Inoue Katsu

Ok first off, lets keep the tempers down a little .. no reason to get all worked up. While the point made is valid, I have to agree with Tsume that the wording could have been chosen a bit better .. but I can feel where the frustrations are coming from. But I'm not going to add to the conversation as enough people already are. But, as usual, I am going to hand out some advice when I spot unhappy people :-) Here's something that goes for everyone, if you are frustrated by something PLEASE don't just sit there and let if fester .. talk to an officer .. or multiple if you feel like the first one you talked to didn't do anything with your frustration.. Even Aryte has an open door policy when it comes to internal problems, I know I nagged him a *lot* when I felt something was wrong. If you don't things will just start to stack up and you'll end up doing things that you'll probably regret at a later point in time. There are already enough people who can contest to that. On a side note, between my E-1 and NCO time, over the course of like a year .. and a half .. or two ... or so .. probably.. I only managed to catch like 1 or 2 outgoing raids *total* while spending most of my time on Ordo land.. So if you think you're not getting enough raids .. don't get a time machine and move to Europe.

Mac has this way back thing (or something) that actually works quite well to put its files somewhere else. From there you can take em in the normal network backup. We just have a policy that nothing should be stored on the local drive other then system software and all the network drives that contain user data get picked up by the network backup.

Another few unusual incidents this week.. We have an application launcher that has a network loaded list of applications people can install and launch (if they have access to them) .. so somebody called saying that if they clicked an icon the wrong program launched. after starting a remote control session with me stating that it was impossible for it to do something like that and the guy on the other side insisting that it was the case I watched this person click an icon and getting the appropriate program for said icon, but he was not clicking the icon he was claiming he was clicking... Turns out a new piece of software shifted the icons and he was just clicking the area where it used to be without really looking. Chalk up another one for the facepalm list. We're also rolling out new desktop computers, including to the department with the highest concentration of people with eye 'problems' and other unusual medical conditions. (The top weird medical condition so far is RSI in the pointing finger because they had to click too much to scroll in a certain piece of software, thus they demanded (they took far enough to cry and go home sick) mice with scroll wheels (which you incidentally also operate with the pointing finger, but this was ignored repeatedly when mentioned by IT).) So this person calls and goes on about how they had shortcuts to files on their desktop, after telling them it is policy that local files are not managed or supported by IT and that users have their own responsibility when it comes to what they put on their desktop this person started to give the first indications of panic. After listening to how 'they had not put the shortcuts there' and the 'files were critical to their work' and some other excuses about how important it was that she got her shortcuts back I asked if she knew where the files were located on the network or if anyone else nearby knew. Obvious answer: 'no idea' We do have a few milion office files on our network but access is fairly well limited for an individual user so all they have to do is look at 2 individual network drives and click around a bit to find *most* of their required files, but this person has already stated that she had no idea what a 'home directory' was and throwing up the usual excuses 'I'm not as tech as you guys' 'isn't it *your* job to know these things ?' etc etc (I'm quite sure it says 'basic computer and office knowledge' is listed in everyones job requirements these days, and basic computer knowledge is more then 'know where the power button is') I already knew where things were going to end up but people like this need to be put some fear into every now and then, so i hinted to how their files were lost forever and that their old computer was probably already wiped (i knew it wasn't) Now at this point people usually start (feigning) hopelessness and going on about 'what am i supposed to do now, i might as well go home!' to which i usually reply 'its your job, just do what you think is best to get your work done' (I cant tell em to go home, because they will and then it'll be *my* fault) This is where they get frustrated and confused enough about my lack of 'understanding' that i can get them to hang up, knowing that they'll go straight to their chief to complain and come up with some drama story. This gives me 5 minutes of respite to do some actual work and send an intern off to go fetch that persons old computer too. Surely enough,5 minutes later the phone rings, its their chief .. at this time the person in question is still in the room usually so I have somebody else answer the phone to tell them I'm not available right now and either to take a message or ask if I should phone back. Its easier to have a conversation about somebody with a chief when they are not in the room. Meanwhile an intern is booting up the persons old computer and comes over to tell me what these life or death shortcuts are about, turns out it was a link to some self made travel cost declaration form. a vacation schedule and some non work related Internet site... 5 extra minutes have past and I call the chief back, the person had *just* left the room (meaning they spent another few minutes whining) and I listen to him ask why we did not copy this persons files over. I give him the standard explanation about how all files *need* to be on the network for backups and such, and that the intern who swapped this persons computer remembered seeing the desktop files but said it was only what I described earlier, which are quite easy to locate again on the network and our local Intranet. Then I told him that in a gesture of goodwill I had already told an intern to go and try to find this persons computer to try and recover the files, but seeing as we had a lot of identical computers it would take some time to locate it but we'd do our best and I gave him the rundown of our experiences with this user and their lack of computer know-how, suggested basic computer training course. Chief happy and informed, user thinking they were victorious. Told intern to make a calender appointment to go copy old files over some time next week and to bring a booklet with basic computer lessons for senior people (person is in her early 40's) as well. The art of IT is to make the other person feel how stupid they really are without saying it out loud.

Only a select few people will remember this .. When 'Titan industries' raided a night club 'neighbor' on its sim where no night clubs were allowed during the 'in between ordo's' time... When the same group found a 'baby fur' daycare center(or some shit) nearby as well and 15 people managed to go through a small door in under 2 seconds after somebody pressed a pager button. People actually showed up after the pager was pressed. Amongst these people were baby fur's with colored diapers and an assortment of toilet noises. Everybody wished they had recorded Vent that day. Linden age-play crackdown 1 month later. Foam bullets and punisher's are still on back-order because of this.

When the grid would be down for hours and hours at a time or you'd get stuck in some sims because teleports just did not work.

I figured it might be entertaining for others to read about the kind of things I run into at work that tend to be rather bizarre yet rather likely that you'll run into when you work in IT. And it gives me a chance to vent a little =p To give a bit of background information, I am a tier 3 sys/network admin at an office with around 200 computers connected to 3 other buildings with 200-250 computers each which each have their own IT infrastructure and staff. (each is its own organization, this might sound weird but for privacy reasons I'm leaving out what kind of office I work at, which would have it make more sense:-) ) Tier 3 means I get to deal with disasters when everybody else is freaking out, considering our small size tier 1 are interns who answer the phone and deal with small (l)user problems, tier 2 are the normal sysadmin's (there's 3 of em) and then there's me. I also deal with smaller problems when there's nothing broken but usually I just growl and let others deal with those, taking a more advisory role instead which gives me time to slack off. I also occasionally pitch in for our neighbors when they have something they cant figure out, being the only networking expert. We also run a rather varied range of OS' on our servers ranging from Win2k3/8 to Enterprise & desktop linux versions, as well as 'true' unix so there's lots of variation in problems. Our main network is not Microsoft so that means we do have a lot less issues then our neighbors on the network. I have also read the BOFH diaries more then once from start to finish =p So today I get an alert that the CPU of our main mailserver(runs on linux) is generating an above average load, while I'm firing up the CPU monitor on a shell the phone rings .. its one of our interns and he's going on about how somebody's mail client is freaking out and after spending about 1 minute to try and figure out what is going on (not the brightest intern) it turns out this user 'magically' had 56000 new emails in their mailbox .. Now I know for a fact that we only have around 100k received e-mails in our system on average, me yelling at people and an system wide auto delete policy having educated our users on a semi decent mailbox management. Right here we obviously had the source of our high cpu load, the server having generated all those 56000 e-mails in about 5 minutes time... After inquiring where these messages were coming from I checked the 'sender' user mailbox for weird rules (rule generated ping-pong messages are frequent, auto reply on auto reply) and what not but that was clean so I decided to take a better look at the stuffed mailbox which they were trying to delete messages from. Deleting messages is a lot slower then creating automatic messages so this was going at an amazing rate of 10 per second. After doing some more inquiring (you REALLY have to learn how to interrogate people and what questions to ask when you work in IT) it turned out that just before they had sent out an appointment to a few (thankfully just a few) other people. This appointment consisted of a repeated appointment for every day for the rest of the year, and they had marked it as that they wanted a notification about who opened it, who accepted or declined it and further status tracking.. So for each user, for each day of the year, upon opening/accepting the appointment, the system generated a pile of messages and sent those back to the originating user .. coming to a grand total of over 56000 messages. Deleted user mailbox, ran a cleanup and created a new mailbox .. problem solved. Protip: over scale your e-mail server hardware EVEN if it runs on linux (dual quadcore laughed at this). This will save you a lot of future problems and user performance complaints as well as allows you to postpone upgrades for an extra year or 2 :-) Next to this, business computers these days come with 22" by default here. When your old standard monitor is 19" and you get a new shipment your company WILL become a statistical anomaly for people with eye problems. Statistically seeing all the people for the whole region who would have trouble with a 19" monitor work in my office. We do not replace all computers at once, there are 4 different models in use that get rotated out. Now you think this would not really be a problem, but people come up with the weirdest reasons for why they need a new computer/monitor. This even leads towards aggressive behavior to IT staff (usually towards the interns), trying to trick interns into making promises that normal staff has already declined, attempts to bypass IT by going straight to the top with angry faces and/or teared up eyes and if that fails they'll actually call in sick. You'll notice people who work close to staff often have high end computers even though all they do is ms office while somebody across the hall is actually having efficiency issues with their brand new software X that runs poorly on a 4 year old computer. IT constantly has to balance things to keep people happy, even 'cheat' by giving somebody who would benefit from a fast computer but already has a 1 year old computer the latest model so you can move last years model with a new monitor to somebody who is causing drama and tell them its a new computer. We do this a lot :-) Gives some extra work for us (us being mostly just the interns) but keeps people happy.

I was sad when Steve died :( Ellen McLain as Mercury *obviously*.

- Eye 'I'M JUST SAYING!' Korobase - Diablos Korobase - Diablos Korobase raging at the commander of the group he was part of after leaving Ordo in a public group while all of Ordo who were on vent was watching

- When everyone was ecstatic about 'shiny' armor with flexi prims. - giant base doors would orbit you - Mini Aryte - 'Oh god Keno!' was exclaimed more then once a week (I miss that) - Keno's dad .... - There were more griefers then 'legit' attackers. - Jetpacks ? whats that .. Ground gremlins are worse =p

Lol @ concealed weapons. Also, is it possible to load a truck full of police/UN weapons, leave them somewhere and have civies use them ? That sounds like a kick-ass plan right there to get into a 'secure' area while walking straight through a roadblock

I dont like the amount of finger pointing thats going on though, i just spent the whole evening playing as a cop and most of it was whining about getting people banned .. its almost as bad as new rome on SL. And Police is seriously fucked as soon as the terrorists have a brdm or any other kind of tanks, the dragon's are expensive as hell and they seem to glitch a lot.

a-team moments.

that guy making 911 calls never saw my slug coming !

depends on if they raise the pay for donators .. or only increase the cost of heavy weapons. also, whats JSOC ? and their website is still down D:

we should keep a mini terrorist blog about what the sons of takistan have been up to .. yesterdays raid till they restarted the server was funky too.

Inoue Katsu card 50% chance of automatically calling in large scale extra support. 50% chance of murderous rampaging robots killing everything.

Are you guys playing some kind of team vs team arma mod ?

I have no idea how good the treatments are for these things but usually its 'find the right mix of chemicals that gives the best results with the least discomfort' right ?

UFO != Aliens Also, there is more physical proof that aliens have been on this planet then there is proof that any of the religions are true >.>

I think this was about april fools 'i'm quitting!' pranks =p buuuuut! if anyone has any good pranks from RL, post them here ? :-)

With multiplayer, geth shotgun ftw .. but i stopped playing after finishing the game >.> \o/ new ending though, lets see what they make of it before really cheering though ..

I think like 99% of the haters is hate about the ending ..

lol bioware forums just lit up too with people who finished it ... so far 300 people liked the ending, 12000 didn't .. of those who voted =p

Finished it ... and this pretty much summed it up >:( [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b33tJx8iy0A

Listen to that gunnery chief when you first get to the citadel in Mass effect 2, he's got some pretty good points about projectile weapons in space./>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p77XnhzJz7g