Archive for 'Humor'

Oh Cisco Press. Why must you annoy me so.

(This is the sequel to “How Does a Windows Administrator Solve Every Problem?“

Apologies to Hyperbole and a Half)

 

This is Scumbag Steve, for the uninitiated (AKA non-Redditors).

 (Apologies to Hyperbole and a Half)

While researching a Windows update for potential problems, I stumbled upon a forum post that I was unusually amused by. This wasn’t a typical case of internet savagery or the ravings of an inebriated internet troll. This was the kind of prose that belies deeper misunderstandings than what is first seen.

The backstory: A forum user posts a quick question asking how he can fix a certain update’s inability to install. Not an uncommon issue. Many Windows updates hang on installation and need some cajoling. Another forum user offers a quick link to a possible workaround. And then the fun begins. A third user kicks the door down, stomps into the thread and sets his coffee cup on the CAPS LOCK key. What follows is some notable misunderstandings of the basic capacities of operating systems and computer science in general. I’ll let you discover the post in its full glory if you so choose, but here are a few of the highlights.

As usual Microsoft has DONE nothng to provide a CANNOT FAIL fix for this error. [...] When is MS going wise up and start writing ALL update in NO FAIL MACHINE CODE. If a Virus can overrule Microsoft then Microsoft can surly write an UPDATE THAT CANNOT BE STOPPED OR FAIL the same way viruses are written. [...]

Certainly, Microsoft has some issues with their update system and smoothly recovering from failed updates is a bit of a pain, especially for someone who is just a casual computer user. Furthermore, I do not mean to completely marginalize the frustration that anyone, particularly this user, has felt concerning a Microsoft product. However, what strikes me is the misunderstanding that 1) Viruses cannot fail to install (and are more reliable than a major operating system) and 2) That it’s possible to make a “no fail system” of any kind, especially for one of the largest collections of code on the planet.

Perhaps it’s just a failure of the computer industry to communicate how things really are. Perhaps it’s the problem of so much emphasis being placed on user friendliness that when something inevitably goes awry, people are shocked at the complexity involved to recover from the error. Or perhaps it’s truly an oversight on the part of the vendor who hasn’t performed the necessary actions to make their software stretch the possibilities and make the difficult seem easy.

Before I veer off into too much speculation and philosophizing, let’s make a simple goal for ourselves as technology workers: Educate someone near you in the topic of computers. They don’t have to be taught subnetting, object oriented programming or ITIL. Just let them know a bit more about computers and their operation. Teach them safe browsing. Talk to them about complexities using basic analogies. Show them how to not be intimidated by their PC, but make them understand its limitations. Leave them better than when you found them.

Together we can lessen the abuse of caps lock on the internet and, more importantly, lessen someone’s frustration with the ubiquitous personal computer.

‘puters are a pain

They deserve a baseball bat

Whack! Whack! Whack! Whack! Whack!

I have a Twitter account. It’s right here. I was supremely skeptical of Twitter for quite a while. In fact, the only reason I signed up was because I had trouble with a game I bought and the only way that I could get in touch with the developer was through his Twitter account. He was not active on the official forum for the game nor did he respond to either of the email addresses that I had for him. Sadly, that was not the only time that I could not contact a developer except through Twitter.

I recall those days two years ago when I was attempting to understand the concepts of mentioning, direct messages and re-tweets. Now, 2,400 tweets later, I understand it well enough to be helping others use it, including one of my clients (a non profit that uses it to drive traffic to their blog). Here are the top ten reasons why I succumbed to joining Twitter:

1. My narcicism is inconceivable.
2. I want you to tweet “I do not think it means, what you think it means” at me after reading the first point.
3. I am a freebie-hound and retweets are cheap ways to enter giveaways.
4. I must be popular because all these girls I don’t know follow me and give me secret passwords to their sites!
5. I’m making it at least a little more likely that Lisa Nova will make a video about me. (see point 1)
6. I want to make up for being voted “most likely to not be voted most likely for anything in the high school yearbook because we thought you dropped out or got hit by a train at least two years ago”
7. I’ve always wanted minions.
8. I get to follow famous people without having any more restraining orders filed against me.
9. My concentration was getting too honed so I needed to break it into less efficient pieces.
10. Oh yeah, and I actually found useful people to follow as pertains to my profession such as
    • @StandAloneSA
    • @obfuscurity
    • @j_angliss
    • @Philiph
    • @voretaq7
    • @AFreshOne
    • @ClonedMilkmen
    • @JReypo
    • @Magurski
    • @rootwyrn
    • And many, many more. I hope to someday put together a Twitter list of the best tech tweeps that I follow, and by no means are the ones I listed above the my only favorites.

Who are some of your favorite Twitter users in the technology realm? List them in the comments below, and yes you can self-promote your own account if you feel like it. =)

As a result of a tweet of mine, I had some rather funny responses that I agreed with.

It’s long been a frustration of mine, however my ire was most recently raised over this topic by a certain company who makes a remote control appliance. To be fair, the company makes a fine product and they totally blow away their competition. However, they leave no clue on their site how much their appliances cost nor a ballpark figure for their Standard or Enterprise licenses. I resorted to Googling to find what their customers are chattering about on the webs concerning their pricing and found that they are indeed one of the highest priced offerings in their market space. Fortunately, word on the street is that they work with you on the prices, but still… why should I have to resort to trolling for water-cooler banter to find out something simple like the price?

There are a number of things that go through my mind when I land on a vendor’s pricing page only to see the dreaded words “Request a Quote!” Here they are:

Our prices are so absurdly high that we know you’ll walk away from us in disgust and consider our competition if we publicly reveal them.

Isn’t this what we all think immediately? It makes the most sense. You only hide what you’re ashamed of or are afraid of being misunderstood over. So why not just fly your flag high and show how much you cost? At least show some guts and don’t apologize for yourself. I’d have more respect for a company to come out and show their prices as being very high than to keep it hidden to ellude me.

On the positive side, perhaps they’re hoping that the product will speak for itself and don’t want people to be distracted by the price. If that’s the most positive spin I can put on this topic, that’s pretty sad.

We don’t trust the merit of our product enough to sell you, so we force you to contact a sales “engineer” so that they can pressure you into buying.

This is actually my biggest fear. I’m already convinced that the product is insanely expensive. However, that doesn’t scare me nearly as much as the likelihood of an army of soul-less sales reps descending on me like Cessna-sized zombie mosquitoes intent on exsanguinating my budget as a light snack. And oh yes, it happens. If you will not be forthright with me about your prices, I am fearing for my privacy that an overzealous sales rep will be air-lifted to my house looking like Chuck Norris in Delta Force.

We’re living the high life sipping Dom Perignon from empty Almas caviar containers in the driver’s seat of our Pagani Zondas.

No, I don’t believe that your profit margins are being used to feed starving orphans in Namibia. I think you’re trying to live like Google by having free snack machines in your lunch room and masseuses roaming the halls looking for any kind of billable work. At least send a masseuse to me when I have to buy one of your “Platinum Service Contracts”. And some chocolate covered malt balls. I love those things.

Our business is in such financial peril that we have to charge heinous amounts of money for our product and we require yearly support contract updates to keep us afloat.

Honestly, rather than the vendor living the high life this is what seems more likely to me. Your business is failing, you can’t figure out what to make your margins on, no one will give you VC, buy equity or offer you a loan so now you have to jack up your prices. You’re really re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic and you’ll be out of business in 6 months leaving me with 18 months left on an overpriced support contract.

We want to research what organization you work for so we can tailor a special price gouge just for you!

My suspicions about this are confirmed when the “organization” field is made to be mandatory. Do you want to see if I’m an upstart so you can assign your least responsive reps to my lower-end account? Or maybe I’m a major corporation so you can upsell my boss’s boss on your latest cash blackhole? Better yet, perhaps I’m a government entity or government contractor! Damn the capex limits… FULL INVOICING AHEAD!

Thanks to @SrslyJosh for this one.

We believe that our product will eventually be commoditized and until that happens we will be as opaque as possible with our business.

Really? I mean… REALLY? A lack of transparency makes me fear that your business model has cracks in it and you’re fluctuating your price drastically and frequently to ride the waves out.

Thanks to @JohnLockie for this one.

In order to hide the real cost of our products they are arranged in such a byzantine structure with so many variant pricing schemes that you won’t know how to decipher them anyway, so please contact us to be put in touch with a pricing ninja (+5 Confusion Spells against C-level execs).

We’ve all seen tiered edition and pricing structures that made us have to brush off our UML skills to chart out the possibilities. Wouldn’t it be nice if the vendor just obscured all of our choices and chose what was best for us? ಠ_ಠ

Thanks to @j_angliss for this one.

Are there any vendors out there reading this? Can you please explain whythere’s secrecy over your product’s pricing? It only engenders suspicion and distrust on the part of potential customers. Then again, if you A/B tested your pricing page and found that it converted better, who am I to get in the way. You’d better have an awesome product though, because if you’re barely better than the competition I’ll choose the more transparent company’s products most of the time.

Finally, if you’re a purchaser, what else do you think of when your vendor doesn’t show their prices at all? Any suspicions that I didn’t hit? Let me know in the comments.

 

 

The Steam group “Real BOFH” is organizing it’s first Team Fortress 2 event. Titled “Welcome to 2011 and let’s kill some lusers”, we’re going to assemble together on the event’s Steam page on Saturday, January 8th at 1900 GMT. We’ll monitor the comments section for the event to find a good public server to congregate on. Hopefully one with low ping for the majority of our members, however since our membership spreads from the Western US to Eastern Europe, that might be a little difficult.Yes, organizing the event is kinda low-tech and shoe-string, but we’ll just roll with it for now.

If you’re committed to the group, you can add the tag >BOFH< to the end of your nick. Let everyone know that yes, you are a BOFH. Perhaps we can start a >PFY< group for those among us that are still working the help desk.

If the group can get off the ground we hope to organize our own private dedicated server and who knows what else. IRC channel? Mailing list? Private island? Secret handshake? The possibilities are limitless.

Remember to check the Real BOFH blog for updates.

Do you have a casual Friday? Or do you work at a trendy-kewl startup where the only dress code is “wear clothes”? This, dear SysAdmins, is the shirt for us:

Perfect for when you have to locomote a switch from one IDF to another when both hands are occupied (perhaps with slapping the person who thought LinkSys switches would be a good idea). If anyone gets one of these, I request pictures.