rickshangle.com

More than meets the eye. I’m Rick James.

Make Optimus Prime utters the words he was born (ehr, built) to say.

Please follow this link and submit, up through October 12.

It’s not surprising I sat at my computer giggling for over 20 minutes at the prospect of injecting various lines from Platoon[1], Carlito’s Way[2], Goodfellas[3] or even Full Metal Jacket[4], but for submission I finally had to settle on the old Commando classic:

"You don't need the girl, Bennet. Take the knife in hand. Stick it in me, look into my eyes, see what's going on as you twist it around."

I guess technically it might be difficult to stick a “knife” into O.Pri (one would hope), but if I win maybe there can be some sort of laser-knife-battle-sequence. With a entirely new uber-adversary… named Bennet… modeled on Commando’s Bennet… played impeccibly by Vernon Wells.

[1] “You see that f’ing head come apart, man?”
[2] “You think you big time? You gonna f’ing die, big time!”
[3] “Go get your f’ing shinebox!”
[4] “WHAT IS YOUR MAJOR MALFUNCTION, NUMBN*TS?”

[image source]
[image source]

Spoiler: And it sucks, at least for me, at least for now.

Shakedown of Amazon’s new movie download system, Unbox.

1. Zero surprise: no OS X support. Running in XP-on-Parallels.
1. Amazon UnBox player (which handles the download, DRM and player) won’t use a Parallels shared folder, which sucks. So I’m forced to download into a Parallels NTFS virtual drive, which angers me.

For the first shakedown, it needs to be short in order to maximize the rush, so there can be only one:

So I said, “look mf, I’m rick james…”

Video file size: 419MB

Frame rate: Probably doesn’t do 30 frames a sec on Parallels, but seems to be doing at leat 25 (eyeballing it).

Price: $2, to own. Unbox features content for rent and own.

Resolution: Unclear, and not clear from the Unboxed web page. Appears comparable to itunes. Which is infuriating.

Audio: Stereo.

Full screen (within a Parallels window) worked ok, at the same frame rate. However, when I took Parallels itself into full-screen (so XP completely took over my MacBook Pro’s screen), the video was restricted to approximately 50% of the screen, as opposed to expanding all the way. Infuriating. Ultimately I fixed this problem by quitting Unbox Player, putting Parallels in full-screen mode, re-booting Unbox Player, and then taking a video to full-screen. Frame rate stayed about the same (sub 30 frames/sec).

Complaints:
No media controls in full screen (although spacebar appears to pause/play).
FF and REW buttons do, uh, nothing.

Next: A movie. A big one.

Update 8.8.06 23:00

Ok, well renting (24 hours, $3) a movie didn’t turn out so well, to the degree that I’ve actually emailed Amazon customer support (which I’ve always had great (no sarcasm (really, no sarcasm (none))) experiences with in the past). Best In Show Plays for 8 minutes, then always stops playing/restarts at the same point.

Did I mention you can’t seem to FF/REW the Unbox player?

So, that didn’t turn out so well. Now it’s time to buy a movie, like a big boy. No more “renting”. No more “partial commitment”. We’re in, all the way. Buy, buy, buy.

When I acquired my video projector for hot projection-on-wall action three years back, there was only one movie that was up to the challenge to break things in. So I guess it’s somewhat of a ritual, and I really should have started with it:

Heheheh. Heheheh. Hehehheehehhehehe. Eeeeee-oooorrr.

Stay tuned.

Update 9.9.06 13:45

Jackass behaves the same Best In Show: plays for seven minutes, then stops, returns to zero. This is annoying. Another ticket opened with Amazon. I wonder how they’re going to do as a software support organization. Guess we’ll find out.

Tally, so far:

1. 22min Chapelle Show episode: worked well enough to be a potentially viable alternative to iTMS, as long as I can get over the annoyance of having to watch my media from within XP-on-Parallels.
1. Rented Best In Show: plays for seven minutes, poops.
1. Purchased Jackass: the Movie: plays for seven minutes, poops.

Update 9.11.06 13:45

Finally received an email back from Amazon customer support. Advice: delete and re-download the media file (which Apple doesn’t let you do.) I do it anyway.

Same issue.

Finally, load the most recent Windows Media Player Security Update, which solves the problem across the board.

Update 9.11.06 14:45

Ok, I spoke too soon. This time, video stopped playing about 45 minutes into Jackass.

Update 9.17.06 14:45

I have received no satisfaction from Amazon customer service re: why my movies won’t play, and honestly have been distracted[1] by Apple’s announcements re: iTMS movies last week (another article). So, so far:

Chapelle Show: worked fine, 22 min.

Best in Show (rental): won’t play past 7 minutes.

Jackasss (bought): downloaded four times (in accordance with the only advice Amazon customer support can seem to give (cut and paste from unbox faq) on the topic), and still won’t play past 40 minute mark, period.

Anger. Given the breadth of content on Amazon Unbox, it would be a really tempting offering, even when playing inside Parallels. If it fucking worked.

I’m not an idiot, and I have no problem believing that I’m running into something that is XP-on-Parallels-related. That’s great and I could even accept that and move on (especially given Apple’s announcement last week) if Amazon tech support would even bother troubleshooting the issue to the point of _asking_ me anything about my environment, as opposed to just cutting-and-pasting snippets of their Unbox FAQ into their responses. That just bugs the s**t out of me.

[1] slash, amazed and really comfortable with how well it (iTMS movies) works.

Brilliant filth.

Filth.

Filth.

Filth.

Filth.

All filth.

Up next: MS Project. WTF’s a ‘bottle’? Feel my ignorance…

Stuck at the End of the Internet? WRONG, FOOL. The Official Seal Generator is a fun way to waste valueable time summarizing your being / site / mojo.

With no further ado (maybe a wordpress theme change is in order):

That tagger was the best I could come up with, after snickering to myself while cycling through a number of motorhead motifs that I also felt summed up the spirit of the site, such as:

1. “Caveat Emptor”
1. “Eat the Rich”
1. “Don’t Forget the Bastard”
1. “Take One Look and Die”
1. “Going For the High One”

… and… well…

They being hard drives, the thing to know being when to fail in order to cause maximal TFDL[1].

I don’t mean to assign hard drives some unwarranted malevolent intelligence — it’s always a bad time.

Depending on the level of rigor involved in a data backup process, a lost drive is (for most home users; I’m talking about for human beings, not companies - that’s another story) a time-consumer as you replace the drive and recover the data.

If you’re not so on top of the data protection thing, then the impact can range from inconvenient (time lost reloading everything / recreating lost data that is re-creatable) to expensive (lost music from iTunes music store) to catastrophic (lost pictures from honeymoon that existed only on that drive; just a random example).

Given that I spend half of my professional life thinking about data protection (and the other half thinking about storing/managing data before it gets lost, then recovered; hooray!), it would be a cobbler’s-kid-foot-bare-thing if I didn’t have nominally effective practices in place for protecting critical data. Since my office is my home, this really applies to everything. 2x.

And trust me, I do have policies, and procedures. They’re not as robust as the ones I build and sell to companies, but I don’t have hundreds of thousands-to-millions of dollars to spend on data protection, either.

So I’ll tell you a secret, for free.

Every ten minutes, my PowerMac G5 looks to see if my PowerBook17 is on the network, after determining that the process I am now describing is not already happening.

If G5, which is called trogdor finds the laptop, which is called sm, then it connects to it and starts copying work-related files that have changed (since trogdor is really the main repository of all data, and sm only “checks stuff out”, and brings it all back home.

Trogodor also has about 1.5TB of disk space on it, and sm only has 80GB. Which is another reason why this is this way.

The system works pretty well. Mostly.

Which is why when the hard disk on my PowerBook17 began failing in the middle of a data migration process (getting everything off it in preparation of wiping it and giving it to my wife, my new (and awesome) Mac Book Pro having arrived the day before), I wasn’t particularly concerned about the work-related data on it. Or my writing, or receipts related to stuff I bought on the web, or a ton of other crap. It was all backed up to the mighty trogdor. On more than one physical drive, in some cases.

What I didn’t back up, though, because I am a f’ing idiot, are the honeymoon-related photos that have been sitting on the PowerBook, and only the PowerBook, for the last month or so.

Now, normally all digital photos in the house are imported through my G5 (trogdor), where there is a policy to (you guessed it) back the photo repository up to two separate hard drive automatically, daily.

The whole honeymoon photo thing… the photos were imported into the PowerBook (mid-honeymoon… mid-ocean, actually: we were on a cruise, as I’ve been very slowly describing in these pages; the PowerBook was with us, and the G5 obviously wasn’t)… the PowerBook came home, my wife began immediately turnings the imported photos into books within iPhoto, yada… it just sort of… getting them into the G5, and therefore into the backup policy, just didn’t happen.

So now, since there is a set of data of immeasurable value on this failing disk, I am faced with doing something I would normally never do: roll up my sleeves and become sort of computer forensics-ist in order to recover this, urp - the pain, priceless data.

Some people would be thankful that their work (work-work and non-work-work, i.e. hobbies) stuff is safe and sound. I am not one of those people. I am an animal — a data animal.

What would I do normally, you ask, were all the data confirmed safely backed up?

1. Computer to Apple store
1. “AppleCare. Hard drive. Replace. Ball peen hammer.”
1. fin

Why didn’t I, say, at least post the honeymoon pictures to a web site or something? I messed up. Simple as that.

Moving on / taking action

Ok, on to coaxing data off a dead/dying hard drive that wants to take the data with it to Davey Jones’ (Casey Jones’? Who was in the Monkees?) locker. Things of note:

1. The drive, which is a Toshiba 80GB laptop drive, is not mountable in the Finder. It has a journaled HFS+ partition. That’s it.
1. The drive won’t pass a fsck_hfs (broken sibling link), which means that it’s not going to pass Disk Utility, which is basically a shell into fsck
1. DiskWarrior doesn’t see it. TechTool Deluxe doens’t see it.
1. The finder does indicate, when i put the laptop into Target Disk Mode and plug it into my G5, that an unrecognizable disk is now on the system, what should it do? I tell it to ignore.
1. The drive is not making any grinding / cackling / drooling sounds inside the case; in fact, that whole side of the laptop (the left side) is rather cool, which leads me to believe (at least part of the time) it’s not even spinning up.
1. S.M.A.R.T. (drive auto-diagnostics) on the drive indicate a status of “failing”. No sh*t. That technology sells itself.

Point 4 above qualifies as a very, very faint heartbeat on our patient, so I’m willing to take a (benign) whack at recovery before I send the laptop off to DriveSavers or the like to do their expensive magic.

Since all the jelly-coated Apple tools (provided and 3rd party) that I’m aware of either ignore this drive or can’t do anything with it in its current state, I need to see if there’s any way I can get the data off, on to a more stable (i.e. not-failing) media, for further analysis.

What will I do with the data then, since it looks like at a minimum that the directory on the drive has been cooked? I really don’t know, but we’ll worry about that later. Now, I want to get the data off the drive. I just want it off. It could turn out that the current state of accessible 1s and 0s on the drive is worth a pile of steaming excrement. I just want it off. The warp core is breaching; all the crew on the cruiser may already be dead, but we’re beaming them off. Just in case. I can’t believe I just used a Star Trek analogy; you can see what the stress of this situation is doing to me.

fsck says chunks of the filesystem directory are toast. This means tools. Real tools. Man-tools: block-level tools. Thank dog OS X is UNIX.

Some people have been saying good things about GNU ddrescue, which (from what I can tell) is basically the UNIX dd command combined with some sort of retry&log system, so that when used with failing drives, when the program (inevitably) experience failures during a dd copy process, the log can be used to determine the point of failure and pick up at that point after the drive has been reset / given smelling salts. A checkpoint, if you will.

Whatever. I’m not one to look too deeply into things before charging ahead. I download and compile ddrescue.

>trogdor-5:~/Desktop/ddrescue-1.2 rshangle$ sudo ./ddrescue -v /dev/disk6s3 “/Volumes/Backup0000-0000 1/MyVolImage.dmg”
“/Volumes/Backup0000-0000 1/MyVolRescue.log”
>Password:
>
>
>About to copy an undefined number of Bytes from /dev/disk6s3 to /Volumes/Backup0000-0000 1/MyVolImage.dmg
> Starting positions: infile = 0 B, outfile = 0 B
> Copy block size: 128 hard blocks
>Hard block size: 512 bytes
>Max_retries: 0 Split: yes Truncate: no
>
>Press Ctrl-C to interrupt
>Initial status (read from logfile)
>rescued: 7222 MB, errsize: 914 kB, errors: 5
>Current status
>rescued: 19471 MB, errsize: 914 kB, current rate: 3080 kB/s
> ipos: 19472 MB, errors: 5, average rate: 3420 kB/s
> opos: 19472 MB
>Copying data…

Ok, I know that looks… marginally allright and sort of depressing at the same time. It’s copying the data directly from the drive at the block level (bypassing the filesystem) and dumping what it finds into a file called MyVolImage.dmg.

What you don’t see is that periodically the drive just hangs/locks (as failing drives are wont to do), which means I need to control-c on ddrescue, shut down the laptop (which is in target disk mode), wait a bit, turn it back on (with T held down, for target disk mode), re-attach it to my G5 (where this is all running), and then restart ddrescue. Well, restart is the wrong word — continue. Remember that log I spoke about.

So far we’ve hit about 5 (as you can see) non-recoverable drive errors in 20 or so GB. It’s a pain in the ass, but if I have to experience 4x as many on the path to getting these pictures (if nothing else) off the drive, it will be worth it.

There we are for the moment - we are in scanning mode. ddrescue is churning away. Stay tuned.

and, if this works out, i’ll post all the honeymoon picts to the site. promise.

[1] total f****ng data loss
[2] and, in parallel once that’s done, I want to take the powerbook to the apple store and have a genius replace the drive so I can get to the business of getting the machine operational again

So, the MacBook Pro 17″ hardware gen 1 arrived today. Although it has already been used long enough for an I.T. Guy[0] to install OS and a few apps, there are no visible signs of heat-related warping, charring or exploding… yet.

I think this is probably the 1,024th web site to do the “oooh, look at my new MacBook!” thing…

Things… seem to be in order. No visible warping. Nothing on fire.

Note the absence of a charred stump at the wrist on my left arm…

Note the same on my right arm. Some bloating, but not related to MBP heat issues.

Things seem squared away. This laptop will never be this clean again, so it’s another good reason I took this picture: memories.

So, at the end of phase one, I can state:
1. The MacBook Pro was not on fire when it arrived.
2. There was no visible heat-related warping when it arrived.
3. I had more or less two functioning hands when it arrived.

We will stick with this story as long as we have to.

tbc.

[0] The CIO of my company, actually, who is a huge nerd and a Mac weenie in addition to CIO.

I’ve owned a number of first-generation Apple products in 21 years, and plan to own many more in years to come. that’s how i roll. in other words, i am extremely reckless and stupid when it comes to that sort of thing.

Assuming the MacBook Pro 17″ currently en route to my home office doesn’t burst, spray battery acid or otherwise cause third degree burns and a charred nub where my credit card-swiping hand was. For certainly the negative experience would likely not drive me away from Apple, but rather drive me towards learning to live a life devoid of thumbs.

A short list of charges:

Mac IIsi c1991 This Mac sort of just sucked. It was underpowered for its time, the internal audio was constantly failing, and was a pain to take apart, which fortunately I rarely had to do since there were few upgrade options other than RAM. It never failed completely, just failed to impress. But notably it did not throw off enough heat to blind / scorch / cook / vaporize anything. Then again, it was not on my lap while in use.

Why this Mac a “gen 1″, you ask? It was the first Mac in a sort of quasi-pizza box chassis that was neither the fx,cx/ci full-height monitorless workstation, nor the true pizzabox style of the Centrix 610 / PowerMac 6100. I think the LC (which was even crappier) was the only other model to share the form factor. I am a huge nerd.

Titanium Powerbook 15″ - c 2001 till future (on hiatus) You could hold it firmly like you’d hold a cafeteria tray, one hand on each horizontal side, and sort of twist[1] just a bit. And that was an uncomfortable feeling, followed by the other heavier, hurt-ier feeling of the battery pack dropping out the bottom of the unit like the Marine drop ship in Aliens. 24 missions, simulated. 2 combat drops, including this one. And landing on your foot. No spraying battery acid, though… at least not for me.

One night I was drunk at my friend’s house, and I opened up the TiBook shell way too quickly, instantly decapitating the monitor from its way too-weak latches back to the main body. I screamed for about a half hour straight the same way b.spears might had she just performed the same action on her child, and then I stayed medicated for a week as said friend, who was not in a state of constant panic, packaged the pieces up and sent them to some Mac experts in Cali to perform emergency surgery. I think I paid each party (friend Mike, and MacExperts) $500 for this activity.

She (Stella was, and is, her name; she was a diver but she was never down) came back from that journey (thank you brother Mike), but she just wasn’t the same. I had to treat her really gently, which meant I could no longer use the open laptop as a foot rest when sitting on a couch. When I configured the screen at certain angles, video would drop out, then I’d tweak the screen back and things were fine, but my mind’s eye was quite clear on the fact that some video signal/power cable was slowly being sawed off inside the connecting hinge. I could see the shoddy job the “experts” out west did with regards to tucking in and covering Stella’s wiry, braided lady business between the main CPU and the screen. I didn’t have the heart to tell her she’d be blind soon, so I didn’t. I just tool her into my bedroom, hooked her VGA port up to a relic (but perfectly-working) Apple Sony 21″ Flat Screen Tube. A new lease on visual life. She had a gig of RAM, she had Airport, she had 100Base-T to file servers, and she had a big brother external color screen and a willingness to fight and live. And she did not feel shame when I relegated her to bedroom media access center. I didn’t have to tell her it was mostly going to be about displaying p0rn, and she never complained. When I switched her off at night, the monitor and the tibook module went dark, and she was beautiful when she dreamed. Eventually the laptop’s screen (post-decapitation/re-union of screen and keyboard) blinked out a second time, and Stella knew she’d be running permanently through external video means from here on in. Maybe she considered it sort of like being on dialysis. Maybe more like having a colostomy bag. She didn’t complain. Then again, she was “it”, and it was a laptop. I hear the new ones are complaining, though.

For the last eight or so months I lived at that place, Stella was carefully packed up and tucked into my sock drawer level of the closet to rest. if the machine was going to participate in a miracle and start regrowing leads and synapses from motherboard to monitor, I could think of no richer, more maternal environment than to be surrounded by my sometimes sorted, always filthy, “white” gym socks that I wore with everything (formal, informal, sandals), for that was my impetuous personal style at the time.

When I moved out of that place last October, I was faced with a decision to make about Stella and her head-problem v. prolongued usefullness in another role, among a few other tech-will-she-stay-or-will-she-go issues. Stella, dead screen still attached, was light, and she didn’t take up much space. And she was strong, at 1GB RAM and 500GHz G4 processor. She could do …stuff… like search for aliens. And I watched The Deer Hunter (bittorrented) for the first time through her (driving the aforementioned 21″ outboard monitor). We weren’t giving up on the old girl — she’d come with us, be backed in a box between some summer clothing and comforters and stuff, kept soft and cozy and in a sort of suspended animation until we can do something about it… in the future, when Apple releases a product called iDoctor which is a robot that first kills all employees at the Genius Bar and then fixes, using nano-technology, your old computer… old Apple computer. So you can keep them with you, like your children. I wish Apple would hurry up. Meantime, Stella is packed in towels, in a box, in an attic. Far away. A sleeping giant.

In summary, some people probably think that drunkenly decapitating a laptop is not an Apple engineering problem per se, but they’d be wrong: it was a design flaw. Those hinges should have been the strongest part of the system, but they were the weakest[5]. Also, the thing was hotter than hell.

My blue and white G3 - 1998-2005 rip , Bucky (named for Buckminster Fuller), did not receive such a honored fate; I gutted the PCI cards (”What am I going to do with a SCSI card? We’ll address it later.”) and RAM, took an ice pick to the hard drives, and eased down the ramp into the dumpster, and had to goad two nagging guilt-driven realizations into getting close enough to each other to cancel out:

a) Bucky was too old / slow to do anything of modern worth. not to mention the jelly blue+white aesthetic was sort of so 1998. I guess it could have been a good target at a firing range (if packed with dynamite), but i don’t have the hardware and memberships/ready access to make that a practical approach.

b) to leave Bucky so gutted, but technically still usable, is like leaving a vampire on a ship at sea with no human crew, only rats to drink.[3] it was a disgrace. I loved the computer, and it got a lot done for me. I paid for it [2], it was paid for, and now this is happening: it’s on the edge of the dumpster/crusher sled, its sliding down, crash. the chassis is down there. i’m looking at the dumpster hole, and i can see the G3 chassis in there. i don’t believe it has any feelings about it’s fate, since the box doesn’t have a loaded OS or… electricity or consciousness of a soul. That doesn’t stop me from, momentarily, wondering how dirty I’d get if I jumped in the hole to retrieve it, or what it would feel like if, during said process, the crushing claw came down like something from that “Layla” montage from Goodfellas and cut me and my former computer in half. No, I just walked away. And told myself that computer served its purpose, I got the data off it i needed, destroyed that which I couldn’t, and we were done, and that next time I should buy a cheaper and less pretty computer, perhaps, so the eventual emotional issues present at system disposal aren’t so gut wrenching. Except I can’t; I’m an Apple user. This process is just going to continue and I need to grow (or find) a pair and move on.

So, to pause, my 17″ MacBook Pro is coming soon, and this is a machine that will mean some new things, good things. It means my wife Kelley will get my 17″ PowerBook (G4), which has a history of not exploding, to replace the G3 chicklet I got her (used; from friend Eric) for Xmas three years ago. This will be an appreciated step up for her, and I will find myself in the cutting-edge world of wielding this first-gen platform that can not only the operating system I need to primary productivity (OS X; duh), but any number of others that could come in handy (Windows, Linux…, VMware stuff?) to take my productivity to the stately pleasure dome of uber-productive.

It should be here this week. Given the goings on with exploding batteries and warp factors, I think I’m going to have to stop taking the Tylenol PM, start taking pictures, crack out the thermometer, and add some fact and opinion to the canon of this story: will my new MacBook Pro heat to hot-hot then orange then white-hot, warp, jump to warp speed, split and spray me with battery acid[4], like the Alien queen in Aliens?

Uh, I hope not, because I actually have work to do, and I like my eyes. Stay tuned. We’ll take this one step at a time. I’ll be posting other stories of first-gen Apple woe along the way. tbc.

[1] I’m not saying i’m doing this…
[2] I had probably just finished paying the Apple loan a week or two earlier. HOOT!
[3] It would also be like when Ripley ran into the cyborg in Alien III in the junk yard, and he’s “alive” but all messed up, so he begs her to shut him down, as that would be preferable to just sort of sitting there forever, rusting. That is an android with honor. Bishop, was he?
[4] Note: To my knowledge so far, I don’t think any Apple laptops in the new lines have actually sprayed acid or exploded. They all seem to have gotten the memo leaving that to Dell. For now. But we also know, from experience, that when the machines choose to rise up, they tend to all do so at once.
[5] This assertion is completely non-qualified, but sounds good.

I’ve reached the point where I won’t use more than one web browser on a regular basis, and that has led to some switching in the last year or so.

why? because i find the idea of running more than one app that does the same thing, due to one having some feature/support the other one doesn’t have, to be deeply offensive. given OS X’s profound appetite for memory[5], even moreso.

I’m assuming each step of this switch is driven in part by JavaScript being great/marginal/incomplete on various platforms, but it’s not in my nature to know precisely why I’m making the move, just whether I’ve stopped moving, or not.

In the age of del.icio.us and outsourcing all of my mail and calender functions to Google, moving around between browsers isn’t such a big deal… except for the fact that I need to keep doing it.

What I’d ideally like to be using: Safari
Because: Integrated RSS, fast, the shiny Apple logo on it, et al.
But it doesn’t: Work with Gcal

I also wouldn’t mind: Camino
Because: It puts Safari’s speed/crack-gnomes to shame, imo. It’s very fast and very basic.
But it doesn’t: Support job’s web portal.

What I am using: Firefox
Because: It works with g*, my bank, my preferred pr0n sites, and now my company’s web/collab/community portal
But it doesn’t: Respond very fast. Feels as bloated as I am.
Forces me to: Use Google Lab’s G-reader or whatever it’s called for news, which isn’t a bad thing. g-readermachino’s sharing functions need some work.

We’ll see how many more shifts I make before 10.5.

[5] Ok… all applications, on all OSes, are hungry for memory.

New Google function that searches the full text of books, then links to where you can discuss/buy them. taking the next step to one-click ebook purchase = the Way.

I knew there was only one challenge I could throw it to test book.googleplex’s merit. Was glad to see it answered correctly within the top five…

I’ve been getting some of this recently, in the last few days:

Coupled with the periodic “Whoops! I can’t send your mail right now! Try again shortly!” dialogue.[0]

I won’t say I’m getting it a lot, but the fact that I’m getting it at all (since I’ve never experienced anything even remotely resembling lack of 100% availability from the Google apps I use[1]) is notable, although I don’t know what it means.

[0] I realize this assertion would be more credible if I had a screenshot of said dialogue.
[1] gmail, search, cal, spreadsheet[2], newsreader.
[2] 24×7, I’m using spreadsheet.

update