Operational Embarassment

Today I bring you a story, a true story, from my very own past.  You may have seen the "broken feet" link on this very page, so yeah I broke both my ankles at the same time falling off a roof.

Fast forward just under two years and I need an operation as the joint are going bad.

On the day of the operation I am handed a lovely double hospital gown and the lady checks who, what and why I am there... The surgeon see's me and puts a big big black arrow on my right leg and I am shown into the pre-op waiting room to just wait.

I am the first case, but they want to pre-op everyone, and slowly the waiting room fills with men in the same garb.

No-one speaks.... No-one.

This is quite strange with us blokes, and to be honest I find it a little freaky, as I'm sat there with my big black felt arrow on my ankle I just joke... "Bet we can guess what I'm having done".

ALL OF THEM, and there's like six guys now, all stony faced.  They don't look at me, they don't look at one another.... Nothing, nada, zip.

What the heck?

So I'm up first, off I go, limping out and am taken to theatre.

I am a quirky case, as not only am I first, but I am to be awake during the procedure, I get an epidural and then a tourniquet is applied and I get to watch them work on my ankle in this freezing cold room.

An hour or so later I'm in resus, first in, first out... I am surrounded by empty bays.  Slowly as the morning wears on and my leg starts to awaken in cramping pins and needles the first of the other guys is brought through... No idea what procedure he's had.

Then another.

Then another.

Until all six bays around me are full and I'm not allowed a drink, some toast and encouraged to rub some life into my leg.

I am very clearly the only patient in this state, the others are all coming around from general anesthetics.

My surgeon pops to see me, he's very happy, I'm very happy and sure enough in the next hour I get up and for the first time since the original accident I'm not in pain in my ankle!

These other guys then start to awaken, and they don't want the nurses helping them, the female nurses, they're all deadly coy and a bit embarrassed, as I'm up and about moving my leg and getting it wrapped and a cast applied.

 "Sorry"

This voice comes across the ward.

 "Sorry for ignoring you earlier, you were just breaking the ice"

And we have a chat..... And then he drops me into the most embarrassment ever....

 For you see... he... and seemingly all the other men in the ward... have all had dick operations.

 Yes, that's right... In a room full of men about to have their john-thomas tucked or worse I made a joke about "Guess what I'm having done".

I wanted the floor to open up and swallow me.

Everyone then promptly burst into laughter at the look on my face.

A couple were having later life circumcisions due to tight foreskins, one was having a lump removed, one was just have it biopsied or something... but all dick ops...

That's why they were silent and jealous of me with my big black felt marker arrow marking me out as the luckiest bastard in that room with the least to worry about.

I think about this today, my big black felt arrow, never have I been more relieved after hearing their procedure stories.  Though they went a little pale when I said "Oh I was awake during the op and watched".

Story Time - Fantastic Rack Mount Mistakes - Part 33 and 1/3

It has been a very long time since my last story time, and so this one comes to you with an unknown number, I am however well beyond any possible NDA or secrets for this one, so I can finally share (it's been 20 years yesterday).

I had a job in a data center, nothing too special, but I loved it.  The loud room, the air conditioning, the rack upon rack of machine, I absolutely loved it.  We're talking 2002 here, these were the 2U high style of machine I use a lot today, the odd 4U or 8U JBOD box too, loved them all.

I had all my wiring terminated and was beautifully dressed, I wasn't in charge of the whole place, just one isle, but I took my time whenever there was an issue to run new cable bundles beautifully dressed along the cabinet runners into each cabinet top, seven cabinets to a row, two face to face on the cold row and then the back of these into the hot, I had a hot row run by a lovely guy called Jerod next to me, he was French I think, lovely guy (shout out to Jerod if you're reading!).

The other side I had the work bench, a coveted space, between the hot and cold isles were thick plastic strip drapes, like you'd get in a meat packing plant.

We would patrol our isle, identifying any issues or disks showing physically bad, schedule them in for late night fix ups and then to into the communal office where we each hot desked.

Each of us had a laptop and would sit and connect into the monitoring suite remotely, with a big screen we connected via VGA to our laptops and dozens of spare keyboards we could quite often spend the night shifts doing nothing but playing games; Medieval Total War was the order of the day for me at the time; some of you know of my origins in the "game industry" take me back to hacking about and modifying MTW (Sorry Tom, whom I now work with, for fishing about breaking your baby).

Anyway, about three months into this job another tech on the day shift came to me about Isle 4, the far end of the room, he was getting drop outs at intervals during the day, but none at night, he was trying to figure out what might be causing it.

We took a look at his logs and sure enough on his disks he had 250-700ms delays for seek times on his platters, he also had a higher than average fault rate on disks, apparently he was also rebuilding raid arrays a lot.

He asked us in the night team to watch over the kit live; which we duely did.... Quiet as a mouse, nothing not an issue ever in about three months of monitoring.

Meanwhile in day light he was tearing his hair out; I've got to admit to genuinely not remembering his name, but he had long greasy black hair and was from Northampton which he told me more than his name... "Hello I'm <forgetable>, I live in Northampton".

But forgettable as he was I can't forget the day he handed that isle over to me.

Stumped as to what was going on, and frankly pulling rank, he shuffled Jerod down to Isle 3, himself into Isle 1 (my isle) and all new machines were coming into isle 2, which mr senior with disk failures was going to be setting up.

This really irked me, my isle was by far the best presented, when sales wanted to show new accounts around they showed them my isle and they all laughed over the name of the cabinets; we couldn't name the machines, most of them belongs to customers, but we could sticker and name the cabinets themselves, so they all got Bond Theme names.... Jaws, Octopussy, Moneypenny, Q and M all had simple servers, processors more or less and my two JBOD cabinets were Sean and Roger.  Stencilled on in lovely white enamel paint.

So I was hoofed off to isle 4, dark, at the back, no work bench... and immediately set about making it my own, I redressed the cable bundles (which annoyed Mr Senior, though he loved my already done ones, my dressing his was seen as an overt declaration of war).  It's so simple too, cable tie around five, cable tie through the middle to break them into three and two sets then pull.... Today you can get cable combs and I find them so sexy.

Anyway, dressed to impress what was not impressing was the fault rate, and instead of it being the accepted norm; as it had been for Mr Senior for months; it was now a big deal because I was in charge of the isle.

I set about trying to work it out, I could not figure it out.

At night, when I was there it was all fine, the day guys saw nothing; they pretty much just tended the machines remotely, no maintenance happened between 7am and 7pm so it was up to the night guys like me to swap disks, rebuild arrays, fix cables and install new machines.

So after two weeks with the log I got showing all these faults, like what was causing a disk which had worked all night and most of the day suddenly to show 500+ milliseconds seek!  It made no sense.

Anyway, 2002 was coming to a close, December 21st rolled around and I offered to cover a couple of the guys shifts, they had kids it was nearly Christmas and we worked Christmas Eve and half Christmas Day, one guy on on guy off for 6 hours at a time those two days, I took two shifts back to back.

Alone in the office, I watched the monitors and played games.

No spikes.... What gives, no spikes on the DAY I am actually here.

Hold on, I'm here, but no-one else is.

Could it be human interference?  I checked electrical circuits for noise, I checked lights, I checked if the air conditioning was affected outside and in.  I checked everything, no signs, no peaks, no noise.

HANG ON.  NO NOISE!

Spinning disks can be affected by loud noises, specifically by vibrations, I'd seen this demonstrated when doing my Compaq certification training.

There was no noise, could it just be vibration?

We were on the first floor (for anyone in the US, this is the floor above the one on the ground) so we are one storey up.  There was the main reception below center of the room, to the right where isle 1 is would be a hall way void with offices leading off it, under isle 4 would be a toilet and a changing room.

I went down, put the shower on, came back up.... Nope.

Then I took my laptop with me, no wifi, but I could plug it into various office ethernet ports around the place as no-one was in.

There I am Christmas Day, banging doors, flicking lights, flushing loos and then pouncing on my laptop to see if it affected any of the disk activity I was artificially running up.

Nothing.

Defeated I logged my time, handed over to Jerod and went to have my Christmas dinner.  I had 12 hours to think of something for Boxing day.

I walked into Mr Senior asking why there was CCTV of me "Dashing about with my laptop in random offices".

I just said I was trying to check light circuits for his disk issues; he made it abundantly clear they were my disk issues and left me to it.

Boxing day, the sales had started, the building was at the corner of a large commercial estate, there being a newly built Ikea across the road as the crowds rolled in and their stock levels fell they would be due a delivery soon.

I still poked around the office and the eureka moment came on the 27th December 2002.  For a large lorry was rumbling past the office, I had to wait for it to pass, a massive blue IKEA clad lorry.  I went into the office, logged into the monitoring and sure enough there was a trace of a large disk issue.  Times 4 minutes before; when that lorry went past!

I didn't hear it, I didn't feel it... But had the disks?

I waited and watched when a few lorries passed during the fairly quiet week between Christmas and New Years, nearly every heavy lorry going back resulted in some affect on the disks, vibration was being carried into the ground and I guess up through the building.  I will be honest, I could not tell.  But every spike I saw was timed with a lorry.  In fact I soon let Jerod in on my idea and plan to fix it and so he watched and I monitored and when he came in I could tell him when a lorry has passed!

I was not about to shout about this to Mr Senior, instead I set about fixing it.

I ordered a mat of 1 inch thick rubber, the stuff you mount washing machines on in your kitchen.  I already knew the racks pretty well, they were bolted at each foot, I'd need a torque wrench to unbolt them and I could use two of the hydraulic scissor platform lift trolleys we used to move machines about to lift the rack ever so slightly.

I didn't want to do this alone, so Jerod was roped in with the promise of a take away pizza from the glorious; but long gone; parlour we loved.

Mr Senior handed over to me and Jerod that night, it was not uncommon for two of us to be on at night, especially if there was work to do fitting something out.  It was normal to have two people when we were lifting machines too.  But Mr Senior would have been apoplectic if he'd know what us two kids were about to do.

I unscrewed the first rack from the floor, swept the dust out and used a wooden baton to bridge the lip to the metal of the scissor lift and I cranked it.... The cabinet moved, I nearly wet myself as it looked like it was going to topple, then Jerod jacked his side up on the other side and it came level, with an inch to spare I slipped in two of the pads.   He slipped in his two and at a shout over the loud AC we lowered.

I then used a phillips head screw driver to puncture the rubber and a knife to dig a bit out through each bolt hold and fastened the bolt back through, not too tight, just tight enough.

It was sweaty work in the hot isle as I was, but we did the first three of seven that night.

I went home and decided to pre cut the squares and use a drill to cut the middle out of them,the next night all seven were done.

Our disk fault rate when to zero.

That was my last time as an IT minion; I went back to programming soon after, and Mr Senior never was told what we did... His training should have told him.

What did Don do?

First things first, we're going back to the latter half of the 90's here; and I've mentioned Don before in one of my older posts, skidding into hero mode.

Don was a programmer, he was kept in a little plexiglass bubble of his own and spent all day in what looked like vi (certainly a terminal based text environment) writing what I think was C for the NCR minicomputer running Sco Unix I mentioned before.

Whether this is actually true, I don't really know, for he spent a lot of time sitting with his hands crossed over his head waiting; at the time I didn't know what he was waiting for, at home I had a Pentium 100Mhz rocking 16mb of RAM and running Borland Turbo C++ for DOS I had a lovely little progress window showing me it was compiling; I had not met the glory of GNU yet.

So Don would stare at a massive (like 19 inch) monitor, he had a Wyse VT100 next to him too, and he would not stare at that very often.  He would also make copious notes on paper and seemed to program very deliberately, looking and reading through the information at hand.

He did this, almost without interacting with anyone else for the whole year I worked with him; looking back on it I wished I had been more proactive and just asked him more about it, as he was clearly programming C around a Unix system, which is a) uber cool and b) uber cool.

It always struck me quite how long he thought about and maybe designed anything before acting.  You could say this was because he was mulling and considering the problem, he was being a good engineer, with forethought and wanted to get things right?

No, see I think he was really just in fear of how long the compile would take...

Just like me with the project I'm working on twenty five years later.

Project Preliminary Fail

I bought some 12V LED filament bulbs for a preliminary delve into a project I'm thinking about building... Only...

That ain't no filament.

Hex Messages when Reverse Engineering

One of the things I did in 2018 was a bit of reverse engineering, the company I worked for had bought a bunch of older hardware which had to be reused, the trouble being?  They had bought the hardware NOT the software.

It look a lot of USB sniffing and signal trapping but eventually I had the device handshake and could see it spew me messages, from these I saw the header format was pretty simple just a pair of bytes and then a length byte followed by whatever the message was.

Interacting with the device stimulated it into sending more messages, so we could start to map physical actions to these USB packet ghosts, eventually we had all the ones we could just prod out of the unit, so it was time to work on more advanced interactions and actually try to tell the device to carry out actions for us.

This immediately met with problems, you see the messages coming out had a counter in the footer, it turned out that if you sent a message you had to use the next number... so receiving messages 1, 2, 3 and then you send 4 and receive 5.  Keeping this in sync was a little bit of black magic, but it soon made sense the unit was serial in operation, you could only talk when it was listening, and it only listened after certain choice messages it sent to you.

This all made sense.... What didn't make sense was a four byte message I saw every few minutes, this frustrated me no end....

10111110111011111101111010101101

I converted these to two into an integer... 3203391149... It didn't ring any bells, but I persisted and was rewarded when I switched it into hex...

BEEF DEAD

This is a common message left in hex in code, as a joke, but it was also apt, the board was not going to talk until a full handshake was given again and the packet series stream started over to order things.  Cute.

I've found other hex strings, but this one was the first on this particular board

Phantom Recruiter Calls

This post actually got corrupted... and wasn't that funny, so I'm just nuking it.

Basically the guy called me, and I had NO idea who he was.... wasted my time, as did this post.

The Mystery FTP Clocking Machine Project

During my very first programming job I was given, late in the day, a unit which gathered user data.  It stored this data in CSV plain text and according to the manual you were to FTP into the unit and retrieve the file.

I had an FTP client, I had an FTP implementation (in Dephi) and neither could connect to the device, standard FTP commands didn't work, they just didn't work.

We could confirm it had an IP Address, see the device within the DHCP list and indeed we could ping it, so it was responding to ICMP, but no matter what the FTP client, as described in their manual, would not connect.

A TFTP client similarly could not.

We had no internet, so after going home that evening, on my own initiative I downloaded three more FTP clients and even downloaded an FTP class for the C++ IDE we could use "Borland C++ for Windows".

In the morning I tried all of these, nothing, nada, naught.

I went to get another from the pile of 30 of these we had sat with customers waiting, nada.

I plugged away at this for a week and in the end arranged for an engineer from the vendor to come see us; the chap came, he had a peek and a poke at my code, saw nothing wrong, tried this test routines, they all ran... so we were at an impasse.

Nothing we tried worked except their test routines, so I of course wanted the code to their test routines.

They were very reticent to deliver it but after a lot of prodding and some negotiation over lunch it was agreed that their own engineer could receive the code, look at it on my machine, even copy and paste a few critical parts and get us up and running with connect, disconnect and that would be it, we could then have to do all the other commands, but their engineer would sit there whilst I did at least "list".

No internet, so I took this engineer to my home address (luckily within walking distance of the office) and over my modem (yes, I'm that old) we downloaded this code to a floppy disk (yes, I'm truly that old).

We headed back to the office, set up and opened the code next to my IDE window, their code was in C, so I would have to transliterate it into Delphi later, but whilst he was present we stuck with the C code, he called his programmer and the chap confirmed it should build in Borland C for DOS.  Which I had.

Sure enough their code seemed to compile fine and it ran in debug and connected, did a list and pulled all the files off the device, deleting them after.

Their engineer did this, then he looked at the code, and he smiled, and stared at the code, then smiled at me.  Remember we've wasted my time, his time, like a week in total here.

He consulted their own operators manual, looked at the bottom of the device, smiled again, then picked up the phone.

"Is there another version of this model?"

<squiggly reply on 1998 Motorola Razor>

"Sure, sure, but is there another version?"

<Squiggly voice>

"Right, right, can you send that?"

<Loud squiggly voice>

"Yes"

<Squiggly no>

"Yes"

And he hung up.

"Sorry gentlemen, he was addressing me and my boss, but ah... it would seem you've got the wrong device".

And he arranged for them all to be collected and returned without explaining himself, he personally returned with another unit, which to me looked identical and this worked instantly.

I have never found out quite what the issue was, but the next morning 29 more of these boxes arrived and we could deliver to our downstream clients the next week.

Goodbye Childhood Confidence

My best game of charades got crapped on... This is a grudge, a very old grudge, for this happened when I was 8... Yeah, I don't let go easily.

It was a life lesson, which put the nail on my opinion from experience that as a child adults can be dumb and remain so outside of their own specific fields of interests, and will miss no opportunity to knock a child's confidence.

What was this about?  Well, it came after a string of little things where adults put me down, my mother would not accept that "ambulate" is a word... And before you start to say "why didn't you just google it and show her?... well, there was no google, this was the 1980's.  There wasn't even a dictionary in the house!

She'd also in correctly corrected my mental arithmetic on numerous occasions, which set me on the path of a life not trusting my own number skills for life.

TL;DR; I'd had a load of adults putting me down...

Anyway, the story.... I go to school this day, you know school; where all the teaching staff encourage learning and being clever like.... Well... No.

On this day, we were all given over to full charge of the schools one teaching assistant, because the teacher herself felt very ill, the teaching assistant, who I will call Mrs C, had no idea what to do with us so we played charades.

Each child was asked to think of a TV show they had watched the night before and to come up with a sign or gesture for it without speaking and we each had to guess the show.  Recall there were only 4 TV Channels at this time, and most of us played out right after school or our tea, so pickings were slim.

Eastenders was signed by one girl pointing east and clapping the drum motif.

Coronation Street was signed by a boy making out a crown on his head and walking about a bit.

Things dried up a bit, "The Bill" was two lads walking around slowly flicking their heels a bit, we all thought they meant a dance show.

Then after a lot of silence, and I was a shy child, I decided to give it a go with the last show I was allowed to watch.

I stood and I performed a wave to everyone, waving and blowing a kiss across the room, then bent down and stroked an imaginary dog at my heels... A pet dog.... A wave goodbye and a pet dog.... A goodbye and a pet... 

I thought this quite clever, I remember watching the men in the show in their bunk room, never really paid any mention to the plot nor story, it was something on the TV and I knew that the words were "goodbye" in German and "pet" was added to affect a geordie accent.

And the teaching assistant, clearly knew what I meant and rather than be encouraging, as she had been to the other kids, who worked in pairs or made only strange motions to intimate their thoughts she shat all over mine.

Like proper shat on me from a great height.  "Don't be ridiculous, how was anyone going to get that?"

Was it my fault you lot can't speak English, or work backwards from "petting something" to "pet" to.. Oh the only show on one of the 4 measly channels last night has the word Pet in it, even if you don't know the funny foreign words because you're 8 English and this is the era before the Berlin wall came down and Germany was a distant ignored memory from old war films and Grandad's recollections of their not liking it up them.

I've never let this go... Not even now.

Multiboxer - Numpad Fail

That moment you're testing and you realise you've bound the test buttons to the numpad....

Yeah, so I'm working on the multiboxer in bed, the amount of work I've got done on it since Boxing Day has been really great for me, I feel like I've gotten it onto the right footing and things are moving in the right direction.

I plan on getting the parameter passing sorted then working almost exclusively on tooling to help write the scripts.

At the moment I do the mouse offsets with a google sheets page, so high on that list is something to help calculate the client relative offset values for me.

Then there's got to be some visual designer for the scripts and the parameters.

If you're not sure what I'm talking about, I'm writing (well re-writing) a multiboxing software application for any old MMO, you can find I've played this a lot on a vanilla World of Warcraft instance, but also on other games.

See my older pages:

http://megalomaniacbore.blogspot.com/2017/07/c-multiboxing-world-of-warcraft.html

But there's a lot of them if you search "Multiboxing" on this very blog.

Taking a Strole

That moment when you're out walking and wish you weren't... No, I'm not talking about the company, the weather or the time of year... I'm talking about the sudden warning about military debris...

Development Job : Interview Questions?

I was asked a question a few hours ago, "how would you kill a named process"... This annoyed me on two levels, firstly, as I was put on the spot, but secondly I had already blogged about this exact problem just a few weeks ago...

The quiz master knew this, or rather they should have, given all the information they had about me, including this blog... So to ask tells me more about them, than my answering would tell them about me.

It tells me that they're working to a bare minimum investigative level, they're looking perhaps too much to their goal (which it to get answers they like) rather than checking anything produced before.

This would be a little like asking Sir John Geilgud, whilst interviewing for a country play.... "Have you done any acting?"

It frustrates me.

The Lost Router

Its gone... Just gone.. Puft... Up and gone... I remember it in the box, I remember packing it... Puft, gone, where is it?... Have you seen it?....

LOST

LinkSys WRT AC1900

Responds with the SSID "XelNet"

Likes to sit on the side serving internet pages to the house and the occasional belly rub....

It's just lost.. I've come this weekend to sort out my network situation, so I've finally gotten an afer market ADSL modem to replace the BT Home Hub, I've got a powerline network adapter to carry network upstairs to the wired office (rather than running wires through ceilings just yet).

I've gotten the hub for the garage and the hub for the office sorted... And all the smaller ethernet cables all crimped to perfect length to stop wires trailing all over under my desk and behind the TV.

But, then I go to find my router and it's just missing... I remember boxing it back in it's own box on moving day, I remember doing that.... I remember it distinctly.

I think it went into my car, not the wifes... My car is now clearly empty, I emptied it... So I've been through EVERY box in the garage three times, been through the loft twice, I've been through every nook and cranny I can find...

My thoughts are that maybe, perhaps, it's at the in-laws house, I've asked them to look and they just said "no"... But I think it's there by their PC and they don't realize the box which looks like theirs is mine.

So frustrating!


--------

Update, the wife came with to go through EVERY box in the garage with me... Guess what... No, no... She didn't come up smug (I knew you'd think she would)... The thing is still LOST... GONE LOST VANEEEEEEEESHED.... Gah.

I think I have to go look at the in-laws.

Age Demographics by Local Radio

I listen to my local BBC radio station, not the national stations, just the local one.  I had this very channel inflicted on me when I was a child, and always thought the music choice was about 20 years out of date quite fuddy duddy.

Anyway, I find myself now in middle age and can't help but stop and pause when a song I remember from my teens or twenties; songs which I think are awesomely cool I might add; come up on this very same radio station.

I think the songs have aged well, it makes me want to continue listening to this channel which I so derided as a kid... And I can't help but think it makes me feel old.

What would some young person of today think of my taste in music?

That Moment....

When after ten years with your significant other, know them inside and out and they turn around and declare...

"You know what, I'll have a Fillet of Fish"

Totally blind-sided me this has.

That Moment...

That moment you get half an hour into watching Brad Pitt in War Machine and the wife suddenly asks....

"Do you know him?"

"Who?"

"The actor!"

"Which actor?"

"Him with the grey hair?"

"The General?"

"Yes"

"Brad Pitt"

"Fuck off, that's not Brad Pitt"

I gave up.

Preach at the Bar?

Oh its been a long hard fortnight, delivery of project at work and the World Cup took up most of the last week, my cars (yes both of them) have cost me a total of £1,100 so far and one of them is still broke... Hence I'm broke.

However, I've been working on a project this very evening and whilst doing so I spotted something rather odd.

You might have thought the Preacher was busy sorting out the festivities at PreachCon, however, I think he's been moonlighting on us... No he's not been playing a game other than Warcraft... Oh no... He's literally IN another game... Take a look...

From NeebsGaming's video of Drunken Bar Fight... Uncanny Valley or what mate!

That's the Preach!  No-one knows where Ghosty is though...

The Best and the Worst : Working with Genius Programmers

A long time ago, in an office far away from where I now sit, I once worked with a chap I still refer to as the best programmer I've ever met.

This was a guy who could take the whole code base, in Delphi, home and over a single weekend re-write it in Java.

This was a guy who I saw, from scratch, write a C controller for an embedded PIC to capture an image from a supposedly incompatible TTL driven camera and then an analyzer for the captured images which would detect and show motion, making for our common employer their best ever selling product a cheap security motion detection system, which didn't rely on relatively expensive high resolution cameras.

It was awe inspiring as a newly graduated programmer, whom had a huge background in DOS programming, but whom had never worked in Enterprise level development before.

I sat next to what I still regard as near genius.

This very same chap was also the worst programmer I've ever worked with.

Because he was so highly functioning he never needed to document his code, fine I hear you cry, good code should be self documenting; and you're absolutely right; the problem?  This guy also got bored so so quickly, so he used to tell himself stories in his code.

Yes, Robert Jordon eat your heart out, this guy wrote epic fantasy on a grand scale, across hundreds of thousands of lines of code, in Delphi, C, C++, Java and even in HTML which I saw him churn out, it was all a gobbledygook puddle of story telling rambling mess.

But the code worked, the managers didn't care that it was gibberish; at least not at first; because they could churn out product to the anticipating masses of customers.

Such a prolific talent, he had so many fingers in so many pies, he was invaluable, key man, the man, the one person every project started with.

The result?  Every single code base he touched was tainted with this un-maintainable morass of code.  Which an ever increasing march of cheap graduate programmers, like my then self, had to then decipher, maintain and coral.

Often the time it took to bring a project into some semblance of order would be three or four times more than it took that one original chap to write, this did not go unnoticed and managers rightly pointed their fingers to ask the question "How could you not keep up?"

I however was the first such junior person with a voice, I've always had a voice, and I pointed right back "How could you let us get into this mess?"

I dated to question, sweep, and change the code, I dared to spend time even just aligning the code correctly.  No JetBrains formatting (or resharping) tools, very few tools existed to cover the whole pantheon of mess we were now wrestling to stay a head of.

Daring to question, change, read and challenge the talented one resulted in his changing his ways, he returned to some of the projects I had lead re-working, he saw the structure and the discipline within he saw that you could quickly pick up and get to work without needing to load all the software into ones wetware in a laborious re-read.

This skill, this willingness, to press the boundaries is somewhere I've oft and continue to take projects, and I do ask those I throw code at to feedback to me where they think anything needs reviewing.

I deplore any project or maintainer whom takes the grounding that they must keep things secret and keep things safe.

Drop, the epic fantasy, you're not Gollem, share, review and open the boundaries.

Sex, Secret or God... Passwords

In the 1990's it was common to have to tell folks not to use "popular" password, like "sex", or "god", believe it or not even "password" and "secret".  Since then times have moved on, folks have become very adept at using other characters in their passwords...

Unfortunately, this is (very seriously) what one of our IT bods here has just found on a machine:

Props to the user for mixing in some numbers, a word and a symbol, however... We can all see the flaw in their storing the password.

(Thanks to our IT Manager for letting me use his picture - it is a lovely left hand, I wonder if he does hand modelling?)

Alright, alright, here it is....

Happy New Year...

Now fuck off and stop saying I'm not festive!

World of Warcraft - Classic

Its happened, the announcement with not quite enough information, but it did happen and the WoW orientated internet has slightly melted over it, everyone and their dog on YouTube have posted opinion pieces on whether this "in development" service will fullfil their desires.  I have no opinion in that, instead I'm going to talk about my Warcraft Experience...

I first met the world that is Warcraft with "Warcraft II", which I remember my brother and I bought whilst on a trip into Nottingham, we bought it from GAME on Lister Gate, and talked about it incessantly as our parents made us trudge around Marks & Spencers, rather then rush home to play immediately.

We played this on our Intel 80486-SX2-50Mhz, with 4MB of RAM and a 128K S8 video card - VGA baby!

I don't remember finishing the game, I have to be honest, I don't remember it that much... However, I still have the game, the exact box we bought is proudly on the shelf, and has been visible behind me in most of my YouTube videos.  And in 2000 I returned to play the game in full, as I had played AOE2 to death, was vastly disappointed with C&C3 Tiberium Sun and so wanted to return to Azeroth.

Fast forward to the release of WoW, and a friend (Hi Paul) came to stay for the weekend, and he brought this game with him... And I walked under the trees of Elwynn Forest for the first time, killing pigs with his level 6 Dwarf Paladin... And I loved it.

The moment he went home on that Sunday evening, I went to the Asda superstore in Long Eaton and I bought the game, the original game, with the first edition of the manual... Many years later I threw this away, when I moved house, I still kick myself for that, and remember distinctly looking at it all in the bottom of the empty dustbin...

But at that moment this was brand new, and I set up my account and went to it... I didn't understand my friend would be on a completely different server to me, so I just allowed the game to pick any server it liked.  I wanted to play and adventure in the game, so I picked the what I thought of as the "single player" option... PVE.  I did not understand what an MMORPG was.

Into PVE I stepped, Allience, Human, Warrior... And there I was, I remember I played three evenings around Northshire Abbey alone... Just three evenings, about 2-3 hours, maybe 6 hours played total, just to finish the Northshire Abbey quests and then I was sent by this NPC to "Goldshire"...

There were no loading screens, I thought I had moved from one zone to another when I left Northshire, I saw the section of map discover, and I thought this is huge - whilst only looking at Elwynn on the map.... And then I right clicked..... And the map stepped out... These slabs of undiscovered map... Darkshire to the south, Westwall to the West, Lakeshire... OMG this is a continent.

And then I right clicked again.... Two continents, two whole continents... I was a very small cog in a very large world.

The the server crashed, this was a three-four days after release.

When everything came back up, I set about questing, and I overwhelmingly remember it taking so long, like a week into my experience I was wearing all white gear from quests, and was eyeing up an Axe - purchased from an NPC - for 10 silver.  Which was a hell of a lot of money.

I remember playing with a friend who had rolled a Paladin, when he sat down to drink, I sat down to drink, I didn't understand what drinking did, I didn't read the tool tips, I was so naive.

A week further on, and my hours sunk into the game expanded and expanded, I was sleeping less and playing more, I used to drive home from work at 12noon, play 30 minutes, not eat, then drive back to work... Where I would leave the second it ticked past time, to get home and play again.

I soon had more friends in the game with me, and I helped form a guild... "Arx"... Named for the Latin word for fortification or castle.  I designed the natty guild tabbard in dark royal blue, a white tower on the chest and suitably lush borders... And we started to level.

I hit 40, and thanks to my side-line of mining - selling stacks of copper bars for 10 silver in general or by mail - as I didn't know where the auction house was - I'd not been to Ironforge (the only place there was an Auction house at launch!), but I hit 40 dirty poor...

I set about that evening going further afield, I travelled to Stormwind and then through to Ironforge, and I found more and more quests, I found the auction house, and saw I could sell the copper stacks I had for 35 silver each, 50 silver as bars... So I did, and made money for my mount so much more quickly.  Back to Eastvale I went to train and buy, a brown mare whom I always referred to as "Nelly".

And I travelled the world, meeting new people... It happened in the swamps outside Theramore, I met a night-elf.  The first I'd ever seen, she was a hunter, level 32 ish, and running... I was mounted, I didn't know any different, this was a female character... I spoke to her, and she spoke to me, we quested together... She joined my guild... THANK GOD she actually was a women... (Hi Sue).

I fancied the pants off of this woman, and rightly so, I saw a picture a while later (grrr baby, grr), I made the mistake of that same assumption before... Not so much fancying, but wondering... "Is that actually a dude?".... (Hi Nick, aka Eve - lol - yes we wondered for a long time mate, before you joined vent!).

The trouble then started really, you see I was a warrior, and the guild main tank, and I was struggling and pushing myself to level and gear up... The first little niggle was my co-guild leader (Hi Chaplain) was also a warrior, so there was a little trouble there that what I had, he had, what he needed, I needed.  This was solved later as he rerolled to a rogue, but we're talking very early vanilla, and having two warriors was a pain.

We also vastly lacked casters, we had a lovely priest (Hi NW), but he would never come into vent, or certainly never spoke, making it hard to dungeon - however, he was a world class top notch priest.  We had the lovely Sue as her Hunter, a Paladin (aka Nick), Chaplain in his Warrior or Rogue.  And then a rotation of different team members, we had a Druid (Hi Hlaalu), we had a warlock (whos name I forget) and that was about it... For a long time.

A friend from work rolled a Dwarf paladin I think, and he got very very drunk and that caused a fraction between WoW in my down time and my work life, so he left the server to play elsewhere.  We then had a few other paladins come and go, and then another female warrior - but she often wondered off to play Horde... True Blue represent, we ain't dealing with no half-Hordies here.

Mage and Warlock were always missing from our group, and it showed.

But we did get Strat and Scholo on farm, meager progress, but we had it on farm, we could go there over and over.  The next chapter of drama was about to burst all over me, a few of the folks in the team were not really grasping the idea of progress, about gearing up, some folks would go spend two or three hours skinning or picking herbs then go sell them, or skill up, and wonder why they were still taking a load of damage - inspect, because you're still wearing level 40 gear, you're level 58.

Another person took an aeon to get from level 57 to 60, and when they finally did break the level cap, they were too busy farming gold for an epic tiger mount... To be frank it all got slightly derailed, but I had pretty nice gear, and kept increasing it by going PVP Battleground farming... Knight Captain, thank you very much, gave me boots and leggings and some other bits to augment my gear, sadly though I lost the plot here, I fell out with Sue... I fell out with a bunch of other folks, and basically kicked them out of the guild.

Chaplain and I re-rolled new characters, I think Nick did too, and we later swapped to a PVP server.

I never enjoyed another Warrior like that first one ever again, I never met as good a healer as I had in NW the priest again, and PVP started to take over.... I rolled my own Hunter, and outdid Sue's progress - basically as she'd moaned she couldn't gear up, I got a full tier 1 (as it was then) including the cap and bow of bones form dark-master gandling, and the chest piece form General Drakkish, I had the full set... Just to point out - spend your time and you get what you want... And I did this before she'd progressed further.

I'll be honest, it was petty, but I fancied her, it was all I had to brag about - look at my gear - eyebrows waggle - I look back on that boy and laugh now, but that doesn't mean I don't miss that kind of playing, and as you can see from this text, I still know so much about the game at that time.

I miss being the sort of thotbott for the guild, literally, anything vanilla and Alliance, and I could pretty much answer on the spot.  I had learned the game.

As BC dawned I ventured as my hunter into the new lands, and I enjoyed them, but I also started my favourite of all my characters, a female human mage... Yeah rocking the female toon now... and I went full fire, never frost, I levelled for 1 to 70 in about four weeks full fire, in every dungeon I could get to, and I got into the level 70 PVP world, especially in AV and WSG.

I also re-rolled a new Hunter, a female one, which I also levelled quickly to 70, and I played DPS classes, no more tanking from me, though I did have a level 70 warrior for the good-old times.

I was mid-way through the vast and complex attunements in BC when Wrath was announced, yes I was not a progress attainer in BC, I just enjoyed it, thoroughly.

I never high-end raid in BC, I tried sun-well a little before Wrath came out, but I said to myself I would try to Raid in Wrath.

It never happened, I took my mage, blasted through the PVE to get to 80 and went dungeons and collecting my marks, and just went full on PVP.  I had a lovely full set of Gladiator gear, when it was very hard to get that.

However, I hated arena, I hated the starting of the crossing of realms, I hated that everything felt the same.  I loved the game, and still progressed my hunter to 80, and then started a druid - who strangely got a full set of tier gear raiding Black-temple as a level 70, but I never level capped everything.

I did Gruuls lair with a guild I had joined, fell out of love with the game, and stopped playing long before Wrath's era was over.

Since then, I have played on Nostalrius, but I missed my team, I missed the feel of my original server.

I fear that many of us have rosy tinted glasses when it comes to Vanilla, what I miss is the server, the knowing everyone, the need to know everything and travel, the RPG aspects.  And I can't help but think today players want instant gratification, they are not going to await for travelling to get somewhere, they are NOT going to want to plan their hearthstone and flight routes for optimum action in a quest hub, they want to point, click and win.

Will Classic servers work?  Perhaps, will they be Vanilla servers?  No.  That time has passed into legend.