Leaving his reindeer behind with the sled

a standard lightcycle would serve him instead.

Pruning the nodes is required for speed

so he searched for all children with gifts to receive.

SELECT * FROM children WHERE status = nice

but proper form dictates he always check twice!

It wasn’t good coding, but this was his vice,

so to that line he added “AND status = nice;”

I work in the customer premise equipment telecom industry. The cards that are installed in the phone system have lights on them to indicate an error condition. When the lights are off, everything is fine, when the lights are on, there is a problem.

I went out to a customer site that had experienced a power outage, but after the power outage, they complained that the phone system was broken. I asked them how they knew it was broken. They explained to me in all seriousness that they had tried pulling and reseating the cards in the phone system but couldn’t get the lights to stay on, and this is how they knew it was broken. They asked how to keep the lights on.

I was stunned for a second and then, after having determined that no one on site or on contract had any knowledge about the phone system, responded:

If your phone system looks like a christmas tree, then that means something is wrong. The red light on the cards is like a stop light: Stop. Don’t do anything. Call for support.

I also pulled the IT guy aside and asked him if he would pull cards out of a computer while it was powered up. He responded no. I said “don’t do it to a phone system either.”

My best friend used to work for a school district IT department, and the neighboring school district had triple the staff with a significant number of certifications (MCSE). My friend had no certifications at the time. One day, one of the IT people from the neighboring school district called my friend and asked if there was any way to recover a computer from a failed BIOS update. (BIOS is Basic Input Output System, and controls the communication between the hardware before the operating system loads… in essence, it tells the computer how to find and load the OS. And a *SPOILER* to the story to make it make sense: You cannot recover a computer from a failed BIOS update.)

My friend replied: “Get a pen and paper and write this down.

“First, go down to the supermarket and get a box of reynolds wrap aluminum foil. You can use any aluminum foil, but reynolds wrap is the best.

“Second, take the aluminum foil and wrap your computer in it. Make sure to tuck it in tightly around the frame, leave nothing exposed. Especially around the power supply and floppy disk drive.”

He was standing up and pacing in his office, surrounded by the non-technical staff at his location, who started busting up laughing as they realized what he was doing.

The other IT guy asked, “Are you serious?”

He continued: “Look, do you want my help or not?”

“Yes, sorry,” replied the IT guy.

“Ok then, have you got all this written down so far?” He asked.

“Yes,” the IT guy responded.

He then concluded, “After you’ve wrapped the computer tightly in aluminum foil, I want you to take that thing outside and hold it above your head… and

PRAY TO GOD THAT LIGHTNING STRIKES THE THING AND BRINGS IT BACK TO LIFE!”

After a short pause, the IT guy said, “really?”

It’s so true…

Zero Punctuation is NSFW.

Care of Phil DeFranco [Video NSFW, text all safe but may not stay that way].

I got drawn in to his website because of the cute Yorkshire Terrier in one of his YouTube videos.

Ticket reads: “I cannot reset the password on my voicemail box, so I deleted one of the phones associated with my extension…  but still no luck with the password reset on the voicemail box.”

The funny of course is that the voicemail and phone are on separate databases, so troubleshooting the voicemail by deleting the phone is not only a huge waste of time, but might remove a necessary phone from the system.

Of course, as I write this, I think I shouldn’t post this because it’s just not as funny when I have to explain just why it’s funny.

Found by Charles Stross

Anyway, Dr Horrible is an excellent role for NPH, and I found Nathan Fillion’s portray of the self absorbed ’superhero’ to be inspired (and quite out of character from what I’d come to expect from watching him in Firefly/Serenity).

You can head over to the fan website, and you can buy the soundtrack on iTunes (assuming that everything goes well between when I schedule this post and when you actually see it.)

Meanwhile, MTV has some choice quotes from Joss Whedon on the subject of Dr. Horrible.