Rocket Science

This one’s for my friend Trent…

A university network brought to its knees when someone inadvertently plugged two network cables into the wrong hub. An employee injured after an ill-timed entry into a data center. Overheated systems shut down after a worker changes a data center thermostat setting from Fahrenheit to Celsius.

Garretson, C. (2010, August 12). Stupid data center tricks. Retreived on August 15, 2010 from Computerworld web site: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9180479/Stupid_data_center_tricks

…reminds me of the time we were baby-sitting our servers overnight because someone decided to turn off the cold-water supply to the air conditioner. Mind you, we had specifically installed the system through facilities, and had made a clear point of asking them to be notified of planned or unplanned downtime. The only reason our servers didn’t melt down, I happened to be in the office late and stopped by the server room.

The other funny thing about this story, it came out on Thursday the 12th. It really shoulda been a Friday the 13th feature.

Well, here’s at least the second (and I think more like the third or fourth fifth or sixth–I just found another one, that reminded me I’ve gotten more postcards from them this year) TruGreen mailing I’ve received this year. And continues the waste of Lexington Landscapers.

TruGreen stop the carpet bombing. There’s no way anyone at “Main Campus Drive, Lexington, MA” is going to buy your service. That’s 387 addresses you can remove from your database, and save the planet some paper, energy and postage.)

(Though if it would save Saturday postal delivery, I could see the USPS raising rates for carpet bombing mailings like this.

…why isn’t the UI telling me that I can’t schedule a Season Pass until it’s had a chance to fully index the program listings?

I’ve spent about 15 minutes trying to setup my Season Pass episodes on my new Tivo Premiere XL.

I can see the program listings, I can see the upcoming episodes, I can’t successfully setup the Season Pass. No error message, no indication if the Season Pass scheduling was successful or not. No information at all.

(Turns out there is a confirmation if the Season Pass is recorded, but I didn’t know that until one successfully recorded. The UI in the Premiere is completely different than previous Tivo models.)

So I contacted Tivo to ask what was going on…here’s what I got from their customer service chat.

So I’ve gotten over five mailings from landscapers hoping to get my business.

Here are three I’ve received in the last week…

Um, I live here…

It’s a big apartment complex, and you might be really happy to get our business. But, I don’t own the apartment, nor am I responsible for hiring the landscapers.

So, go green! Save the paper, postage and energy and remove all of the apartment complexes from your mailings!

Please?

I like O’Reilly’s Radar site, I really do.

Brett McLaughlin posted an article relating “e” in ebooks to the <blink> tag.

But, d’oh!

This is before the fix…

Download the full-size movie (9.6MB, MOV)

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