The Vent and Rant Thread

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by Rumpelteazer

But I agree with Katsunami, a lot of things are sweet enough. I am the only one in the family to eat some fruits (strawberries, red berries, grapefruit) and yoghurt without sugar. I always wonder why my sister makes tea. She adds so much honey or sugar that she won't taste the tea.

I'll never understand why people put sugar on their strawberries...

------------------

I need to vent and rant and I rembered vaguely there was a thread somewhere for that...

So, here goes:

I needed 3 screen protectors (3 different devices). The most important one was for my new camera. I especially want a matte protector for that, as I hope to use it in sunny conditions a lot. So, 3 matte screenprotectors.

Found a webshop that had screenprotectors for all three devices, matte. So, I ordered it there. And yesterday, I received the enveloppe. Yeay! get the camera!

Oh, two matte and one clear protector... Checked the invoice again: 3 matte protectors. So, they added the wrong one for my camera (the one that I mostly needed it for, the other two were extra). Can happen, bummer, etc.

So, time to make a complaint. The site offers a nice webform for that, I fill it out, explaining I got the package and that one of the three items isn't what I ordered.

I expected a reply like "oh sorry, our fault, send the faulty item here and we'll send the correct one to you asap"

But I only got a generic copy/paste message back:

Your order has already been handed over to our transport service provider. It is therefore no longer possible to cancel the order.

Hmm, where did I mention that I wanted to cancel the order? Didn't I already say I had received the items? Wouldn't that imply that it had been handed over to the transport service provider?

Not even an apology that they made a mistake! Now I'll have to find an enveloppe (that is not digital...), go to a postoffice (which means I've to go to town), and send it back. Which will cost me about half of what the screenprotector cost in the first place (just in stamps)! And only because they made a mistake...

[badgoodDeb]

Originally Posted by Sweetpea

Now I'll have to find an enveloppe (that is not digital...), go to a postoffice (which means I've to go to town), and send it back.

Sorry about your screen protector; that's a real bummer when you are waiting for something.

If an envelope has 5 (6?) bar code like things along the top edge, I don't think that's a problem. They all have THE SAME bars, no matter which bill they came with, so I'm pretty sure those bars are just for alignment in the reading machine. I reuse those all the time.

[Dylrob]

In an effort to reduce my weight I've been trying to restrict what I eat. That includes limiting my salt and sugar intake. I took a brief break from that today to celebrate Mother's Day with my aunt and her family. One of the things they had were tortilla chips... Upon taking a bite, I couldn't help but notice how incredibly salty they are! They were just regular store bought chips, but wow! You really don't notice just how much salt we Americans consume until you go off it for a while.

[Rumpelteazer]

Originally Posted by Dylrob

In an effort to what is my weight I've been trying to restrict what I eat. That includes limiting my salt and sugar intake. I took a brief break from that today to celebrate Mother's Day with my aunt and her family. One of the things they had were tortilla chips... Upon taking a bite, I couldn't help but notice how incredibly salty they are! They were just regular store bought chips, but wow! You really don't notice just how much salt we Americans consume until you go off it for a while.

Big food manufacturers in the Netherlands are slowly reducing salt in their foods, so that people won't notice. I can remember when I studied in the UK the first Friday we had class on a different campus and because of the bus schedule we were almost an hour early. Some people bought lightly salted crisps/potato chips and were shocked to discover how much saltier the lightly salted flavour was in comparison to the Dutch regular salted flavour.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by Dylrob

In an effort to reduce my weight I've been trying to restrict what I eat. That includes limiting my salt and sugar intake. I took a brief break from that today to celebrate Mother's Day with my aunt and her family. One of the things they had were tortilla chips... Upon taking a bite, I couldn't help but notice how incredibly salty they are! They were just regular store bought chips, but wow! You really don't notice just how much salt we Americans consume until you go off it for a while.

Expect more frequent pee breaks while your body gets rid of the excess water it has been storing.
Good luck with your diet.
Some store bought chips are way salty.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Blossom

So can I. People say I'm freaky. I can smell sugar. I can smell coca cola if it's flat or off or good. You can put Pepsi, Coke and Dr. Pepper in front of my and I can tell by smell which is which. Diet and Regular.

Put tea in front of me and I can tell hot or cold if it they forgot the sugar.

They may call me a freak but who do they hand their drink to when the fast food place forgot to label it and ask is this what I ordered​.

Sent from my Nexus 7

Why would that be freaky? I can smell sugar as well. I can also taste it if a cup has been re-used without washing it out properly, first. Nothing freaky about it. If you don't smoke, your smell and taste are actually not destroyed, as is often the case with heavy smokers

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Rumpelteazer

Big food manufacturers in the Netherlands are slowly reducing salt in their foods, so that people won't notice. I can remember when I studied in the UK the first Friday we had class on a different campus and because of the bus schedule we were almost an hour early. Some people bought lightly salted crisps/potato chips and were shocked to discover how much saltier the lightly salted flavour was in comparison to the Dutch regular salted flavour.

LOL. Lightly salted was saltier than our normally salted crisps and over here, we're already on the 'too much salt' side? Then their regular crisps would taste as if they are encrusted with salt. Yech.

My sugar intake is basically non-existent apart from what is in the food by default (I never add sugar to anything), and the only thing I add salt to is when baking/roasting meat, and French fries (and even those amounts are very little compared to what I see other people adding).

[CRussel]

RANT: Why do people who are supposedly intelligent security professionals allow cloud based IaaS virtual machines that they're no longer using to simply run, unattended and unpatched, for months on end? Not only does it cost real $$, but it also leaves them wide open to whatever the latest malware is! AT LEAST SET THEM TO AUTOUPDATE for goodness sakes!

And, of course, who do they complain to at 6AM on a Monday Morning? Yup. Like I was supposed to magically know about these machines and have them patched for you. And you don't have any backups? Gee, how's that working for you?

/RANT.

(And yes, I did have a backup of it. Not because he told me about the VMs, but because I monitor that cloud account, just in case. But I made him sweat a bit before I allowed as how I might be able to help.)

[Blossom]

Does this have to do with that ransomware going around?

I was really surprised how many computers out there that hadn't patched that vulnerability.

Sent from my XT1528

[CRussel]

yes, it did. Though it could have been ANYTHING. There's really no excuse for getting caught by this one. The vast majority of the problem computers were Windows XP. Duh. But in this case, it was just being lazy.

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by CRussel

yes, it did. Though it could have been ANYTHING. There's really no excuse for getting caught by this one. The vast majority of the problem computers were Windows XP. Duh. But in this case, it was just being lazy.

Especially since the patch has been out since March and this is May.

Sent from my XT1528

[wodin]

Large organizations don't just take Microsoft's patches on faith, they often have proprietary software or unique architecture that can be broken by a patch.

Typically, when a patch is released they will delay installation until it can be thoroughly tested in their environment, and only then will it be deployed across the enterprise. This will often delay implementation of a patch by days or weeks. I'm not sure if that was the case this time, but...

[Hemmi]

Yes, one of our computer systems at work is way behind on updates, it's still largely run on Windows XP. Every time the software vendor patches and updates something, the whole damn system goes down. I never trust them anymore when they say, oh the updates have gone smoothly everywhere else we've done them. Umm, no, they never go good for us and result in us being down for sometimes hours at a time.

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by wodin

Large organizations don't just take Microsoft's patches on faith, they often have proprietary software or unique architecture that can be broken by a patch.

Typically, when a patch is released they will delay installation until it can be thoroughly tested in their environment, and only then will it be deployed across the enterprise. This will often delay implementation of a patch by days or weeks. I'm not sure if that was the case this time, but...

When MS releases a critical security patch, you either install it. Or face the results. There's a REASON it's a critical security patch.

I work in a mid-size organization with a fairly diverse set of hardware and software across a dozen countries. I also work in a small business environment with a VERY diverse set of software but mildly diverse hardware. And I work _with_ one of the largest and most diverse organizations in the world running Microsoft OS's. At all three, we install patches. Full stop. Each has a somewhat different protocol for installing, but every single one gets critical security patches installed within a matter of a few days.

As for XP? There is zero excuse for allowing an XP machine to be connected to an external network these days. And, frankly, at none of those three organizations would we allow one to be connected to our network. That being said, a case can be made for a legacy, busines-critical LOB app but only if it's sitting on an isolated machine. If your app is mission critical, then update it to an OS that was released more recently than 15 years ago! In the case of the UK's NHS? Many didn't even have BACKUPS! With PATIENT DATA ON THEM. That is just inexcusable.

I've been in IT for >30 years. I've heard every excuse under the sun.

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by Hemmi

Yes, one of our computer systems at work is way behind on updates, it's still largely run on Windows XP. Every time the software vendor patches and updates something, the whole damn system goes down. I never trust them anymore when they say, oh the updates have gone smoothly everywhere else we've done them. Umm, no, they never go good for us and result in us being down for sometimes hours at a time.

Great. Well, as soon as one of your users clicks something he/she shouldn't, you're toast. Because with XP, if they get in at all, they'll own the whole network.