The Vent and Rant Thread

[Freeshadow]

Originally Posted by Rumpelteazer

Today there was a woman in the store who completely lost her cool when I couldn't remember what lightbulb I sold her five or six years ago for the light fixture in her powderroom/toilet/cloakroom. It was a long day today.

I know, it's one of the things one wishes to have had a witty answer in time.
Should you ever again have such an idiotic request just answer:
"Sure let me check that. Can I have the serial number of the banknote you paid with?"

If you have one of these insisting to "want your name":
"You certainly ain't somebody I would consider to adopt or marry."(My favorite )

Of course they will then say that want to "bezwaren" (is it homonymous like in German?) - say: "Great, I'd even pay for the concrete."

Have fun.

Originally Posted by Rumpelteazer

Today there was a woman in the store who completely lost her cool when I couldn't remember what lightbulb I sold her five or six years ago for the light fixture in her powderroom/toilet/cloakroom. It was a long day today.

I would have just asked her if she still had the package it came in. Or maybe if she still had the receipt.

Getting more serious . . . So how long had it been since she made use of that light fixture? Didn't occur to her to bring in the burnt out light bulb?

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Rumpelteazer

Today there was a woman in the store who completely lost her cool when I couldn't remember what lightbulb I sold her five or six years ago for the light fixture in her powderroom/toilet/cloakroom. It was a long day today.

LOL. Try this one.

"Hello, <helpdesk>. Good afternoon."
- "Hi, I have a <computer>. I've lost the password to my e-mail."
"I'm sorry to hear that sir. You'll have to call the service that provides your e-mail, and have them reset it."
- "But... but... It's *YOUR* computer! Can't you look that up for me?"
"Yes sir, it's one of our computers, but it's *YOUR* e-mail, so we can't find out your password."
- "Why not?!"
"Because the fact that *WE* can't know the password to *YOUR* e-mail is the entire point of a password, sir."
- "DON'T YOU BE TALKING SMART TO ME YOU HEAR!"

*Sigh... Long day ahead....*

Been there, done that. I'll NEVER work in support again. Ever.

Originally Posted by Freeshadow

Of course they will then say that want to "bezwaren" (is it homonymous like in German?) - say: "Great, I'd even pay for the concrete."

LOL @ concrete.

And yes, it's the same.

Beschweren -> Complain
Bezwaren -> Complain

Although, the word 'bezwaren' has fallen into disuse in Dutch. Nobody says "Ik zou mij willen bezwaren" anymore. Normally the expression is "Ik wil een klacht indienen." (They both mean "I want to file a complaint.") The term "bezwaar indienen" (which is mostly sending a written complaint to an official institution about a decision they have made) is still used.

If you'd use it in the way of making something heavier, then "bezwaren" would be correct as well, but that's *really* archaic use. The correct term nowadays would be "verzwaren", or "zwaarder maken."

[Katsunami]

I wonder what's wrong with the internet nowadays. The last few months, I can't order ANYTHING without something being wrong. A few days ago I posted this:

And a serious rant is that I've just received a dead on arrival article. It's one of two table supports that I wanted to convert into a very heavy speaker stands by bolting a 30x40x2.7cm beech board on top of it.

(This stand is going to hold a speaker that's 28cm wide, 35 deep, and 40 high, and it weighs in at 30 pounds. While most normal speaker stands are rated to hold this box, I just don't trust the low weight and their often very small bases and top plates to hold a box of this size and weight.)

Well, what can be broken about that, you ask? It has four feet. One of them is broken off, and fell clattering out of the box when I unpacked the thing.

The store replaced that base ASAP (sent out a new one the day I called), and I received it the day after. Very well, and I put everything together.

Yesterday, I received the speakers, two of these:

Focal Alpha 80 (Although in reality, it's much darker, almost black, and not this greyish color as in the picture.)


One of them has a dent in the housing. It has to be swapped.

Sigh.

Fornuately, they live up to the expectations the manufacturer set:

- Works well in small rooms (because the bass port is in the front, so it doesn't smash the bass against the back wall; the one the speaker is standing against)
- Has good frequency response at low volumes (I wanted such a big speaker to reproduce the piano/organ bass well, not to blast the roof off the flat)
- Low directivity (doesn't need to be angled toward the listener)

There are very few, if any speakers apart from this one in this price range that combine all of these traits, so I was a bit skeptical, but... It's all true.

I put the speakers left and right next to the stage piano (on their stands), and they sound exactly as I'd hoped to. Tonight I'll package up the damaged one and send it off for replacement tomorrow.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

LOL. Try this one.

"Hello, <helpdesk>. Good afternoon."
- "Hi, I have a <computer>. I've lost the password to my e-mail."
"I'm sorry to hear that sir. You'll have to call the service that provides your e-mail, and have them reset it."
- "But... but... It's *YOUR* computer! Can't you look that up for me?"
"Yes sir, it's one of our computers, but it's *YOUR* e-mail, so we can't find out your password."
- "Why not?!"
"Because the fact that *WE* can't know the password to *YOUR* e-mail is the entire point of a password, sir."
- "DON'T YOU BE TALKING SMART TO ME YOU HEAR!"

*Sigh... Long day ahead....*

Been there, done that. I'll NEVER work in support again. Ever.

I went through that supporting both Windows and Linux users. In both cases, the stack answer was "I can reset your password so you have to create a new one. I can't tell you what it currently is. It's stored in an encrypted format for security reasons."

My favorites were the folks in the Win3.1/9X days complaining that they needed more memory. The problem was that Windows back then had the concept of "resources", that were allocated by applications when they ran. The amount of resources was fixed (two 64K heaps in Win 3.X, one 128K heap in Win9.X,) no matter how much memory was installed. Various applications would allocate resources but not properly free them when they exited, and when resources were exhausted, all you could do was reboot. (Microsoft Excel was a worst offender about not properly freeing resources.)

Getting across the distinction between memory and resources was a challenge. I was delighted to switch to Win2K at home when it was available and those constraints no longer applied.
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Yesterday, I received the speakers, two of these:

Focal Alpha 80 (Although in reality, it's much darker, almost black, and not this greyish color as in the picture.)

<...>

Fortunately, they live up to the expectations the manufacturer set:

- Works well in small rooms (because the bass port is in the front, so it doesn't smash the bass against the back wall; the one the speaker is standing against)

I haven't seen home speakers where the bass driver wasn't front facing.

- Has good frequency response at low volumes (I wanted such a big speaker to reproduce the piano/organ bass well, not to blast the roof off the flat)
- Low directivity (doesn't need to be angled toward the listener)

An old friend, decades ago, moved to my area from Chicigo. His parents owned a manufacturing business and were well off. He lived in an apartment of their mansion. He managed a stereo store, made good money, and lived rent free, so he accumulated gear.

His home system when I knew him had a Crown pre-amp, Phase Linear amp, Thorens transcription turntable, Nakamichi tape deck, and Klipschorns for speakers. He and his roommate shared a house a mile from their nearest neighbors, and a good thing. The Klipschorns would start rattling plaster off the walls if you turned the volume on the amp past 3, and the bass was a physical punch in the chest. He blew a speaker at another friend's house trying to get the sound he was used to at home, and the speaker blew before reaching the desired level. He said "I have Klipsch adjusted ears."

(The friend understood and they had it fixed in 20 minutes.)
______
Dennis

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

My favorites were the folks in the Win3.1/9X days complaining that they needed more memory. The problem was that Windows back then had the concept of "resources", that were allocated by applications when they ran. The amount of resources was fixed (two 64K heaps in Win 3.X, one 128K heap in Win9.X,) no matter how much memory was installed. Various applications would allocate resources but not properly free them when they exited, and when resources were exhausted, all you could do was reboot. (Microsoft Excel was a worst offender about not properly freeing resources.)

Getting across the distinction between memory and resources was a challenge. I was delighted to switch to Win2K at home when it was available and those constraints no longer applied.

Stop reminding meeeeeeeehhhh (trailing shout after I ran off a cliff, remembering)... This goes right along the same lines as those idiots writing games that require 635K of free main memory. (Back then, a computer was laid out to address 1MB or RAM: 640KB of main memory, 384KB reserved, blah-blah... I'm sure you know.)

The most I've ever been able to free up was 632KB by using QEMM (Quarterdesk Expanded Memory Manager), hand-tuning it after auto-optimization.

I got it to support both EMS (expanded) and XMS (extended) memory above 1MB at the same time, along with everything else: SMARTDRV for cache, MSCDEX for CD-ROM, etc... everything loaded in the space above 640KB. The only thing loaded in main memory was the QEMM driver itself, which took 8KB.

Still one game wouldn't run. Rather than use a boot disk, I just never played it. I don't even remember the name.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I haven't seen home speakers where the bass driver wasn't front facing.

I don't know what you mean by a home speaker. Hi-Fi? Bookshelf? This is a studio montior. About every studio monitor I've looked at (around €350-450 a piece, and 8 inch) have rearward facing bass ports. As the speaker will stand as close to the wall as possible, that isn't good.

As the speakers are to the left and right of the piano, they are not angled towards me; low directivity is therefore a plus; and most of the time, studio monitors are very directional. These work fine though: when playing, the sound seems to come out of the middle of the piano, with the bass a bit biased towards the left, and the high notes a bit biased towards the right (which is good, as the bass strings and high strings are obviously situated left and right).

Also, being able to project a good balance in the frequencies at low volume is very important to me, as these can get very loud.

I run the piano with the master volume at 50%, and most of the part 1-4 volumes at 50% as well; so I only use 25% of the capacity. And then, if 100% isn't even enough, I can raise the piano's output jack power by 18(!) dB... *AND* the speaker volume can be raised by another 6 dB using a switch.

Isn't every 6 dB equivalent to doubling the output power? (Don't know on top of my head, if it's 6 dB or 10 dB.) If so, then I could still raise the volume... by...

50% master -> 100% master (double)
50% part -> 100% part (double double, or 4x)
Three times 6 dB in the piano's menu (4 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 32x)
6 dB at the back of the speaker (64x)

If the speaker can even handle that (100W RMS bass driver, 40W RMS tweeter, IIRC), then I don't even want to be in the same city anymore. It's PLENTY loud enough at the 25% I'm driving it at.

"I have Klipsch adjusted ears."

In the same vein, a friend of mine once said to me: "You should go out more." When I told him that I didn't like the overly loud 'music', he just replied: "You get used to that."

Uh... doesn't getting 'used' to loud sounds just mean that you're getting deaf?

At my current age, I can still hear a pin drop, which certainly isn't the norm. I think that this is because I never went crazy on the volume knob, especially when using head or earphones. Even so, I've noticed, in a test, that I did lose the ability to hear some extremely high frequencies. 20 years ago, I was able to hear sounds up to 21.5 KHz (more than what is considered 'normal'), but now I seem to cap out somewhere in the range of 17-18 kHz. Such is life, I suppose.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Stop remembering meeeeeeeehhhh (trailing shout after I ran off a cliff, remembering)... This goes right along the same lines as those idiots writing games that require 635K of free main memory. (Back then, a computer was laid out to address 1MB or RAM: 640KB of main memory, 384KB reserved, blah-blah... I'm sure you know.)

Yep. I started out on the original IBM-PC with MSDOS 2.1.

The most I've ever been able to free up was 632KB by using QEMM (Quarterdesk Expanded Memory Manager), hand-tuning it after auto-optimization.

I got it to support both EMS (expanded) and XMS (extended) memory above 1MB at the same time, along with everything else: SMARTDRV for cache, MSCDEX for CD-ROM, etc... everything loaded in the space above 640KB. The only thing loaded in main memory was the QEMM driver itself, which took 8KB.

Still one game wouldn't run. Rather than use a boot disk, I just never played it. I don't even remember the name.

I'm not a gamer, so didn't feel that pain.

I still have my first home PC sitting on a shelf. It was a clone that I gave a 10mhz motherboard with a NEC V20 CPU, and an AST 6-PAK card with a MB of addon RAM. 512K was allocated as a ramdisk, 256K as a disk cache, and 256K was EMS for applications that could use it.

I had a Hercules graphics card driving a mono amber monitor. I found a freeware app that could allocate unused video memory to main memory, and the Hercules card left 64K of video memory unused, so I booted to a system that thought it had 704K free DOS memory.

I have a Unix machine at home before I go the PC (I still have it - an AT&T 3B1), and wanted the PC set up as much like Unix as possible. I bought a package called the MKS Toolkit that had DOS versions of all of the Unix commands that made sense in a single-user, single tasking environment. The killer tool for me was a DOS version of the Korn shell., my preferred shell on Unix, that had everything save asynchronous background processes (because DOS didn't do that.)

Installed in fullest Unix compatibility mode, the Toolkit substituted INIT.EXE for COMMAND.COM as the boot shell. INIT loaded and put up a Login: screen. Enter a userid and optional password, and INIT called LOGIN, which looked up the ID is a Unix compatible /etc'/passwd file, and it it found a match, changed to the ID's defined home directory and ran what was defined as that ID's shell. I had IDs that ran the MKS Korn shell, vanilla COMMAND.COM, the 4DOS shareware COMMAND.COM replacement, and Desqview. Exit the shell, and INIT was reloaded. I could change environments without rebooting. RAMdisk, disk cache and the like were all set up in CONFIG.SYS and common to all environments.

I kept the setup when I moved to Win 3.1. The default shell for Win3.1 was Program Manager, but others existed. Which it used was determined by an entry in the SYSTEM.INI file. I had MKS IDs that would copy the appropriate SYSTEM.INI file I wanted over the real one and then run Windows, or I could dispense with Windows and just boot to DOS.

Tricky to set up, but worked fine.
______
Dennis

[Katsunami]

Back in the time when you actually had control of your computer...

The huge Windows 10 update released at August 31 didn't resolve the disk hang problem I've been having since the anniversary update. Just now I remembered that something like "Intel Rapid Storage Technology" exists; a way to do things such as set up RAID0 or RAID1 on one disk, using multiple partitions instead of multiple drives. It uses a different driver.

By default, Windows 10 uses StorAHCI.sys, released by MS in 2006. (Device manager says so.) I've read that, for several users, the Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver resolves this issue. Even though I don't use the extra's that IRST offers, the driver might indeed solve this problem. I've now installed IRST, and the driver is now StorAHCI.sys, from 4-11-2015, from Intel.

I hope this fixes the problem.

I *NEED* this system, Microsoft. It's a workstation class laptop, that should be rock solid. Rolling updates without (obvious) means to prevent or reverse installation is *NOT* a good idea.

[Rumpelteazer]

Originally Posted by Hamlet53

I would have just asked her if she still had the package it came in. Or maybe if she still had the receipt.

Getting more serious . . . So how long had it been since she made use of that light fixture? Didn't occur to her to bring in the burnt out light bulb?

It good when you bring the bulb, but even better if you bring the box or the top flap with the information. More and more bulb manufacturers use crappy ink to stamp the details on the bulb. Which means that when it has gotten hot a lot (especially if it's a small halogen bulb) the ink doesn't stick anymore and is easily wiped off the glass.

It's a very regular occurrence that customers get upset when we don't remember which lightbulb they bought years ago, don't know which bulb has to go in their very famous design light fixture (hell can break loose if you tell them you haven't got a clue which fixture that is), or send them home to find out how much watt their 12 volt halogen bulb has to be (there is a small chance of blowing up the transformer if the watt is too much or too little).

Normally you forget those type of customers, but yesterday was a slow day, with several difficult customers and when one blows up over something like this it makes the day go by even slower.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Rumpelteazer

It's a very regular occurrence that customers get upset when we don't remember which lightbulb they bought years ago...

I wonder why people never know what they need, and expect others to know it right out of the blue. Maybe I'm the only one on earth who expects others to NOT know what *I* need. Therefore, I never lose passwords, files, or information I know beforehand that I might need in the future. The passwords are all in Keepass, the files are where they're supposed to be (\Documents, \Files, \Software, etc...), and things like 'information', suc as invoices, are in "\Documents\Invoices".

The one thing in my house that is a mess, is paper administration. If I haven't scanned it into the computer, I won't ever find it again. I hate paper administration.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

The one thing in my house that is a mess, is paper administration. If I haven't scanned it into the computer, I won't ever find it again. I hate paper administration.

A legendary analog designer that worked for National Semiconductor got an obituary a while back.

His office was famous in the industry. He had a lot of paper, mostly technical documentation, and his filing system was date order within stacks. If he needed to retrieve something, it was go to the appropriate stack, then the right level in the stack where the particular document was. He could find things in a heartbeat, but God help anyone else tasked with finding anything in his office.

I had a co-worker like that at a former employer, and once had the fun of trying to find something in his office when he was away. I said "I'll try, but it is Peter's office, so I'm not promising success..."
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Back in the time when you actually had control of your computer...

I still largely do, though blunt instruments are sometimes required.

The other side of that coin is that back then you had to know a lot more about the computer to be able to use it.

I compare computers with automobiles. You can own and drive a car without being a mechanic, or understanding the principles of operation of the four stroke internal combustion engine. We aren't there with computers, though things are better than they used to be. Depending upon what you are trying to do, it can still help to be a mechanic and have some notion of how the system works.

The huge Windows 10 update released at August 31 didn't resolve the disk hang problem I've been having since the anniversary update. Just now I remembered that something like "Intel Rapid Storage Technology" exists; a way to do things such as set up RAID0 or RAID1 on one disk, using multiple partitions instead of multiple drives. It uses a different driver.

By default, Windows 10 uses StorAHCI.sys, released by MS in 2006. (Device manager says so.) I've read that, for several users, the Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver resolves this issue. Even though I don't use the extra's that IRST offers, the driver might indeed solve this problem. I've now installed IRST, and the driver is now StorAHCI.sys, from 4-11-2015, from Intel.

I hope this fixes the problem.

Let us know if it does.

I *NEED* this system, Microsoft. It's a workstation class laptop, that should be rock solid. Rolling updates without (obvious) means to prevent or reverse installation is *NOT* a good idea.

When you have millions of installations, a few will always be problem children, and you drew a short straw.

I have Win10 on four laptops - my SO's older failed laptop she upgraded from Win7, an older travel laptop I upgraded, a Win8.1 laptop I ungraded for a friend, and my SO's new laptop that came with it. The laptops are all rock solid and run fine.

My desktop is odd man out. There were some initial issues that were resolved by turning off hybrid shutdown (which let the machine actually reboot without a power cycle), and turning off Windows write-cache buffer flushing, because I boot from an SSD and that give the machine severe heartburn. For a while, things were stable.

Now it's a case of "New and different Win10 BSODs. Collect the whole set!" and I have been. The biggest culprit is DCP_Protection_Error, which occurs when some process exceeds the hard-coded limit for how long something included under that should take. I've had other issues that are USB related. I dual boot Ubuntu Linux, so I can still get stuff done if Win10 is being recalcitrant. My annoyance is that I don't understand why the problems are occurring. After 30+ years of dealing with this stuff, I generally have an idea of what's wrong and how to fix it, but not this time...
______
Dennis

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Let us know if it does.

I've copy/pasted the wrong name for the Intel driver.

StorAHCI.sys is from Microsoft, 2006 (according to device manager).
iaStorA.sys is from Intel, 2015 (according to device manager).

I don't know if I'll be testing this for a long time in the current installation. I've also had problems removing and installing programs. I'm thinking to do a clean installation from a USB-stick. It seems the Anniversary update has botched a large number of things in my installation.