Way back in 2003, I bought a ThinkPad T30. Yesterday, July 10 2017, I turned it off for probably the last time.
Ode to a ThinkPad T30
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Category Archives: Anecdotes
The cure for darkness is light. Not more darkness.
The matter of data centre security was raised recently on a network mailing list I subscribe to. Someone was wondering if data centres checked incoming equipment for “bad stuff” – explosives and what-not.
The reaction from some was “don’t talk about that, we don’t want to give people ideas”. What a muddle-headed response!
Electric toothbrush yuk nope nope nope
After using my electric toothbrush I always rinse the whole detachable head, dry the bristles, remove the head and tap out any water. Yesterday when I tapped out the water (from the open end that sockets onto the handle) a tiny black speck appeared on the white porcelain of the basin. Hm, I thought.
Good error messages
I recall our little team getting into trouble many moons ago. We were writing a creditor system, and one of the requirements was for comments to be attachable to individual invoice lines. In COBOL every data structure has to be predefined. One of us thought that surely, surely, 400 comment lines would be enough for any one invoice line. This turned out not to be the case. Continue reading
Mikrotik troubleshooting case study
Just for the fun of it, here’s a a case study in troubleshooting. Actually it’s a case study in stupidity too, since I should have figured this out without all the troubleshooting. Anyway, just as an exercise…
VirtualBox flubs IPv6 (when in doubt, go wired)
I’ve just spent an hour struggling with (I thought) IPv6 on Windows 7. IPv6 is enabled by default on Windows 7. I was seeing autoconfigured addresses on the ethernet interface, but there was no IPv6 connectivity beyond that. Looking at it with Wireshark, I could see neighbor discovery packets leaving, but answer came there none. No firewall rules were blocking ICMPv6; in desperation I turned the firewalls OFF on both source and destination test machines – still nothing. What the…?
Bank limits
True story: I tried to transfer some money from the Commonwealth Bank a few years ago, and struck a daily limit of $5000, with no way around it.
So when I was planning to move back to Australia from Switzerland and knew I’d need to transfer a deposit (for a house) out of Switzerland , I rang my Swiss bank. The following conversation ensued: