Yes, he actually did expect me to write a mission statement! I thought, “Isn’t that *your job* as VP and the guy who is supposed to sign on new clients? How do we not already have a mission statement with almost a million dollars worth of student loans we’re servicing?!” ![]() I really wanted to say “Nooo, what is too expensive is having the system blow up every second day and losing the previous day’s work! We’re going at half speed and while I’m trying to save this company, Bob expects me to also write a mission statement for the company!”. So we went to the boss/owner who said “Too expensive.”. The VP, Bob (yes, his real name, his job was to sell banks and other lenders on our technology but he knew next to nothing about computers, pretty much the human version of Bob the Dinosaur from Dilbert) thought it was a great idea. I even did some reading up on what the batch files were doing and started on one in Excel 97. I figured that an Excel Wizard should have been able to do the same work with a few spreadsheets. There was something I never touched which the ladies in the front office used to enter payments as they came in by mail. IIRC there was another batch file to hammer out the papers to be mailed on a dot matrix printer. REORGER.BAT reorganized the database, then DUEDILIG.BAT did the due diligence to find out who needed to be billed and who hadn’t paid. What was crazy about it was the database processing software was all MS-DOS batch files, ported from COBOL. My suggestion was to take an upcoming 3 day weekend, make certain the database was backed up, wipe every computer in the office, do fresh installs of Windows 95 OSR2 on the workstations and fresh installs of Netware 4.11 on the new and old servers, then have the database processing people fly out from New York to install the latest, Y2K ready (what we were using was NOT Y2K ready) version. Not even a couple of Novell Engineers direct from Novell in Salt Lake could straighten it out. Nevermind the CD-ROM had NOT FOR USE IN A PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT printed in all caps across it, Novell sent it and she installed it. Reminds me of when I worked at a place that had a majorly screwed up Netware server thanks to the previous CNA installing 4.11 BETA over 4.1. There are days when I think about feeling bad about it. Before logging out I would copy and paste the top two hundred misspelled words in the English language into a word doc then add them to the dictionary. I logged into a different workstation every day to check my school email and submit homework. So much bit torrent and mIRC traffic…Īnyway, me being the evil jerk that I was figured out that you could edit the MS Word dictionary and Ghost wouldn’t detect the change. anyway so the network admins didn’t care what we did to the terminals during the day. ![]() Everything got reset by Norton Ghost at like 4:00 a.m. It was glorious chaos save for the port controls which we got around by using proxies. We only needed our student ID to log in, no shared drives or accounts where data could be saved, Zip disks abounded and students could download and install almost what ever they wanted. You could write your geology paper in the music building and no one cared. Posted in ATtiny Hacks, Peripherals Hacks Tagged attiny85, maus, mouse, mouse jiggler Post navigationĢ003-2008 my university was putting “computer labs” in any room the fire marshal would let them. Mouse jigglers came to prominence as working from home became mainstream. It’s also available on Tindie if your boss has you so busy that you don’t have time to build one. Along with the microcontroller, MAUS also features a red LED and a WS2812B RGB LED for user feedback. It runs on an ATtiny85, which is able to spit out USB HID commands with the help of the V-USB software USB implementation. Instead, it directly injects emulated mouse movements via USB. The MAUS is not a mechanical system that moves a real-life mouse on your desk. Mouse jigglers aim to fool these systems, and the MAUS from is one you can build yourself. ![]() Often, this involves monitoring mouse movement to determine if workers are slacking off or not. Some employers didn’t like the loss of perceived control though, and saddled workers with all kinds of odious spyware to monitor their computer activity. The work-from-home revolution enabled many workers to break free from the shackles of the office.
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