Best posts made by Carnival Boy

@thecreativeone91 said:

Seems like I do them regularly I've averaging about 10-15 a month now. I've turned down quite a few job offers for various reasons.

Bloody Hell! I'm not sure I've had 15 interviews in my entire life and I'm 43!

@Dashrender said:

If you want Outlook to stay open, why are you clicking the X?
instead click the line

Fear not, I'm aware of how Windows works

I want to force Outlook to keep running in the background and prevent users from closing it, so they receive notifications of new e-mail. Users could click the line, but they don't always and as an evil dictator I want to force their behaviour.

Look how complicated that is! Three different types of bonus, 2 different subscriptions. They're just a bunch of amateurs run by marketing men. Amazon and Google are miles ahead.

A lot of these problems would be solved if only the world started excepting "IT Generalist" as a valid job title.

There's a difference between 'not recommended' and 'not supported'. If they only recommend you don't use a VM, I'd probably ignore their recommendation and do it anyway.

Thanks. Just read it. I have to say, I love Lego as much as the next man, but I think this is bullshit

"The Lego Serious Play workshop design had people sit together who normally didn’t work together, so each table contained one or two people from each of the company’s six offices. Through a series of building challenges, each table-based team had to collaboratively design a way to get more work. Every‐one built a nightmare client, then they built dream clients, then bar‐riers to connecting with more dream clients. One team created a landscape with two minifigs collaboratively pushing a wheelbarrow to the reservoir of gold between the mountains. Blocking the way to the reservoir was a chicken on a hinge. Their thinking was: we will get more clients if we stop being “chickens” (being afraid of picking up the phone and calling people they don’t know). And at that point, the storyteller snapped his thumb and forefinger against the chicken on a hinge and it “flew” off the model. The flying chicken became an icon of cultural transformation"

Really? "The flying chicken became an icon of cultural transformation"? WTF?

By the way, there's a great video about Lego's London HQ here:

Youtube Video

@scottalanmiller said:

But the majority of SMBs running Exchange are doing so because they are either just bad at IT, their IT person is doing things intentionally poorly in an attempt to technologically extort career stability from the company and/or someone is operating from an emotional position of fear and lack of understanding of IT. All bad things.

LOL. I'm just trying to figure out if I'm useless, corrupt or over-emotional. Or all three!

Bad mental image

Sorry, I'm not touching your underwear, Scott.

It's looking good. I'd space it out a bit and increase the size of the margins rather than shrinking it to one page as I'm finding it a little crowded. It's a great resume that deserves two pages

I'd also list certifications in reverse chronological order. You got an MCSA in Office365 in 2014 which is awesome, but the first thing I read is that you got a MOS in Word 2000 which is, well, less awesome. Put the best stuff first.

Oh yeah, ignore the forum and use /unread instead of /recent. Works a treat. Thanks!

Yeah, I'd love to, but I can't afford it and don't have a wife that could support me whilst I messed about "discovering" myself.

@IRJ said in Merits of Staying Long Term with a Job or Moving More Rapidly:

My career in a nutshell:
GeekSquad (6 months)
Helpdesk (3 years)
Desktop and Network Support (4 years)
System Admin (3 years)
Network Admin II (3.5 years)

Mine:
Analyst Programmer (16 months)
Analyst Programmer (4 months)
Analyst Programmer (15 months)
Analyst Programmer (15 months)
IT Manager (16 months)
IT Manager (3 years)
IT Manager (13 years)

It's probably time for me to move on, but when you find somewhere you like and you work with people you like, it's harder to leave.

As I mentioned, I've never read a book on IT. I have occasionally bought them with good intentions though. The main use they get is for monitor stands

Hmmn, I think I'd rather either do a standard, clean, fresh install or manually uninstall bloatware.

@DustinB3403 said in Peter Principle - Where internal promotions occur even if the promotee is unqualified:

The Dilbert principle is probably the correct one, the Peter principle was the only thing I could think of.

In either case a person who is incapable of performing a task is promoted (and with it any professionalism they had goes with em)

I'd say it might be neither. This person may be great at his job but is just an asshole (or twat, as we say in England). I've worked with a few brilliant salesmen who I want to kill. They're awful in every way apart from their ability to pusuade customers to depart with large amounts of cash. These people are rare though.

Of course, your guy is probably useless at his job, but it's not a given from what you've written. The only given is that he/she's a twat.

I hate the modern concept of rating everything. Everything has to have a score these days. I get some help from an IT company and then they're asking 'how would you rate your call on a scale of 1-5'. Uuuurgh. Can you imagine Michelangelo asking people if they'd mind rating the Sistine Chapel so he could get useful feedback.

Sorry, rant over.

Amazing when you think that WhatsApp still only has 55 employees (according to Wikipedia).

Shouldn't there be a rule that prevents new users from posting links?

@scottalanmiller said:

Two is that changing sometimes means that other mistakes, like accidentally unlocked accounts, can't be compromised for forever.

This is a great point. It's basically doing one practice in order to mitigate against bad practices elsewhere (like keeping on top of expired accounts).

This brings me to the main reason I expire passwords. I work in a culture of password sharing amongst users. Instead of addressing this culture (through a mix of user education and management enforcement), I use password expiration to mitigate the effects of the culture. This takes two forms:

1. Constantly changing passwords makes it inconvenient for users to share passwords. If you make something inconvenient, they are less likely to do it.
2. People will forget to tell people their new user passwords, so the shared password has expired.

Many times I've had a user phone me up and say this:

Sue: "I'm trying to log on to Bob's PC but it says the password is invalid".
Me: "Well, maybe you have the wrong password"
Sue: "Well, I wrote it down and I've used it before"
Me: "Well then, you probably have his old password but not his new password"
Sue: "Oh, ok. Can you tell me what his new password is then?"
Me: "No. I don't know what it is either."
Sue: "So I can't log in using Bob's credentials any more"
Me: "No!"