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The article notes that in Birmingham, children have starved to death (in a supposedly first-world country)! Do you really believe that the only thing wrong with Birmingham is its school system?
I freely admit that Israel has its social and other problems, but not on that level!
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack.
--Winston Churchill
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I didn't read the article, because it's the opinion of one of the people in charge of Ofsted, which is well outside my range of interests.
I imagine that children suffered because of mistreatment, not because of whatever it is that you're implying.
Unfortunately, children are mistreated everywhere -- far worse in the Middle East than the UK.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I think my is a Soapbox material...
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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A fluorescent tube manufacturing line. A furnace at one end pouring out molten glass; 600 feet later, a tube of hot glass. We wrote the software to control the machinery on the finishing end of the line.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Loveland ski area in Colorado. Trying to get my then boss's wireless lift ticket scanning system working up and down the mountain and in the base camp while early season skiers were using and abusing it.
Cold as $%^&!. LCD metering equipment would just fade to nothing in the -22 degree working environments in the morning.
I was hustled up and down the mountain as needed on snow machines.
SSSSSSucked.
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In my dream was the most awkward place. I woke up, wrote the code and it - to my surprise - really worked. 
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[edit] I'm taking "awkward" to mean uncomfortable, out of the ordinary, or just weird. [/edit]
A couple interesting places.
At a test range in Utah, outdoors with several cameras all watching a missile test from different angles. The video was recorded onto VCR, frame grabbed, then we manually marked the tip of the nosecone in each image, then the software gave (very imprecise) info as to velocity, acceleration, position, etc. Cold, windy, stupid. In a related "demo" of the system, China Lake CA. That was fun, got to see this airplane (can't remember the name of it now) with a huge wingspan that was going to circumnavigate the world, and got to bounce up and down on the wing of a 727 (while it was on the ground).
Another interesting place -- Slidell Louisiana (or thereabouts) at a test facility for shuttle engines. A 104% power burn for 11 minutes with a camera pointing at the exhaust to detect hydrogen fires. In a related test, somewhere out in the middle of the mountains north of Santa Cruz CA, there's a NASA test facility. This one was for a 1/4 scale shuttle motor, where they were testing for hydrogen fires during an emergency shutdown. Took forever to find the place. It was the damnedest thing -- they had all these hydrogen sensors near the engine (so as not to get incinerated) and the video showed this massive hydrogen fire that snaked all around the hydrogen sensors but never actually touched one.
Anyways, this was all done years ago, lugging Compaq "portable" computers around.
But by far, the worst place was in a 120F degree freight car in San Bernardino CA. The freight car was one car out of several that housed the personnel and equipment for the now (thankfully) defunct MX Missile train.
Marc
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In a car.
Didn't work out though, the screaming passengers are pretty distracting 
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Sander Rossel wrote: Didn't work out though, the screaming passengers are pretty distracting
You were also the driver? 
If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't. — Lyall Watson
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I remember working for one client from the back of a station wagon. Every morning I would string half a kilometre of power leads and connecting cable to the computer room, only to retrieve it at the close of business in the evening. This carried on for two months when my Winebago office arrived with a duplicate of the client's computer system onboard.
The difficult may take time, the impossible a little longer.
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Karratha - 25 years ago, pimple on the arse of nowhere. Setting up a system to manage the maintenance of ore cars, hot, dirty, RED for Ghu's sake. Computers had to be enclosed to keep the bull dust out!.
They do grow some great rock out there!
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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My worst experience isn't even in the running - at least it was in an office! My hat's off to anyone who has had to work in the conditions described in their messages.
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack.
--Winston Churchill
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During my Cadetship many many years ago, we had to crawl along geothermal steam pipes to inspect the condition inside them. Worse part was going round a 90 degree corners and hoping you could get back. Long before computers!
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Inside a -40ºC freezer of about 500 square meters and 8 meters high in a factory that made all the Burger King meat for all the BK shops in Spain. Just for testing the database and the automated control of the meat boxes path along the production line...
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Turned up on a customer site many years ago, for a planned job that was estimated as a week's work.
They'd been told they needed to provide me with a workstation.
They had.
it was on the floor, in what was originally a broom cupboard; a hole in the wall led to the server room, where a cable had been passed through.
I couldn't actually fit in the cupboard with the terminal. But I called their bluff (they were, I think, just being arseholes as they felt that my company should be paying for a bug fix, while my company was charging them for an enhancement)
So, I lay on the floor, legs out of the door. 2nd day I brought in cushions and blankets to lie on.
Programmed like that for a week.
I admit I had to take the occasional walk around the office to straighten the spine - but all in all it wasn't actually too bad!
'course that was when I was young; these days if I got into position I'd never get up again!
PooperPig - Coming Soon
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At least they couldn't tell if you were napping or not.
To err is human to really mess up you need a computer
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if only I didn't snore 
PooperPig - Coming Soon
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Once, I worked three months in a closet. There was no room in the main office. As bizarre as it sounds, I was really happy because there was dead silence
Marc R.
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The Men's room.
We had a lab that required men's and women's dressing rooms. The lab had been abandoned so they put my office/lab area in the dressing area of the Men's room. There was a bathroom located inside this dressing area. It was the most remote bathroom in the building so a lot of guys would go there to take care of "serious" business.
All-in-all, since it was so isolated, I got A LOT of work done.
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In a van, down by the river. Literally, in a 96 Ford custom van, at the Frio river, in central Texas, middle of summer, engine running, A/C on, power adapters buzzin, on a laptop, usin (AT&T) USB dongle Cell wireless internet(i.e. SLLLOOOOWWWW) for a week when with extended fam at a cabin out in the boonies! Having to do data transfers in morning(receive), process the data(thousands of invoices), and send completed zipped data in the evening! $20/hour, but got it done. Cell wireless too slow for upload, so had to drive til I found an open wireless connection, which I DID finally find, out at a rest stop, literally in the middle of nowhere! Very weird situation, but had a blast w/ the fam when not workin!  Was nice to be able to travel and work...
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Prison...
We were installing software for the inmates to run.
We literally had a "Captive" User Base ))
OMG the red tape to get in/out, and the requirements to lock things down.
Of course, you could not trust the users! And when 4-5 of them called you over to
look at something on their screen... It made you nervous!
The lunch was cheap. And tasted like cardboard. LOL. I remember thinking I couldn't
hack prison because the food was so bad... Oh, and the limited access to computers.
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This doesn't compare to some of the others but it sucked none the less.
Back in 1994 I was working in a Cyber café that had internet terminals and Virtuality VR games. I had to support the pc's, network, Virtuality machines (Amigas) and the clients. People had just seen the movie Disclosure with Hollywood VR and were irate because they didn't see themselves in full realtime 3D when playing Dactyl Nightmare. People were much more ignorant of technology back then and didn't understand.
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In the early 2000's a national grocery chain got into online shopping (by buying a start-up).
The company I worked for got to develop the back-end.
After the first site was "bedded-in" I flew early one morning to the second site, in an old supermarket.
They had put a server rack in the old staff toilets (the plumbing and stalls were ripped out, but the tiles etc remained).
I was asked to make a bunch of changes to the software, using the server console as my dev pc. Basically, I was standing at the server rack using a slide out keyboard and staring at a monitor about 6 inches above my head.
I had to work on the "live" version of the system (there was no other version to hand).
Every 15 minutes a guy would run in and ask me to stop while they picked and packed some orders.
This was all dictated to me by a trio of VP level dudes from the grocery company.
I struggled all day with this, and their increasingly crazy mod demands. And, standing on cold tiles in a cold toilet for 20 hours wears you down a lot.
Eventually, around 3:00 am the next morning, I said to the VP's: "I'm really tired. I'm going to go back to the motel and get some sleep. I will be back in about 8 hours."
No way. They were angry I should even suggest such a thing: "You can't leave until you're done."
"Well", I said, "If I stay, I am so tired, I will likely make a mistake and destroy your system."
Now they were really angry: "Don't try and threaten us. Do you know who we are? If you leave now, we will make sure you are dismissed today!".
So I said: "If I stay, I will screw something up, and you will get me fired. And if I go you will get me fired. I'm outta here - see you guys tomorrow".
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I guess I didn't have it wedged in there tight enough! 