Airport Leprechauns
Just before the real summer hits and people start heading off to somewhere nice for their holidays, I thought I better give a little shout-out to the Airport Leprechauns on Flickr, which cheers me right up every time I look at it. If you want to join, just take a snap of yourself wearing a leprechaun hat or beard the next time you’re in the airport and and put it in the group!
Finally. #
How big is the iPhone anyway?
Engadget recently ran a story highlighting what a different hand-model can do for the perceived size of the iPhone. The results are pretty interesting. Here are the two images, with the iPhone set to the same size in both. Mouse over the image below to check it out.
A tenner says this will be on the next Beastie Boys album #
Happy Bloomsday!
STATELY, PLUMP BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
…
Oh, fuck it. Read the rest on Project Gutenberg.
I’ve never read Ulysses, and at this rate, I probably never will. Still though, as Sean Hughes says, “Great preface”.
Ireland: it seems to be going okay, like
The guy at 02:30 is my hero. Instead of renewing Dan and Becs, RTE should just give this guy a weekly show where he can sit in a comfy chair and dispense his words of comfort and wisdom.
all your eggs in one basket
They suffered a massive power failure today which meant that a large number of their customers’ sites were unavailable for around four hours. Right now, their status blog entry detailing this problem (and how the repairs are coming along) has 159 comments.
Most of these comments are of the frustrated-yet-understanding variety. A worrying number of them are terrifyingly puffed-up with their own sense of self-importance. And far too many are threatening to move their operations to another hosting provider.
Having worked as a system/network administrator for a while, I know exactly what Ed and the guys at Hosting365 are going through, so I sympathise completely. I’ve had those awful days where the worst thing that could possibly happen actually happens and you’ve got angry customers demanding a full report on how the problem happened, what steps you will be taking to fix the problem and how you will prevent this happening in the future while you’re focusing all of your efforts on just restoring a basic level of service. Horrible days, to be sure, but they have their uses.
To those people who are thinking of moving away from Hosting365 I say: stop. If I was using Hosting365, I would not switch to Blacknight now precisely because Blacknight haven’t suffered from something like this — yet. Whereas, I’ll bet you €100 that, after today, Hosting365 will be putting all of their attention into their reliability, focusing how to make sure that something like this never happens again.
And to those people that are complaining about their mission-critical services running on Hosting365, I say: well, I don’t know what to say without sounding rude. I’ll just say that if I was a reseller and it was my ass on the line, I’d make sure that my ass was covered. From a business perspective, a secondary server (from a different hosting company) is cheap as chips and worth its weight in gold when your primary server suffers from extended downtime.
This could be the start of something beautiful: bacon as a fabric. #
Fire on the metro
You know, it’s getting to the stage where I’ve got half a mind to rename this blog to “lowbrowcultureshocked“.
Today, I was up at the Irish College to get a mass card for an aunt who died recently. To get home, I decided to get the Metro at the Colosseum. Now, I should probably explain that there are two metro lines in Rome. Metro A has been recently revamped and now all the trains and most of the stations are pretty. Metro B, on the other hand, is dingy and ugly. All the trains are covered in graffiti outside and covered in piss and various other bodily fluids inside.
Colosseum is Metro B.
I’m in the station waiting for the Metro to arrive. It’s around lunchtime, so there’s not a lot of tourists leaving yet - they’re all inside the Colosseum, baking and sweating and wearing funny hats. The sign says there’s a train in three minutes. I drift back off into the dreamworld I go to when I’m wandering around Rome listening to my iPod (travel tip: this is the only way I have found to not constantly lose my shit at the lack of an orderly queuing system in Italy). Gradually, I start to smell smoke. I’m looking around, a couple of other people are sniffing too. But there’s no obvious fire, so no major panic yet. Then we get the buildup of wind that precedes a train coming down the line. Suddenly the train screams past as if it’s being chased by the devil himself. It’s totally dark except for the one carriage that is completely ablaze.
My mouth was still hanging open by the time the next train arrived. All the Italians shrugged as if this was entirely unremarkable and went back to wearing their giant sunglasses and looking like Hugo Boss models.
Mr T: The “T” in I.T.
So there you have it. Mr. T pities the fool who doesn’t use Hitachi data system virtualisation.
(?)
Failing Now.
Our Macbook had been crashing frequently over the past week or so. It would hang randomly when doing minor things, like copying a new program into the Applications folder. Sometimes it would take the computer two or three minutes to get itself together. Other times, it wouldn’t get itself together at all and a hard reboot was the only option.
Eventually, I took a look in Disk Utility. The hard drive was listed in red. It told me the disk was dying. I used smartmon to give me more information, and this is where I got the image at the top of this post - my “Reallocated Sector Count” was at 0, and my disk was “FAILING_NOW”. I’ll spare you the gory details of what this meant, but the shorthand version is “ABANDON SHIP! WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST!”
Copyright © 2006-2008 lowbrowculture • Buy the ticket, take the uh.. ride.