Mods are asleep, post fake Richard Scarry cars.

I used to think the government was hiding evidence of alien UFO encounters to prevent widespread panic. Now I think they’re using general UFO encounters as a cover for weapons testing.

So expensive though. But the last time I was there, they just filled the bag with fries instead of using one of those little cardboard boxes. I ended up throwing half a pound of fries away.

Next story:

Company emails were formatted First Initial Last Name @ Companyname . com. I have a common nickname I’m known by. Nobody calls me by my given name, and my nickname had a different first letter. My company email uses my given name. Pretend it’s clastname@company.com.

I start getting phone calls from customers, suppliers, people outside the company, etc. that any email they send to me is getting bounced back. When I ask what address they’re sending to, they’re using an email created using my nickname. Pretend it’s dlastname@company.com. So I tell them it’s wrong, give them the right one, and fix it one caller at a time.

This gets old, and it happens while the IT manager is talking to someone else in the department when it happens again. I walk over to her and ask if it’s possible to have a second email address based on my nickname, because I’m getting a lot of calls about people using that instead of my official address.

“Absolutely not. If I give you a second address, pretty soon everyone is going to want one.”

One of the engineering managers is standing there. He says “I don’t want one.” Another engineer speaks out “I don’t want one either.” IT manager is pissed, but stands her ground. I don’t get another address.

Pretty soon, I get a phonecall from a college intern that was planning to come back for the summer. He says my email address doesn’t work. I explain the issue, and give him the right address.

He says “That’s not what’s on the webpage.”

For some stupid reason, the company webpage had everybody’s email address on it. Except mine was wrong. When IT made the page, they put dlastname@company.com on it. But since that was wrong, all email was returned to sender.

I talked to the IT contractor about it, and he basically said “That’s stupid. It’s a 30 second fix, I’ll take care of it.” And a few minutes later, I had two email addresses and the issue was fixed.

I used to work at a company with a…slightly incompetent…IT department. A couple stories:

We had a problem with the company network crashing, about once a week. It was an ongoing problem for almost a year.

The engineering department used Unix based CAD workstations. The rest of the company used Windows. To run Windows apps, we engineers had a Citrix server that would we would remote into, and run Office apps from there. One day, one of the engineers discovered an admin app that would let users logged into the Citrix machine to send instant messages to any other user. It was both useful, and abused, because the messages weren’t tagged with a sender. You could pretend to be anybody.

One day, an outside IT contractor (the internal IT department was incompetent, so they hired a contractor) discovered a log of all the messages. He came into Engineering, and just told us the log existed, and to be more ‘professional’ when sending messages.

He must have told the IT manager, because next I know, the entire department is called into the VP’s office, interrogated about the IM app, and sent home while they decide what to do. Sent home without pay.

Over the next few days, engineers were called in one-by-one for meetings with HR. Turns out, the IT manager told HR we were using the IM app to purposefully crash the network. Never mind that the contractor told her that wasn’t possible. She was intent on finding a scapegoat.

HR decides to suspend everyone without pay for a week. But nobody is fired because there’s no proof and no “confession”. While everyone is out (I found out later) the network crashes.

Things get back to normal, time passes, and a couple months later, the network just stops crashing. No more problems. It turns out, IT had installed the wrong printer driver for the engineering plotter in another department. This other department only used the plotter about once a week, so they just used the plotter in engineering. It was overwhelming the network whenever it was used. This was fixed quietly, without fanfare. We engineers only found out about it a few years later, after the IT manager left the company.

I might sympathize with them more if they didn’t work just as hard protecting Republican sex-offenders.

Give America all your oil.

Keep in mind this is “X, the everything app”. Musk expects it to be your one stop on the internet for everything, including online banking.

It probably requires an app to monitor the wash cycle. All they have to do is start charging a subscription to use the app. If people bought the dishwasher because they would get alerts when their dishes were clean, now they have to pay a recurring fee.

Roku pushed an update to their TVs requiring owners to agree to a new terms of service. There was no “disagree” button, and the TV wouldn’t work until people accepted the changes.

This is such a new problem that it’s never been challenged in court.

There have been instances of network-enabled devices updating to put existing features behind a paywall, unilaterally changing the terms of service (can’t use device anymore until you agree to new terms), and simply removing features that you paid for when you bought the device.

Why does a dishwasher need wifi?

I would pick something remarkably awful, like Valerian and the World of a Thousand Cities. And at the end of the movie would be a note that says “I have to live with this, and now you do too.”

Never pass up a chance to fuck with future self’s mind.

911, what’s your emergency?

I found a dead body on the side of the road.

Where are you? I’m sending police to you now.

Uhh, I touched it.

OK, don’t do that. Do you have hand sanitizer?

I may have eaten some.

…

Also, I tripped. I may have slipped inside.

What does that mean?

I…completed.

Listen just stay where you are, police are on their way.

“I make online honeypots.”

Happy cheesecake day!

“Private Equity” says it all.

But…mud bricks? Did they make any mud bricks?

I hate this game so much. I played 3 times yesterday.

I see a couple people, and some oddly colored blobs.

This would be a good article if the pictures actually showed people wearing the clothes.

I wish people would start uploading their videos to Pornhub so I wouldn’t get embarrassed whenever someone sees the app on my phone.

/s…or am I?