Sometimes users are fun

Anyone who works in technical support is familiar with some of the incredibly funny situations that can arise on the phone when dealing with customers. I was recently shown an entire website of computer stupidities, many of which made me laugh out loud, for real. Take a look, unless you've called tech support because you don't understand your computer, in which case you may find yourself on the list.

• Customer: "I lost some of my files. I archived them, but when I went to retrieve them, they were gone!"
• Tech Support: "What program did you use to archive your files?"
• Customer: "I used DOS -- but now I can't find them!"
• Tech Support: "Ok, what program are you using to do this?"
• Customer: "I used 'undelete', but they aren't there."
• Tech Support: "Uh...what command did you use to archive your files?"
• Customer: "I used 'del' and the filename."

It turned out that the guy had been deleting files, which would free up disk space (he liked that), and when he wanted a file again, he would undelete it. Apparently he actually got away with this for a while, until he discovered 'defrag', which overwrote his deleted files.

If you have your own stories, make sure to share.

Geeking out Linux style

Every following has its events, whether its Daytona and Indianapolis for their respective racing fans, or conventions for various sci-fi followings. As a computer geek who's bent on using Linux everywhere, the one I'll be at this summer is the Ottawa Linux Symposium later this month.

The Symposium brings together Linux people of all areas of expertise including simple fans and programmers, kernel hackers and company reps. As a simpleton myself by comparison, I enjoy hobnobbing with the likes of file system designers and SCSI engineers. The list of events this year is quite impressive, with some very interesting topics including SELinux and Bluetooth audio streaming, energy management, mobile devices and BitTorrent distribution, it should be a very enlightening extended weekend.

My employer has paid for me to attend (I am after all a Linux system administrator and programmer for a living), but I'll be covering my personal, travel and hotel costs. Since it happens that the convention falls on the week of my wife's birthday and a week before our 10th anniversary, we're making an outing of it and having ourselves a little vacation too. No, my wife probably won't attend any of the events (and isn't registered to do so anyway), but she did enjoy meeting some interesting people last time we attended, and getting to ride in a home-made electric car (something Mazda hadn't intended for their Miata, I'm sure).

Since my fellow geeks at the convention will have the building wired for wireless (lol), I may be blogging random updates as they happen starting July 22nd. Check this space for more details, with the tag OLS2008.