Happy New Year

As the Danish Queen hints of abdicating, I can’t help but wonder “is 2024 going to be that bad?”. Well, Trump 2.0 is a possibility, for starters.

So… Happy New Year everybody! 🎉🍻

So… Happy New Year everybody!

+5 ahead – celebrating in the Maldives? :)

Happy new year – I hope mine involves more RISC OS than 2023!

I have some New Year fireworks for you.

Kinda.

Buckle up, it’s a hell of a ride!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywaTX-nLm6Y

Bonne année à tous.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywaTX-nLm6Y

The best New Years gift ever! Completely addicting!

The best New Years gift ever! Completely addicting!

It reminded me of the open battery array UPS that we had replaced last year. Fitted in the PBX room as the electricians didn’t want it in the electrical room next door – due to the high voltage.
Apparently, something that is too dangerous to put in a room only accessible by qualified electricians¹ is perfectly OK in a room accessed by IT staff with no HV knowledge.

¹ Most of whom totally fail to impress me, for a variety of reasons I won’t bother listing.

I wonder what fire arrangements are made for the ‘Batteries’.

Halon dump. Run.

It made me laugh that at McLaren that you had to go on a high voltage training course to work with ignition controllers which were 90V, back when I was a qualified test engineer for the CEGB and allowed to play with power stations, high voltage was something that could jump out and get you from the other side of the room.

Halon dump. Run

More modern suppression gas, press hold-off button until any colleagues are out, head for exterior gathering point and report to evac lead, ensure fire service are briefed before entering the building/area.

Happy New Year, Buon Anno a tutti ;)

Halon dump. Run.

We had this occur during one Christmas maintenance period. The computers used line printers as consoles, so behind each was a box of fan-fold paper, which then added to the stack on the out basket of each.

The halon was released under the raised floor. The cables for the printers came up from below through cutouts, so the halon did the same, picking all that paper up as it went and walpapering the computer room.

Meanwhile the fog that resulted from the discharge made it difficult for the one person in there to find the door.

Happy New Year to everyone.

Back in the day, finance ran routines that listed the query output to both a file, and also to the system line printer.
Once a month we rid ourselves of the boxes of output by trolleying them over to their (finance) offices.
When they complained about the unwanted printout, we suggested they learn to configure their output for file only, but since this proved to be too high a hurdle for them, we engaged the services of good old dev/null

When we first got ISDN, Company Secretary wanted to know why the phone bill was so high, so got BT to itemise every single call made. Next month, several boxes of paper appeared. Soemthing like 2p per connection. Then it’d drop because someone thought 15s idle time was enough. Repeat.

New staff member accidentally printed an intended-for-A4 invoice on A0. Printer operator duly took this massive invoice, put it in a tube and sent it through the internal mail. The new guy never made that mistake again :)