The Grumble Thread - No energy for a full on rant.

[T42]

Fluff. Household full. Where does it all come from? I know that dust in part is human sheddings but where does fluff come from. And more to the point, why is it that two minutes after I’ve vacuumed every last vestige of fluff from every damn crook and nanny is the another metric tonne of the damn stuff blowing tumbleweed like across the floors.
Pah!

Dust bunnies proliferate faster than real ones.  I once had a CPU meltdown due to dog bunnies. That's when I bought an air compressor.

[spesh]

Fluff. Household full. Where does it all come from? I know that dust in part is human sheddings but where does fluff come from. And more to the point, why is it that two minutes after I’ve vacuumed every last vestige of fluff from every damn crook and nanny is the another metric tonne of the damn stuff blowing tumbleweed like across the floors.
Pah!

There is (nearly) always a Trump tweet Dilbert cartoon.

https://dilbert.com/strip/1991-12-15
https://dilbert.com/strip/1990-07-22

Disclaimer: any linking on my part to a vintage Dilbert strip does not imply any endorsement of Scott Adams' blog, which I diskard utterly, chiz.

[Torslanda]

Much less annoying, at least fluff has a secondary use as camp fire kindling/tinder

Whereas tortilla chips/Doritos (other forms of gum laceration are available) are only useful as kindling...

[Kim]

Dust bunnies proliferate faster than real ones.  I once had a CPU meltdown due to dog bunnies. That's when I bought an air compressor.

There's nothing quite like blasting air from a compressor for de-fluffing electronics.  Hoovering never quite gets into the crevices and canned air doesn't come close.

The trick is remembering not to breathe.

[Si S]

Biological scientists, Excel, sig figs and log mantissas. 

What a mess.

Ftfy

 

[Mr Larrington]

FFS, Google. If I type "Banff" into your search box, at least have the grace to present the one true original Scottish Banff (home of Brig'o'Banff whisky) on the first page, and not 57 bits of irrelevant detail about that cardboard Canuck replica.

Search engine optimisation, y'all...

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the online visibility of a website or a web page in a web search engine's unpaid results—often referred to as "natural", "organic", or "earned" results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a website appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users; these visitors can then be converted into customers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization

What you complain about is the relatively innocuous end of what SEO gets used for...

https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/06/how-the-trump-russia-data-machine-games-google-to.html

Surely in this case it's "Search engine optimisation, eh"?

[fuzzy]

Bloody weather and Churchill Retirement Living.

I'm trying to observe Comet Wirtenen/46P. The bloody gaps in the clouds keep disappearing and, when the gaps are big enough, some fucking idiot has built a retirement apartment complex in the bloody way 

[Legs]

Lycamobile (ooh!)
Calling for the very last time,
Lycamo-o-o-o-bile,
Got no signal,
And no landline...

[woollypigs]

O2 is (or has been) down today and that took out GiffGaff too. I think lyca is also on O2 network.

[Legs]

..hence my grumble.  Compounded by the fact that our home landline is also out...

[Beardy]

Service providers seem to,have abandoned the idea of redundancy of single points of failure in this day and age ...
<insert anacdote of minor service failure requiring major reportage in days of yore>

[hellymedic]

Hence 100% bed occupancy causing chaos in hospitals...

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link...

[fimm]

Dear colleague, if I have clearly just brought me lunch to my desk, will you stop asking me questions?

[Kim]

Redundancy only works if you don't roll the same problematic software out across the whole thing...

https://www.ericsson.com/en/press-releases/2018/12/update-on-software-issue-impacting-certain-customers

Expired certificate! 


I've just received an email from barakta, informing me that Eduroam wasn't and that she's off to do battle with BloodyTrains.  With any luck I'll see her in a couple of hours or so...

[Mrs Pingu]

O2 still borked, whatever Ericsson are claiming....

[Kim]

O2 still borked, whatever Ericsson are claiming....

My understanding is that the network is flooded with signalling traffic as a result of the failure, so fixing the underlying software problem won't bring things back to life immediately.

Meanwhile the media is full of sob stories from people for whom telecoms is mission critical, but not critical enough that they're willing to pay for some redundancy.  Makes a change from Brexit, at least...

[Basil]

O2 still borked, whatever Ericsson are claiming....

My understanding is that the network is flooded with signalling traffic as a result of the failure, so fixing the underlying problem won't bring things back to life immediately.

My son sent me a test sms.  I received it. Received it again a couple of minutes later . Received it a third time an hour and a half after that.
I assume it re-transmits every time they re-boot something.

[Kim]

O2 still borked, whatever Ericsson are claiming....

My understanding is that the network is flooded with signalling traffic as a result of the failure, so fixing the underlying problem won't bring things back to life immediately.

My son sent me a test sms.  I received it. Received it again a couple of minutes later . Received it a third time an hour and a half after that.
I assume it re-transmits every time they re-boot something.

Barakta sent me a test SMS this morning.  I replied with a single^[1] 'PONG'.  She's received at least 50 copies.

My guess would be general overload meaning that something never receives an acknowledgement that the message has been sent successfully, so it waits a bit and tries again.  None of which is likely to help the situation.


[1] "Give me a ping, Vasili. One ping only, please."

[Beardy]

So many things I could say, but is shall limit myself to ARF

[Kim]

O2 are confident that service will be fully restored by Friday morning.  They haven't specified which Friday...

[Mrs Pingu]

I did wonder this morning if it was the Chinese throwing their toys out of the pram over all the Huawei shenanigans of late.

[nicknack]

I did wonder this morning if it was the Chinese throwing their toys out of the pram over all the Huawei shenanigans of late.

<smug> MY Huawei with Vodafone is working just fine</smug>

[Beardy]

I did wonder this morning if it was the Chinese throwing their toys out of the pram over all the Huawei shenanigans of late.

<smug> MY Huawei with Vodafone is working just fine</smug>

Of course it is, they can’t watch you if it doesn’t work 

[SoreTween]

There is some pleasing irony in that, if The Register is correct, today's wailing and gnashing of teeth occurred because the systems worked exactly as they were designed to (in the event of certificate expiry).

[Kim]

There is some pleasing irony in that, if The Register is correct, today's wailing and gnashing of teeth occurred because the systems worked exactly as they were designed to (in the event of certificate expiry).

It's okay, I'm sure they're rolling out software updates to ensure they accept any old certificate as we speak...