nobody asked…

My previous post wherein I ranted and rambled about Dreamhost’s nightmares and their effect on my emotional stability and psychological well being, also mentioned another item that has of late diminished my quality blogging time. That is, the discord in my integrated aft cushioning device … the pain in my ass…

Like everything else in my life that has deviated from script in the last couple of months, this all started with the move of my office, which is now referred to as simply, Th’ Move. Somehow Th’ Move had resulted in an extra high-back executive-style chair which appeared to be better and more comfortable than the one I was using here at BlogCentral. So I did the natural thing — confiscated it for long hours of sitting here writing, editing, cursing, reading, sneering, snoring, and commenting. Turns out that was a mistake, the one mistake that I allow myownself each year. Geez … it’s still July and I’ve already used up my mistake. Anyway, I returned that chair to the source from whence it cameth and swapped for another. This one was most comfortable, having been with me as my orginal office chair since the mid-80’s. Over the years of punishing use, it had molded itself to my arse perfectly. The controls had all been tweaked for the right height, tilt tension and range, and swivel motion, so that it required nothing but the sitting. Looked like the devil, with an ugly brown fabric upholstery that was worn and pilled from years of use, but just right for BlogCentral where nobody sees it anyway.

So there I am one evening, checking the transactions of global impact, when Roomie makes a rare visit to my hide-away nest. She plopped down in our puppy’s favorite wicker chair as if to announce “I am here and I want your attention. Now!” I shifted my attention from the screen, dropped my mouse, and swivelled toward her for conversation. It quickly became obvious that this was more than a 30 second commercial break, so I leaned back to get comfortable. And that’s when it happened…

SNAP… CLUNK… echoed around BlogCentral as some part of the complicated adjusting mechanism under the chair decided it had had quite enough abuse from the 200 pound toad perched comfortably above in the bucket. It all happened so quickly … I’m not sure if I actually went all the way back and onto the floor, or it just felt that way. Two things are certain: the damn chair no longer wanted me, and the next sound I remember after the SNAP and CLUNK was Roomie laughing her ass off as I tried to recover from the spill, arms and legs flailing, hands grabbing at pieces of air… In Pittsburgh they have an appropriate description for that maneuver … ass over tin cups.

That old scumbag of a chair got its due a couple of days later as the trash men threw it into the compactor truck and made unrecognizeable metal, plastic and cloth garbage of it. Meantime, I’m sitting on a hard wooden chair which is quite unforgiving, regardless of how many cushions I’ve tried. Therefore, blog sitting for more than a few minutes at a time is out of the question. As soon as time permits, I must get to the chair store and find another as comfortable and long lasting as the old reliable that just kicked me in the ass.

My loyal readers (both of them) may have noticed that my volume and frequency of output has decreased recently. That happens as men age… What? Oh… yeah… right… I’m supposed to be talking about blogging. Anyway, while I owe no explanation, it might do me good to shoot off about this.

When I decided to start blogging in early 2005, I did some serious research and analysis of hosting providers. Of the many available, DreamHost kept bubbling to the top of the heap. Their pricing is excellent and they deliver a lot of bang for the buck in terms of bandwidth, storage, WordPress savvy folks and services, and number of domains supported in their various plans. That last one is important since collectively, Roomie and I have 6, or is it 8, and still growing. The other kicker, and perhaps the deciding factor, was their uptime, or lack of downtime. The stats I found and the people I listened to, all pointed to DreamHost being one of the most stable, highestest availability, hosting companies on the planet. And, indeed, my first year of experience with them proved that to be so true that I never even thought about it.

Then everything changed. Over the past couple of months, DreamHost has delivered many outages, high levels of instability and unavailablity, many excuses matched only by the number of apologies. They have had power grid problems, server failures, hard drive crashes, router insanity, and switch deaths. That last one is truly amazing, since switches never hardly ever fail. But all this stuff interacts, cascades, takes its neighbor out as it goes down. I know. I understand. I’m in the business. I’ve seen it happen. Except for the switches…

Ya gotta feel sorry for their techies. They have worked ’round the clock for days and nights on end, only to get it all patched up and 2 days later start all over again. Living on stale coffee, Jolt Cola, Mountain Dew, M&Ms, chips, and cold pizza … while getting only short, fitful, catnaps on the well worn office sofa (if lucky) or the floor (if not) … Over time, all of this conspires to morph the techies into unkempt, ill-tempered, trouble-shooting robots with a couple of fried circuits themselves. Robots experiencing excessive and frequent evacuation from all the junk food, caffeine and sugar.

So, if you’ve wondered if Winston had packed up and left town when you have seen the “Server Not Found” message, now you know. It’ll take more than DreamHost’s nightmares to get rid of moi. In addition to the original deciding factors enumerated above, I also preferred a host with facilities on US soil, and DreamHost is. A bonus I did not know about at the time, and which few if any other hosting companies offer, is an offsite status page. This is their network status, open for the world to see, and updated frequently during major burps as we have seen lately. And as already mentioned, this page is located offsite, on a server at a remote location not likely to be affected by network or external issues of concern at their main server farm. Reading a few sequential or random entries is like reliving your worst nightmares.

By now, it seems that DreamHost has replaced almost every major component, and many of the minor ones. With so much of their infrastructure replaced, does that mean their customers can expect to experience improved stability and uptime? One can hope so, and for those inclined to pray for divine intervention by the Big Techie Dude upstairs, now would be an appropriate time to do so. I know nothing of DreamHost’s financial situation, but cannot help but wonder how badly all this sudden expense might have wounded the company.

The title also mentions pain in my integrated aft cushioning device, but my rattling on about DreamHost’s nightmares has taken longer than anticipated, so the arse agony will have to wait for the next session … as soon as I get over sitting this long for this part…

TECH SUPPORT: Good morning. How may I help you?

CUSTOMER: I’m trying to write my first email.

TECH SUPPORT: OK, and what seems to be the problem?

CUSTOMER: Well, I have the letter ‘a’ in the address, but how do I get the circle around it?

In all my reading travels, through books and reams and entire libraries, I had never seen this word or anything like it. Not even a clue as to it’s roots.

metoposcopy

\Met’-o-pos‘-co-py\, n. (Gr. ? observing the forehead; ? the forehead + ? to view: cf. F. m(’e)toposcopie.) The art of discovering the character of persons by their features, or the lines of the face.

In a previous post I had written about wrinkles, which are now expression lines if you want to be a part of the politically correct crowd. Perhaps to a metoposcopissed metoposcopist it makes more sense to call them expression lines, since they apparently study them to discover character traits. In my vast research spanning months, I found that apparently this field of study is the same as or very similar to physiognomy. Well… that certainly clears it up…

A few days back, I wrote of a problem with this blog not displaying correctly in Internet Explorer. Of course I used the opportunity to goad readers who are still stuck in the slow lane with IE to consider a better alternative browser, such as my favorite, Firefox.

After reviewing my template code, trying a different template, looking at everything under the sun that I knew to look at (that took 43 seconds), my safe fallback position engaged. WWFD? Just what the hell would Frank do? Screw it. Let ‘em eat cake. Or get Firefox. That flushed the entire matter out of my head. Aaahh… the refreshing breeze of a good catharsis… Knowing you are right, but even if you are wrong, it’s OK, because you chose to be, and that makes it right… Or something like that…

A few nights later I had a dream. And in that dream a vision came to me. A vision from hell sent by Lucifer hisownself. A vision in which I was falling, spiraling downward, being hooked and gouged and scraped and cut by the dreaded SQUARE BRACKETS… When I awoke, lathered in sweat, head spinning in panic, it came to me… “deja freaking vu”.

Once before I had visited this strange land where nothing is as it seems, where everything is out of kilter. I don’t even know what a kilter is, but it sounds good here, so I’ll stick with it. The answer back then, and the answer still, is the dreaded SQUARE BRACKETS. I like using them instead of the more pedestrian parentheses. But, alas, Word Press does not like them for some strange reason. A quick search of the last few postings uncovered a faux pas, a senior moment (which I am), a blonde moment (’cept I ain’t) in which I absently minded used the freaking SQUARE BRACKETS. Then a quick edit of that post to change the ^7y#&! freaking SQUARE BRACKETS, and my sidebar was back where it was supposed to be, conjoined up and down the spine with the main posting window.

All seems to be OK now in Firefox and IE, regardless of resolution. You Opera, Safari, and Netscape dudes and dudettes please report any problems you see so that I can once again declare to all the land: “Screw it!”

The gods are in their respective heavens. All is right with the world. Life is beautiful. Que sera, sera… Or as Chevy Chase would say, “Tierra del Fuego”…

(This post is dedicated to Joy who through her comments triggered my adrenalin and other glands into spontaneous action. Thanks, Joy!)

Andy Borrows blog is mis-named Older But No Wiser. Since I started blogging well over a year ago, one of the bright spots of my reads has been checking in on Andy and his wonderfully varied life. One never knew what he might be up to next — playing electric bass guitar in a stage production gig, hiking the highlands and bringing back beautifully composed and presented photographs to share, or taking a weekend road trip on his new motorcycle. Of course, all that and more is on top of a full schedule of having a career as a working stiff for a major British company, nurturing his dedication as a family man, and somehow finding time to blog along with us. Yes, Andy is getting older, is probably starting to feel the realizations and uncertainties of middle age (crisis?), but his marquee claim to be no wiser misses the target by a country mile kilometer.

My life in comparison is so one-dimensional and boring. But Andy, like many of us who have reached cruising speed in our mid-years, questions his accomplishments, laments his perceived failures to achieve certain dreams and goals, and is frequently found searching for more. His is one of the more unique voices I read, so transparently open and honest, showing his soft underbelly, his fears, yes, even his failures along with his accomplishments. What a wonderful place this could be if we could all allow ourselves to openly display our vulnerabilities as does Andy. Far too much effort is spent applying makeup to cover our blemishes, while simultaneously embellishing and highlighting what we perceive as our beauty marks. Not Andy…

Andy continues his open struggle with life, dreams, failures, and accomplishments in a series of posts, this one perhaps being the most definitive. Included in his response to comments on that post, and in the follow-on post, Andy shares these powerful words from George Bernard Shaw:

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no “brief candle” to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

…
This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

Thank you, Andy, for sharing yourself with us and for showing us how to be open and honest. Thank you for being a shining example of logging your life, day by day, event by event, for all of us to see and read and share and learn from. If you need to change something for you, just do it. You need change nothing for us.

You may have noticed problems here off and on over the past 3 or 4 days, up to and including a great white void when nothing would load. When I finally realized there were serious ongoing problems at Dreamhost (still one of the best hosting companies out there, IMHO), my priority became completion of a full backup. About 3 weeks had lapsed since my last complete backup, and who knows what drivel I’ve spewed forth in that 3 weeks that might strengthen, yea verily, even save, humanity in the future. Ergo, it must be preserved for all time…

This morning I awoke to happily find Dreamhost on smooth seas again and nobody asked… sitting up proud and straight. Checking Dreamhost’s Status Site, which resides on a different server at a remote site (what a great but simple idea — why don’t all ISPs and hosting companies provide such a useful tool?), I read the final chapter (hopefully) of this saga, and it does seem they have the problems under control with only a few cosmetic issues left to deal with. Here is the wrap-up posting from their Status Site. It reads like a techie’s worst nightmare…

Network problems resolved.
July 17, 2006 at 7:01 pm PST by jeremy

Today’s network problems were caused by not 1, not 2, not even 3, but 4 separate issues.

First, one of our older distribution switches decided to give up on life.
After replacing it with newer hardware, everything ran just fine for a couple hours. Then, it decided our network topology had changed (apparently due to a different default configuration since the old days when it was deployed), and started dropping a good percentage of traffic.
This issue also affected another switch that some of our file servers plug into, so customer data was unavailable to a good portion of our hosting servers.
Consequently, one of our more active mail servers tried to dump all of the backed up email all at once, saturating some of the network that it’s on.
Once these configuration issues were resolved, one of the network interface cards in our main firewall machine died, requiring a quick swap.

We’re still working on some of the after-effects, and there may be some slowness while things get caught up, but everything should be back to normal later tonight.

While I feel for all of Dreamhost’s customers (including me) whose sites were down or affected, I have the most sympathy and empathy for the group of techies, the server farmers, who worked day and night on these problems, catching a few winks here and there. Been there. Done that. No fun. They probably fought over who got to make the next supply run. These kind of problems require a lot of M&Ms (Peanut), coffee, Jolt Cola, Mountain Dew, Red Bull, pizza, etc.

Robert Brady, from his vantage point on a Japanese mountainside, speaks to us through the monkey chatter in his vehicle, Pure Land Mountain. In his current post, Genuine Growth, Robert delicately explores growth and aging, and assembles words in a beautiful fashion equalled by few.

I urge you to visit Robert’s mountainside and read his short but powerful post which has this as a cornerstone:

Every age has its laments and regrets of passage that, in a life well lived, are more than offset by the rewards that come unbidden with genuine growth. If there is no true growth - as within as without - then one must bear increasing sadness at loss of joy that should have been.

He concludes this walk through his garden with:

And if you’ve genuinely lived, when it comes time to die, you simply step forward into the light as you always have.

Thank you Robert Brady…

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field. — Niels Bohr

At my current rate of misteak-rendering, I will achieve expert status around 15:41 CDT on September 17th of this year… That’s just a SQWAG of course…

I learned yesterday that the right-side-bar of this blog has packed up and moved South, all the way to bottom. In Internet Explorer only. Highly intelligent users of Firefox are not affected. No idea about Opera, Netscape, Safari, or others. I have not used IE in so long that I did not know this had happened, or when, and as yet don’t know why. So, if you’re still stuck in the broke-down lane with Internet Explorer, scroll down, way down, to find my links, etc.

Could I interest you in a fresh installation of Firefox? IE is so old, so patched and fixed and fixed and patched, so holey, so vulnerable … it sucketh badly. Help yourself and get a new browser. It’s free, easy to install, faster, less vulnerable … and you’re gonna love tabs… Microsoft says they will catch up. Right. Catch up next year to where Firefox is this year. But it seems the Mozilla dudes are not sitting still with Firefox either. Who knows where they will be next year, other than still way out in front of Billy Gates and the Redmond banditos…

One of my most enjoyable occasional reads, from which I always bring home a nugget, is The Blog of Henry David Thoreau. No, HDT did not have internet access when he was at Walden, but blogger Greg Perry delivers each day an excerpt from Thoreau’s Journal for that date, years varying. I was particularly captured by the beginning of Greg’s excerpt on July 5, which reads as follows, emphasis added…

Thoreau’s Journal: 05-Jul-1845
Saturday. Walden.—Yesterday I came here to live. My house makes me think of some mountain houses I have seen, which seemed to have a fresher auroral atmosphere about them, as I fancy of the halls of Olympus. I lodged at the house of a saw-miller last summer, on the Caatskill Mountains, high up as Pine Orchard, in the blueberry and raspberry region, where the quiet and cleanliness and coolness seemed to be all one,—which had their ambrosial character…

the quiet and cleanliness and coolness seemed to be all one — Such simplicity of language, elegance of ideas, and power of imagery … these are the identifying marks of Thoreau that I first came to know in my wide-eyed teen years. These are the marks by which I still identify and think of HDT, most especially his Walden years. For such a simple fellow, living remotely and apart as he did, Thoreau had, and still has, a powerful message with a remarkable impact. If only we will sit still and listen…

The loss of Michelle Goodrich (Mandarin Meg) on June 25 caused a stir in the blogging community, and rightfully so. Even those of us who never had the opportunity to develop a relationship with her were well aware of the service she provided to the community through her creativity, generosity, and ability to educate by example with such an efficiency of language. Unique among us, Michelle leaves us with warm memories and a chilly void. She will be remembered and missed…

A couple of days later, the infamous Rob Smith (Acidman) died suddenly and unexpectedly. Readers knew he was going downhill, but we had no idea how far he had slid, how close to the end of the road he was. Rob was unique in style and language. He described his daily offerings as “humorous observations, vitriolic rants and a ceaseless quest for adoration from people who don’t know me.” Rob too is missed and leaves a void that will not soon or easily be filled.

These unwelcome news items, coupled with recent events involving death and dying about which I have written here, triggered my thoughts once again. Several years have passed since reviewing my will, living will, final directive, etc., so it is time to drag those out of the safe and make sure they still properly convey my thoughts and wishes, and are still legal and valid. No problem…

But what of this new corner of my life. What if I unexpectedly expire or become incapacitated? Many of my virtual blog friends are as important to me as my real world flesh and blood amigos. We have all known bloggers who were posting regularly, perhaps we even had an email relationship, who just quit…suddenly, without notice or explanation. Poof…gone… Like me, you have probably wondered more than once if they died, had a tragic accident and were incapacitated, too busy to blog, house and computer destroyed by fire, hurricane, tornado, flood, earthquake, etc., or just highly offended and pissed off about something.

Realizing that it may be unavoidable in some circumstances (think Katrina), I do not want to vacate the blog landscape in that fashion. In both Michelle and Rob’s situations, the blogging community was made aware by family members. We are fortunate that they did so, and that is certainly a good approach. The more I have thought about it, the firmer I have become in my resolve to say adios myself, in my own weird words, with the lighthearted jocularity to which my blog friends have become accustomed. Polite and proper prose, punctuated in accordance with the Chicago Style Manual, just doesn’t cut it for me here in this forum with this readership.

So here’s what I’m thinking… I will go ahead now, or very soon, and pen my final woids to youse guys… my auto-obit and final thumbing my nose at the world for you to remember me by. Then I will instruct (and leave written instructions for) someone trustworthy on how to login to my blog’s WordPress Administration Panel and publish what I have already written. If said person wishes to expand on that post or add one of their own to explain the nature of my disappearance and how happy sad the family and friends are, that is fine. But if they do not post my final words, I will return and haunt them forever with supernaturally induced sudden diarrhea at the most inopportune times.

So… what do you think? Got other ideas? Don’t give a damn? Gotta better plan? Love to hear it.

Anyone who has heard or read George Will (Is there one so chaste amongst us?), and regardless of feelings about him or his political extrapolations, we probably can all agree on one thing: Will is a grand-master word merchant, up there in a class with very few others … only William F. Buckley, Jr. and Frank Paynter come to mind at the moment.

Now George has even outdone hisownself. In The Last Word column of the July 3, 2006, issue of Newsweek, he discusses the insipid fury of the Aug. 8 Democratic primary in Connecticut, a serious threat to Joe Lieberman’s long tenure in that state’s political landscape. Will describes the lack of interest and low-level turnout for summertime elections thusly:

Those most likely to vote in vacation season are disproportionately the ideologically incandescent and seriously annoyed — not Lieberman supporters.

Ideologically incandescent … Oh, how I wish I had said that! What a unique and interesting way to describe the loud minority who trumpet their beliefs, blared so often out of key, with so much glowing fervor.

And then he brings us back from that intellectual sojourn with a dip into the whimsical seriously annoyed.

Thank you, George Will, for the morning’s entertainment here on Independence Day, 2006.

(Editorial emphasis and interpretive remarks by the author with apologies to George Will if his ideas or intentions were in any way hijacked or corrupted.)

My previous post was a Robert Brault quote that I shagged from Peter (the other). The longer I bathed in those simple words that so well define who I am and who I strive to be, the more I realized I had no idea who Robert Brault was … or is. He has a pragmatic philosophical bent that I find most appealing, so I trekked off to Googleland to find him. Here are just a couple more of Brault’s one-liners that efficiently pack so much into so few words.

I value the friend who for me finds time on his calendar, but I cherish the friend who for me does not consult his calendar.
— Robert Brault

Today I bent the truth to be kind, and I have no regret, for I am far surer of what is kind than I am of what is true.
— Robert Brault