Watch for mountain sheep

Pandora's box

In The Shuttleworth Lab, you can never be too careful about those pesky students...

It's a good thing that someone managed to secure the distribution board by locking the corner shut against itself. Imagine what might happen if someone could open it.

Microsoft

Found this little joke in a forum, thought I'd share it

There was once a young man who desired to become a great writer.

When asked to define "great" he said, "I want to write stuff the whole world will read and react to emotionally, stuff that will make them scream, cry, howl in pain and anger!"

He now works for Microsoft, writing error messages.

Howto Fail

[ Thank you haha.nu, and colleghumor.com ]


His professor sent him an e-mail the following day:

Dear Michael,

Every year I attempt to boost my students' final grades by giving them this relatively simple exam consisting of 100 True/False questions from only 3 chapters of material. For the past 20 years that I have taught Intro Communications 101 at this institution I have never once seen someone score below a 65 on this exam. Consequently, your score of a zero is the first in history and ultimately brought the entire class average down a whole 8 points.

There were two possible answer choices: A (True) and B (False). You chose C for all 100 questions in an obvious attempt to get lucky with a least a quarter of the answers. It's as if you didn't look at a single question. Unfortunately, this brings your final grade in this class to failing. See you next year!

May God have mercy on your soul.

Sincerely,
Professor William Turner

P.S. If all else fails, go with B from now on.
B is the new C

Disbarred US lawyer given top legal job at UCT

[thanks politicsweb.co.za and Adrian]

A senior official with legal responsibilities at the University of Cape Town had been suspended from the practice of law in the United States for eighteen months before taking up his job at the university. Dr Paul Ngobeni took up the position of deputy registrar (legal services and secretariat) at UCT in September this year. He was suspended from legal practice in Connecticut in late 2005, and continues to face a series of misconduct and criminal charges in that state.

More at the article.

A tragic accident

BOFH: A tragic accident

Workplace safety just ain't what it used to be

By Simon Travaglia → More by this author

Published Friday 12th October 2007 11:02 GMT

Episode 35

It's an exceptionally quiet morning at Mission Control and the PFY and I are killing time by rifling through the director's PA's drawers to see if she left anything good behind when she departed the company.

"Ah... excuse me?" a voice asks haltingly from behind the partition.

"Yep?" the PFY asks, always willing to help out.

"I'm looking for the manager of systems and networks?"

"Ah, well, unfortunately he's gone."

"Do you know when he'll be back?"

"He'll never be back - he's gone," the PFY responds.

"What my assistant is trying to say is that he has left the company following a workplace accident," I add.

"Really? What happened?"

"He unfortunately fell into the path of an oncoming cab."

"What?! When was this?"

"Last friday lunchtime," the PFY says gazing into the distance thoughtfully. "I remember because it was the deadline he'd given us to install some patches on our system. It didn't happen and he came to the pub to find out why and get us back onto the job. On exiting the pub I observed a cab, black in colour, coming down the street and that my manager appeared not to have noticed it. I reached out to grab his jacket just as he tripped into the path of the vehicle."

"Really? Was he ok?"

"A few bumps and bruises, a loss of accurate memory of events preceding the event, but apart from that he's ok – but he's decided to move on."

"I... see," the bloke says slowly. "Perhaps then I could speak with his immediate superior?"

"And there's a funny thing," I say. "The IT director, returning to the office that same afternoon, heard of the boss' misfortune and grasped the wrong end of the stick and presumed that the injury may not have been accidental in nature. He immediately sought me out in the stairwell on the floor above preparing to move a trolleyload of boxes of old lineflow paper. As he entered the stairwell below me I realised that (a) I hadn't needed to bring the paper up to that floor to dispose of it in the first place and (b) the lift would be a better way to get it to the basement. In executing a 180 degree turn one of the boxes of paper slipped from the top of the trolley and fell onto the director."

"Oh. How about your helpdesk supervisor?"

"Again, a workplace tragedy. He'd asked us to ensure that all our calls were passed through the helpdesk system so that they could be logged in his database - and in order to do this had our DDI numbers redirected by a telco contractor without our knowledge. My assistant here went to speak to him about how we could facilitate the return of the DDI numbers and accidentally knocked a desk lamp into the fish tank at the exact moment that he happened to be cleaning it..."

"Someone – anyone - FROM the helpdesk?"

"Gone also - but nothing to do with us. They're all on sick leave after ordering a dodgy pizza from the place across town that has a web ordering service and free delivery. Apparently there was some glitch in the webform which resulted in the words 'powdered glass' being entered into the freeform text box under 'additional toppings'. Ordinarily this would have not been a problem as they don't have this stuff on hand in the store except that the exceptionally customer-focused delivery person stopped off on the way and added it."

"That's terrible!"

"I know," the PFY says. "That someone with the dedication to go the extra mile for the customer is treated so shabbily. As luck would have it though, once we heard of his availability we were able to offer him a position in our helpdesk starting next week. And wouldn't you know it – he's just finished a degree in IT!'

"I... see. So is there anyone I can talk to? Your security consultant?"

"Cycling accident."

"Business analysts?"

"They got trapped in a lift over a bank holiday weekend with no water supply. Not pretty, as I'm sure you can imagine. Of course they're both nuttier than monkey crap now and have an extended stay in the dribbling academy..."

...a few minutes later...

"So there's no one?"

"Just us," the PFY says.

Sigh. Okay, well I'm here to audit the IT portion of your business process for the company's annual business stability rating."

"Which means?"

"Well I'll just need to verify that you're following best practice in change controls, security management, access control, logging, and suchlike. So I'll need to see all supporting documents so that I can check them for completeness."

"Oh right," the PFY gasps cheerfully, having noted my surreptitious nod. "We keep them in a fireproof safe."

"Excellent – if you could just show me to them..."

"Sure, sure, they're upstairs – on the roof."

"The roof?!"

"Yeah they wanted to bolt the safe to some structural element of the building and the only accessible pieces are where the roof meets the outside walls of the building..."

...Two minutes later...

"There's been a terrible accident!" the PFY gasps, staggering into Mission Control.

"Yes, I thought there might be..." I say, kicking the auditor's briefcase under the PFY's desk to join the others we've collected over the years.

wmv player == null

it seems that microsoft is trying something different and is no longer recommending their own media player (or any player for that matter) for wmv files. and before you say that the site needs to be run on ie... it did not work there either.

Yoda vs Dr Seuss

[some thanks due to Mark Parisi, and consider this fair use...bonus fail to Mark]

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