Category: Diary Entries

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Tales From IT: How I got paid to play World of Warcraft for 3 months

Upset customers, complex systems, poor documentation, high-pressure situations, bizarre legacy choices.  Working in IT is hard work.

Except when it’s not.

Watching installations / patches run, interminable meetings, deciphering manuals (“What does ‘Klaatu barada nikto’ mean?”), hanging around for a change window to open;  there can be plenty of waiting around.

evildeadnecronomicon
“I found the regular expression documentation!”

But waiting around for 3 months with a client that had nothing for you to do but refused to let you leave?  That’s a pretty unique situation… Continue reading “Tales From IT: How I got paid to play World of Warcraft for 3 months”

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LAN Yarns : Apologizing for playing my race in Starcraft 2.

I played Starcraft 2 a great deal a few years ago.  After months and months of play I eventually got to Diamond league and promptly hung up Pneumatized Carapace for good.  Occasionally I’ll still watch a game or two but when I was dedicated to it I used to watch loads of them.

While digging through some old posts I made on the forums at the time I found the following about watching a game with my wife.  It’s a “my race is not as cool as the other races” whine but at least it’s by proxy! Continue reading “LAN Yarns : Apologizing for playing my race in Starcraft 2.”

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Tales From IT: Don’t Confuse Relative and Absolute Pathnames!

This incident occurred in the first place I worked and it proved to me just how much damage a little ignorance can do (unfortunately I was the source of the little ignorance in this story).

More specifically, a little ignorance, god-like permissions and a hacked-together backup system built out of scripts. Continue reading “Tales From IT: Don’t Confuse Relative and Absolute Pathnames!”

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Tales From IT: I Don’t Want To Win If They Don’t Lose

IT projects past a certain size get quite complex.  They have a lot of moving parts and often those parts have to be aligned correctly and at the right time to make everything work.  In turn, that means you need the various people to pull together to make sure the project as a whole delivers.  Sometimes the team doesn’t succeed but normally everyone is pulling in the same direction.  There is no “I” in team!  Etc Etc

There are exceptions.  In one place I worked the IT departments were actively trying to push each other under a bus.  Think ‘Game Of Thrones’ with RAID arrays.

Ethernet 1
Day 1 : How to Make a Garotte out of Ethernet Cable

It made delivering the project…. interesting. Continue reading “Tales From IT: I Don’t Want To Win If They Don’t Lose”