Yesterday, JMB revealed by the comments that she didn’t know what “poets day” was and being something of a poet, was intrigued enough to Google it.

It is of course UK vernacular for it being Friday, the day before the weekend, namely Piss off early, tomorrow’s Saturday.

Then, through a tenuous mental ramble, many others popped up. As they frequently involve offensive words (generally beginning with the letter F) then these are the sanitised versions which are used in substitution should someone ask.

I spent twelve months working on a project for the BAOR, the British Army of the Rhine. Here I was taught all the variations of SNAFU which I believe has American origins- “Situation Normal, All Fouled Up“. Other jargon was slightly tweaked as well, COTS stood for “Commercial Off The Shelf” and referred to the Forces buying suitable product rather than having it built for them at vast cost. It was also known as “Crap Off The Shelf” as sometimes the selection procedures were found wanting.

Being a Forces project and having had to have been positively vetted for the official secrets act, I was always a bit circumspect about saying too much about the project, although a year or two later I was bemused to find it the subject of a detailed wall display and associated customer reference flyers at a trade show, at which point I realised that my caution was probably a bit unnecessary when the site locations and technologies were freely available! Therefore I feel that the Spooks are unlikely to waterboard me if I reveal that the project was called Rodin (corrupted to Rodean, the well known Girls Public School) and was for the update of the DFTS, the Defence Fixed Telephone Network, a fancy name for the non-secore phone system. The F in DFTS was substituted with another word as well, unsurprisingly…

My role was a somewhat high level (but not senior) one, being responsible for technical project management rather than day to day on the ground issues. The biggest project challenge was generally logistical and the biggest technical challenge political, the German Division not being involved so being highly uncooperative on support issues. One lasting memory from this was the term “Partial success”, where a milestone was not achieved because something went horribly wrong and the outcome was a near complete failure other than something trivial going OK, like the system didn’t fall off the wall, or the truck turned up before the guards went home.

I spent a fair bit of time in the JHQ NOC at Rheindahlen. (JHQ stood for Joint headquarters and NOC is Network Operations Centre). Here I first saw the classic poster “Pigs fed and watered…” I can’t readily find one online, but it went something like-

All objectives achieved,
All Issues resolved,
All staff engaged
Pigs fed and watered, ready to fly…

Indirectly related to the army was FUBAR, Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition. The Software Beardies hijacked this for putting into UNIX help documentation, whenever the outcome of an Instruction was required to be shown, the two Operands frequently used were Foo and Bar. Some argue that FooBar predated FUBAR, I’m not old enough to know.

Thinking further back, British Telecom had it’s own quirky arcane language based on a strange mix of technical and Civil service Practise. For example, bulbs didn’t light up, indicator lamps glowed. Telephone exchanges had n alarm panel known as a lantern which had several different coloured compartments engraved with cryptic letters like RA, FA & PG. RA stood for Release Alarm and indicated something mechanical that had not returned to the normal condition. FA stood for Fuse Alarm, meaning a fuse had blown somewhere. PG stood for Permanent Glow, i.e. some other fault condition that was causing a lamp to stay on.

On the administrative side, as an installer working for one of BT’s suppliers, I used to come into contact with Clerk of Works people who we used to hand over installations in a structured manner. They would do their own testing and then accept or reject the work. The rejection form was known as an A308 and we used to get a lot of these. Not because the work was sub-standard , I hasten to add, but because we were getting type-approval for a new system and were constantly pushing the envelope. (We would do a new technique, the work would be rejected, we would raise it with THQ, the Engineering standards people and sometimes they would let it go). I once got an A308 back with two ports listed as “NFG“, which was politely explained as “Not Found Good”. The same clerk told us he used to write OFI on some trouble tickets, where switchboard operators were complaining about something that wasn’t actually a fault. In this case it meant something like “Operator Found Ignorant“.

Of course, often there weren’t alterior meanings to the abbreviations. I also spent a year in Saudi mostly writing FNF, NFF or OK IN/RO on trouble tickets which meant Fault Not Found, No Fault Found and Ok In, Refer Out respectively. (All faults were tested on the main Frame to determine if they were internal (exchange) faults or external (outside plant) faults).

These days, we band about terms like CRAC, (Computer Room Air Conditioner) UPS (uninterruptible power supply) and VESDA (Very Early Smoke Detection Apperatus). Some things never change…

Green computing is something of an Oxymoron, a real dichotomy. Business has a need for speed, not a manyana approach to handling information. To go faster uses more resources, which costs more money. There are possibilities to improve efficiency of course, but there is a lot of guff talked about greening data centres. Many Companies push their green credentials for competitive advantage but often their claims don’t stand up too well to close scrutiny. I’m personally convinced that were someone to actually check and challenge the FTSE top 100 annual reports, they will all be using more renewable energy than is actually available.

I’m keen on saving my Company money in the Thunderdragon sense so I do get to look at a lot of innovation which often has a fair amount of associated greenwash. When reviewing a number of Powerpoints today, this made me smile.

I came across it whilst reviewing some Conference presentations. I’m more interested though, as to why the presentation made by John Suffolk (the Government CIO) on Transformational Government from a green perspective (that contains the above slide has slide fourteen backed out. A convenient untruth, perhaps?

Take a look- the presentations aren’t password protected, although I was expecting them to be. The Technology Innovation one by Mark taylor of Microsoft is particularly refreshing and there are some great quotes in the keynote by Simon Post of Carphone Warehouse.

It seems that Blogpower Mark II might be happening, with James Bigglesworth flying along with some Ginger and Algy co-pilots. I’m not paying too much attention as I don’t feel like getting involved with any more collectives at present but it has a rather fetching picture of a dog facing into a fan with it’s ears blown back. I wish the blog dogs well.

I’m tasked with creating our work team site at the moment and latched onto the idea of “network dogs”. I looked around for a more scabby looking dog picture (we aren’t a photogenic bunch us Cisco monkeys) and they were a bit too scabby! but I found this nice gif that Captain James might find useful if it is public domain.

Anyway, it is on my mock-up site with Network dogs- staying cool in the face of adversity as the spoof strapline. The general reaction so far seems to be more along the lines of Network dogs- when the shit hits the fan…

(The White Fokker was Biggles’ first appearance in 1982).

This will have the watermelons in apoplexy.

Several months ago, I noticed the “Build you own Solar System” part work in a newsagent somewhere. I dug into it, blogged about it and put it to the back of my mind- until David started asking lots of questions about the planets as they are doing astronomy at school.

After showing him the video of the orrery and the information on the website, I asked him if he would read it if we subscribed to it. Yes, came the reply, but I’d have to help him assemble all the gears.

So, pleased that he was showing an interest, I signed up for a subscription, starting from Part One. The small print warned that the current one would be sent first, followed by earlier ones afterwards with the various free gifts, including the toolkit on the third delivery.

After a few weeks, a grey plastic sack envelope plopped through the box. When I opened it up, I found issues 4-6, a binder and three prints of the Solar System (the first wave of extras). They were all a bit bent as they had been folded over to fit through my letterbox but they were otherwise OK. A couple of weeks later, another grey sack, issue 7 arrived, with the toolkit. Odd, I thought, it must have beaten the earlier order there. A week later, I received issues 8-11 (in a grey sack). At this point I assumed that 1-3 must have gone astray, so contacted them. They advised me that their records showed my subscription as starting from number four (despite their confirmation showing as number one further down the email as I had replied to their initial acknowledgement ) and there wasn’t actually anything they could do about it, However, if I rang their 0871 number, I could place back-orders.

Strange, I thought, a Customer services team that didn’t actually seem to be capable of serving the Customer. Still, I got myself onto the website (rather than hold for ages at my cost) and back-ordered issues 1-3.

The next thing to arrive was my card statement. I looked closely at what I had been charged and it didn’t add up, two single issues charges and two four issue charges. So I had paid for ten issues but only received eight. I queried this and they advised that they had accidentally taken payment early for the next tranche of four issues, so I was actually quids in in that I had paid for ten but was receiving twelve. A couple of weeks later, 12-15 arrived (in a grey sack, of course). Time continued to pass. I had a week holiday and hoped it arrived before we went so I could take it with me to assemble for david in the cottage. It didn’t, but I consoled myself that it would probably be waiting for us when we got back. It wasn’t. I was now starting to get twitchy, wondering why the back order was taking so long. I now had a large A4 pouch bulging with twelve blister packs containg brass wheels, planets, moons, grub screws, washers and assorted bracketry, but without the basic building blocks to start it.

All this week I’ve been watching the post. (I’ve been “watching the post” since 1968 for a present from my Uncle Allan, but that is another story). Monday- letters. Tuesday- letters. Wednesday-letters. It was like waiting impatiently for my Acorn Atom self-assembly Computer back in 1980. Thursday- a red Post office card, “package too large for your letterbox”. (The first delivery was too large but that didn’t stop them trying!) Could it be?

Off to work via Morley Softing Office this morning. Postie gone a long time. Will it be a grey plastic sack envelope? YES! Punch the air!

I have now assembled the base with the main shaft topped with the Sun and the geared Mercury, what the suppliers refer to as stage one (the first four kit parts). David asked me to do that stage but he wants to help with the subsequent bits. It looks a bit more spartan than the picture above, of course, but time is a great healer.

(Some assembly required.)