Journal Entries
It worked
Posted Jul 25, 2000
Well, the upgrade has gone smoothly, and all seems well.
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Latest reply: Jul 25, 2000
Dell Technical Support
Posted Jul 3, 2000
Sometimes I wonder what we're paying for.
We have a tech support contract with Dell. Our IT manager phoned them up, and tried to get an engineer out to repair/replace/whatever the faulty drive on one of our web servers. The support bod on the other end tells him that they can't send out an engineer until they're sure it's a hardware fault. And they won't accept our word that after resetting the machine when its hung, the BIOS tells up the drive is 'detected but nor ready' (after a minute's wait at the SCSI startup) and it starts looking for DHCP and BOOTP servers.
I'm not the worlds greatest hardware expert, but that doesn't look like any kind of software fault to me...
Michael Dell was in this country a week or so ago, telling everyone how great his company was, and how its service was consistently rated highly by its customers. Well, I suppose if they never have to send out any engineers, of course their service looks great.
It's a pity, too, because the machines (until now) have been pretty reliable. Time to find another supplier...
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Latest reply: Jul 3, 2000
Summer show
Posted Jun 22, 2000
I've just come back from the first night of our Summer Show. It all went rather well, even given the fact that one of our cast is sick with food poisoning and couldn't make it. I had to stand in for him in a couple of places (one being quite a complicated sketch featuring a silent movie, which I had also been directing, so at least I knew it).
But I doubt the audience noticed the gaps, as everyone coped well with the absence, and Charlotte made her stage debut for the final number 
If you'd like to come and see h2g2 Technical Lead prancing about on stage (and opening the show with a drum roll - we couldn't find a drummer, so I have to fill in where needed) there're still plenty of places available for future nights - Friday and Saturday this week, and Thursday, Friday and Saturday next week. Tickets are £8, which includes supper, and doors open at 7:15. It's at the Boxmoor Playhouse, St John's Road, Hemel Hempstead.
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Latest reply: Jun 22, 2000
Forums
Posted Jun 7, 2000
Well it was inevitable. Given the time most people spend on forums, the changes were bound to upset people. It's just a pity that we overlooked the need for 'find latest' until it was too late to slot it into this release. Ho hum. It happens.
Here's how I see it working:
By default, we show the oldest posts first. This is correct a lot of the time because people start reading threads from the beginning.
We tweak the 'Recent forum posts' so that it links directly to your last post. This would be most useful in most chat threads. But we also give a 'go to latest' from the same place.
Have a 'show latest' button in the thread view itself. Ideally, have video recorder buttons - ffwd, rewind as well as previous and next.
And another possibility is a preference to specify if you always get shown the newest posts.
Slightly more work would be for us to finally implement a system of marking threads as read, allowing even more accurate navigation of forums. But that won't happen in a real hurry (like these other changes probably will).
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Latest reply: Jun 7, 2000
Upgraded!
Posted Apr 14, 2000
If this journal posts properly, it means that: The upgrade worked, and the new server is behaving itself.
Here's hoping
Discuss this Journal entry [5]
Latest reply: Apr 14, 2000
Jim Lynn
Researcher U6
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