Now listen to this.... Dangerously and accomplices dressed as nuns, driving a sedan covered with... you'll love this, duckies and bunnies.

I had a client who called me at 2AM to ask for assistance in restoring his billing database. I showed up and asked where the backup files where. He pointed me at the directory where hundreds of "dbname_fullbackup_yyyymmdd.dat" files were nicely lined up, timestamps and file names in complete agreement.

The only problem was, every file was exactly 0 bytes long. Something in their backup script was broken, and it basically just created the file and then bailed with a "success! database backed up!" message.

The client was super happy with his high-performance backup solution. It saved him HOURS of time compared to the old solution that made him wait forever to complete.

I think they lost something like $300K in billing (thankfully, the order-taking database wasn't broken, and they were able to reconstitute the rest of the billing with a little help from honest customers. Otherwise, it would have run to the millions of dollars lost.)

I mean, who would know better, right?

And "holm" in Danish is a suffix roughly denoting "small or low lying island." Other examples from the Copenhagen area are Gammelholm, Slotsholm, Holmen, etc. The other common Danish word for island is "ø" (e.g. Refshaleøen). Note that the "en" in some of those names is how Danish handles direct articles. "The island" is "øen" as opposed to "an island" which is "en ø."

So the developers could have chosen "Lynetteøen" if they had really wanted to. But it sounds stupid and probably violates some other Danish word construction rule that I don't know because I'm not actually Danish and probably got all of the rest of this explanation wrong anyway.

Could easily ensure that that rocket delivers 100 tons of supplies to a burning heap of slag. It's not like you can distract a heat-seeker with chaff when you're tossing gazillion-degree rocket exhaust out your tuchas. If you're delivering cargo "anywhere in the world," you have to remember that a lot of "anywhere" doesn't want you delivering cargo.

In my favorite edition of "Pick the Lowest Bidder and See What Happens!" we contracted to move our classified data center from the Washington Navy Yard down to the Naval Information Warfare Center Atlantic. Some no-name company put in the lowest bid, despite zero experience with large-scale transportation of electronic equipment. I think they might have moved a few individual servers at some point in their past, but that was it.

They showed up at the data center with a bunch of dudes and refrigerator hand-trucks. They didn't take the servers out of the (first) rack. They just walked up, strapped it into a hand-truck, and started rolling away. And then they came to the three-step staircase down from the data center's raised flooring. Results were predictable.

One of the data center guys said he almost tried to "catch" the rack as it started to fall, but realized he would probably end up dead. So he just watched in horror as four state of the art (for the time) servers, 120TB of HDDs in RAID chassis, and assorted 40GB switches, routers, and patch panels tumbled to the floor.

We spent years playing the "blame game." The various insurers all agreed that it was a tragedy- just not THEIR tragedy. IIRC, the small moving company ended up bankrupt. I think we settled for some token compensation just so that we could get the servers up and running.

Surprisingly, the rack mostly survived. We lost a few disk drives, and it was hard doing the re-cabling at the new datacenter because the rack was deformed in four dimensions (the usual three, plus it had been torqued along its longitudinal axis). Pulling a server out of it was an exercise in creative geometry. You'd yank back, and little ball bearings would fly out of the rails and roll down into the cracks in the raised floor, never to be seen again.

But we actually did manage to get the cluster going. The mfr of the equipment did a hardware recertification, made sure all the PCBs were in their slot, all internal cabling was attached, etc. It never ran quite right after that, though. We had tons of "mystery errors" and spent more time restoring from backups than we did actually using the system (or at least it seemed that way to the poor schmuck- me- stuck with maintaining it).

With Folded Hands, by Clifford D. Simak comes to mind.

That might change due to the increasing remote work adoption. When I had to go back and forth between home and work, a laptop was idea. Now that a lot of people are permanent work-from-home, that mobility isn't as important as it was. I never open the clamshell on my laptop these days.

On the other hand, with a lot of work being done in the cloud, a giant honking desktop PC isn't as important either.

Where I see it going in the next few years is something in a mini-PC form factor. Enough power to do some of your work on-the-box, but not so much that your CPU is stuck on 99% idle 24x7. Some companies could go to a full thin client, with most of the work being done on virtual remote desktops.

The good news is that there are options, even within specific vendors' offerings. There's no need for a one-size-fits-all solution.

That'll do(pig);

I sort of recall that one of the cool things about the Wankel was that you could stack several of them together on the same crankshaft. With the airflow coming in from and out of the faces of the disc, it doesn't look possible with this configuration. You might be able to cook up some manifold arrangement where there's an inflow and outflow disc on either side of the power disc, but that ends up making the engine three times as long, mitigating any advantage. You COULD put two together, with inflow coming from their exteriors and a common outflow (or vice versa) for a slightly smaller "length penalty."

Those who paraphrase others' quotes with fancy French terms to negate them deserve neither quotes nor fancy French terms

Now all I need is to plant an elacca wood orchard.

I realize you're joking, but sadly they are likely to become the control subjects. I predict that the mask deniers will also refuse to be vaccinated, either because they believe the virus is a hoax or they will believe the inevitable bizarre stories and conspiracy theories that will arise about the vaccine.

These people have been manipulated to such a degree that they are incapable of forming rational judgements. Hatred and ridicule are the easy responses, but I feel like we have an obligation to keep fighting no matter how fixed their fears and ignorance are. Regardless of their faults, they still deserve to be treated as human beings. "Letting Darwin sort things out" is not an ethical option.

Yes. WFH is a lot more efficient in a lot of ways. But for me, it's lonely and it sucks. Videoconferencing and online calls help, but they're not nearly as satisfying. Body language and other non-verbal forms of communication don't quite make it through the cat5e cable.

This isn't my first virtual rodeo. I was 100% WFH for seven years at my last job. When that employer went under, I intentionally sought out others who said that they did not plan on supporting full time virtual work.

The psychological toll of being on my own all day with no human interaction was just too much to take. It was debilitating. I felt disconnected from everything. In seven years, I met exactly eleven people I worked with. I never even met my manager at all! To be brutally honest, it sucked. There was no motivation to excel- who am I measuring myself against? There was no sense of shared accomplishment- who am I sharing them with? If there was someone I only interacted with infrequently, I tended to forget about them entirely.

When I got the job I'm in and settled down in my new office, it was just so hygge. People. Actual people! I remember telling someone that it must be the same way convicts feel after being released from solitary confinement.

I'm looking forward to when we can go back to our office. Some people have decided that they never want to. I'm cool with that, but for me it will be a relief.

I think those people never developed the association of the sensual aspect of books to the literary aspects of books. For me, books mean "a rainy day sitting in the bay window reading Lord of the Rings while Mom makes hot cocoa in the kitchen." Hearing the pages as they turn. Feeling that incredible sense of disappointment when you realize that the width of pages read has greatly exceeded the width of pages unread. Looking at shelf after shelf in my house covered with old friends. Knowing that the more battered and bedraggled the spine is, the better the book. Thinking "maybe" when I see a title I remember liking but haven't read in years- but knowing I'll probably nurse a favorite with pages falling out through one more read.

And we books as a means of communication, at least in our family. I love seeing margin notes my Mom (long since passed away) left for me when I was a kid- I have a copy of A Wrinkle in Time where she wrote "I think you'll love this book. You remind me of Calvin" on the front page. Sure, you can leave an annotation in an ebook, but it conveys with the reader not the book itself, usually.

Maybe there's a new generation who now equates the feeling of aluminum and glass slipping out of your hand as you turn pages with a flip or your thumb with the pleasure they get from diving into stories and living new adventures. And I suppose that's OK. But I feel enormously sad for people who don't understand that reading is more than just streaming words off a page, electronic or otherwise. From what I've seen, most of us who do understand that also understand that an e-reader only offers a very small fraction of the total experience.