I have a few accounts floating around for different services Microsoft has bought out or since integrated logins for. I genuinely don’t know how many Microsoft accounts I have, and it’s always a pain trying to guess which one a given service is on

If you live in rural America sone information is only posted to Facebook, from private businesses to small county or town governments

Why’d you call me cat over?

Slight correction, he only drove about 30 minutes. Wikipedia says he left Antioch IL which is 5 miles south of the state border to go murder protesters.

Only way he really went out of his way is if he road the Metra commuter train from Antioch to Kenosha since each are the terminus of different Metra routes, and this was probably outside of normal Metra operating hours. Plus he doesn’t strike me as someone who would take a 5 hour train ride to travel 20 miles

Note: I just picked the Metra stations in both Antioch and Kenosha for the below map. I don’t care enough to bother getting more accurate than that

There’s an infamous tech support tale dating back to the Windows 95 days of a very religious lady who wanted all of the wizards removed from her computer. Similar for an individual who absolutely did not want any mice around their computer

I’ll just throw out there the old school halt and catch fire (also the name of a really good show I need to rewatch and actually finish sometime) but also who can’t love lp0 on fire?

More like Naked Gun 420 ^6/9

I’ve experienced formatting issues on different installs of Microsoft Word that both are M365, so its not even like we’re throwing Office 2007 into the mix to get weird extra pages or other formatting problems

many (most?) browsers have a PDF reader built-in

All 3 of them do. You have to work at it to find one that doesn’t support reading PDFs, unless you happen to still be using Internet Explorer in the Year of our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty Four

Now that Chrome, Firefox and Microsoft Edge can not only open but even fill PDFs straight out of the box, there’s no excuse to not be able to open a random PDF file these days. It means you’re either still using Internet Explorer or something equally dogshit

I love how cops take less training to arrest people than I took to professionally reset passwords

The biggest problem with the bubble that IT insulates themselves into is that if you don’t users will never submit tickets and will keep coming to you personally, then get mad when their high priority concern sits for a few days because you were out of office but the rest of the team got no tickets because the user decided they were better than a ticket.

If people only know how to summon you through the ancient ritual of ticket opening with sufficient information they’ll follow that ritual religiously to summon you when needed. If they know “oh just hit up Rob on teams, he’ll get you sorted” the mysticism is ruined and order is lost

Honestly I say this all partially jokingly. We do try to insulate ourselves because we know some users will try to bypass tickets if given any opportunity to do so, but there is very much value in balancing that need with accessability and visibility. So the safe option is to hide in your basement office and avoid mingling, but thats also the option that limits your ability to improve yourself and your organization

What irks me is the “technical impossibility” of raw TCP and “I must be wrong” when filling out their firewall change form.

Most commonly a port is opened to accept traffic of a specific protocol that runs overtop of TCP of UDP. I’m guessing the individual that responded might not be very good at technical communication and was just trying to question “are you sure it’s raw TCP and not just http traffic?” In order to keep the holes poked into the firewall as narrow and specific as possible

They’ve since given us a different port “close to others that we use”, for whatever reason that matters, and based their choice on some list of common protocols outside the reserved range. But not 4001.

Usually if infrastructure is assigning a port other than default it’s because that port is already in use. The actual port number you use doesn’t matter as long as it’s not a common default (which basically all ports below 1024 are)

Using ports that are close together for similar purposes can aid in memorability if that’s a need, but ultimately it doesn’t matter much if they’re not conflicting with common defaults

They opened a ticket because an arrow at the border of our UI vanished when they screen shared on Teams. Because of the red border. And they blamed our application for it.

Probably a user was complaining and needed action immediately and they didn’t have time to test a cosmetic issue in an edgecase. For minor issues I’ll open a ticket with the party I think might be responsible just to get it out of the way so I can get to higher priority stuff, and I’ll rely on that party to let me know if it’s not actually their problem. Heck it might even simply be the IT person assumed it was a misrouted ticket, since users open tickets in random queues all the time

They didn’t set up their PKI correctly and opening our webpage on specific hosts gave the typical “go back” warning. But it was our fault somehow, even though the certificate was the one they supplied us and it was valid.

If the certificate is correctly generated and valid an SSL error would indicate it was incorrectly applied to the application. I’m guessing by the inclusion in this rant that the conclusion was it was in fact a problem with the certificate, but we don’t have enough details to speculate if it was truly a mistake by the individual that generated it or just a miscommunication

Honestly it sounds like you’re too quick to bash IT and should instead be more open to dialogue. I don’t know the specifics of your workplace and communications, but if you approach challenges with other teams from an “us vs them” standpoint it’s just going to create conflict. Sometimes the easiest way to do it is to try to hop on a quick call with the person once you get to more than a couple of emails back and forth, plus then you have more social cues to avoid getting angry with eachother and can give more relevant details

WSL is interesting because it manages to simultaneously offer everything a Linux user would want while also actually capable of none of what a Linux user would need it to do. Weird compatibility issues, annoying filesystem mappings that make file manipulation a pain, etc

In a Windows environment I’ve found it honestly works better to either ssh into a Linux machine or learn the PowerShell way of doing it than to work through WSL’s quirks

no benefit over GUI alternatives

Lol nice bait

My current workplace organizes both development and infrastructure within IT which itself is a sub department of finance. I’m not saying this is the best approach because honestly it only took 1.5 layers of apathetic management to make long term planning a nonstarter

I wonder if I’m missing something about myself

Lol I feel that. I can’t tell how much I might be a little bi or just horny

I support their rights, they are people

the genitals only mader in bed

These things are very tied together. Supporting people being who they are means supporting them if they want to publicly show their identity

I just don’t want aliens in the far future watching our shows and thinking “god damn, it was femboy paradies!”

What does that matter at all? Who cares what people in the far future think? What matters is what people think today, and representation helps people find their own identity and know that they’re included in society

Literally what my oldest does right now when left unattended for 5 minutes

I thought I’d never meet a trans person and very few gay people in the agricultural college I attended when I went back to college. Turned out every damn one of the friends I made was somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum. So as the other person said “as far as you know”

Acceptance of gay and trans rights has allowed so many people to realize they’re not so straight or not so cisgender and that’s wonderful. People are finally finding the freedom to be who they are!