Author: Chill

Host Parasite

Chill Amusing, Clowns

For a while I worked at a hosting company. Sometimes as a side business, though, we did field installs for customers. Since I was one of the few people there who knew enough in disparate areas (solution design, security, hardware, networking, software, racking, cabling, etc.) I usually got picked to go to customer sites to set things up.

One of our major customers was a nightmare on the phone so I knew it’d be even worse in person. And sure enough when I arrived they were hovering over me, asking how long it was going to take and saying they were losing money while things were down (they had chosen the time for the migration). But after an hour or so I got everything racked, networked, set up, running and ready to get back into full operation1.

When it was all done the hoverer said, “I notice there’s only one server. I thought this would be a cluster. It’s not redundant this way.”

This customer had specifically said they did not want a cluster on multiple phone calls where I stressed this solution would not be redundant and that if enough items in the single server failed2 the virtualized machines hosted thereon would indeed crash harder than a 737 MAX.

So I said, “On our phones calls I noted the chosen solution would not be redundant and if you wanted something with more resiliency it would require two servers. You said this was too expensive and not to do it.”

“Oh. I thought your company would just provide it anyway. That’s poor customer service that they don’t,” the customer said angrily while sighing loudly. This “provide it anyway” would mean giving the customer about $10,000 worth of free equipment. Not even close to happening.

I didn’t really know what to say to that so I took the wiser path by saying nothing and got out of there as quickly as I could. When I made it back to HQ, I let my manager know about the exchange and closed the ticket out.

The customer wasn’t done with their carping, though they let the redundancy “issue” go. The next day they called claiming their new server was only running at 10Mbs. I knew that was impossible because the networking equipment we installed wouldn’t even negotiate a 10mbs connection (100Mbs and above only), so I remoted in to take a look. Somehow, they’d misread 10Gbs as 10Mbs. When I pointed this out they got very defensive and claimed it had said 10Mbs before.

Right.

Customers be crazy, man.

  1. What I did would’ve taken most people a full day, but I’d done some clever stuff in advance to reduce the setup time.
  2. It had dual power supplies, RAID 6, etc.

Chill Links

‘It was a terrible idea’: Air traffic controllers say recent issues at Newark are rooted in a plan from Trump’s first term.

Trump administration revokes Harvard’s ability to enroll international students.

New Bacteria Have Been Discovered on a Chinese Space Station.

Banning lab-grown meat is stupid. Like everything the know-nothing MAGA clowns are doing.

Japan and the Birth of Modern Shipbuilding. How Japan invented modern shipbuilding, and conquered the shipbuilding industry in the process.

Diseases are spreading. The CDC isn’t warning the public like it was months ago.

32 Bits That Changed Microprocessor Design. Bell Labs’ Bellmac-32 paved the way for today’s smartphone chips.

“Secret Mall Apartment,” a Protest for Place.

Felis

Chill Amusing

By the way, I scored 800/800 on the reading portion my SAT. Long ago.

And on the math portion I scored, “Are house cats supposed to sit for this test?” I think I knew how to do maybe one question on the math part and I’m pretty sure I got that one wrong too.

(Ob)Literate

Chill Regular-ass Post

College English majors can’t read.

That is incredibly sad. Obviously true as well. The depressing part is that Bleak House is not a particularly challenging text. Of the ~20,000 books or so I’ve read in my life, I’d say it’s in the bottom 30% of difficulty. I do remember that work, though, as I enjoyed it; I read that one over the summer after eighth grade in a couple of days even though it was as mentioned in the piece around a thousand pages long.

The truth is most people are mostly illiterate, even the “smart” people. And smartphones/social media have made it so much worse.

Chill Links

UnitedHealth secretly paid nursing homes to reduce hospital transfers.

Incredible shrinking clownfish beats the heat.

Brembo develops brakes with almost no brake dust and less wear.

Jupiter was formerly twice its current size and had a much stronger magnetic field, study says.

“Microsoft has simply given us no other option,” Signal says as it blocks Windows Recall.

Yellow hat revolt: Inside France’s rural rising.

Poland hits a wall trying to curb Big Pharma’s profits.

Flightful

Chill Killin' It

I’ve been to one of those places.

It was in Egypt, flying on the UH-1 Hueys they had there. The pilot said we were going to do something fun that day. After flying a long way out over the Sinai desert in the vast middle of absolutely nowhere, he set the chopper down. It was at least a hundred miles from any roads, any civilization, anything; we had not seen a camel or a house for 30 or 40 minutes. The area was bounded by mountains and there was no sign of any life.

As we stepped out of the cabin into the blistering heat the pilot said, “Congratulations, gentleman and lady1, you’re standing on ground it’s likely no human has ever stood on, and if so no one has been here for many thousands of years.”

Though it was hard, I am glad I joined the army and became a paratrooper. I got to see and do things that almost no one else ever gets the chance to experience.

  1. There was one woman with us.

Crawlers

Chill Annoying, Tech

Only people who didn’t know anything about anything thought that was true.

I personally — and I mean with my own funds — could build enough infrastructure to crawl 90%+ of the web every few days and store the metadata. It’s just not that much data. It’d take about $200,000 of gear and connectivity. That’d buy me a dozen petabytes of storage and a couple dozen 10Gb links. And that’s enough. The software is all open source.

Google’s moat has nothing to do with the ability to crawl or digest anything and more to do with their former search algo dominance.

Kashmir

Chill Music, Music Video, Video

This is not to take anything away from Sina. She’s great. An amazing drummer. But there’s never been a pure rock drummer like John Bonham. Perhaps Karen Carpenter. And…that’s about it.

That’s a great cover. And there’s nothing wrong with this, but she’s not Bonham. She’s a little too on top of the rhythm. Bonham dances with the rhythm, he plays with it and brings it where he needs it to be before you know it needs to go there. He’s behind the next note when that’s what makes sense and emphasizes or drags out a few phrases to make the music better. And, mostly, Sina doesn’t do any of that. Because what Bonham does can’t be imitated and probably cannot be taught.

Sina’s cover is technically perfect. But it’s also a bit shallow. It just doesn’t have the same soul.

Sina is better than almost any drummer who has ever lived. But when you’re playing against Bonham that simply does not matter.

Now compare Sina’s version with the original.

That hurried little fills in Kashmir are so great. How you learn to do something like that I cannot even begin to imagine.