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Showing posts from November 7, 2007

Datacenter Confidential #11

Shotgun Re-org A shotgun re-org is my own term for what happens when a business runs out of operating funds and immediately shuts down operations, or worse, posts a message like this: Feedster is Changing... We'll be back up soon with exciting news! I am citing this particular (and very recent) example by name because they failed to notify my company, their paying client, of their feed shutdown. As a result, my pager would go off twice every six hours: first, when my cronjob would complain that no new feeds were coming in and second, when our offshore "noc" would ditto the page (I swear, I think they just exist to infuriate me). Last night, as I was going to bed, I had the amusing thought that "wouldn't it be funny if they had gone tits up?" This morning, that intuition was confirmed when my co-worker IMed me to tell me that they had, indeed, gone tits up. I literally LOLed, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. I worked for a marketing firm in 1997 that had ...

Your Tax Dollars At Work

Wow, is our government really this stupid? http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/11/7/112926/221 Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists. The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area. Watch out, Rainbow Coop ! Big brother is watching what you eat! Stupid, stupid, stupid..