Category Rants

Last night after work I felt the need to get something productive done so I hopped on the tractor and mowed the grass.  Cindy was unhappy with me since she was planning to mow the grass on her day off tomorrow.  I assured her there was another acre or so of the back yard that can be mowed if she really is feeling the need tomorrow.

Last night was the 5th night the dogs have been over at the house, waiting for Ali’s living arrangements to get finalized.  Of course I love having the dogs over but they certainly put a dent in my sleep quality.  When they are with Ali they sleep in with no problems, often not getting out of bed until between 7 and 8AM.  For some reason when they get to the house their internal clocks appear to instantly flip.

Sadie is the instigator.  She gets up and starts making noise, wanting to be let outside so she can patrol the dark back yard.  Her activity wakes up Nicki who then starts with heavy breathing and whining.  This morning the routine started at 4:45 AM.  Sadie can also wake us up in the middle of the night simply by her breathing.  If for some reason she decides to sit up and go into panting mode the entire bed will bounce up and down. It’s fun.

So the NBA  dropped the hammer on Donald Sterling, the owner of the LA Clippers, for the taped conversation that came out where he instructed his girlfriend (he is married) that she should not be posing with black people in her Instagram photos.  Sterling was banned from the NBA for the rest of his filthy rich, racist, adulterous life.  In addition he was fined 2.5 million dollars, the maximum fine the NBA can levy but a pin prick to a billionaire like Sterling.

The outrage from his blatant racism has been severe as one could imagine.  The odd thing is that people are only outraged now.  Sterling actually has a long track record of discriminatory behavior, this is just the latest episode.  Obviously to be an owner in the NBA which is dominated by black athletes seems to be a position a man like this would not want to be in.  I guess the fact that these men pump money into his life boat sized wallet make up for the color of their skin. Scumbag.

So despite how much I despise a person like Sterling, whom in my mind is the poster child for what the majority of one percenters are made of, I think this gold digging woman is a piece of shit as well.  She has willingly been bought and paid for, receiving unbelievable gits and rewards in return for keeping company with the toad.  For her to record a private conversation and then utilize it to castrate the balls that have been putting golden bons bons in her mouth is a pure gold digging C move.  I wish nothing but bad things for her down the road.

This was interesting enough that I don’t want to wait until Monday.  Desean Jackson, the pompous, showboating, inconsistent punk of a wide receiver was cut today by the Eagles.  The move came as a big surprise.

The reports the Eagles were looking to trade him that have popped up in the last week or so were surprising enough, to cut him outright is pretty shocking since statistically he was pretty good last year.

The report I saw at the gym mentioned something about gang affiliations that Jackson has.  I had never heard this before but based on his attitude it isn’t all that surprising.  Apparently whatever was discovered was serious enough that the Eagles were willing to part ways with Desean, getting nothing in return.

My dislike of Desean Jackson is well documented in the blog.  Sure he is fast and has made some big plays but he also is wildly inconsistent with one good game typically being sandwiched between two or three where he absolutely disappeared.  His taunting, showboating attitude drove me insane.  He is sort of a present day Terrel Owens.

I can’t tell you how many times I screamed at the tv when he would run backwards, losing yardage, trying to elude defenders.  He was successful in doing so very infrequently.  With Chip Kelly’s offense I have absolutely no concern with filling Jackson’s shoes. I have a feeling we will all be saying “Desean Who?” sooner rather then later.

Adios, idiot.

So as I mentioned yesterday, over the weekend I was screwing around with Cindy’s Keurig which was not drawing any water out of the reservoir.  I got it to pull water but once it did it started leaking water underneath the brewer during each brew cycle.  I had read that if you call Keurig and report a problem like this out of warranty they will give you a price break on getting a new machine, so that is what I did.

I called them up and described the issue.  I did not have exact purchase date info so I told them it was received as a gift in December 2012.  Well evidently when you state the item was a gift they are much more lax with requiring proof of purchase.  The nice woman on the phone said the machine just was inside the 15 month warranty period (I thought it was only a year), she would send me a brand new replacement, for free, wow.

I had no expectations of getting a new machine when I picked up the phone.  It was yet another of my personal countless examples of , “if you don’t ask, you never will know”.  Of course Cindy was quite happy to hear the outcome of the call as well since she was just about ready to pull the trigger on buying a new Keurig.

One of my FB buddies posted a video clip of two guys discussing how Ronald Reagan (whom I voted for) was the grandfather of the “us versus them” mentality where “us” were white Americans and them were the minorities that were using our tax dollars to collect government entitlements undeservedly.  This is the backbone of the anti-government movement which is still very prevalent today, which is charged with two primary tenants, LOWER TAXES and LESS SPENDING (on entitlements).

The point of this video discussion was pointing out that this is actually a brilliant strategy devised by those in the upper echelons of society.  By getting the masses to focus on “us vs them” it has allowed tremendous tax cuts to come online the last 35 years that started with of course, Ronald Reagan.

It is not a coincidence that the income inequality chart started a dramatic upward charge at the same point in history.  Yes everyone likes a tax cut but the reality is the trend that was started by Reagan 30+ ytears ago has been the driving force behind the historic income concentration at the top of our economic scale.

Yes out of control government spending and reckless taxation are indeed problems that always need to be addressed. However the fact that a MASSIVE portion of the population is blind to the danger of the country’s wealth being ultra-concentrated at the top is amazing.  Repeatedly history has shown us what happens when this occurs yet through careful manipulation, the wool is once again being pulled over our eyes.

One of my politically conservative FB friends grabbed the video link and reposted it, describing it as one of the most ridiculous things he had seen.  He seemed to think that the point of the video was that all corporations are evil and the video was little more than an attempt to further that image. He continued by explaining that corporations provide the jobs and pay the taxes that help government function.

Instead of getting into a round and round discussion about it I would simply ask what logical conclusion should be drawn when historic corporate profit margins and stock market records are co-existing at the same time as an overall consensus of a poor economy and lackluster job market?  Something stinks.

Yesterday after work I stopped at Costco to get something.  Even though it was a Tuesday night there still were a quite a few people milling about.  I have complained in the past about how I dislike my shopping experience at Costco, despite my support for their business model where they pay their employees real wages, despite being in the highly competitive retail market.  Unfortunately, there are just too many human beings that crowd the aisles of my local Naples store and I find it extremely annoying.

Last night in the span of 30 seconds I ran into 4 different individuals, all women, blocking the aisles through thoughtless cart placement.  Two of them stuck their cart in the middle of the aisle at an angle, making it impossible to pass on either side.  Two of them pulled the classic bonehead move, park your cart on one side while you look at stuff on the other side, turning yourself into a shopping cart/human barricade. Each successive female got an increasingly frustrated sounding , “Excuse me…” as I tried to snake around them.

When The Bachelor first came out nearly a decade ago I watched the first season of it and never have returned as I deemed it as not worth my time.  Well Cindy has been a long time Bachelor fan and indirectly got me watching this current season with the infamous Juan Pablo.  Well even though I realize the show is trash tv at it’s finest, I have to admit I found last night’s finale fascinating.  The guy has cemented the crown as the biggest d-bag bachelor in the history of the show.  He is the male equivalent of a beautiful woman that has air between her ears and a horrible attitude to boot.  The most amazing part of the show was how Juan Pablo’s family basically told both of the final two girls that JP is more or less an asshole.

There have been a lot of press down here lately regarding vehicles hitting cyclists and pedestrians.  In the past couple months there have been a number of these cases.  As someone who has a road bike and has put a decent amount of time in on two wheels on our local roadways I have seen a lot of this firsthand where vehicles get far too close to me as I am pedaling in the bike lane.  Luckily I never had an impact with a car/truck.

Just yesterday I saw a guy on a bike that got knocked over on my way to the gym and then on my way home saw a driver making a right hand turn lay on his horn and narrowly miss a guy in the crosswalk.  There is no excuse for a driver to hit a pedestrian or cyclist.

However I have also seen the side of this coin.  You see, in these incidents there is one common factor, human beings are involved.  Human beings do stupid things and this is often the case with pedestrians and people on bicycles.  I can’t tell you how many times I have seen both cyclists (on sidewalks) and pedestrians cross in front of cars or enter intersections without so much as a momentary glance to ensure they are seen.  Yes, drivers are responsible for making sure they spot people on bikes or on foot but that does not absolve cyclists/pedestrians from doing their part to avoid potential accidents as well.

Hell 5 or 6 years ago when I was going to the gym I knocked over some Hispanic guy on a bike that crossed in front of me as I was looking the other way at oncoming traffic.  Yes I should have made sure the other direction was clear but he should have made the effort to determine if I saw him or not.  Instead he just went straight ahead like he had a set of blinders on.  As I said, I see this behavior ALL the time, so much so that I just assume the other person will not bother to look at me.  Failure to exercise common sense in your own personal safety is your problem first.

So finally, finally, finally, my DB driven websites came back online early yesterday afternoon after being down since early Sunday morning.  Since I have had a presence on the internet in the 90’s, I have never had my content be down this amount of time.

To have this type of outage in 2014 is even more incredulous since high availability technology has improved so much in the last 5 years.  IX really has managed to set the bar to a new low.  I am pretty sure no major webhost in the last 5 years has had an outage of this duration.

The official description of the incident was IX’s RAID 14+2 SAN had a drive fail, and then as a hot spare was being swapped in, another drive failed which put the entire SAN into a failed state.

I have questions about why this would happen as the SAN was described as actually being 5 storage arrays, each one with 14 drives  in it.  I don’t follow why a failure of two drives in one of the 5 arrays would bring down the whole shebang.   If a massive array of 90 hard drives was toppled that easily then there was some poor engineering/planning/configuration utilized.

Last night I received an email from Faithi Said, the CEO of IX, declaring the recovery process was now officially complete with a promise of a full investigation of the circumstances that lead up to this mess.  Noticeably absent from this email was any mention of compensation for this clusterfck.  Many, many people literally lost thousands of dollars as a result of this outage.  A simple “sorry, our bad…” just isn’t going to cut it.

Last night on the way home I picked up a Craftsman tractor shade at the small Sears location in Bonita Springs.  I bought it online.  I had the option of having it shipped to a store and picking it up for free or paying almost $70 to have it shipped to my door.  It was a pretty easy decision to go pick it up.

The store appeared to have exactly one employee in it, at least while I was there.  It seemed pretty representative of the dire situation I read that the Sears family is in.  As I was waiting for the guy to be free I walked around the store, mostly looking at kitchen appliances since I have plans to update my set sometime in the future.  I was surprised at just how expensive most of what I looked at was.  There was a fridge sitting there tagged at $3600, wtf??  Sure it was big, something like 33 cubic feet but still it gave me sticker shot.  The floor was littered with high priced appliances, tons of them $2k or more.  Obviously Sears is not looking to be a low price leader, sheesh.

So the guy retrieves the box and asks me if I have the confirmation email on my phone.  I realized I did not.  I ordered the canopy the same day my IX servers went down.  The email confirmation was one of the casualties as initially IX f’d up and had things configured so people sending email to me would have gotten an undeliverable bounce message, meaning a number of emails sent to me in the first 24 hours vaporized in the the internet bit bucket, including the Sears email, great. Luckily he was able to confirm my order using some other method.

I actually have thought about getting a canopy for my yard tractors for years, ever since I saw my old neighbor Rick tooling around his yard on his sun shaded John Deere.  With my skin cancer history, avoiding unnecessary sun exposure is a smart move.

The addition of the canopy will make certain tractor maneuvers no longer possible under low hanging objects but I’ll trade that inconvenience for a less UV intensive and 10 degree cooler mowing experience.

This weekend we have a BIG movie to see, the sequel to 300 comes out.  As silly as it sounds, the original 300 really had a big impact on my life.  It was that movie and the published 300 workout that the actors on the film used that transformed my fitness routine.  Up until that point in my life my gym routines were pretty static, routine and yielded no real results beyond maintaining my current level of fitness.

The 300 workout is a brutal circuit that really pushed my mental and physical endurance boundaries.  I was REALLY into it.  I even have two pages dedicated to it the description of the workout and my log of 300 workouts which I maintained for 2-3 years.  When I did 300’s I had no real concept of the difference using full ROM and good form made.  Looking back now, with many of the movements I used poor form.

My 300 workouts eventually morphed into my current day calisthenics/bar focused exercise regimen that I have been doing for most of my 40’s.  So the point is, to me a new 300 movie is a big f’n deal. Cindy is a big 300 fan as well so we both are very excited to go see the film in 3D on Saturday night. I HOPE it lives up to epic-ness of the original.

I am planning a double endurance training weekend with hopefully a 5 mile run tomorrow backed up by a bike swim/brick on Sunday.  We also might be doing more work with getting the house ready for a full time second occupant.

For the last two days I have spent time in my underwear in front of two medical professionals.  Yesterday I had a physical required for my insurance coverage.  Because of my age the physical had the requirement of a DRE (digital rectal exam) aka. finger up the ass.  Thankfully my health advocate waived that requirement for me when I told her I just had a full man part exam late in 2013 as part of my visits to the urologist.

My physical went fine except for one thing, my blood pressure readings were on the mildly high side.  They actually took it twice, once at the start and again at the end of the visit.  The first numbers were like 140/76 and the second reading was 145/85.  I attribute the high numbers to slamming my customary large cup of coffee prior to the office visit and the involuntary anxiety any visit to a medical office invokes for me.

Despite these explanations, I was given a portable BP machine to check my readings the next two weeks just as a precaution. Both my mom and dad have high blood pressure, although I think theirs has as more to do with lifestyle choices.  When I checked it late afternoon the numbers had dropped to 123/80 so I feel confident coffee and nerves were the real catalyst.

My email services for my internet domains were restored yesterday, unfortunately my DB driven websites are still dead in the water.  They should hopefully be up and running within the next few hours.

The president of IX, Faithi Said, posted a more technical explantion of the hardware failure, claiming the array that failed utilized RAID 14+2, meaning it could tolerate a maximum of two simultaneous drive failures.  Supposedly one drive failed and then the drive that was actively being swapped in to replace it had a failure as well.

I am quite interested in seeing what sort of compensation will be offered to IX customers after this mess.  It seems surreal they have servers that are down for going on their 5th straight day.

Last night Cindy’s daughter stopped out with her Mustang.  The passenger side mirror had been broken for quite awhile.  She bought a replacement which I offered to put back on for her.  Replacing the mirror was extremely easy, little more than removing a trim piece and removing and replacing three screws.

While she was there I looked at some other cosmetic issues the car has like two damaged wheel wells and a missing front air dam.  Cindy’s daughter can be tough on things she owns, espcially vehicles and smart phones.  I think she has gone through 9 phones in the last three years. Afer doing the repair Katie and her friend hung out with us a bit which was nice, I don’t see much of her normally.

This morning I was once again in my boxers in  front of the dermatologist.  I got a clear screening for basal cell activity but got some cream for a rash that I have had for quite awhile.  Apparently I am not treating it long enough.  I have hit it with cream until it stops but then it will return.  The doc said I need to treat it a solid week or two beyond being symptomatic to make sure it is gone for good.

So I have been wearing my new Gunnar computer glasses all week at work.  As advertised they make things on my screens look cleaner, crisper and larger thanks to the slight magnification.  However there is something else going on, my eyes feel worse after wearing them all day.

One of the things that Gunnar users typically report is wearing the glasses eliminated the eye strain, dryness and headaches they were experiencing previously.  Although I don’t have headaches, my eyes feel MORE tired wearing the glasses then when I go at it naked.  They also feel dry, very odd.

A recurring message in reviews of the glasses is you need to give your eyes an adjustment period to get used to them so that is what I am planning to do.  I am just a little freaked out that I am developing symptoms that Gunnars are supposed to help correct.  If this is still the case a week or two later then I will have to reevaluate.

Here I am day 4 of no blog. IX webhosting is STILL in the process of recovering servers.  A four day outage is like years in internet time.  It will be quite interesting to see what sort of compensation plan they come up with for customers that haven’t already jumped ship. On a positive note, my email server was restored early this morning so at least that avenue of communication is once again flowing.

Over the weekend Cindy and I had a discussion about living arrangements.  The lease on her apartment is up soon.  The talk was about the idea of her moving in with me at the house.  To some it might sound like a big leap but for those that are more familiar with the situation it really isn’t that much of a stretch.  Cindy already spends a good chunk of time each week at my place.  We have spent plenty of time going through day in and day out together, enough to know there are no major personal obstacles/problems with living under the same roof .

Sharing the living expenses would be a major financial plus for both of us and Cindy is always eager to help me out at the homestead with whatever needs doing.  Really my only two concerns were not being able to my own thing and lack of space.

Cindy has never been the demanding type, just the opposite really.  She loves to do things with me but is fine doing her own thing if I want to do the same.  Space-wise she actually doesn’t have all that much stuff.  Getting her “moved in” really shouldn’t be that involved at all.

So anyway we decided to move ahead with the plan.  I think it will be a good thing for both of us.  It should be complete by this time next month.

So I arrived at work pretty early this morning, before hardly anyone else was there.  As I walked in the door I spotted some movement on the ledge in front of the windows.  As I focused I saw it was a small bird.  The bird looked wobbly and weak, having a hard time standing up and not moving much as I got closer to it, not a good sign.

I went inside but I quickly returned outside with a small box.  My office has about a half dozen feral cats that hang around, the little bird was sure to be killed by one of them if I let it be.  I wasn’t sure what I was accomplishing by bringing the bird inside, perhaps only giving it a quiet place to die.  It allowed me to pick it up and put it in the box with little fuss.

The bird was small and almost looked to me like it could be a baby mockingbird.  He didn’t seem to have a broken wing as he did move around a bit and was able to keep both of his wings tucked back in what looked like a normal position.

I wondered if it was a baby that dropped out of a nest.  I went back outside and looked at the nearby trees, seeing if I could spot a nest.  I saw none.

I got my hands on a plastic cup that I cut the sides off to create a makeshift water bowl for the bird.  I showed the bird to my boss.  She brought in some small pieces of bread in case it was hungry.  The bird didn’t show any interest in either although he did make some noises when I tried to move him around.  The noises sounded like something a baby bird would make.

I told Cindy about my office guest.  She said the wildlife conservancy located near the main post office would be the logical place for the bird to go, if it was a youngster hopefully they could feed it until it was ready to go back out in the wild.  I asked Cindy if she would mind picking it up since her work was nearby, she was fine with it.

So as I worked I would check in on my little feathered friend.  He seemed to just be resting but when he noticed me he seemed more alert than when I first found him.  I had the top of the box open since it seemed obvious he was not old enough to fly.

Cindy told me she was in the parking lot so I walked out with the bird in the box, showing some co-workers along the way.  I found Cindy in the lot and showed her the bird.  Just as she was saying how cute it was the bird took off and flew to a set of trees 100 feet away.  My mouth dropped open as I looked at Cindy.  He can fly!  I was surprised and relieved that the little guy apparently was ok.

I thanked Cindy for stopping by and went back inside with my now empty box.  I guess the bird did actually fly into the window and was just dazed/woozy.  I’m still glad I took him in as I am pretty sure one of the cats would have finished the little guy off without a second thought.

It’s always nice when an animal in need story has a happy ending.

Here I am going on my third day of internet darkness.   In a way I feel somewhat lucky that none of the sites I run/maintain are used for a real business.  When I read the comments from IX customers that are literally losing fistfuls of money and customers from this outage I feel badly for them.

This outage reenforces my dislike of MASSIVE consolidation of server resources, at least for things I manage personally.  Sure it’s really cool to have 10 servers shrunk down into one server, however if something just happens to go haywire with that one server, 10 servers go down with it.  That is why for mission critical things in our environment I use a traditional server model with individual RAID protected storage.  Call me old fashioned but I just don’t feel great having too many eggs in one basket.  I like my castrophic failures to be contained in nice little pockets of chaos instead of network wide.

The status blog for IX Webhosting is lit up with over 1500 comments from customers that are besides themselves about the slow recovery from this failure.  I find myself chuckling at the pleas to DO MY SERVER FIRST!  This is probably the longest outage I have had of my internet presence since it was implemented back in the 90’s.   Yes it isn’t good to be cut off from email for this long since it is my most heavily used and preferred vehicle of communication, but there is literally nothing I can do about it at this point.

Well this is an unusual occurrence, doing a blog posting in Wordpad.  I will be outlining the reason for this later in the entry.

I got home Friday night and noticed the pool cage rescreening job had been completed.  My eyes were immediately drawn to the two corners of the cage which had small wrinkles in the screen.  Other than that the rest of the screen looked really good.

We had a beautiful morning for the race I timed Saturday morning.  The turnout for the event was very small with somewhere around 175 people signing up.  This race takes place on the same weekend as a large half marathon in Fort Myers so it is set up for failure.  It really needs to be moved to some other weekend in the future.

The race was so small that I was able to shoot some aerial video with the Phantom as finishers streamed across the finsih line.  Both spectators and participants were fascinated by the buzzing, 4 bladed camera platform above.  The video I captured turned out pretty well.  I hope to be able to do this more often in the future.

On Saturday afternoon after finishing up post race work I went to pick up the dogs.  I told Ali I could keep them overnight.  It worked out well since she was one of those people running the Fort Myers race on Sunday.

Cindy and I decided to spend Saturday night at the house instead of hitting the movies.  I had a fresh Netflix rental to watch anyway, Rush.  Rush has the guy that plays Thor in it but if you ask me, the story, at least the more compelling part of the story is about Nikki Lauda, Thor’s nemesis in Formula 1 racing.  I remember hearing Nikki’s name growing up during ABC Wide World of Sport broadcasts but I had no idea he went through the hell depicted in the film.

I found the movie to be good, quite surprising since I could care less about racing in general.  I’d give it a strong B+

Sunday morning started off slow, it was very damp and foggy.  We scrapped another biking/swimming brick for another run around the track instead.  I was surprised that simply moving from lane 1 to lane 2 on the track added nearly a 1/4 mile to the total distance according to my GPS.  My Garmin said we covered 3.37 miles at roughly an 8:30 pace doing 12 laps around the oval.

The girls had fun hanging out at the house as usual.  They just love being able to walk around outside without any major obstacles.

The pool screen guy stopped by Sunday afternoon to collect the balance of the payment.  I pointed out the screen wrinkles.  He said he was hoping a day or two in the sun would have smooth them out. (really?)  He said he would be back on Monday to take care of them.

While he was there I asked him  about the technique used in rescreening an entire cage.  Since I have spent many irritating hours replacing screen panels I was curious to hear how you do it on a large scale.  He said they attach one end and then unroll the screen to cover an entire row of panels, they pull it tight, drop in the spline and then cut the screen.  It saves a whole bunch of cutting and measuring.

On Sunday evening Cindy and I watched Inequality for All, a film produced by Robert Reich, a name/face you may recognize.  Robert’s most famous position was as labor secretary under Bill Clinton. In recent years he has been popping up all over the place making commentary on the growing wealth disparity in the United States, both why it has been accelerating the last 30 years and why it is a huge problem.

The documentary, which is available for streaming free on Netflix was 90 minutes of some stuff I already knew and a lot of stuff I didn’t.  The start of this canyon size gap of wealth disparity started pretty clearly in the late 1970’s when the wages for the majority of the population stopped following the same general upward curve as the economy.  Wages flat lined while the economy continued to generate more and more revenue.  The overwhelming percentage of that additional revenue went directly into the pockets of an amazingly small amount of individuals.

The film will do a much better job of explaining the issue than I will regurgitating the facts here but let me simply say that any logical human being should see why this trend is unsustainable and self destructive in the long term, unless the goal of our country is to exist in a feudal society.

Once the ultra-rich cross a certain point of control in politics, reversing that trend becomes a task of monumental portions.  How do you change policies that benefit massive corporations if the massive corporations have bought enough influence in Washington to ensure nothing gets done?

Despite Roger’s small stature, I don’t think he is even 5 feet tall, he has a big voice on this subject.  I have followed him on Facebook for quite awhile and generally find myself shaking my head in agreement to most of what he says.

He does have some ideas that seem a bit far out there, even for me, like wanting to raise the minimum wage nearly 50% beyond the new levels Obama had mentioned ($10 and hour).  Robert wants $15 an hour as the new minimum hourly wage.

Robert says without a strong middle class, the country will rot from within, as it is the middle class that does the majority of the spending that drives consumption of products and services in our country.  His thinking is if people make a higher minimum wage, more of that spending can occur.  Of course there are counterpoints to this theory such as increasing the minimum wage could cause even greater unemployment or drive up inflation.

I did find it quite interesting that the one woman featured in the documentary was a Costco employee,  a big chain that sells goods warehouse style like Wal-mart does with Sam’s Club.  The retail market for the most part has been operating under the guise that there is absolutely no way that a retailer can offer employees decent wages and still be profitable.  Well Costco is a huge middle finger to that concept.  The woman was making $21+ an hour.  It can be done.

Please take an hour and a half out of your life and check it out.  I guarantee regardless of your political inclination you will get something out of it. It will give you a reason to really think about what sort of society we are becoming.

So sometime yesterday I noticed a flood of error messages hitting my email.  They are messages that mean that for some reason my local server was unable to pull mail from my host, IX Webhosting.  This happens from time to time.  Sometimes the issue is local, sometimes the issue is at IX but typically it doesn’t last very long so I just ignored it.

Well when I checked back on my mail later I saw I had 300+ of these error emails so I figured it was time to see what was up.  Evidently my good pals at IX, whom I have had various issues/rants about over the last 5 years had a major hardware problem.

The way it was described was they had “multiple” drives fail simultaneously in their SAN (storage area network)  This SAN evidently was shared storage for 150 or more servers at IX, meaning every single one of these servers was now dead in the water.

In IT it is quite common for hard drives to be built in such a way thet they offer redundancy since they are the most failure prone device in a system.  Tiny platters spinning at 5000-15000 rpm’s 24 hours a day, 7 days a week are going to die sooner or later.

To combat this, RAID was invented (redundant array individual disks).  In layman terms, you tie several hard drives together in such a way that if one fails your data is intact, you simply replace the failed drive and all is fine again.  The most common level of RAID is RAID level 5 which is what I just described.

However in a huge ISP RAID 5 is simply not enough protection since data storage is so critical.  There are higher levels of RAID.  Level 6 allows for up to two drives to die at the same time, something which is statistically minute however an ISP needs that level of protection just because the hard drive arrays are depended on by literally thousands of customers.

Well in IX’s explanation of the failure they used the failure as “multiple” disks.  I would like to know what multiple means. Because if multiple means two drives failed at the same time, which as I said is very, very, rare, that means they had their SAN only using RAID 5, which is very irresponsible and poorly designed.  Of course they would never admit that publically.

So anyway, every single thing in my personal internet web sphere has been offline for 24 hours and counting.

The IX status page has been DESTROYED by customers bitching non-stop about the outage as you can imagine.  I saw no need to pile on, since being in IT I can sympathize with the engineers that are trying to get this data disaster monster back in it’s cage.  It doesn’t make me any happier though about IX overall as a web hosting company.

Time and time again they have let me and many others down.  The only thing that has kept me there is the massive task I would face relocating my earth mover sized pile of content to another web hosting provider.  Depending on how much longer this drags on, the effort/reward formula to move my sites might just tip the other way.

I got my new Gunnar computer glasses on Friday.  I wore them during the weekend while I was on the computer and brought them into work today.  So far I like them.  They are so light I hardly know I am wearing them.  Visually, they brighten, focus and slightly magnify the images on the screen.

Things just look better through the Gunnars.  I plan to wear them full time at work.  I won’t be able to give a full report card until I give my eyes time to adjust.  I am hoping that my distance detail vision slowly will come back around.

So I got a report from my one retired neighbor during the day that she did not see anyone at my place doing work on the pool screen.  This concerned me since the screen guy said he would be starting with the screen removal and cage washing yesterday afternoon.  When I pulled in the driveway last night the first thing I did was take a walk out back which confirmed nothing had been done.

Anyone that has read my blog for a period of time knows how I feel about businesses (or people) that do not do what they say they are going to do.  Even worse is when they don’t show up and don’t at least call you to let you know they will not be showing up.  I received no call yesterday.  I have had incredibly poor luck since moving to Florida with dealing with the service industry.  It seems underpromising and overdelivering is a concept foreign to most Sunshine State business owners.

I let out a long sigh before dialing up the installer, I hate having to deal with this shit time and time again.

So I get the guy on the phone and he is immediately apologetic.  He said the job he was supposed to finish up Tuesday morning ran long.  He said he did not have my phone number with him to let me know and he planned to call me when he got back.  The excuse loosely held water since I had him scribble down my cell phone number the day before, I did not call him from it so it would not have been in the phone already.

He apologized several times and assured me they would be out at the house today to begin the work.  I accepted his excuse.  I did not immediately take an agitated/combative stance towards the guy.  He gets one strike before the gloves come off.

Last night I clumped all 146 of my 6 second long Vines into one almost 15 minute long compilation.  It’s an amazing collection of moronic behavior.

The rest of my evening was mostly spent puttering around in WoW and reading a couple more chapters of Inferno.