Posts Tagged ‘failure’

Case Study for Geographic Separation

Monday, September 26th, 2011

In one of those coincidences that make you wonder, I was just the other day discussing with a friend, how having a duplicate of all my music and photos at work didn’t do much for proper disaster-recovery-style-off-site-backup, since the two locations are less than 100 yards apart, and any disaster likely to physically destroy my home would destroy work as well….and Sunday, just after the cable-man came and got me 90% up and running, the power went down in my neighborhood, killing machines at both locations. Thankfully, everything is coming back online without issue, so far.

It occurs to me, I now know for certain that you can power off the scanner before the PC is done post-processing.

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Ginne Mae recommends Wamu

Monday, May 2nd, 2011

I find it amusing in a depressing sort of way, that Ginne Mae, the government mortgage insurance program, still recommends Washington Mutual as a lender for the Seattle area. You’ve got to wonder at just how much effort they put into doing the hard parts of their job, when they fail so publicly at a simple part of their job, like only listing companies that actually exist.

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G1 failure mode

Tuesday, April 12th, 2011

Sigh, boy am I wishing for the iPhone’s plug-and-play backup and restore system.

Before lunch today, my G1 had been running slower and slower as of late, taking literal minutes between closing an app and fully displaying the home screen, so I shut down the phone.

When I started the phone back up, it didn’t seem to be acting much better, if not worse. Then I noticed that the home key had stopped working completely, and the menu displayed on a long press of the hang-up key only showed “power off”, completely missing the options for silent and airplane modes. What’s more, mounting the SD card caused the phone to play a ringtone until the phone was shutdown again. Googling around suggests the only fix is to reset the phone to factory condition and reload all your apps/contacts/etc.

So, I did the reset, said ‘yes’ to all the ‘destroy your data’ prompts, and sure enough, once it rebooted, the phone was working better, albeit without anything on it. And of course Namco isn’t giving away pac-man anymore, asking $4.99 for what used to be free.

Having a headache from the near constant sneezing fits I’ve been having today isn’t helping my mood any.

UPDATE: ARGH squared. Trying to re-install apps, started with Google Voice, the phone just reset itself.

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AIX uh-oh

Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

One of the AIX boxes wasn’t responding to status checks this morning via STAF. I’ve had problems with people shutting down the wrong slice on the AIX shared hardware server, so that’s my first assumption, but the box is telnetable still, so that’s not it.
First thing I notice is how slow my telnet session is to respond. I do a “netstat -a”, and get a bus error (core dump). Well that’s not good. “df -k” doesn’t show anything obvious; what should be mounted is listed as so. Hrm. “fsck -fy” fails with “Unable to read superblock (TERMINATED)”, and “errpt -a” gives back “-bash: /usr/bin/errpt: There is an input or output error.”

Sounds like a hardware failure. Here’s hoping it’s only something throwaway like /tmp, but I’m not holding my breath since it’s probably all the same physical disk slice underneath.

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The eMusic party is finally over

Wednesday, October 13th, 2010

With the addition of UMG, eMusic draws their life as the alternative-little-guy-tries-to-be-good to an end.  Gone are the simple to use credit-per-track subscription models.  In their place is a credit-as-currency-that-you-can-lose model.  It certainly places them in an odd position.  Their value differentiation is gone.  There’s no benefit to being a subscriber to emusic; you’re better off spending your money as you want to via amazon’s mp3 store.  There’s nothing that emusic has exclusive control over, and now they aren’t any cheaper.  I put my account on a 90 day hold; hopefully before the 90 days is up, their revenue stream will have suffered enough that they decide to ditch UMG altogether, and go back to indie-land where they can thrive.  Rhapsody still rocks.

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Lucky 4th

Sunday, July 4th, 2010

When the “check engine” light came on just as I was getting the Beetle to work, I was a little annoyed, but figured, hey, I’ve got the scooter as backup.

Then it started raining.

Thankfully, it’s stopped raining in time for the fireworks (pics uploading), and once the traffic is gone, the streets are dry enough to scooter home.  I don’t have my long-johns at work, will have to get out the scooter-skirt, lest my legs freeze.

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Uncovertable TXTs?

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009

A new kindle curiosity today.  I have some .txt files that an author put up on his website, of some of his classic short stories, for free.  I’ve been slowly kindleizing them, and ran into one today that Amazon’s online converter choked on.  Bringing the file up in UltraEdit showed nothing immediately obvious, so I try resaving as a UTF-8 only txt, still no joy.  Bring it up in MS-Word and save as a doc, and now everything is happy.  Someday when I have nothing better to do, I’ll start chopping up the original txt file, till I find the smallest subset that amazon will choke on, figure out what it doesn’t like.

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They Shoot Hard Drives, Don’t They?

Monday, December 14th, 2009

I’ve been getting a blue-screen warning of hard drive failure about once a week, but the box kept soldiering on, so I put off swapping out the HD.  Last week, a new laptop HD was on my shopping list, but I forgot the list at home, and didn’t get one.

Tonight, it finally bit the permanent big one.  Lucky me, I had a spare laptop HD, so I just have to reinstall an OS and essential apps.  It is a little odd to be replacing a drive from 2005, with a drive from 2000….that made a noise if I turned it on it’s side.  eh, it’s not an important box.

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dead xbox 360

Friday, October 9th, 2009

I went to watch Victor/Victoria tonight, and the xbox died before the title screen came up.

At first I thought it might just be the HD DVD drive, but no, it’s all dead =(

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Grrrr HTC G1 battery woes

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

Well under the 1 year mark, and my G1 battery has gone kapput. You can try to call me, and I might be near an outlet and plugged in, but don’t count on it.

woo hoo technology =p

UPDATE:  Bought a new, OEM, battery at the tmobile store (way overpriced, but I wanted my phone to be working again now, silly me), and the phone refuses to charge it too,  so that was a big waste of time.

UPDATE2:  Just noticed, the user manual doesn’t mention the orange LED, only the green and red.  Strange.

UPDATE3:  t-mobile customer service rocks.  they are 2-daying me a replacement phone, no major grief, and refunded the new battery that didn’t help.  HTC, on the other hand, makes a crap phone it seems.

UPDATE4: so, replacement phone came, and it won’t charge the old battery now…sigh.

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