Back Up

I just spent all day fighting a power outage that happened in our colocation facility. We managed to get all the machines back up and running correctly, except for one. The one that was just going on 1000 days of uninterrupted uptime, by the way, spoiled by Abovenet/DataPipe's interruptible Uninterruptible Power Supplies.

We lost a disk and some RAM from that system, and /usr/local/bin disappeared, and... it's a mess, pretty close to destroyed. The hero of the day is Allen, a friend of the company, who made a very long drive down to San Jose to help us out of a tough spot.

Anyway we did have backups of the data, I have moved the web site over to another machine, and the couple of mail accounts that are still stuck on there will be moved someplace else tomorrow, and then we can abandon that heap of junk to Abovenet/DataPipe when I abandon their facility sometime in the near future.

So that is a somewhat happy story, despite the loss of one day of my life. Here is what happens when you don't have good backups:

Business magazine fails to heed its own tech advice

NEW YORK: Business 2.0, the technology-aware magazine published by Time, periodically reminds readers of the importance of backing up computer files. A 2003 article likened backups to flossing - everyone knows it's important, but few devote enough thought or energy to it.

Last week, Business 2.0 got caught forgetting to floss.

On the night of Monday, April 23, the magazine's editorial system crashed, wiping out all the work that had been done for its June issue. The backup server failed to back up.

(International Herald Tribune)

Mysterious Linux boot message

paride: aten registered as protocol 0

I knew it! I knew it!

A campaign to expose the truth of 4/29

http://www.429truth.com/

Ah, that explains it

Wednesday One-Liners No Function Beer Good Without

Belligerent wino: I am the government!

--Caton Ave, Brooklyn

via Overheard in New York, Apr 25, 2007

The Western Syndicate's Foray into Linguistics

The Hyperactive Voice: An Anthropological Linguistic Study of the Oboioboioboiwikantsitstil (The Speculative Grammarian)

It is Too Early

I have to agree with the Anchoress. It is too early to talk about a Presidential election that is two years off. I think it is unhealthy for the republic to be in a permanent election campaign.

I could get into politics this way

Even Unopposed, Candidate Gets No Votes
MISSOURI CITY, Mo. (AP) - Joe Selle didn't exactly get voted out office this week, but he wasn't re-elected, either.
Selle, who was running unopposed for City Council, didn't get any votes at all. Not even one from himself.(more)

Cow

Hamburgers, That's How
Non-native presenting for speech class: Everyone has cows in their life. Cows at home. Cows at work. Cows in our families. Cows can take over everything. But how do we get rid of the cows?
Teacher: Chaos. It's pronounced 'chaos.'

Truman College
Chicago, Illinois

via Overheard Everywhere, Apr 4, 2007

But how do you fit the US inside the shrinkwrap?

US Constitution version 2.0 (InfoWorld)

America's Financial Founder

Another good article up on Supply-Side Forum, this one about Alexander Hamilton.

My favorite quote is:

The end of fighting was only the beginning of the struggle of the new country, faced with a worthless currency and dismal credit rating. John Witherspoon, President of the College of New Jersey, later Princeton, and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, described it well: “For two or three years we constantly saw and were informed of creditors running away from their debtors, and the debtors pursuing them in triumph, and paying them without mercy.”