I'm dkf, ask me questions or don't or whatever
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I'm @dkf. Ask me stuff if you must. I might answer if I'm bored or I think it will amuse me otherwise.
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What's the weirdest food you've ever eaten?
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Is the rain in Spain mainly on the plane?
Are you @blakeyrat's alt?
What's the airspeed velocity of two swallows carrying a coconut on a string?
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Who is @dtf?
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Why do people m keep creating those stupid threads?
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HasHave people m made a thread yet?Here, FTFY. No need to thank me, as always the pleasure was mine.
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Give us a short bio.
inb4 "E_QUESTION_NOT_FOUND"
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Why do people m keep creating those stupid threads?
Would it be too out of our acceptable level of trolling to create one for @kt_?
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Paging staff to use their powers of impersonation!
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Why do people m keep creating those stupid threads?
We're bored. And hipsters. Can you think of anything less scary bored hipsters could do than open threads? Can you imagine something more scary?
Yeah.
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What's the weirdest food you've ever eaten?
A Chinese banquet in Singapore that I gatecrashed. Only the fresh coconut pieces for desert were recognisable to me.
Is the rain in Spain mainly on the plane?
In my experience, yes.
Are you @blakeyrat's alt?
No. That's @boomzilla.
What's the airspeed velocity of two swallows carrying a coconut on a string?
That depends on whether they're at a Chinese banquet.
Who is @dtf?
No idea.
Can you imagine something more scary?
Yes.
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Give us a short biro.
They're rather difficult to digitise. Will this picture (with complimentary US coin image for scale!) do instead?
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DOES HE LOOK LIKE A BITCH?
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DOES HE LOOK LIKE A BITCH?
What?<!And if that's about CodingHorror, no, he looks like cunt.>
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DOES...HE...LOOK LIKE A BITCH?
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What?
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I have shot your shoulder already. Pray I do not shoot it further.
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There is a power that admins have to impersonate users.
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disseminate
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What kinds of jobs have you done? Which have you liked best and why? What is your most memorable wtf at work?
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What kinds of jobs have you done?
I've pretty much always been a programmer/software engineer at the same university. Moved between a shit-load of different projects though, and collaborated with lots of different people (my LinkedIn spread is almost as wide as if I'd spent the last 20 years company-hopping).
Which have you liked best and why?
I did like it when I was working on developing a standard for a computational job submission language. It was a shit-load of travel (“it's
DATE_A
so I must be onCONTINENT_B
” was a thing for a while) but I got to work with some great people and learned very much about how to get things done.The down-side was that most of my coding at that time was done in airport transit lounges.
What is your most memorable wtf at work?
The time someone drilled into the main electricity supply to our building (which at the time had a big datacenter in it) with a backhoe is definitely the big one. It put the guy in hospital and blew out the circuit breakers on the main substation for the area. Which includes that hospital.
More to the point, at that point we had a number of linked failures.
- The emergency lighting turned out to not work at all in an emergency. The building has several interior rooms that have utterly no natural light at all. [spoiler](Yes, this is fixed now.)[/spoiler]
- The (very powerful) backup generator worked like a charm, and our supercomputer (which was briefly a long way up the Top50 list) switched over to it just fine, but neither the air conditioning nor the network routers were on emergency power at all. This meant that the supercomputer was busy running at full tilt producing data it couldn't write anywhere (because the SAN wasn't reachable), was completely uncontactable over our management network (again, because that relied on the power being up) and was producing megawatts of heat in the datacenter without any way to get it out of the building. We had to do a crash stop of the system before it set fire to the room and triggered the halon system! (The halon system had its own power, of course, as it was a backstop against the entire building going up in smoke.)
- The floor in the datacenter was up for regular maintenance, exposing some deep voids beneath it (shitty building was, and still is, shitty).
- Only one person (my boss's boss at that point) had a torch.
So yes, we were running around in the pitch black, trying to get to machines to cut the power to them before the fire suppressant system kicked in and asphyxiated everyone in the room, all while trying to avoid the unknown and unmarked pit-traps everywhere.
Madness!
A few weeks later, the same backhoe broke a gas main (only slightly, but enough to be dangerous) and we got to evacuate the building again. Guess where all the smokers decided to go and congregate for a swift one on company time?
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ld it be too out of our acceptable level of trolling to create one for @kt_?
Nothing is out of our acceptable level of trolling. Go ahead, I'll be more than happy to change its title ;)
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Can you imagine something more scary?
This reminds me of an old joke:
- What's worse than than finding a little maggot in an apple?
[spoiler]- Holocaust[/spoiler]
- What's worse than than finding a little maggot in an apple?
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Guess where all the smokers decided to go and congregate for a swift one on company time?
Near the soon-to-be-ablaze gas geiser because the only lighter they had was out of gas?
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As it happened, not that time. Security (usually the biggest smokers of the lot) chased them away.
Those foundations have been finished a while ago now, and the building they put on top is supposedly “iconic”. Too bad it has bricks falling out of it, apparently because someone skimped on the ties connecting the outer skin to the building frame. (But that's not an IT WTF.)
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Paging @abarker or @boomzilla or @pjh
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The floor in the datacenter was up for regular maintenance, exposing some deep voids beneath it (shitty building was, and still is, shitty).
Oh, that one.The datacenter which I had been regularly going to (that means no longer now) always has some uncovered holes on the raised floor that is supposed to have server racks be placed on. I suppose it'd be easy for someone to fall into it when the light goes out.
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Paging @abarker or @boomzilla or @pjh
Discourse doesn't have pages and never will.
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I suppose it'd be easy for someone to fall into it when the light goes out.
Trivially easy, but not normally an issue as datacenters should be restricted-access areas.
Does anyone make fluorescent floor tiles for datacenters? If they did, that'd be great since if the power goes out you'll still be able to see where the voids are, and you'd be able to pretend you're in the hacking sequences in the Shadowrun computer games.
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Do I also get 4 turns to run around and try to fix stuff for every one turn of management yelling at me?
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Do I also get 4 turns to run around and try to fix stuff for every one turn of management yelling at me?
So long as you've got the rest of your team holding them off with nerf guns, you'll be OK