Archiving my Twitter, Facebook and other social network activity
Remember, when you’re tempted to say, “Great, now what?” — DON’T!
After watching the very intense Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars, we came home, I flopped on the bed, and thought, “I’m tempted to stay here.” But no, I wanted to post a brief, spoiler-free review. Heh, heh, heh.
(Feel free to ignore this post — I just need to vent somewhere.)
Around 10:00, one of my co-workers asked me about an error message he was seeing every time he booted Windows. It looked related to yesterday’s JPEG security fix (yes, you can now get hacked/infected/etc. just by looking at an image using Microsoft software), so I went to Windows Update.
And then the pop-up ads started. There should not be any advertisements on Windows Update. Clearly something was wrong.
I spent the next 1½ hours removing adware from his computer. Even after removing the obvious bits through the control panel (some of which left pieces behind), Norton found 21 different pieces of adware, including a program whose sole purpose is to surreptitiously download and install new adware while no-one’s looking, and several programs that claim to block pop-ups, but actually generate them.
Wow. We just turned back on a website account for a customer whose domain was “hijacked” a year ago (IIRC he didn’t renew on time, and someone snatched it up). Apparently he gave up trying to get it back, because he asked us to set it up under a new domain name.
We hadn’t moved the files at all, so all we had to do was change the name in our config. (And fix an error in a CGI script that probably relates to a Perl upgrade, since it presumably worked before.) But the site…
Let me just say it was already old before he lost the domain name. It probably looked old in 1999. Everything’s centered, it’s got blink tags, animated GIFs, a clock and a Java-based music player.
But the thing that caught my attention was the “Netscape Now! 3.0” button.
(Netscape 3 came out in 1996. Windows 95 was still new, IE was barely usable at its own version 3, NCSA was still working on Mosaic and Netscape was still charging money for its browser.)
My boss and I just finished installing 1300 pounds of extra batteries for our server room’s UPS* units, more than doubling our previous backup coverage.
See, the power company has decided they need to cut power to our block for 8 hours tomorrow night in order to do work on the local grid. And here we were with only enough battery power for 2½-3 hours. (This was more than enough back in the era of rolling blackouts, since those only lasted an hour or so.) We can shut down everything on the inside network, no problem… but a five-hour outage for all the websites, email accounts, dialups, DSL accounts, etc. that we host is not something we want to be stuck with.
So we got more batteries.
We’ll still have to be here at least part of the time tomorrow night, keeping an eye on things, turning off internal systems to conserve power, etc. I can’t say I’m looking forward to that.
* That’s uninterruptable power supply, not united parcel service.
Hmmm… a co-worker has informed me that he just made hotel reservations for next year’s Comic Con (this year’s having ended yesterday)… and that some of the nearby hotels are already sold out!
alenxa and I pre-registered for next year’s convention yesterday (avoiding deadline issues and saving $50 over the at-the-door price for a full membership). It might be worth planning further ahead…
A bit of excitement at work today. There was a small electrical fire over the weekend. Fortunately someone was working on Saturday, noticed one of the servers wasn’t responding, went into the server room and saw the plug on a heavy-duty extension cord glowing slightly, with smoke coming out. He unplugged it from the wall, made sure it went out, then rearranged some power cords so he could get back to work.
We’ve bypassed the UPS involved until we can be absolutely sure that (a) it didn’t cause the short and (b) it wasn’t damaged. There’s charring on the outside of the plug where it was in contact with the extension cord, though nothing like what we found inside the other plug. The hot wire had burned clean through, leaving charcoal dust all over the inside of the plug. The cable and the circuit breaker are both rated for 20 amps, so the most likely explanation (since the UPS wasn’t belching flames) is that the cable was faulty – and an extension cord is a lot easier to replace than a 130-lb power supply!
alenxa and I were driving back from lunch when something reminded me of David Bowie’s “A Space Oddity.” This in turn reminded me of a previous conversation — with somebody — about a story or story idea I had read or thought of. The key issue here was the repeated “Major Tom” theme. There are at least the two songs, and I recall hearing that there is at least one more somewhere.
Anyway, the story idea was this: suppose there was some seriously traumatic event – maybe not 9/11 level, maybe more like Challenger, or any of several celebrities who died before their time – that everyone knew about, and everyone was affected by. Now suppose that all memories and records of this event disappeared. But it’s still sitting there, in the back of people’s minds, and every once in a while there’s a song, or a TV movie, or something about this event that no one remembers really happened.
Imagine “Candle in the Wind” without Marilyn Monroe, for instance. Or imagine that an early astronaut really did drift off into space to be lost, and no one remembers Major Tom except a few songwriters, and even they don’t realize they’re remembering his story and not making it up.
Has anyone read a story like this? If not, would anyone like to?