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In the late 90s, I had the pleasure of meeting a consultant who provided his Windows Administration skills to several clients.
A story he told me concerned a client who repeatedly called to say that the "server was slow and it took forever to print".
He'd talk them through going to the server room, getting to the console, logging on, checking Task Manager, etc.
At which point the server would suddenly start serving and printing again.
He got this call several times. Eventually he went to the client site, went to the server...
And found to his dismay that someone had changed the screen saver from "Blank" to "Pipes" with maximum colors and complexity. 
He changed it back to Blank. Problem solved.
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This adds an entire new meaning to the word "dumb" 
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A couple of years ago a dev server I was using went down.
I went to investigate, it was on a desk in a room with a number of other low priority servers, stuff for which there was no room in the secure server room.
A consultant from a company doing work on behalf of someone had been setup in there, when his laptop battery was getting low he pulled a plug to make space for his.
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
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Once I saw a UPs system that should empower all the computers of a factory with the output cable ending with a normal male plug.
The company was still in the building stage but that was amazing...
Imagine somebody burning to ashes as the big UPS was completely full...
Once I was working in a company manufacturing machines for the meat industry (killing all kind of animals,...), when we were starting the computer network with an old backoffice NT server that took 20 minutes to start in our customer's facility we had to plug into a plug that was downstairs.
We placed a piece of paper covering the plug and a note saying:
"Don't unplug this cable, sensible and expensive IT equipment plugged"
After half an hour of work all our computers died to start after some seconds.
We went downstairs and saw that the paper was a little bit lousy and that two cables were reaching the plug... our cable and another one... we followed that other cable until we reached a fat operator on a ladder welding (yes welding) something on the roof.
I asked him his name, the company he worked for and asked where had he plugged the welding equipment. He told us that he had to remove a paper, unplug a cable and make a provisional connection by winding his cables against ours. When I asked him if he was capable to read and he answered that he was... I told him... "do you know that all the computers have stopped suddenly and that something could be broken?"
The answer was:
"But... it has been only a moment!"
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Getting out of bed??
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Many years ago I got an emergency support call from our mainframe support staff telling me that all of the menus on the one PC based system they had had disappeared and they were unable to process overtime payments for the UK prison system, which would cause huge ructions.
I jumped in a taxi for a five mile journey to the computer suite, spent ten minutes getting through security, then looked at the system fo3 30 seconds. I then turned up the brightness on the monitor and walked out.
The government department I worked for employed a firm of cleaners to tour the building every few months, cleaning monitors, keyboards and phones. While cleaning this particular monitor, they had wiped over the brightness and contrast controls (physical dials for those of you who have only ever worked with flat screen monitors), switching them both down to about 10% of normal
=========================================================
I'm an optoholic - my glass is always half full of vodka.
=========================================================
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One of my first IT jobs involved doing general IT support for a smallish company based in a converted church. The offices weren't ideal and some leads and cables were stretched a bit tight.
At least five times one lad called me because his pic either wouldn't turn on or had turned off. Each time I went over and pushed the plug back into the wall socket.
At my next job I had to do out of hours front line support in the evenings. Many of the users we had never logged in, the computers were just always on, they used generic user names, and there was no timeout to login screen.
One bloke phoned me up because he had encountered the login screen for the first time, had found the manual with the username and password in, but when he was trying to type in the password it just displayed stars and not what he was typing.
Users who know absolutely nothing are a lot easier than those who think they know something.
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
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Two stories, both second-hand:
One of my profs worked on the vehicle entry barrier system for the new fruit market in London. There were repeated reports that the software was crashing, but nobody could find a bug. He gave up checking the code and went to the site to record all events leading to a crash. Clients of the market had to pay 50p to enter, but delivery drivers were allowed in free; controlled by a booth for all the entry barriers. The prof saw a delivery driver pull up and the controller sent the signal to open the gate. Before the driver entered, he then dropped 50p into the coin slot. The state machine clearly hadn't accounted for such generosity.
My first job was in the International Telegraph division of the post office (telex etc.). Overseas channels were protected by ARQ (Automatic ReQuest for repetition) equipment that changed 5 bit code to 7 bit to detect transmission errors. These circuits were very expensive (satellite communications) and one circuit to Australia would regularly go down around mid-morning. Nobody could find the fault. It never lasted long, but remained a mystery for some time. By chance, one of the engineers spotted an operator who had a stool by one rack of equipment. When the operator took his tea break, he'd lean back against the rack which pressed a button to busy out the circuit. It cost countless thousands in lost revenue!
Life is like a s**t sandwich; the more bread you have, the less s**t you eat.
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One of the greatest Hockey player that ever played the game.
Jean Beliveau[^] played for the "Canadiens de Montréal" and won the Stanley Cup 10 times as a player and an additional 7 time as member of the team.
Was renown as being one, if not the most gentleman in the sport.
![Rose | [Rose]](https://codeproject.global.ssl.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/rose.gif)
I'd rather be phishing!
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Ciao number 4 !
~RaGE();
I think words like 'destiny' are a way of trying to find order where none exists. - Christian Graus
Entropy isn't what it used to.
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If you can levitate, raise my hand.
«OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. » Alan Kay's clarification on what he meant by the term "Object" in "Object-Oriented Programming."
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Is the Kindle format ebook from Manning actually readable on a Kindle? Does anybody have that ebook? It has a lot of C# source code listings inside, I wonder if the publishers actually used some special formatting.
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Don't have that one. The only programming book I tried reading on my Kindle was a python one that someone here promoted on the lounge (IIRC as a free download). When I finally got around to looking at it (IIRC a week or so after the fact), it was as much of a cluster-elephant as I feared it would be. 
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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I've a number of code books on Kindle - all the code samples are basically unreadable...so I'd guess not.
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Are they Kindle formats (MOBI, AZW) or PDF? I know PDFs don't work well on Kindle.
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Kindle format - bought from Amazon. It is just due to the number of characters across...any big C# (or java) code listing always ends up wrapping and being followed by a large flock of seagulls.
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Yes, also it's by Jon Skeet which is a major plus 
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Are all code samples fine? Do you read on an actual Kindle device?
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Yeah the code samples are perfectly readable, obviously you need to type them out but this isn't a bad thing.
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Most things are readable on Kindle, I have a variety of books on mine. And the bonus is that you can get a Kindle reader for your PC and iPad so you have a variety of places to read it from.
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I usually read technical books using the kindle app on my tablet. They format horribly on an actual kindle. I usually get them here, there are a ton of free ones: http://it-ebooks.info/tag/programming/[^]
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I created part of a web app. Another dev went in and changed how some code works and a modal dialog stopped working (it shows as an empty modal with only the title, but underneath there's an exception). Guess who was assigned the bug? Of course the creator of the tool, that would be me. This happens from time to time and I hate it. I feel that whoever breaks stuff should be publicly shamed  (for example in the CI server's website, but of course my client doesn't have CI...) and responsible for fixing it. I am sure this was discussed a dozen times here, sorry. This really grinds my gears.
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Ahem. With colleagues, always praise in public and criticize them in private (i.e., to them and not just talking about them behind their back).
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