Oh great! He's mucking around with that damn computer again!
Interesting or funny stories from my may eons as an engineer or growing up.
It was the 1990’s, and we were heading toward a disaster of biblical proportions, or so they claimed. For decades a known bug lurked deep in the heart of all the computers that ran everything. A time-bomb, no, nuclear explosion just waiting to go off. It was set to explode on 12:00:01 on January 1st, …
As of the other day, I’ve been a UNIX or Linux admin for exactly 1/2 my life. That’s 23 years of UNIX or Linux hacking. Can hardly believe it myself. Anyway, in all those eons, I’ve made some predictions. As one would expect, some were spot on, some were close, but not quite, some were …
It was sometime in mid-’98 to mid-’99 while I was working for the ticketing company. I had designed the new ticket printing outlets for a local grocery chain. It would allow customers to walk up to the costumer service windows at these stores and buy tickets to events at the local playhouse and several other …
During the week leading up to January 12th 2012, I was working at the Printing Office. There was some issue with the Netapp boxes and Snapmirror working that the network team and myself had been working on. The network team had some ideas, but when I left the office on the 12th, it was still …
It was during the Stanley Cup in the late ’90’s. Final game of 5, and the ticket company was the one who sold the tickets for the event. As walk-up and will-call ticket holders started getting tickets, the load on the storage array had gotten pretty heavy. A KNOWN hardware issue in the array’s single …
Sometime in early-’94 at the Law Library, we had an ( then ) experimental Linux box. It was a Dell PC with an early version of Slackware installed. It was in the office, and I was just sitting there playing around. At the time, I was still learning UNIX commands. So I was playing with …
So it was during the government shutdown in October of 2013, which was an odd time. Fortunately, I was among the lucky ones who got to work, which meant I was guaranteed to get paid, which was good since I was a contractor. The deal for government employees was actually pretty controversial. The trains were …
So it was late ’95 to early ’96, and I had just started working full-time at the printer company, with much to learn back then…. So the director of HR calls me up one morning, when I first walk in the door, to tell me her printer isn’t working. My first thought was an an …
So it was sometime in the late summer or early fall of 2003, I was installing HPUX on some new servers for a big Oracle upgrade project I was working on for the Bank at the time. So I was in the lab where all new server builds happened. And in walks this particularly conservative …
So, around fall of 1998, I was working as a UNIX sysadmin for Tickets.com, and taking classes at CSU trying to get my EE degree. I had attempted to take the networking class without taking the pre-req UNIX class first. I figured I was a UNIX admin, had been doing this stuff for a few …