Bugs in the system

[azurelunatic]

It was a fine fun time filled with Resident Evil, Dr. Pepper, pizza, and giggling. We make good friends, because I will watch zombie movies for him. (They're usually not my cup of tea plate of brains.) And I will enjoy them.

His books have taken over the room. From the lack of stuff on the floor, I suspect either he did some fast cleaning, or his mother prevailed upon him for same, either because of general messitude, or because I was due over.

I had some Fun Computer Moments at work today. I have become the "WTF is wrong with my machine?" person, and can fix most errors, especially the "You didn't turn your phone on before you tried to log in, so of COURSE you will get the "port not ready" CTC error, you n00b" error. There are some machines (supervisor machines) with the incorrect power management scheme. I have described this to my not-so-technical cohorts as "They're narcoleptic." Point got across, and people stopped panicking.

I do not wear any USB drive on a lanyard on a regular basis. The Mix Stick does not count as a real USB drive; it gets clipped to the necklace, or the lanyard of the moment, or the collar of the shirt. I do use USB drive lanyards as leashes, to hold them where the hell they're supposed to be. This is often inside a purse pocket or on a keychain.

The fun code error of the day was in $OTHER_SIDE_JOB: the Goose Girl found herself in a place where she could not go forward and finish the survey, and she had entered all the right information! Obso1337 Super dismissed it as either too much backing up, or some other form of incorrect information entered. I thought I knew what had happened (even though I'm not familiar with the survey, as it's wildly not work-kosher for me to deal with it regularly (work has two incompatible sets of surveys, and someone who works on one may not work on the other; for phone goons, it is in the same quarter; for supervisors, it is on the same day)) so I went digging through the survey program in training mode to see if I could duplicate the error.

Lo and behold, I found it. When entering that one had experienced a special deal on X product and/or service, and mentioning that 1 unit of X was purchased, it asks if the deal included any freebies. If it does, it asks if there were any freebies included in that one unit, yes or no. The next question asks how many freebie units there were. If the answer is "Yes, that N unit(s) included the freebie I got", the survey insists that the number of Free be *less* than the number of Units. However, if the "No, that N unit(s) did not include the freebie unit(s) I got; that was in addition to this purchase!" is selected, then suddenly if you purchased one unit, you can say that you got one unit free! ...Or something. It looks like a bug in the survey. It smells like a bug in the survey. It seems like the question is in upside-down, because it does not account for something where someone for whatever reason just wound up with a freebie without actual purchase.

And now I know how to back out of that one gracefully.

Mr. Hitchhiker told me (all glowing with glee) that he got himself a first-edition copy of one of the H2G2 books at Bent Cover -- with the cover printed upside-down. He shared it with me because he knew I could relate. Then he had a bizarre typo accident that wound up kicking him off a survey into the man pages, and he couldn't get back on, dammit.

Strange things. I'm telling you, strange things.

Wind blew car around while getting to Mesa. Did not drive as fast as Darkside's dad.

Comments

[wibbble]

A flash-based MP3 player is a totally different proposition to just a pure flash drive.

[azurelunatic]

Indeed.

hcolleen is paying me computer rent in the form of one of those little bracelet flash drives that I was admiring so much online. Whee!

I would imagine that people without regular drivespace used would use them a lot more: I see them dangling off student ID lanyards at the former school a lot, or worn by themselves, as students do not have drivespace for random programming shit on the school network, and wind up at a different lab computer every day; the only reasonable solution is personal portable storage. This used to take the form of zip disks; it's now flash drives.

[wibbble]

Here student ID isn't worn - it's just a card you stick in your wallet or pocket and only need to take out if you have to go into a restricted area, so there's nothing to hang it on. Lots of people used flash drives (personally, I used a small USB card reader and a memory card, but only when I had to used the Windows machines) - not so much the geeks, though, since they got very generous allowances on the departmental system. (Which you could access over SSH, which was nice.)

I want to use my flash drive for /something/, but I really don't actually need it for anything in particular.

[azurelunatic]

At the former school, ID is not used for actual ID purposes often (bookstore, or at an event to verify current student status) but is used to verify attendance in class; attendance is taken through swipe-card machine. So it's needed multiple times daily.

Most of the students there are using government student loans, and that requires regular attendance in the classes. So they went electronic.

[wibbble]

See, attendance isn't an issue here, even if you're on student loans. Mostly, there's no attendance taken in lectures - but there is in tutorial and practical sessions. But there it's done by paper lists and tickyboxes.

[azurelunatic]

I don't think that most US colleges do it that way. This one prides itself on being bleeding-edge, though what I've heard in the "real world" is that the graduates are mostly nigh-unto useless, probably mainly because they're arrogant pricks who think they know it all when they've only covered the general basics.