The Jaded Tech

You want what?

Decisiveness is about the only indication of any significant intelligence that is judged by our society. Whether that is right or wrong, not for me to decide. I merely observe and report

When I asked a friend what she wanted to eat for supper, I got “I don’t want McDonalds and I don’t want Wendy’s either…” Dammit, I asked you want you want….not want you don’t want!

Here’s yet another fine example of ‘you don’t know what you want!’

Client emails in asking to manage his contracts all from one account….but the said he ’should be able to manage the licenses separated’….huh? Is this one of those ‘jumbo shrimp koans’?

Now, you would think that people would know what they have, even given the paperwork in front of them.

Client emails in asking why he can’t download his software that he purchased. Sends in a receipt showing everything EXCEPT the product he is asking about. Dude, did you even look at the sheet??

Now, all this is enough to drive someone to drink Hamilton Water . So lets talk about people who KNOW what they want.

ConnectU. These guys know what they want and that is a piece of Facebook. Nothing like waiting till someone is willing to sell for $10 Billion. These punks at ConnectU waited 3 years before doing anything significant? Hey, if you have a claim, then make it. Otherwise you let the opportunity go and the world is now a ‘better place’ with someone making some decent money. The world is already full of people who have absolutely stunning ideas that could revolutionize the way we do thing but are so afraid of loosing it that we’ll never see it in the light of day.

Its kinda pathetic really. It’s one of those ‘If I can’t make money, then the rest of the world can go to hell!’ type of approach. The cool thing about us is that such an idea will never be solely held by one person alone. Life always finds a way to make sure such things get out into the general populace. How many people thought about making something and then years later find that something on a shelf in a store and said to yourself “Hey, I thought about that idea!” Too late…someone else had the wherewithal to actually go out, find investors and make it happen while you stayed at home saying “I don’t know anyone who can help me…”. There’s a great little saying that I picked up a few years back “Whether you say you can or say you can’t, you are right.”

Suck it up princess!

Everyone knows about the blackout that happened back in 2003. I was working for a big corporation out of a 12-story building in Markham. Now every business building of significance is equipped with backup generators, usually diesel powered. Where these generators are placed varies but usually on the roof. For the building we worked in this was the case. They also put the fuel tanks in the ground. Makes sense, wouldn’t want a flammable fluid potentially leaking down on top of your clients, generally considered a bad thing.

I was taking some calls when it all went down. It was kind of strange. I was talking with one office who said they just lost all power. I told them to call back and I’ll help out their computer issue when they are back up. The very next call another office said the same thing. To whit I replied “That’s funny, another office just said they lost power too.” Then it all hit the fan. Mass chaos everywhere. Cell phone towers jammed, calls were not getting through although text messages seemed to work most of the time. Everyone scrambling to get a hold of their friends/family, businesses lossing money and here we are, a tech support company without anything to do because the bulk of our clients had no power, thus no computer problems

Well, in our building where we worked, I mentioned that the fuel tanks for the generators were stored in the ground. That in of itself is nto a big deal but who was the freaking idiot engineer that designed the fuel PUMPS to be run off electricity from the building?? I mean our building was now officially without power, despite having a generator on the roof. I’m sure some dumb-ass construction engineer would have gotten reemed and fired for such a bonehead design.

Ok, so not only does our helpdesk get designated an ‘essential service’(Duh! Hello! Nothing to fix here!)we now have the stairway open while people walked up and down them carrying buckets of diesel fuel to the rooftop generator. Once that got started we had the great pleasure of working in the fumes of diesel fuel AND exhaust. And you thought doing tech support at a helpdesk was a pushover I bet!

So, like I said back in my May 16th post “Floppy Disks? In 2009???”, Google has ‘preannounced’ their Chrome Operating System. I also said that “a ”Google Computer” that is nothing more than a ‘netbook’” and here’s an excerpt from that article:

“Google is planning to launch lightweight operating system dubbed the Chrome OS that’ll target netbooks…”

So this isn’t so surprising if you paid attention to what Google has been doing. We’ll see how this all turns out.