4AM rant

Shit happens.
This is perfectly normal, and depending on the size of the company your’re working for, it is the same everywhere — just the size of the fan and the maximum amount of the shitload change size.

If your job is for 15-people-ISP, it is safe to assume that while a broken network cable can be replaced as fast as everywhere, a fault in a critical under-10k euros network appliance can bring you on your knees (you have no money for real redundancy).
Working for big-big-cellular-phone-telco-$$$, you would also assume that the same fault can be managed easily, and/or that there is hardware redundancy everywhere, and that the real show-stoppers are much more rare. Well, you’re right — and this result comes obviously with a cost: more hardware, more planning, more tests, more procedures.

What escapes me is why BBCPT$$$ cannot manage people the same way it does with the services infrastructure. Having smart people working for you is cool. Smart people keep your business running, like reliable hardware does. But while a bunch of geeks can pull the rabbit out of the hat most of the time, dumbasses can’t find the hat.

What’s the value of a 100k euros DNS infrastructure when the people using it can’t /flushdns their cache or check which name servers they’re pointing to? (and by consequence wake me up at 4AM in the middle of a service migration?)

Don’t put monkey behind your keyboards. Or PEBKAC could be your next buzzword.

SGI elite

Courtesy of Simone, da qui

[…]
But the numbers are small. If the Mac community is dwarfed by the Microsoft horde, the number of SGI users amounts to a rounding error. Mac users may form a cult, but the SGI community is the tech equivalent of the pre-Reformation Moravian church — unknown, tiny and years ahead of its time.
[…]

“Ci si sente un po’ una elite dai… ”
Eggia`… :)

Chernobyl ride

Pochi giorni fa parlavo con un mio collega di questa ragazza russa, che sulla sua ZZR-1100 si era fatta un viaggetto nella zona ad alta radioattivita` successiva all’incidente dell ’86. Vidi le pagine qualche mese fa, le trovai inquietanti e nel contempo di grande fascino — come tutte le documentazioni di qualcosa di grande. Ora lo sta rifacendo, con una gita tra i bunker e le zone delle varie guerre che ci sono state dalle sue parti. Entrambi reportage un po’ naif, ma molto interessanti.

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