Tag: songs: computers and technology Page 1 of 2

On Her Majesty’s SysOp Service
by Rob Wynne
TTTO: “You Only Live Twice” by Leslie Bricusse & John Barry

You always save twice or so they say;
One set for your files on a well supplied RAID.
You always save twice, so we have avowed.
A backup is stored on disk, tape or cloud

And data will stack up, and platforms will fry
Don’t think of the backup, and the data will die

This NAS is for you, so pay the price
Keep your data true, and always save twice.

And data will stack up, and platforms will fry
Don’t think of the backup, and the data will die

This NAS is for you, so pay the price
Keep your data true, and always save twice.

Inspired by Bill Sutton’s unfortunate travails with his PC, and by his delightful “Goldfinger” parody detailing them.

Your Call Is Very Important To Us…
by Robert Wynne and Larissa March
Music: “Nessie Come Up” by Dr. J. Robinson
© 2006

The customer sits by his keyboard
He needs to reach tech support
His coffee goes cold
while he’s waiting on hold
Three hours at the last report
The muzak plays soft in the background
As a voice he no longer believes
Says “Each call will be
Answered momentarily
In the order that it was received”

Thank you for holding on still,
For waiting for us so long,
For being polite and holding all night,
Your hope and your faith are so strong!
We thought that you might, we bet we were right,
We see that we weren’t wrong!
Thank you for waiting so, waiting so, waiting so,
Thank you for waiting so long!

He daydreams of a working computer
As the music his thoughts intertwine
He starts to lose hope
He’ll be able to cope
When a cheerful voice comes on the line
He tells her his problem in detail
And all of his details and specs
“Oh, sorry, sir you
Got into the wrong queue
I’ll transfer you, hold just a sec…”

Thank you for holding on still,
For waiting for us so long,
For being polite and holding all night,
Your hope and your faith are so strong!
We thought that you might, we bet we were right,
We see that we weren’t wrong!
Thank you for waiting so, waiting so, waiting so,
Thank you for waiting so long!

The morning sun shines through the window
As he slumps in his chair, fast asleep
The phone in his lap
He succumbed to a nap
And slowly the hours have creeped
A puzzled technician asks three times
“Hello, is there anyone there?”
Then she shrugs and moves on
As he wakes with a yawn
To hear that same tape loop declare…

Thank you for holding on still,
For waiting for us so long,
For being polite and holding all night,
Your hope and your faith are so strong!
We thought that you might, we bet we were right,
We see that we weren’t wrong!
Thank you for waiting so, waiting so, waiting so,
Thank you for waiting so long!

Somewhere On The Windows Server
by Robert Wynne and Jeffrey Williams
Music: “Somewhere Down The Crazy River” by Robbie Robertson
© 2004

Yeah, I can see it now
The flashing green link light shimmered in the dark
I was feeling like a user on a strange site
You know, where people play games on the net?
God, it was too slow to post
I followed the link to an mp3 site from somewhere out in Asia
All of a sudden, I could hear someone whispering from right behind me
I turned around and she said “Why do you always end up on the chat room page?
I said “I don’t know, the links just kind of led me this way.”
She said “Hang the proc”

Dump the blue screen
Errors never seen before
Look for me
Somewhere on the Windows server
(Somewhere on the Windows Server)
Dump the blue screen
All the way down to the core
You can find me
Somewhere on the Windows server
(Somewhere on the Windows server)

Grab a jpg of this
The machine room is empty, abandoned 486 server
Sitting at the console listening to Little Billy Gates
Yeah, that’s when your apps stood still
Y’know, I’m gonna go down to the CompuShak
And let ’em build my box
She said “That UNIX stuff don’t do nothing for me

I’m a man who needs virus protection
I’m a man with a broadband connection
You load the line
You slow the net
I can find my files yet

Dump the blue screen
Errors never seen before
Look for me
Somewhere on the Windows server
(Somewhere on the Windows Server)
Dump the blue screen
All the way down to the core
You can find me
Somewhere on the Windows server
(Somewhere on the Windows server)

Wait, did you see that?
Man, this is stirring up some errors for me
She said “There’s one thing you gotta learn
Is how to keep rebooting it.”
I said “No, I hate it. I hate it, it sucks.”
She said, “You hate it now, but you’ll learn to loathe it later.”

Dump the blue screen
Errors never seen before
Look for me
Somewhere on the Windows server
(Somewhere on the Windows Server)
Dump the blue screen
All the way down to the core
You can find me
Somewhere on the Windows server
(Somewhere on the Windows server)

I’ve been coredumped — failing the trace
I’ve been coredumped — failing the trace
Log on the system — disks and mem’ry
I’ve been coredumped — somewhere on the Windows server
This is another case of Jeff and me being silly in conversation and having it lead to a pretty nifty song. Both of us have been big fans of Robbie Robertson for years, and especially of the moody jazz noir of “Somewhere Down the Crazy River”. If I can figure out a way to recreate the accompaniment to this, I’d love to actualyl perform it someday, or see someone else do so. It’s such a cool tune, it’d have to be done “right” for it to work.

Never Seen The Tech Desk
by Robert Wynne
Music: “Never Been To Spain” by Three Dog Night
© 2004

Oh I’ve never seen the tech desk
Cause I’ve always been too lazy;
But I know a lot of folks there
They call me up and drive me crazy!
My spirit’s droopy
Cause they’re so loopy
They’re our support staff
Our tech support staff

There’s not a day goes by now
They don’t call me on the phone
And they start each conversation
With “Hey, now what’s going on?”
Is there an outage?
Or some strange problem?
We can’t define it!
No we can’t define it!”

I ask them if they’ve done their homework
And what they did to troubleshoot it
They say they’re not sure what to do next
And wonder if they should reboot it?
I say “Don’t know yet
Where you ought to go yet
What is the error?
You haven’t said the error!

I studied hard to be a SysOp
Because I thought that I would like it
I didn’t know back when I started
That you also must be psychic
I do my best, still
Hoping that the rest will
Learn from repeating
But memory is so fleeting

‘Cause the next time that my phone rings
Once the problem is resolved
and it’s the same technician calling
And a new customer’s involved.
Why can’t you see it?
I can guarantee it’s
The same thing as the last one
It’s the same damn problem!

Oh I’ve never seen the tech desk
Cause I’ve always been too lazy
But I know a lot of folks there
They call me up and drive me crazy
My spirit’s droopy
Cause they’re so loopy
They’re our support staff
Our tech support staff
I’d like to state, for the record, that I adore my support desk, and they really are good at what they do. Having said that, the sorts of things that this song details are inevitable in ANY organization where someone has to support the support folks, and that’s what I do for a living.

The song is also true in the regard that I’ve never actually set foot in our call centre, as it is located in another city and I haven’t made time to go down there. I really need to correct that some day soon.

Fund Me Now
by Robert Wynne (from an idea by Dan Reitman)
Music: “Hold Me Now” by The Thompson Twins
© 2000

I have an idea
A surefire scheme
A vision of making a few million off of technology dreams
There’s just one problem
I don’t have the cash
If I could just find some investors I’m sure we’d be rich in a flash

Oh-oh, fund me now
Oh-oh, fund my start
New VC
Is the hardest part, the hardest part

You say I’m a dreamer
We’re a dozen a dime
But this one’s a sure thing, I promise we’ll turn out
A profit this time
We’ll create us a new firm
That will draw in the dough
All we need is that first little push to get started
Can you make us go?

(chorus)

You ask for the numbers
What’s our business plan
But those are just details, and don’t you agree
Our idea is just grand
We’re not asking for billions
Just a few million bucks
You’ll make it all back in the end, all we need
is a whole lot of luck

(chorus)

Someone on rec.music.filk posted a filk of the Thompson Twin’s “Doctor, Doctor” titled “Dotcom, Dotcom”, and Dan Reitman suggested someone should write “Fund Me Now” to this tune. I picked it up and ran with it.

One of my favourite performances of this song was the first time I played it for my friend Robert Cooke, who writes grants for a living and actually gets to listen to just this sort of pitch every week. I’ve never seen someone laugh so hard at a song in my life.

Buggy Software
by Robert Wynne (with a steal from Dave Weingart)
Music: “Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds
© 2000

Buggy software on my desktop
Buggy software built of hacky-tacky
Buggy software on my desktop
And it crashes all the time
There’s some perl code
and some C code
And I’d swear that’s some Fortran there
And it’s jumbled like spaghetti
And it crashes all the time

And the programmers at Microsoft
And Apple and Sun Microsystems
Hack out all this buggy software
So it crashes all the time
There’s a C hack
And a Perl hack
And an Object-oriented hack
And they write code in the wee hours
And they’re crashing all the time

And the boys down in Marketing
Design the pretty boxes so
When the code has been hacked up
It can be shipped out on time
There’s a blue box
And a red box
And an round multi-colored box
And they don’t care if the code runs
If it still ships out on time

Buggy software on my desktop
Buggy software built of hacky-tacky
Buggy software on my desktop
And it crashes all the time
There’s some perl code
and some C code
And I’d swear that’s some Pascal there
And it’s jumbled like spaghetti
And it crashes all the time
This was inspired by a thread on rec.music.filk. Note that I don’t single out any particular vendor or platform as a target — I wholly subscribe the theory that “All software sucks.”

SETI@Home in Cincinnati
by Robert Wynne
Music: Theme from WKRP In Cincinnati
© 1999

Baby, if you ever wondered
If this earth was life’s only home
I’m listening to the airwaves for a signal
That tells us that we aren’t quite alone

Got radio antennae pointing skyward
Scanning across every frequency
One day we’re sure that we will make a contact
As long as we don’t give up on SETI

(Running) S.E.T.I.@Home in Cincinnati
This was written right around the time that SETI@Home was become the passion of several of my friends. I include it for completeness sake.

Open Source of Frustration
by Robert Wynne and Amanda Marlowe
Music by Robert Wynne
© 1999

I untarred it just an hour ago
Then I made a tiny fix
The error list’s a hundred lines
It must do this for kicks
And the compiler’s complaining that it don’t know what to do
I got the I can’t compile without an error blues

Don’t know what’s it’s asking
It’s really got me pissed
Cause the libs its says are missing
Came right in the dist!
And the docs are in Norweigan…I haven’t got a clue
I got the I can’t compile without an error blues

I started on this project
I thought it would be fun
I finally got the source compiled
And the damn thing wouldn’t run!
Why does anyone write software that no one else can use?
I got the I can’t compile without an error blues

I tried a different angle
Forget what’s on the shelf
But this one don’t run either
And I wrote the thing myself!
And it can’t be Y2K, cause it’s now 1902
I got the I can’t compile
(I can’t even save the file)
without an error blues

Amanda and I wrote this in #filkhaven back when it was still on TalkCity. I was chatting with her at the same time as trying to compile some software which wasn’t cooperating, and I was venting my frustration to her since she was there to talk to. Writing the song was very theraputic, and eventually, I DID get the errors in the code fixed.

You’ll Never Surf Alone
by Robert Wynne
Music: “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from the musical Carousel
© 1998

When you log on the net hold your head up high
And don’t be afraid of a crash
If your Netscape should fail, it’s no cause to cry
You’ll have it right back up in a flash
Surf on through the lag,
Surf on through the faults
Tho’ your mem’ry be fragged and blown
Surf on, surf on, just restore the defaults
And you’ll never surf alone!
I wrote this for my sister-by-choice, Dina, after she e-mailed me in a panic because her Netscape installation had gotten corrupted and she was afraid she’d lost all her saved bookmarks and e-mail. Just a bit of silliness to cheer her up.

This song was published in the Gafilk 1999 songbook.