Year: 2005

BALLOON MAN

I got Bill Morrison, The Balloon Man in the mail today. My mind is now blown.

Forty one-minute um things by this balloon-obsessed madman. Highly recommended if you like crazy music. He’s somewhere between lounge act, kids’ show, and street lunatic. Like a manic Ken Nordine who’s all about balloons, sort of.

If you can’t get one of the limited edition of 300 CDs, it should be available somewhere around on mp3, etc.

Today’s Bob Trout story

Brister was a famous drunk on Cape Cod. Not famous anywhere else, but famous enough for the Cape. He came into the seaman’s drinking spot and drank until he pissed himself. He was a regular. One night he was there, I was there, I was drinking gin until I saw blue spots. Saw a lot of stuff on other drugs, blue spots on gin. Anyway, Brister was falling down drunk and they said no more for you. So he left. Came back about 10 minutes later with a running chainsaw. Opens the door waving this chainsaw.

So he goes to the bar and starts sawing it in half with the chainsaw, bartender yelling “STOP STOP, WE’LL SERVE YA!”. So he stops, and goes out to put the chainsaw in his truck and passes out in the rain and sleet outside. Meanwhile there’s his setup sitting on the bar.

Anyway, one time we were out in the dunes working on this guy’s house. It was in the national preserve. His grandfather had a place there before it was a preserve so he could live there but as soon as the house rotted away, it’s over. No rebuilding, just get out. So we were there putting rebar and concrete and all kinds of shit in there to make it last. So you’ve been living on a sandbar in the Atlantic for the last 200 years? Enjoy, you dumb fuck. So we were done for the day, and drinking pretty hard, you know, winter on Cape Cod and construction. And we were way the fuck out there, you know you couldn’t get there easy. You had to go through a couple feet of salt water on a good day, no road, all washed out. We’re sitting there in this shack on a sand bar and BAM the door flies open and there’s Brister with three whores. How the fuck he got there with three streetwalkers in heels no one knows. HERE I AM BOYS and in he comes.

So he was a legendary Cape Cod drunk, like I said.

Les nonnes se sont rasé les sourcils, et se sont jetées dans un puits les unes des autres

Wikipedia just broke, the same way LJ did: power outage, plus MySQL/InnoDB. Two cheers for LAMP and no cheers to whomever hosted that thing.

What happened?

At about 14:15 PST some circuit breakers were tripped in the colocation facility where our servers are housed. Although the facility has a well-stocked generator, this took out power to places inside the facility, including the switch that connects us to the network and all our servers.
What’s wrong?

After some minutes, the switch and most of our machines had rebooted. Some of our servers required additional work to get up, and a few may still be sitting there dead but can be worked around.

The sticky point is the database servers, where all the important stuff is. Although we use MySQL’s transactional InnoDB tables, they can still sometimes be left in an unrecoverable state. Attempting to bring up the master database and one of the slaves immediately after the downtime showed corruption in parts of the database. We’re currently running full backups of the raw data on two other database slave servers prior to attempting recovery on them (recovery alters the data).

If these machines also can’t be recovered, we may have to restore from backup and replay log files which could take a while.

Is there an echo in here?

Whoopee! Another Meeting!

redmaenad decided that I didn’t have enough horror and revulsion in my life, so she gave me the print catalog for Trainers Warehouse, the place where asshole corporate trainers get all their stuff.

hr humor
Whoopee! Another Meeting! Video
Preempt the rolling eyes and yawns of a jaded group of learners with this surprise attack opener. Heavy eyelids will pop open when you call your training session to order with this hilarious video snippet by internationally acclaimed humorist and HR consultant Loretta Laroche. Using zany humor and funny props, she lampoons the reputation of the dreaded meeting — but what she’s really doing is helping you bond with your group and win you some good-guy points.
beginners bagWelcome bag for learners
It’s a Welcome Wagon for learners! Welcome participants with a full bag of fun and practical items to inspire participation, open-mindedness, feedback and learning

  • Meter Pin: Tell us how you’re doing.
  • FlexiBlox: Remain flexible and open-minded.
  • Key Chain: Don’t be embarrassed to ask questions.
  • Ball and Cup: Challenge yourself
  • TO DO pad: Learning applied is learning remembered.
  • Gold Coin: Your contributions are priceless.
  • Pep’o’mint Lifesaver: Refresh your mind.
  • Squeeze Star: Your goals are within your reach.
  • Pencil w/ Eraser: Make mistakes! You’ll learn more.
  • Learner’s Bill of Rights: Enjoy a safe learning environment. (See full text.(PDF))

smileSmile Mirror: Set of 12
Give your people a smile mirror to keep by their phone as a reminder to communicate positive energy through their voice. Mirror is backed with a gentle adhesive so that it can be mounted and removed from computer or wall. 2 1/2 “ x 6”.

It just goes on and on and on like this…

This is what happens when almost all your good scientists leave

From about.com, unverified:

Hitler’s Nazis were convinced that they were destined to rule the world, and they came to this warped conclusion through the acceptance of many occult beliefs and practices, including astrology, the prophecies of Nostradamus, and the hollow/inverted Earth theory… hohlweltlehre. Because they suspected that our surface is on the interior of a concave Earth, Hitler sent an expedition, including Dr. Heinz Fischer and powerful telescopic cameras, to the Baltic island of Rugen to spy on the British fleet. Fischer did so not by aiming his cameras across the waters, but by pointing them up to peer across the atmosphere to the Atlantic Ocean. The expedition was a failure, of course. Fischer’s cameras saw nothing but sky, and the British fleet remained safe.

This is probably apocryphal, but every time I run into this story I start laughing again at the earnest Nazis peering into deep space trying to see what the Allies are up to. Meanwhile, of course, we’re building nuclear weapons with all the Jews and Slavs who had to get the fuck out of town.