Wimminz – celebrating skank ho's everywhere

March 8, 2013

Living in a virtualised world

Filed under: Wimminz — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — wimminz @ 10:39 am

I’ve been busy of late, hence the dearth of new posts..

My current gig is basically summed up thus, world + dog are chasing economies wherever they can find them (a good example is regional offices that years ago would have been on leased lines now being connected by xDSL) and so ACME corp’s 447 regional offices get new Cisco 887 adsl routers and all that, and the IT management can then be outsourced and offshored…. 447 expensive leased lines dropped, the in house 500 strong IT department sacked en masse, loadsa money saved, trebles all around at the bean-counters offices.

But some cunt has to turn up with the box and physically plug in the patch cables and so on, and when, not if, when that shit breaks, some cunt has to turn up and physically reset or repair the thing that cannot be fixed remotely…. even if that someone is just a remote pair of hands for a resellers resellers resellers reseller….

Don’t get me wrong, this shit is slick, but it is a basic engineering principle that the more layers of complexity you build up, the more there is to go wrong… which is why twice in the last week alone the NatWest Bank customers have seen all the ATM‘s simply stop working and no on-line banking either, and this is being repeated across the nation in all things IT.

Like the song says, Do your fucking job till the end

Till your job ends that is…. meanwhile back at the gig the crowd I work for are all gung ho, gangbusters and corporate image, which is fucking great while it lasts, which is by definition going to be a finite amount of time, we are hyenas feeding on corpses, for the moment it is a banquet…

I smile sweetly at them all, and friday rolls around and I think to myself that is another week’s money grabbed, wonder what next week will bring, because you see I am old enough and cynical enough to know that in this solyent green world, the crowd I work for can disappear with as little warning as the jobs of those we are replacing with little Cisco boxes (themselves now made in the Czech republic, oh the irony) went down the swannee…

They tell me about all the valuable skills and qualifications I can earn while working for them, and there is an element of truth in that, but I had valuable skills and qualifications in my previous trade of marine engineering, and they don’t put food on the table today, but my survivalist attitudes to life do, so what is more useful to me?

Never take a job you aren’t prepared to walk away from on a moment’s notice is a good motto, because already in this young and dynamic company I can see signs of the rot setting in, and the infection is spreading a lot faster than it did 20 years ago… I see this all over now, they will give some guy a £25k car to turn up at the customers premises in, because it looks good, but no 5 dollar uniform sweatshirt, just wear something of your own, and if you are given any tools they came from walmart, it is utter fucking madness…. exactly the same brand of utter fucking madness that created the jobs in do in the first place… by sacking all the IT staff and sticking in a remotely managed router and some switches.

Of course VOIP is all the rage, so when the cute little cabinet goes down the ACME corp regional office does not just disappear from the HQ WAN, all the fucking phone lines go down too… how many of these sites have all this shit running on a UPS, even a cheap and nasty will only keep it running for ten minutes SOHO job from APC or similar?

You got it, haven’t seen a single fucking one yet….

It is fucking dreadfully incompetent and amateurish, I don’t give a flying fuck how swish and fancy and cute all this remotely managed Cisco kit is, WHEN IT IS WORKING, I don’t care how impressive the tricks are that you can do, WHEN IT IS WORKING, I don’t care with what ease you can do quite complex tasks, WHEN IT IS WORKING, all I see is a system that studiously ignores the 9,000lb gorilla in the room, what the fuck do you do when it stops working, and their answer to that is to point at dudes like me…. whoooosh…

So anyway I’m chilling after a job yesterday with another of the field engineers, who is of a similar age to me, and we are discussing this, and the one thing my extensive experience has taught me…. and this is from the year dot of web servers on…

  1. The least likely person to bork such a box is the field engineer sat there physically in front of it, in true CYA mode he covers his ass at every step, when I am asked to type in console commands for a box that has lost connectivity to a remote IT management centre I read and spell everything back phoenetically, and then ask them, do you want me to press return now? No matter how simple the command.
  2. The MOST likely person to bork such a box is the remotely connected tech telnetting in or whatever, they don’t give a fuck, and this is before they get confused between the three other field techs they are talking to simultaneously to me.
  3. The MORE of a wizard the remote tech is, the WORSE they will bork the box…

All of which means that instead of us field guys being remote waldoes for the megamind remote admin guys, which is how all this shit is marketed by the bean-counters, we are just another point of failure, for exactly the same reasons that someone playing Call of Duty will have a different approach to a crunchie on the ground in Afdiggastan with actual bullets flying around…Networkfailure

Now these people, if you push them, will admit that there are things like the graphic above, a “cascade failure”, but these same cunts have never had to RECOVER from one, because the fact is they have never been in one, of if they have, they were but one node…

I can distinctly remember being in a large hydroelectric turbine hall when a (local) cascade failure hit, because one of the turbines was tripped out by a vibration sensor, which they think was caused by a log getting down into the vent, so one goes down, and it takes aaaaaages to spin down, but the SOUND is indescribably different when it is not under load, and then the next one went because it was overloaded thanks to the first one going down, and then then remaining three went almost together…. and everyone is stood there looking at each other and the hall lighting goes out, and emergency DC lighting flicks on and the turbines continue to spool down… it is the most eerie motherfucking experience… and it took on the onsite diesel gen set and four hours or work before they could start spooling up again, another two hours to get the first two turbines synced to the grid, and another four hours for the remaining three.

But they had ENGINEERS on site, not fucking remote wizards and the only thing on-site some field techs told on a phone press this button now, now press this one, now type this in, now move that cable from here to there, OK I’m in, you can go to the next job ta….

SLA’s, well SLA’s are fulfilled if the resellers reseller can get a warm body on site within 4 hours, that warm body doesn’t have to actually DO anything, or FIX anything, he is just there so the SLA penalties can’t be invoked.

What the people I am currently working for do not know, that I do, is this.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THEORY AND PRACTICE, IS GREATER IN PRACTICE THAN IN THEORY.

So what happens in extreme cases, well someone ships a new box down, and it gets swapped out and we see if that fixes the problem, the only thing rarer than a UPS is the proverbial “smoking gun” when responding to an error call, nobody know what went wrong or what the causes were, and nobody gives a fuck, this job has had a 2 hour slot allocated to it, and that’s all there is.

Various three letter government agencies are waffling on about the threat of cyber terrorism, and hackers are getting sent to gitmo for 999 years of waterboarding pre trial, but the fact is that the real terrorists are all the fucking beancounters putting these bastard systems in place in the first fucking place, it isn’t IF it falls over, it is WHEN it falls over.

Currently these failures ain’t that bad, wossname bank goes down for 6 hours, wossname ISP goes down for 8 hours, wossname supermarket goes down for 4 hours, but no measures are being put in place to improve on this, on the contrary…. the opposite is what is happening.

Currently, cascade failures in IT have been confined to so called fucked up countries where fucked up stuff like the so called arab spring uprisings were going on, and again shit was blamed of guvvmint shutting shit down, hasn’t YET happened to a western country on the scale of the seventies east coast USA power grid cascade failure, which was ultimately caused by ONE part dying…  hasn’t happened YET.

But it’s gonna, why else is everyone getting the pre – emptive bullshit excuses in place about digital pearl harbours.

And it is not just ACME corp and your local supermarket and your local mobile phone shop doing this shit, it is also your local Court of law, your local Police station, your local lawyers, your local bank, your local hospital, and the technology is spreading in all these places.

Sure, they may well have a diesel genny out back that can be fired up to keep the lights on, but what fucking use is that when packets carrying everything from data to voice suddenly find no routes outside the LAN?

Which reminds me, next week’s money I need to buy myself a new NAS box and a couple of WD Red 3tb disks… lol

 

October 20, 2012

Dream lover

Filed under: Wimminz — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — wimminz @ 2:18 pm

Dreams are funny shit…

I’m driving down the road, looking into the sunset, and remembering the dream I was having when I woke up that morning.

So in this dream I have gone back to a house I used to live in, and in the interim the village has changed, some houses have disappeared, some new houses have been built, and in the back yard of where I used to live someone split the house from the yard, property wise, and built four horrible art deco style townhouses, and it looks like it should be a studio set or a record album cover.

Someone beside me says “Yeah, those houses have been empty since they were built 27 years ago“… and at that point I wake up and the alarm is going and it is time for me to move my ass.

So 10 hours driving later this “…empty since they were built 27 years ago..” is still floating around at the back of my head, and I start doing mental arithmetic, and realise after a few minutes of that would have been in 1980, so that means that that would have been 1982, so sort of stuff, and I come to the conclusion that I left that house with the big back yard, wait for it, 27 years ago now.

So my fictitious characters in dreams have instant access to facts that I, in my awake state, have to sit and think about, not something new as revelations go, but this one struck me, because it struck me how much the world fucking changed in that period.

27 years ago was 1985.

The big house with the huge yard set in the idyllic countryside was UK £25,000 on an 8% mortgage from NatWest, which at the time my bank, Midland, manager called “financial suicide” on the part of NatWest, so banks were changed, mortgages taken and property deeds altered.

Back then the multiple was 4 x your salary, I can’t remember car prices but I can remember NOT buying a new with dealer miles MHR Ducati Mille Miglia for £4,500 (which gives you some idea of house prices relative to top of the line bike prices) because that and £500 gave me the 20% deposit of £5,000 on the house, which allowed me to sneak under the mortgage multiplier of 4 x with my £5,000 salary, or approximately £100 a week.

I can tell you that £100 a week wasn’t an especially good wage for 1985, remember I was more interested in partying evening and weekends, and would never have considered overtime or anything like that. From memory the dole was about £25 a week at that time.

I can tell you that is was five short years from 1979 when my dad said he would “stop driving when petrol got to one pound a gallon” and there we were five short years later in 1985 (forgive my maths) and there it was just about to go through two pounds a gallon.

(today at £1.44 per litre and 4.54 litres to the (imperial) gallon it is £6.54 per gallon)

I can particularly remember this as on the last trip up to see the MHR before I passed on it, I stopped to fill the twin tanks on the old shovel, it was on reserve and I handed over a TENNER and got some change, and the guy pumping fuel (manned pumps still in 1985) said “come next year it will cost you more than a tenner” (to fill that motorcycle up with fuel…) which was insane… I only earned £100 a week before tax…. and here I was splashing £10 into a motorcycle to fill up dry tanks!

Here is another way to look at it… in terms of gallons of petrol…

In 1985;

  • I earned 50 gallons of petrol a week before tax
  • A top of the range exotic sportsbike cost 2,250 gallons
  • A LARGE house with a LARGE yard in the country cost 12,500 gallons

So lets take our £6.54 gallon and work that backwards;

  • A mid twenties guy should have no problem finding a job that pays £6.50 x 50 = £325 a week, no overtime, no nothing, £325 a week is £17k per annum, local city bus drivers make that, just, if they work overtime…. so by any meaningful metric wages today are 25% to 50% lower in gallon of gas terms than they were in 1985… the average weekly wage is nearer 250, which at £6.50 a gallon = 39 gallons of gas
  • A top of the range sportsbike £6.50 x 2,250 = £14,625, closest my local dealer, the same one I was going to buy the MHR from back then, has on their website price wise is a 2013 Kawasaki VN1700 Voyager custom at £14,599… a 2012 VMAX is £21,499, so we aren’t a million miles away really.
  • A LARGE house with a LARGE yard, £6.50 x 12,500 = £81.250…. this is where it gets fucked.

The actual house in question, you can go there today and and see not four art deco creations in the back yard, but one large detached freehold, which according to http://www.nethouseprices.com sold in April 2009 for £325,000…. the original house, now minus the huge yard because the above mentioned extended £325k place with outbuilding was build in it, so it now only has a moderate but still large by UK standard 1/8th acre garden sold in June 2011 for £277,000

You have to remember that while what I did in 1985 was just about financially doable, it was considered by my own bank manager to be, and I quote, “financial suicide” on the part of the lenders, NatWest, and myself, racking up that much (£20k, I had £5k deposit) debt to buy a big house in the country.

There is a sound reason for referring all these things back to the gallon of gas / benzine / petrol / essence / whatever…. and that is that a gallon of gas = a pretty much fixed quantity of energy, and energy is the lifeblood of a modern technological society.

That house with that land (eg building plot) has to be what the house went for in June 2011, which is 277k, plus minimum 100k for the plot the 325k house and outbuildings now sits on, plus 20k for the long strip of land sold the other side to give access to the land at the bottom, which was never ours, but which now has yet another executive house built on it, so 277 + 100 + 20 = 397 lets not mess around and round it up to 400k

It is also worth noting that in 1985 this house cost 12,500 gallons of gas, today £400k / £6.50 = 61,538 gallons of gas…. 61,538 / 12,500 = 4.92, call it five times the fucking price in energy terms.

£400,000, now I had a 20% deposit and took a mortgage for the remaining 80%, today that would represent a £80k CASH deposit and a mortgage for the remaining £320k….. like fuck, what mid twenties guy has that kind of loose lying around today.

We have already seen that if you are prepared to put in the overtime, our modern mid twenties guy can drive a city bus and pull in £17k…. 320/17 = an 18.82 times multiple, get a liar loan for the full 400k and 400 / 17 = 23.53 times multiple.

WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED?

We went from a 4x multiple, which my bank manager said was financial suicide, but hey, it was my funeral, to buy a house worth 12,500 gallons of gas, to the EXACT SAME MOTHERFUCKING HOUSE now costing 61,538 gallons of gas.

So financial suicide for FIVE GUYS IN THEIR TWENTIES WORKING AS A TEAM.

But wait, there is more.

While I looooove my technology and teh intertubez and my mega LED flat screen and 1080p HD did-yit-all moovie cameras and all that shit, all that shit didn’t exist commercially in 1985, you could spend half a weeks wages on a Sinclair 8 bit micro, you could spend a lot of money on Hi-Fi, you could buy a stupidly big 26″ colour telly… monthly bills were pretty much landline phone rental plus light and heat… there just wasn’t anything else.

Credit cards were also very rare, as indeed were debit cards.

People who travelled to foreign countries or worked abroad might tote a Diners Club and an AMEX card, they might, emphasis on might, most didn’t.

Mostly you wrote a cheque or paid cash.

Cash was king, because everyone had the legal right to be paid weekly in cash, and 80% of the population was, and if you are in ANY doubt that removing that legal right (Thatcher government) was anything other than a planned and necessary step on the road to personal credit / debt for everyone then you too are fucking dreaming of 1985…

A £20,000 mortgage for 20 years at 8% interest is £169.75 a month, getting on towards HALF of my gross wage in 1985….

IF I had stuck it, and all other things being equal, which is by no means certain, I would have been mortgage free seven years ago…. and my last year of mortgage payments would have been 2005, and a mortgage of some 40 quid a week in 2005 would have been peanuts…. especially compared to the new “Council tax” which in reality is something you pay in exchange for getting your bins emptied once a week, and for that house, which was LARGE, the council tax in that area is £2,200 a year, or £42 a fucking week.

================================================

The present financial “dreamworld” that we live in is however anything but a dream, no fucker is going to wake up from this and idly run things through their head behind the wheel many hours later with mild amusement.

So far we have been inflating things in terms of a gallon of gas, when the wheels fall of that wagon and the actual cost of a gallon of gas doubles in five years, then doubles again in another five, which is what happened 27 years ago, all sorts of bed dreams and evil spirits come home to roost.

 

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