Tuesday 9th

I've just spent the greater part of the weekend reading several books on hacking, and trawling the Internet for the latest techniques. After all, it's important to know what methods hackers use so that we can make our systems secure, isn't it? Of course it is.

The phone rings. It's someone from Marketing. They need to do a retouching job on a photograph and want to know if we have any software that will do it. As it happens, we have. I retrieve it from the store room and flick through the manual. Hmm, this looks quite fun, shame to waste it on a user really. I decide that I had better test it out first so I install it on my machine. Now for some photographic material to work on. The boss is in a meeting, so I sneak into his office and borrow one of the girlie magazines I know he keeps in his bottom drawer. I select a suitable picture and scan it in. Then I practice my hacking skills on the employee database and copy the photograph of the Operations Manager. I combine the two, and after some tricky editing I succeed in producing a picture of him in a highly compromising position. Pleased with my efforts I print it out and mail it to his wife. I'm sure she'll find it most amusing.

I return to my office and the phone rings again. It's Frank from Accounts, the chap from last week who's been busy trying to build a database in Windows Cardfile on my advice.

"Hey, I don't think much of this Cardfile business. It's really slow."
"Have you tried requesting a Pentium?"
"Yes, but I was told there aren't any left and the budget's run out."
"Well, never mind. The Pentium chip has a nasty bug in it anyway, so you're probably better off with a plain old machine."
"I thought the Pentium bug only affected floating point calculations in the ninth significant digit..."
Wise guy, huh? Is he trying to tell me my job? I run the buzzword generator program.

"Yeah, well that's what the press said, but we computer professionals know better. The fact is that recent tests have shown that the chips are susceptible to impedance fluctuations in the optical flux calibration circuits, which are often caused by temperature inversions in the dipole-quadrupole field generator component. This in turn results in pseudo-random bitwise comparator errors in the protocol decryption firmware routines."
"Yes, I suppose it would. So what should I do?"
"Well if it's speed you want, you should code up your own application in C++. That's probably the fastest thing around. Make sure you learn it properly though, because it can be quite tricky for beginners."
"OK, I'll do that. Thanks."
"No problem."

That should keep him occupied for a while.