Opening Up to More Beta Testers

If any current beta testers know of users that they think would make great beta testers here, could you please quote/message me and let me know who and why? I think it's time to bring in another group of people to check out the forums, try things out, and see if there's any pain points in posting or using the website.

 

Ok. It's March 4th. It's time to open this up to even more beta testers.

I'm going to start increasing the invites I send out with a pretty high frequency. I need to see what happens with more people.

 

A server explosion? Have you got some automatic scaling happening with the backend infrastructure or is it all just running off one dedicated server?

 

I don't have automatic scaling on the backend (yet) because I think I can handle a good portion of it with this server setup. From a cost perspective when l was looking at my options and I extrapolated AP.net's traffic out with a lot of the caching and optimization options I put into it — I decided on this for now. I may need to do some load balancing in the future if it gets stupid popular, but I think I've got a strategy in place to grow with it. Or this is going to burst on me tonight and I'm nowhere near as clever as I think I am.

 

Haha well I think the general advice is don't start scaling (or worrying about scalability) until it actually becomes a problem. But it sounds like you've already got it covered so I'm sure everything will go swimmingly (touch wood).

 

My friends really hate when I do this when we're hanging out and we're talking about things not related at all to technology.

"Dude, pass me a beer."
"Yeah, but will it scale?"

"I'm thinking of picking up the new Madden tomorrow..."
"yeah, but will it ..."
FUCK YOU JASON GO HOME.

 

Haha I'm going to have to start doing that. Although most of my mates are involved in tech in some way so they'll probably just shake their heads.

In a similar vein I've always wanted to play buzzword bingo in a meeting. Never quite got around to printing out the playing cards but I definitely started keeping track.

 

Hahah. I feel like I'd be horrible in "real" meetings for this very reason.

I used to have to do these calls each week with Spin — like weekly calls on Monday morning — and I couldn't handle some of the jargon. If it wasn't at like 9am I would have started playing MBA bingo. Drink for "synergy", drink for "social media strategy", drink for "platform" or "mindshare" or "deep dive."

I mean, my liver would fucking be dead, but hey.

 

Oh man. I had a friend that worked at a grocery store once. He knew like all the tricks. He showed me how he could bend this one little part in the can return machine so it would run the same can over and over again, and then he'd run it for a couple minutes, let it make up 4-5 bucks, and then would buy lunch with it.

I can only imagine the hijinks. I mean, the crap I got into when I worked at a book store was ridiculous. And my summer of painting houses (which was the worst job I've ever worked) led me to realize I'm not a good fit for that kind of thing.

 

That would definitely be a reason not to look forward to Mondays. Unless the drinking game came into effect and then I would just see it as a challenge.

The worst I've ever done in a meeting is turn around and start staring out the window, my manager wasn't impressed but he got the picture...

 

There should totally be a worst job thread now.

 

There really should.

I remember an AP.net thread from years ago that was like "tricks/secrets from working at _____" that I remember finding fascinating (or terrifying). I think that was the thread that basically made me never want to eat at Subway ever again.

 

The only really exciting thing we got up to with new hires at my old job was mess with their computer settings if they left their computers unlocked (company policy to lock computers when you were away from them). So we'd just mess with their mouse pointer (slow it down, make it have a tail, maybe choose the dinosaur theme), change backgrounds, send an innocent email to the team, that kind of stuff.

As for people had be there for a while everything was free game. A co-worker went on holidays so I end up replacing his monitors with boxes, cling wrapped his entire desk, and then put bio hazard stickers everywhere. Good times.

 

Haha, this is like the store version of "there's a pool on the roof."

I once was tasked with cleaning out this closet of bags and boxes at Borders and because I was like 17 or whatever I saw a button under some counter and pushed it. Turns out™ there was a silent alarm that not even management knew was set up at the store or with the police and about 20 minutes later the entire store was surrounded by cops that thought we were being robbed.

Thankfully everyone found it really funny at the store, and my bosses, (my parents did not), and it was this long running joke for like the two years I worked there.

 

Haha, the computer related jokes are my favorite.

We used to set screen savers to turn on at the smallest possible time ... like 30 seconds or whatever ... and so many people didn't know how to change it that for months they would read email or work on the computer while just constantly moving the mouse with their hand to keep the computer from sleeping.

In my CS lab I used to send messages to the professor's computer using, shit, what was it ... like Netsend or something ... while he was doing problem sets as though HAL was taking over. I was an awful student.

 

Oh man this brought back memories. We used to so do something similar in high school. But then they started restricting access to certain parts of the file system, but there was a slight bug in Windows NT where if you could open the file explorer you could get access to the different parts of the file system and we would access an executable that gave us a list of everyone connected and just message them. I think people like us are why policies are brought into existence...

 

I never got a suspension but there were multiple times where I was caught climbing onto the roof of classrooms because we kept playing hacky sack near them and some one would also get enthusiastic and launch it onto the roof. I just happened to be the defacto "climb on the roof" guy.

 

I'm about to date the hell out of myself, but back in middle school with the old school Macs, they used to have this security extension on it to keep people from doing stuff, and once we figured out how to disable that at start-up, we used to do the most childish things. The funny thing is ... that it was because me and a couple friends used to try and break the security that we ended up getting recommended to the high-school network administrator, and he brought us in for a class he just created. We got to run the high-school's network, fix their problems, issues, and teacher's computers. It's where I first learned about HTML, and built the high-school website. It was probably the best part of high-school for me all-in-all.

The best was that whenever it was a teacher that I actually had ... I'd always do it the hard way. Like it would be something stupid that didn't need any sort of real fix and I'd do it from the command prompt just to make it seem more difficult and so they would keep calling me to get help. Haha, I am convinced my GPA is at least a half-point higher because of that.

We ran a server off the school's T1 line that was my first exposure to pirated music and software. One of the older kids in that "networking" class used to download the early music (Eminem) and burn it to CDs and sell them to kids in school. I thought he was a genius. (Now he works for Apple.)

 

lol.

I got in-school suspension because they wanted us to memorize the preamble of the constitution and recite it out-loud in class. (I don't know why that was a thing btw.) Midway through it the class bully started making fart noises while I was in front of the class all alone. Everyone laughed. The teacher told me to start over, I messed up, kids laughed, and I was embarrassed and responded with basically, "oh god, shove it up your ass."

I was in "ISS" for two days because of that. I'm still mad.

 

That is awesome! It sounds like you had a supportive school when it came to actually IT base learning so that's cool.

Although doing things from the command line makes me think of when people say "oh you type so fast", or "you know so much about computers". To the first I usually say, it's my job, and for the latter I'm usually just saying in my head "you know you could just google this". But I think half the thing with googling a problem is know how to phrase what you're looking for.

 

When I used to work at Best Buy we always used to mess with each other's emails. Most of the computers we used were throughout the store so you were always supposed to log out when you were done. If you didn't someone would go to your email and send out an email to various coworkers. It was always pretty harmless stuff since it was a company email and we didn't want anyone to get in actual trouble. After the embarrassing, but harmless, email was written we would always sign it "email ninja" and then send it off.

At my job now, if you don't lock your screen when you step away you will have a new desktop background. My boss hates spiders, so we usually do something with a spider for him.

 

Hahaha.

I still will change my girlfriend's wallpaper on her phone if I get a hold of it. Usually a really ugly selfie of myself.

 

my 7 year old brother does this to my mom haha

 

audrey should be here, that's a must

 

Please let anyone know you think should be added here to PM me on AP.net.