Fish Fear Me

Tuesday Morning Funny

Heh...The Official ObamaCare Pace Car.

Monday Odds And Ends

I was staring at the TV yesterday afternoon, with .02 left in the game and the Ravens lining up for a field goal, wondering just what the hell had happened and if maybe it would be a good thing for the Ravens to make it and win. The Vikings defense had collapsed in spectacular form in the fourth quarter, and perhaps they should pay a price for that. Well, the Ravens missed and the Vikes escaped by the hair of their chinny chin chins and reading today's coverage it sounds like they know they lucked out big time. I hope so. Not to take away from the Ravens' effort, but that fourth quarter was ugly.

On the plus side, Ryan Longwell gave my FFL team a strong 16 points, countering my opponent's 15 points from Drew Brees. And Marques Colston's 9 points helped a lot also. I wish I could have watched that Saints game too, it was a good one. Anyway, I'm up 49-32 with Brandon Marshall going tonight and my opponent finished. Now I'm just going for my second high score for the week.

I missed the whole balloon thing when it was happening. Now it appears to have been a particularly stupid hoax. I hope the local family services people are keeping a close eye on the six-year-old kid who inadvertently spilled the beans.

I've been trying to figure out what to think about Afghanistan and the right direction for us to go. A great deal hinges on the results of the recent election there and how the various parties deal with the fraud that apparently riddled it. The UN announced today that as much as a third of the votes for Karzai should be thrown out and a runoff should take place. Karzai's supporters are saying that is unacceptable. I think this is a bigger deal than most people realize. I'm as anxious for a decision from President Obama on Afghanistan as the next person, but I think he's right to wait and see how this shakes out first. If it works out okay then it doesn't assure anything. If the political situation spirals out of control though, I think it will doom any military escalation as futile. This could be a disaster.

I was absolutely shocked when Tom Brady came out on the field for the second half with his team sporting a 45-0 lead and snowy field conditions. I'm not bitching about Belichick running up the score, the Titan's are to blame for that, but putting Brady out there was the height of arrogance. I like Tom Brady and don't really wish him any harm, but during that entire drive I was kind of hoping he would get hurt. Just enough to ensure the shitstorm that Belichick would so richly deserve.

More Sidekick Rumors

More rumors are surfacing regarding the Sidekick debacle. AppleInsider says that it has a couple of sources on what happened; one that points to changes within the data center being instituted and one that speculates about sabotage:

Additional insiders have stepped forward to shed more light into Microsoft's troubled acquisition of Danger, its beleaguered Pink Project, and what has become one of the most high profile Information Technology disasters in recent memory.

The sources point to longstanding management issues, a culture of "dogfooding" (to eradicate any vestiges of competitor's technologies after an acquisition), and evidence that could suggest the failure was the result of a deliberate act of sabotage.

Reading the article closely, it looks like both sources really don't have solid information about what actually happened. They are speculating and so a heavy dose of skepticism is in order. There are a few more details there about what the operating environment was like, and apparently there was indeed a SAN involved, an EMC one if the article is to be trusted. I would expect so in this day and age, but there are similar options that could have been employed. Once you have taken that leap, you should easily be assured of being in the area of the upper 90% of your data is backed up. I haven't seen any figures, but it sounds like far more data was lost than that.

I'm not going to speculate myself. I can see how either scenario is possible. I find it hard to believe that people at that level would institute changes without thorough testing and a rollback plan...but then I've seen some of that bullshit up close and personal at a decent sized but much smaller organization, so who knows?

And I don't know about sabotage either, but it's not out of the question. The fact of the matter is it is very difficult to build a foolproof system that at least one IT employee can't screw over pretty thoroughly. I don't think my former employers ever truly understood how I could have destroyed them in a matter of hours in the dark of the night. Not just the operational systems, but all of the backup and media they would need to recover. I was pissed and stress had left me not entirely in my right mind when I quit, but the thought didn't even occur to me. It would have been immoral, a betrayal akin to cheating on your spouse or spying for the enemy of your country. Illegal too, but that may or may not have stopped me if I thought it was a moral act. It wasn't even close though.

When I was an IT guy, there were about six people in another IT section who could wreak some serious damage that we could recover from with some major pain. There were three of us who could totally screw the company. I bet there were way more at the possibly ironically named Danger. I suspect that there is a great story and lesson for many companies here if we are ever allowed to see it. Far beyond the very real caveats that people are issuing now about cloud computing.

Puzzled

Is it just me, or is there a certain weird randomness to Facebook? Such as things disappearing and then reappearing. And my blog posts show up on my wall still, but now they don't have a link back to my blog like they used to. I'm afraid to get invested in Facebook because I suspect that it will eventually drive me insane.

Humor Poll

Sometimes my sense of humor gets me in trouble. I'm sure that's a shock to my beloved regular readers. Or maybe not. I guess it depends on whether that second sentence was perceived as the sardonic statement that it was intended to be or not.

Anyway, I got in some minor trouble with the FFL league I'm in with a smartass comment I left on the main page of the website as the website league manager, and I'd like some opinions on whether it was out of line or not. First some background.

This fantasy football league has been around for about fifteen years. Six or seven out of ten of us are charter members, so we've known each other for a long time. The two most recent members are the league commissioner's(and founder) sons. Last year was the first time we used an online free service to keep track of the league and make it visible to everyone. Prior to that, the commissioner snailmailed updates out to everyone.

Putting the league on the web was my idea and I first proposed it for 2007. It was received poorly then, to say the least, but I managed to get seven team owners online last year. This year, I was down to the last two most-Luddite, M and S(must not switch that order, that would not do at all). Well, miracle of miracles, last week M decided to join the league online, leaving S as the last holdout. Everyone in the league knows this. So last Sunday I put this up on the league's home page:

Don't faint, but Mxxxx may actually be online this weekend. Please continue your prayers to St. Jude regarding Sxxxxx.

St. Jude being the patron saint of lost causes, of course. Well, I was absolutely floored when I got a call the other night wondering what had happened to S. Was he ok? It seems that three or four team owners saw that and thought that S had experienced some kind of ill fate and that he truly needed our prayers. I felt bad that some had become alarmed at my snark, which I thought was pretty self-evident as such, given recent history and the context with M.

So the question is: Was that a reasonable bit of snark, or did I cross a line? I'm truly interested in some perspective here. I need some perspective here.

Just Remember...

...Every time you say no to more drilling for oil, a bunny goes up in smoke in Sweden.

Coming Soon: Good Deals On Pork?

This will be bad news for pork producers if it is confirmed:

Pigs in Minnesota may have tested positive for the H1N1 virus in a preliminary test, the first potential U.S. cases in swine.

Agriculture Department officials cautioned that further tests were needed to confirm that the pigs had been infected with H1N1. Officials say that the pigs did not exhibit signs of sickness and may have been exposed to a group of children who had contracted the swine flu virus.

I already have a stocked freezer from reduced price and two-for-one sales at the local grocery earlier this week. If history is any guide, if H1N1 is confirmed I'll bet pork sales will plummet, no matter how strenuously officials say there is no danger. I love getting the deals, but an unstable pork industry will be bad for consumers in the long run. I hope this turns out to be a false positive.

FFL Update

I popped above .500 for the first time this year. I'm 3-2 now, but you'd think I would have a better record with having the third most points scored for and the third least points scored against. The adage "It's not who you play, it's when you play them" is truer than ever so far this year.

We've also reached a remarkable level of parity in the league. Going into last weekend, there were eight teams at 2-2 and one each at 3-1 and 1-3. We finished the weekend with five teams at 3-2 and five teams at 2-3. I don't think I've ever seen that before. The league is very much up for grabs still.

Me Too

Nick Gillespie(via Instapundit):

I want my reality back. I don't know when it went missing. But I want it back.

No kidding. It seems that the absurdities are coming harder and faster than ever. From President Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize simply for being elected, to the Saudis  demanding development aid if the world buys less oil, to the clip that Gillespie shows where an Obama administration official actually had the gall to say that Mao is one of her favorite political philosophers back in June, it has been a week of one absurdity arising after another.

The problem is not the absurdities themselves. The problem is that we have a political class that is batshit crazy and actually believes that the absurd has merit. Most of the time we the people can insulate ourselves from this crap to at least a reasonable degree. The anger and fear that is palpable now stems from the realization that these idiots are working hard to ensure that there will be no escape from the absurd.

Unbelievable

I can't wait to hear the real story behind this:

The Sidekick was one of the first phones to keep all your e-mail, contacts, events, and photos in an online "cloud"; cool, right? But in the wake of a critical server outage more than a week ago, frustrated Sidekick users are learning the hard way that when things go wrong, cloud computing isn't everything it's cracked up to be.

In what's shaping up to be one of the worst tech train wrecks of 2009, T-Mobile and Microsoft (owner of Sidekick developer Danger) admitted Saturday that any contact, events, or to-do lists that haven't already been restored following a massive server meltdown earlier this month are probably gone forever.

Data backup and recovery at the enterprise level is one of the more interesting, challenging, and expensive aspects to managing a data center. It gets even more fun when integrated as part of an overall disaster recovery plan.

Just before the last company I worked for so horribly imploded, I had built a 2-year plan for moving the company away from the mess of small servers that had been foisted on me to a "scale up" system based around a SAN(eventually two SANs) and a server(s) more along the lines of an ES7000. I won't bore you with further details, but one of the beautiful things about a SAN is its ability to easily create snapshots in the 24/7 environment that we had evolved to, as opposed to the tape backups we were still using by the time I quit. Eventually, the plan was to have a mirror site that could be used as a failover in the event of a disaster at the primary site and essentially get us to both real time data backup and assured application availability.

All cool stuff and pretty expensive too. The point I was trying to get through to management at the time was so is losing data, maybe as much as a days worth. It's not really that expensive if your company is moving thousands of shipments a day and has $450 million a year in sales.

Which gets us back to Microsoft and T-Mobile. How can companies that big not have a foolproof data backup and recovery plan? I'm trying to imagine a scenario where this is possible in this day and age that doesn't involve gross incompetence or actual malfeasance on the part of those two behemoths. I can't. It's really quite amazing. Eventually the story will come out I think. I bet it will be a doozy.