Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

[mansaxel]

Nope, because I saw this happening, as I said, in the late Eighties/early Nineties over the period I was running PC Magazine's labs for Spliff-Davis. The Compaq buyout was 2002. If anything I'd say it worked slightly the other way around, the retained 'Compaq' product lines (e.g. proLiant) got more tool-less and neater after HP took over.

This sounds about right. 1998 I had a Ericsson-supplied hp workstation PC on my desk to check if things worked in ESOE (their packaging of NT4) and it was really neatly put together, and horribly slow. The SS5 adjacent to it felt a lot better, and had a SSH client.

I slid out of that gig early 2000 and went to a place where I had an Ultra5 and no Windows PC (but a ThinkPad running OpenBSD) on my desk and all servers ran FreeBSD. Some of them were yellow Compaqs. I bought a Wera T20 driver just to deal with them.

Gig after that still was Compaq servers (and some DEC, including VMS) and FreeBSD. During my tenure there the compaqs became "hp". And then everyone bought Dells instead.

[mnementh]

Sometime in the late Eighties/early Nineties -hp- had an ah-ha! moment and realised that it was in their own best interests that things ought to be easy to assemble, disassemble and service. I suspect that they started hiring decent production engineers by the bucketload. At the time I could see it in their computers. Suddenly, with the advent of a product line refresh, everything became super easy to pull apart and put back together again - often without tools. You saw similar improvements in the production engineering of their test gear around then too and, though I never got to see any, probably of their laboratory systems as well.

That design ethos came aboot (I believe) as a result of their buying out Compaq, whose PCs at the time were pretty much a paragon of toolless design, and more importantly, plastic-fantastic cases that could be redesigned and delivered on a near-quarterly basis to keep the "look" modern enough to attract the interest of the fickle public. I suspect those engineers systematically infiltrated the entire company and brought in as many of their friends as they could, at least until the psycho-bint-from-Hell-on-acid bought her way into the boardroom.

Of course, that could also just be my aging brain-cells and poor memory conflating the two converging timelines... at this late date, nothing is certain except uncertainty. 

mnem
 

Nope, because I saw this happening, as I said, in the late Eighties/early Nineties over the period I was running PC Magazine's labs for Spliff-Davis. The Compaq buyout was 2002. If anything I'd say it worked slightly the other way around, the retained 'Compaq' product lines (e.g. proLiant) got more tool-less and neater after HP took over.

Hmmm... I was working for them pretty steadily as a independent contractor ASP around 2005... it was my impression from listening  to my contacts at their ASP HellDesk talk while we worked that the Compaq buyout had been in the distant past.  I suppose with the Carly-shitstorm going on all around them, everything from before felt like a previous lifetime... 

mnem

[bd139]

It's so long ago (for reference we were seeing mostly 386 and 486 class machines) that I can't remember the specific model numbers of the Compaqs we were getting through the labs, but I will say in their defence that it was a relief, in terms of build quality and accessibility, to get a Compaq in front of you instead of the POSs that were being turned out by the likes of Gateway, and (worst of the worst) Amstrad.

Going to be honest, my father's OEM PC outfit turned out some reasonably nice bits of kit back then. Mostly proper Intel OEM boards, disks, quality cases and power supplies etc. None of that second rate AMD K5/6 shit (how times have changed ). BUT when it came to something slightly more industrial, Compaq and Dell won.

The best story I have to attest to Compaq not being shit was a job I got to set up a dialup router for a 3 person office (accountant). Fairly simple task so I grabbed a junker P90 compaq deskpro I had lifted from a skip, poked a hard disk in it and stuffed NetBSD on it. I set up a rexec script on each of their windows machines that would connect the dialup (to prevent false auto-dialouts and nasty phone bills) and another script to shut it down at 6pm if it hadn't timed out. Took about 3 hours to get it working and they were happy. Didn't hear anything for 7 years (this was 2006 by then) and then one day out of the blue I got a call asking me to come and fix it because it had broken. Figured why the hell not. Well it turned out that the dialup ISP they were using had shut their service down, NetBSD disk was full of logs and it had an uptime of over 5 years still. Hardware was 11 years old by then and I didn't fancy risking it further so I just pulled the power and replaced it with a ADSL connection and a Draytek router and got them an ADSL line in. They bought new PCs for themselves from Dell and I helped them migrate it over to something slightly more modern which didn't take a lot of effort and they were happy again.

I'm going non-Ferengi here but I've been doing hardware, ISP and software refreshes for them every 5 years since just because I actually enjoy working for them. Nice supply of biscuits, coffee and a good context switch away from the usual grind. I break even on the job. They are thoroughly competent power users as well and don't need to ask me questions every two minutes, just when they want to make big changes.

The only other "good" client I ever had was a company that made die cut sticky things. I wrote them an ERP system in Access (sorry!) that they ran their business off for years. That was of course until a change of management decided to pay someone lots of money to replace it with a web based system that never worked properly and ruined their business. I was asked to look at it and found the page hits were 1Mb a go (viewstate hell in asp.net), which was not good on 2004 Internet Explorer... 

I need to write a book.

[mnementh]

...PuroLATER (as in a week later than it was supposed to be here ), arrived with my bedframe off Amazon. Aboot effing time.

mnem

Hmmm... perhaps my anger at Purolator is a bit misplaced; there's a great big red REWEIGH stamp on the shipping label, and an overweight exception in the tracking history now that it's been delivered. 

The label says Amazon paid for 35lbs; the product listing says it weighs 49lbs, and actual weight (measured on the bathroom scales out of curiosity) is 54lbs. This thing is grossly overweight; and that's not even considering dimensional weight on a 82" long parcel.   

Is this another instance ofthe oft-complained-of issue of Amazon deliberately bullying their carriers over underpaid shipping? Or is it just some 1D10T drone who just plugged the weight from the smallest twin-sized variant (29lbs gross weight, so 35lbs would be just aboot correct adjusted weight) into the shipping software?

The cynic in me says the former... the PSB in me says the latter... but the realist says it is both; that this happens all the time because productivity metrics, but the cost in human-hours to catch it even most of the time is ridiculously high, so Amazon "negotiates the problem away" and it becomes just another little bit of shit that rolls downhill in the form of the end-user not getting the service s/he's paying for, with the courier providing UDP-level "best-attempt" delivery service.

I should be mad, but I just can't muster the GAF; this train of thought has already consumed more human fuel than it's worth to me. 

mnem
"It's all shit; pick a layer and dive in." ~me

[mnementh]

It's so long ago (for reference we were seeing mostly 386 and 486 class machines) that I can't remember the specific model numbers of the Compaqs we were getting through the labs, but I will say in their defence that it was a relief, in terms of build quality and accessibility, to get a Compaq in front of you instead of the POSs that were being turned out by the likes of Gateway, and (worst of the worst) Amstrad.

Going to be honest, my father's OEM PC outfit turned out some reasonably nice bits of kit back then. Mostly proper Intel OEM boards, disks, quality cases and power supplies etc. None of that second rate AMD K5/6 shit (how times have changed ). BUT when it came to something slightly more industrial, Compaq and Dell won.

The best story I have to attest to Compaq not being shit was a job I got to set up a dialup router for a 3 person office (accountant). Fairly simple task so I grabbed a junker P90 compaq deskpro I had lifted from a skip, poked a hard disk in it and stuffed NetBSD on it. I set up a rexec script on each of their windows machines that would connect the dialup (to prevent false auto-dialouts and nasty phone bills) and another script to shut it down at 6pm if it hadn't timed out. Took about 3 hours to get it working and they were happy. Didn't hear anything for 7 years (this was 2006 by then) and then one day out of the blue I got a call asking me to come and fix it because it had broken. Figured why the hell not. Well it turned out that the dialup ISP they were using had shut their service down, NetBSD disk was full of logs and it had an uptime of over 5 years still. Hardware was 11 years old by then and I didn't fancy risking it further so I just pulled the power and replaced it with a ADSL connection and a Draytek router and got them an ADSL line in. They bought new PCs for themselves from Dell and I helped them migrate it over to something slightly more modern which didn't take a lot of effort and they were happy again.

I'm going non-Ferengi here but I've been doing hardware, ISP and software refreshes for them every 5 years since just because I actually enjoy working for them. Nice supply of biscuits, coffee and a good context switch away from the usual grind. I break even on the job. They are thoroughly competent power users as well and don't need to ask me questions every two minutes, just when they want to make big changes.

The only other "good" client I ever had was a company that made die cut sticky things. I wrote them an ERP system in Access (sorry!) that they ran their business off for years. That was of course until a change of management decided to pay someone lots of money to replace it with a web based system that never worked properly and ruined their business. I was asked to look at it and found the page hits were 1Mb a go (viewstate hell in asp.net), which was not good on 2004 Internet Explorer... 

I need to write a book.

Expect lots of "cease & desist" letters from Simon's IP lawyers. Probably The Daily too. 

mnem

[Saskia]

Glasses broke (rolled over in my sleep onto the glasses that I had parked on the neighboring bed. Shit happens. Needed to get the fixed, drove to the optician (Apollo, local chain). Their drone took the glasses, fingered them all the time and asked me where I got them from. Because, if not through their chain they would not do anything.
Well, I had to ask for it to get it back, calmly explained to them that I was not willing to buy another pair of glasses and wait for the actual lenses to be cut/polished, etc spending hundreds of pesos and waiting 3 weeks if all that needed to be done was to swap out one of these screw in thingies.

Now, I had to ask for disinfectant. With all that covid craze going on and their requiring everybody to wear a mask even outside in the parking lot plus disinfecting their hands, why ffs is that overpaid whatever fingering my glasses if she knows beforehand that she cannot fix it ?!

Phone ordered some replacements from a friend of mine. Will get them next week. Apollo Optics, eff U.

[SilverSolder]

Glasses broke (rolled over in my sleep onto the glasses that I had parked on the neighboring bed. Shit happens. Needed to get the fixed, drove to the optician (Apollo, local chain). Their drone took the glasses, fingered them all the time and asked me where I got them from. Because, if not through their chain they would not do anything.
Well, I had to ask for it to get it back, calmly explained to them that I was not willing to buy another pair of glasses and wait for the actual lenses to be cut/polished, etc spending hundreds of pesos and waiting 3 weeks if all that needed to be done was to swap out one of these screw in thingies.

Now, I had to ask for disinfectant. With all that covid craze going on and their requiring everybody to wear a mask even outside in the parking lot plus disinfecting their hands, why ffs is that overpaid whatever fingering my glasses if she knows beforehand that she cannot fix it ?!

Phone ordered some replacements from a friend of mine. Will get them next week. Apollo Optics, eff U.

That's funny, most "chain store" optics places that I've ever gone to with broken glasses have been extremely helpful (and, as a result, I come back when I need to buy something...   service works!)

[mnementh]

   Fucking marketing people... I swear.

On an intellectual level, it always annoys me a little bit when a merchant tries this hard to establish a personal connection with their product; I generally prefer to keep my emotions out of the business transaction & just feel good of my own accord over simply getting fair value for my dollar when it happens.

These are the same people who make the mattresses I've bought several times off Amazon; they too come with similarly "too precious" bits of greeting card fluff. The one for the rolled-up mattress warns that it knows karate and may kick you if you open the baggie carelessly; this did give me a chuckle but ultimately all the included blank greeting cards still get recycled as scratch paper, since the back-back of the card has their website printed (yes, discreetly, but still...) on it.

But here they've spent actual money... not just a few cents worth of marketing SPAM (for which we ultimately pay the delivery cost) but actual money... on a halfway-decent 5mm Hex ratchet wrench for no other reason than it will save me, the customer, a few minutes of time & aggravation. Even tho the hardware kit sourced from xyz in China includes a regular 5mm Allen wrench.

Dammit! Now that actually does warm the cockles of my little tool-dwagon heart, even tho I know they're just trying to buy me off! 

Bastards! 

mnem
...and it worked, too, didn't it asshole...? Even if just a little bit...?

[dl6lr]

That's funny, most "chain store" optics places that I've ever gone to with broken glasses have been extremely helpful (and, as a result, I come back when I need to buy something...   service works!)

Same here, I once broke a contact lens (lots of years ago when they were really costly and had to last about one year) and I had to go the other day for a business trip. As my optician was in another town around 180km away, I called the local chain store (Fielmann) if they could be of any help, telling them the data of my lens. They asked for a moment to call me back. Around one hour later I got a call from them, telling me in which branch they have that lens available. So I drove there and they handed me a replacement lens (one of those you normally get for the first time adaption) for free.

Now for something offtopic: Sniped a new cable for the E4418 power meters for cheap. Less than only the connectors would cost...

Regards, Bernd

[mnementh]

*pokes the thread with a stick*

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Is it dead...?

mnem
What is that smell...?

[Cerebus]

Your feet.

Off to bed...

[25 CPS]

News flash: They're here.    We're expecting 5-10cm today. 



This is the scene from my back door. We spent all afternoon down in that yard blowing/bagging the last of the leaves yesterday. Just in time is the word of the day!

mnem
nice pants.

10PM - Still snowing 10 hours later. Almost 3X as deep.

mnem
*toddles off to ded, filled with impending dread*

Only 5 hours snowing here and we already have as much as you.  The puppy has no idea how to handle this.  It is the second time in her life she has seen snow.  She was quite bewildered when she went from a full speed run to full stop when she reached the snow bank I shovelled.... and time to shovel it all back again!

By the time it was all done here, nothing accumulated because it stayed just warm enough to keep melting the snow as it landed on the ground.  I have no objection especially from a midnight shift point of view where there's nothing worse than having to scramble to scrape the truck off and dig it out all against the clock before hitting the road in whatever shape the roads are in to get to work and let the afternoon guy go.

I'm on rotating shifts and they're horrible.  Thankfully, I live alone, it's just me and the cat - definitely no parents! - so nobody else is disturbed by my erratic comings and goings at all hours.  Several of the guys I work with live with wives and in some cases kids so when they're on the back hour shifts, it's an awful game of tiptoe so they don't disturb other family members and vice versa for the family trying not to disturb them when they're trying to sleep in the middle of the day.  At least none of that's a concern for me since I'm on my own but it does have its downsides too though.

Sorry, I must of gotten you confused with someone else with regards to living arrangements.

I feel for you. Rotating shifts are a killer...sometimes literally.   

There's definitely a health impact to rotating shifts for sure.

[URI]

*pokes the thread with a stick*

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Is it dead...?

mnem
What is that smell...?

Thank good, not XXX pages to catch up with after getting up.   

Not everything that smells is dead, jim..   

[Zucca]

advantest r8340a only 150€

soooo tempting.... ahhhhhh

[BU508A]

*pokes the thread with a stick*

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Is it dead...?

mnem
What is that smell...?

No. bd139 has now a real job and therefore less time for the TEA thread.   

[bd139]

I’ve actually got two at the moment and I can’t do either of them 

I’m mostly working on “administrative shit” at the moment 

[tggzzz]

I’ve actually got two at the moment and I can’t do either of them 

I’m mostly working on “administrative shit” at the moment 

In the decent companies I've worked in, the decent middle managers have been adept at umbrella management deflecting seagull managers.

I've always thought that to be a joyless way od spending your life

[med6753]

I’ve actually got two at the moment and I can’t do either of them 

I’m mostly working on “administrative shit” at the moment 

In the decent companies I've worked in, the decent middle managers have been adept at umbrella management deflecting seagull managers.

I've always thought that to be a joyless way od spending your life

You never worked for IBM, did you? Whenever there's a problem they appear in massive flocks. 

[BU508A]

I’ve actually got two at the moment and I can’t do either of them 

I’m mostly working on “administrative shit” at the moment 

In the decent companies I've worked in, the decent middle managers have been adept at umbrella management deflecting seagull managers.

I've always thought that to be a joyless way od spending your life

You never worked for IBM, did you? Whenever there's a problem they appear in massive flocks. 

Looking at the picture. I run ...

https://youtu.be/iIpfWORQWhU

[tggzzz]

I’ve actually got two at the moment and I can’t do either of them 

I’m mostly working on “administrative shit” at the moment 

In the decent companies I've worked in, the decent middle managers have been adept at umbrella management deflecting seagull managers.

I've always thought that to be a joyless way od spending your life

You never worked for IBM, did you? Whenever there's a problem they appear in massive flocks. 

One of the better points about HP was that if I had been promoted six times I would have been CEO. The reasons the intervening levels were there were obvious and sensible.

ISTR that IBM had 14 layers.

The only management book that is worth the paper is "Up The Organisation"

[bd139]

You never worked for IBM, did you? Whenever there's a problem they appear in massive flocks. 

Did they also only succeed in raining shit upon the landscape as well? 

I'm not going to say too much about this place yet, for it is early days. Even the shiniest ball can be made of the stinkiest poop.

[med6753]

I’ve actually got two at the moment and I can’t do either of them 

I’m mostly working on “administrative shit” at the moment 

In the decent companies I've worked in, the decent middle managers have been adept at umbrella management deflecting seagull managers.

I've always thought that to be a joyless way od spending your life

You never worked for IBM, did you? Whenever there's a problem they appear in massive flocks. 

Looking at the picture. I run ...

https://youtu.be/iIpfWORQWhU

You just had to bring that up and remind of the awful 1980's. I run far away. 

[med6753]

Did they also only succeed in raining shit upon the landscape as well? 

I'm not going to say too much about this place yet, for it is early days. Even the shiniest ball can be made of the stinkiest poop.

"Stop ship meetings" "Task Force Meetings" And anything else possible to hinder finding the right solution.  Yes, in essence a total shit storm.   

[tggzzz]

You never worked for IBM, did you? Whenever there's a problem they appear in massive flocks. 

Did they also only succeed in raining shit upon the landscape as well? 

I'm not going to say too much about this place yet, for it is early days. Even the shiniest ball can be made of the slinkiest poop.

Some people are adept at polishing turds, often correlated with observations like "cream isn't the only thing that floats to the top".

[Zucca]

My HP cup was lost by USPS. Please observe one minute of silence with me.
I am a little sad, it was a wonderful piece of electronic history somehow.

It will never come back.