rickshangle.com

As you may or may not know, Kelley and I are getting hitched on Saturday.

There may not be any posts between now and, say, Monday or Tuesday. Or, there may be. Who can say? I’ll repeat: who can say?

See you on the flip side,
rds

rickshangle.com and a few other web sites I run out of one of my web services providers went down for the past few hours, but appears to be back up now… for now. I hope you survived your loss of knee-slappery / frippery / frippertronics with minimal long-term psychic damage… snort.

given what I do for a living (protect data, manage storage, make systems highly available; also- babble, stink up the joint), it would be the apex of hypocrisy if I went off on a rant re: this unplanned downtime, given that the extremely modest sum I pay annually for these services, versus the relatively broad menu of use-to-use options my provider offers. I don’t pay for five 9’s, so I don’t expect it. Honestly, I don’t pay for three 9’s, either… do I even pay for two? Is there any explicit service level agreement / contract in place between my provider and I? The fact that I don’t know offhand is as good as “no”, in terms of my expectations.

What was my point… oh yeah, found it: I feel like I pay a fair price for what I get (a user-friendly service with a lot of technical features, is up most of the time, and keeps me from having to be a round-the-clock system administrator).

However, what has changed with my provider recently is their level of response to inquiries re: outages et al. For the three outages I experienced prior to today, the chronology generally ran like this:

1. +0 minutes: I notice something’s wrong
2. +5 minutes: I determine it’s very likely not my application (ex. Wordpress) taking a giant dump (and it has on occasion)
3. +6 minutes: I contact the help desk with the problem, asking for status / assistance
4. +15 minutes: I’ve received a response with either said status, or acknowledgment that my inquiry was received, and a number of follow-on questions to help troubleshoot the issue (what I expect in terms of standard content for a help desk dialogue, in other words)
5. +30-45 minutes: I’m generally back online, and satisfied, with the issue resolved. Granted, most issues fitting under said hypothetical timeline are generally minor/minor to resolve (ex. a database got moved)

Contrast that with today’s experience, which is the first outage I’ve had since my provider has been touting their shift to “24×7″ service a few months back:

1. +0 min - I notice something’s wrong
2. +5 min - I determine, since it’s impacting a number of apps (different apps - not all Wordpress, for example, so the odds that a common exploit is being attacked are lower than they could be) in different domains
3. +6 minutes - I contact support describing the problem
4. +120 minutes (now) - my sites are back up, and I haven’t heard from the help desk.

Someone is clearly off making a sammich.

Everyone has bad days. As someone who worked help desk support for about four years, I know this. We’ll keep an eye on it. And at the end of the day… for $120 a year or whatever… how much can I complain?[1]

rds

[1] Terror rising at how much those sound like famous last words.

The “pictogram” approach was so wildly successful last time, we just need to burst forward with it. But the brief commentary:

Taylor, you blew it. I like you, though, and I will come see you with your bar band next time I’m in Alabama in a parallel universe.

Elliot, who is perhaps the biggest talent on the show, is in constant danger of ejection (I mean, it has to happen at some point, because he’s not going to win), but logged another stellar performance and punched out clean… for now.

With that said:

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rds

Commentary and brilliant graphic of Sun’s revised corporate plan for the post-McNealy era @ ars technica.

Just the strategy graphic, for those who are lazy/cool:

Jeremy Reimer / ars technica

rds

Note two small black dots dramatically differentiating the 17″ MacBook Pro rendering from prior models in the conceptual rendering.

Configured.

My current g1 PB 17″ appears to be going for about ~$1,800 on eBay.

Can’t do it… can’t do it. I should feel good about holding back, but also feel weak, like a kitten who is afraid to lock into the enormous power.

If I actually believed the 5x speed bump claims emanating from the ARDF (and that they applied to anything other than counting from 1 to 2^64), it’s quite possible I’d feel compelled. As-is… holding off.

rds

Update

I was full of crap - those eBay numbers I quoted were for like “buy me now” new G4 PowerBooks. The actual bidding range for used systems is mid/high sub-$1000.

r