What first world problem did you have today?

[Ajay]

Yep, IT is pretty lax on USB drives except for executables. Launch a program from a USB drive and you might as well pull the fire alarm.

Couple of jobs I've had had some good perks. Technical Lead as a software developer. IT - you can't have Admin rights. Me - I do all the testing for new development tools and Java JDKs.. IT - okay, you can have Admin rights.

IT - help desk and desktop support - pretty much anything I want except top level Domain Admin rights.

 

[highland145]

When I redid this house, I bought a gas forced air furnace and all the associate parts and installed it myself. A few years later, I went back to the same supplier and they would no longer sell to the public. You had to have an account and needed a business license to get an account.


I think of the whole 'right-to-repair' notion where you have to be able to buy parts for stuff you own. I guess they made it so you can't buy the stuff to begin with.

Been that way, here, for a long time. No hvac license, no unit. Some years back, cost me $4K for a guy to swap out a $1500 unit. Took about 3 hours. Can't beat quality/licensed tradesmen but damn....

 

[Red Squirrel]

I can sorta understand requiring a pro to touch gas since a mistake could end up leveling an entire neighbourhood, but I do find some places are ridiculously strict. Like some places won't even let you do your own electrical, which I think is completely absurd. Thankfully here it's fairly lax. Well I wouldn't say lax, just not super enforced. You're suppose to get permits for practically everything, but for indoor stuff I don't bother. For outdoor stuff I just make sure to do it in a way that doesn't require one. For example a deck that is lower than a certain amount and not attached to house does not require one, so made sure my deck met that. Sheds under a certain size, same idea.

 

[IronWing]

IT started pushing updates yesterday afternoon. I'm at restart number six.

 

[lxskllr]

IT started pushing updates yesterday afternoon. I'm at restart number six.

 

[highland145]

And do what? Go home? Hell, naw, my office is my man cave.

 

[lxskllr]

Could always go to the pub ;^)

 

[Lost_in_the_HTTP]

I must have a drain froze up too. Kitchen sink won't drain. Thought it might be goo in the trap. Just pulled that apart and it's clear. S'posta warm up Monday so I'll leave it until then. I have another sink I can use.

 

[Red Squirrel]

IT started pushing updates yesterday afternoon. I'm at restart number six.

Wow I thought ours was bad. The most I've had to reboot is twice. It was a pain though since it was delayed by like an hour so I went through the trouble of bringing up all my stuff only for it to reboot again.

 

[Lost_in_the_HTTP]

I'm not sure my drain issue is a drain issue and not a vent issue.

Sink drain goes underground to a piece of corrugated pipe that percolates out. No toxins or chemicals, just wash water with no solids. The country way.

Thing is the ground is frozen much harder than usual for here and probably several inches deep, which is also unusual. Ice doesn't let the drain percolate like it would normally in gravel and loose dirt. No perc, no vent, no flow.

Temp should thaw it all by mid-week.
.

 

[pmv]

Got a very odd text message that purported to be from a financial institution. It gave me a pang of anxiety that there might be some identity fraud going on. On the other hand, it might also be a complete scam phishing text intended to falsely make me _think_ there's some identity fraud going on. Or on the third hand it might be someone just got their mobile number wrong when registering for something.

I got as far as finding the web-site of the alleged sender and emailing them to report a possible phishing scam, but then when they replied to ask for more details I got paranoid that maybe _this_ was part of the scam so decided not to tell them anything. It wasn't helped by the poor English of the email reply (though their site seemed legit, I found it independently, not from the dodgy web address in the text message and even found the building of this institution on Streetview, and they appear to genuinely exist.)

This stuff is driving me crazy. I get so many obvious scam calls and texts. I no longer believe _anyone_ is who they say they are when they phone or text me. I have started to consider giving close family members some sort of password to confirm that it's really them (possibly even including when I meet them in person*).

* I mean, you can't be too careful. Though on the other hand, if I find myself getting really irritated by them, I'll know they are probably the real thing.

 

[highland145]

@pmv can I talk to you about your car insurance?

 

[lxskllr]

Got a very odd text message that purported to be from a financial institution. It gave me a pang of anxiety that there might be some identity fraud going on. On the other hand, it might also be a complete scam phishing text intended to falsely make me _think_ there's some identity fraud going on. Or on the third hand it might be someone just got their mobile number wrong when registering for something.

I got as far as finding the web-site of the alleged sender and emailing them to report a possible phishing scam, but then when they replied to ask for more details I got paranoid that maybe _this_ was part of the scam so decided not to tell them anything. It wasn't helped by the poor English of the email reply (though their site seemed legit, I found it independently, not from the dodgy web address in the text message and even found the building of this institution on Streetview, and they appear to genuinely exist.)

This stuff is driving me crazy. I get so many obvious scam calls and texts. I no longer believe _anyone_ is who they say they are when they phone or text me. I have started to consider giving close family members some sort of password to confirm that it's really them (possibly even including when I meet them in person*).

* I mean, you can't be too careful. Though on the other hand, if I find myself getting really irritated by them, I'll know they are probably the real thing.

I solve the problem by ignoring everything that gets sent to me. If it doesn't come first class mail(maybe important) or registered mail(important), it doesn't matter. Email is just informational. I sure do appreciate amazon letting me know someone from a random ip address just logged in with their windows 10 computer :rollseyes:

 

[snoopy7548]

IT at my workplace is weird. They recently sent out an e-mail stating there is a mandatory password reset with new guidelines, and from this point forward your password only has to be changed once every two years. They go on to state the requirements, like no common words/phrases, no repeating numbers, etc.

I successfully changed mine to P@ssword1234. Oh well...

 

[lxskllr]

Password requirements seem like shit more times than not. Maybe a decent approach would be letting people do what they want as long as it meets a minimum entropy check. Send the proposed password to a checker, and if it passes, let it go. If not, reject it, and if you want to make it a learning experience, gives tips on creating decent passwords. All of that would be trivial to implement.

 

[Lost_in_the_HTTP]

Why do some PW rules require some common special characters @#$%! <>, but disallow others like ~ _ ^ .. ?

 

[lxskllr]

I assume it's laziness. Some characters cause problems, but instead of fixing the core problem, they abridge available password characters.

 

[Red Squirrel]

IT at my workplace is weird. They recently sent out an e-mail stating there is a mandatory password reset with new guidelines, and from this point forward your password only has to be changed once every two years. They go on to state the requirements, like no common words/phrases, no repeating numbers, etc.

I successfully changed mine to P@ssword1234. Oh well...

My workplace did something similar, it's insane trying to figure out a password that works. the requirements are super strict, like you can't have the same character repeat twice, or two characters in sequence (ex: ab or qw or 00 or 12) and there's a bunch of other requirements too. Has to also be 12 characters, but think they recently changed it to 16 characters. I'll find out when it expires. It also takes a few days to propagate throughout the systems when you do change it, so I always make sure to change it at the end of my last shift when I'll be off for a while otherwise a bunch of my stuff won't work then I get locked out. They have a really weird setup.

I seem to have figured out a sequence that works though but it's quite awkward to type out. To avoid having to type that out so often throughout the day, I just write it down once in notepad and then copy and paste it everywhere.

 

[Lost_in_the_HTTP]

^^ Yabbutt, then you have the jeannie-usses that prevent paste. I've run into that several times. No paste, gotta do the manual keystrokes. Probably just a Java thing, but seems ripe to be prone to keyloggers.

The US Treasury for quite a while used an onscreen virtual keyboard. You couldn't paste, you couldn't even type, you had to mouse click each character.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Oh yeah we have a few systems where you can't paste, because it's running in some sort of sandboxed environment. Lot of IE6 and java sites are like that since they require a very specific environment to work in. Pain in the butt.

 

[Lost_in_the_HTTP]

I heard a gurgle and it isn't even mid-week yet.

 

[QueBert]

Too much damn security now-a-days, I miss the old BBS days where a lot of the BBS software had a max password length of 5 characters and no special characters were allowed at all.

 

[sdifox]

I heard a gurgle and it isn't even mid-week yet.

Stop shanking people!

 

[Red Squirrel]

My ADS-B receiver glitched out and was no longer sending data to Flightaware so I may have lost my uptime streak. I was at 2,606 days.

I actually forgot that thing even existed until I got the notification email. It's like "oh right, the orange box in the server rack". Got it for free years ago and setup the antenna in the attic and it's been running since like 2016.

 

[MrSquished]

I have a seller who wanted to do a use & occupancy for his home for 2-3 months after closing. The first deal we had was cash, so the rent did not have to cover a whole mortgage. That deal fell through for other reasons and now we are in deal two, and they are using a mortgage. And a mortgage on a 2 million dollar range property is a chunk of change a month, think 7.5K, with 30% down. So 7.5K, plus around 4K in taxes, plus insurances. So the rent would be around 13-14K a month. The seller thought that was crazy.

The seller was yellling at me because he refused to understand that his rent would have to cover the new owners bills, including their mortgage, mortgage insurance, home insurance and taxes. He didn't understand why their mortgage payments should be included in the calculation - that was their choice. I tried to explain that they would essentially be paying him to live there and it never works that way, you always have to cover the new owners monthly costs on the house if you want to rent it back, I've done this many times and so have my colleagues. He got mad and yelled at me for never getting things right lol He hung up the phone in a huff. This is not unusual, they guy is a clueless entitled spoiled man-baby, and also VERY cheap and stingy, and has been this entire transaction.