online cons I've been doing this year have been mostly about the gaming, but there have been a few panel discussions that have piqued my interest.
We were planning on going to paizocon again this year (we went one time before in 2017).
It was just so relaxed. Everyone there to do some gaming, talk gaming, hang out, paint some minis, get tormented by cosmo. Do the silly quizzes. It was real cool.I wish I could remember!
That game doesn’t ring a bell. Were you in the Leshy game run by badger/Mike Welham?
Yes! I was in the Leshy game! I even have a picture of it!
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Aaaand... Woran and Vanykrye both "win": The event log (I didn't even know Windows 10 had one) shows that every time I lose network connectivity, the system's trying to access the proxy script. (When we're on VPN, we need a proxy to get out of the corporate network, and instead of hard-coding the DNS we grab a script that can be dynamically updated as needed.)
So I can at least tell my IT department, "Hey, this proxy script is failing every 5 minutes. What gives?"
In the meantime I'm going to turn it off and stick to internal connections and see whether things suddenly work.
Just proves again that all your experience with computers just mean sh*t when people/software/corporate find new an exciting ways to eff things up.
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I went to con of the north last year. Were you there too?
Nowadays I go to Con of the North to network with friends and play game demos. I learned how much I love Zombicide at CotN. Otherwise the rest of any con is kind of lost on me.I was, but only briefly Friday night. I went to meetup with a guy that works the computers downstairs, then also strolled the buying hall and chatted with some folks, trying to get some new players.
The past couple of years I haven't been as active at the con as I was in previous years. What were you there for Woran?
Gaming. Pathfinder/Starfinder the whole weekend. Plus a LOT of alcohol.
Im a responsible adult...
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Y'know what's really refreshing?
To get an IT guy on the phone, have him talk to you for two minutes, and then have him just say, "Yeah, OK. You know the drill. Go ahead and run the manufacturer's update software to update your BIOS and firmware drivers and let me know if that doesn't fix things."
In other words, "I have spoken with you and determined that you have a brain, and I am therefore trusting you to take care of this on your own and then let me know how it goes. Thanks for saving me time."
Yeah, I've run a few BIOS updates in my lifetime, dating back to the old, "Put it on a 3.5" floppy and boot from the floppy" days..
Yeah. That is my MO as well. There are a few users I trust to do things and I'll give them free reign.
Other people not so much.
It will be very, very bad if Oracle wins this case.
In no way do I think Google farts rainbows and moonbeams, but the API is there for a reason. If you think software interaction is a problem now, just wait for the fallout if Oracle wins this.
So for me there are two issues at stake:
(1) Oracle is trying to claim copyright on API, which would indeed be very, very bad.
(2) In addition to copying the API, Google lifted 11,000-12,000 lines of code. Er... you're not allowed to do that.So I wouldn't be bothered if the court ruled that Google's code-lifting was illegal and damages were owed. If the court rules that Google violated Oracle's API, we're in for a nightmare of incompatibility for the foreseeable future.
On point 2. Yeah, I agree, but that 11k-12k lines of code represents only about 1% (give or take a decimal point) of the original Sun Java source code. From what I've read in other articles on this case over the years, Sun knew about it at the time.
I don't think Google's transgressions on this one are particularly egregious or troubling. Still something that they can be called on, sure, but also from that article Oracle used Amazon's APIs for cloud services without licensing as well. So...pot...kettle...cake...hungry...
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Next time I'm in attendance then I'll watch for a responsible adult Dutch woman with a fondness for Pathfinder games and toast you with a Jameson from a respectable distance then.I went to con of the north last year. Were you there too?
Nowadays I go to Con of the North to network with friends and play game demos. I learned how much I love Zombicide at CotN. Otherwise the rest of any con is kind of lost on me.I was, but only briefly Friday night. I went to meetup with a guy that works the computers downstairs, then also strolled the buying hall and chatted with some folks, trying to get some new players.
The past couple of years I haven't been as active at the con as I was in previous years. What were you there for Woran?
Gaming. Pathfinder/Starfinder the whole weekend. Plus a LOT of alcohol.
Im a responsible adult...
Sounds like a good plan!
Y'know what's really refreshing?
To get an IT guy on the phone, have him talk to you for two minutes, and then have him just say, "Yeah, OK. You know the drill. Go ahead and run the manufacturer's update software to update your BIOS and firmware drivers and let me know if that doesn't fix things."
In other words, "I have spoken with you and determined that you have a brain, and I am therefore trusting you to take care of this on your own and then let me know how it goes. Thanks for saving me time."
Yeah, I've run a few BIOS updates in my lifetime, dating back to the old, "Put it on a 3.5" floppy and boot from the floppy" days..
Yeah. That is my MO as well. There are a few users I trust to do things and I'll give them free reign.
Other people not so much.
Very few.
You know the world is weird when you watch a video made in amsterdam by an expat that starts with that sentence.
My accident in December could have been completely avoided by a different interchange design. I first ran into this kind of interchange in the suburban DC area, but I've also seen it start to get put in other places as well.
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It is somewhat funny to me that microsoft outlook routinely treats microsoft teams meeting invites from known senders as spam and consigns them to the junk folder without me ever having seen them.
I appreciate that MS Teams is a pile of dog poo, but you would think that MS at least would respect the product enough to have the invites treated as regular mail rather than preemptively assigning it to the junk folder.
It is somewhat funny to me that microsoft outlook routinely treats microsoft teams meeting invites from known senders as spam and consigns them to the junk folder without me ever having seen them.
I appreciate that MS Teams is a pile of dog poo, but you would think that MS at least would respect the product enough to have the invites treated as regular mail rather than preemptively assigning it to the junk folder.
We use Teams too. I like and loathe it. I've seen the same problem, but only with meeting invites from three specific people. Which...at least with two of those people...is actually kind of useful in a way?
These are coming from a client, so moderately important. Even if I don't want to attend. Ah well. Wrapping up for the day. Gaming tonight!
Woot. Well virtual woot.
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Thank you, everyone, for the PMs meant to cheer me up. I don't mean to be a sad sack. But this is my only place to socialize online really so it is going to be the first place to get hit with the newest and heaviest information. Let me know if it gets to be too much and I will spoiler or move to PMs entirely.