Tag: brokenstuff

broken stuff update

1) Heater problem was fixed. It was some variation of “pilot light out” but the water heater is very old and the pilot light is not accessible, apparently. I had taken off the cover and attempted it, but according to the Gas Company guys it’s weird and dangerous and I should just call them next time. Since it’s free I have no problem with that.

2) THE NEW AT&T is sending me a new phone, having agreed with my assessment that I got a lemon. It was nice to see that the rep on the phone believed me when I told her all the stupid human tricks I had already done, and only made me give her the serial number and agree not to fuck with them when they mailed me a new one.

3) Yesterday I broke 1 ceramic bowl, one plastic plate (!), and 1 glass.

THE FUTURE LIES AHEAD

One of our internal webservers at the office blew up. It’s an intricate and bizarre hack on a little-used platform, and we’re terrified of it dying because our knowledge of the internals is bad. I was pretty sad about it, and especially so because I had to fix it.

A careful search of the internet found a mailing list thread in which many, many other people had the same problem, all starting after 2006-05-12.

The thread starts here: http://www.mail-archive.com/aolserver@listserv.aol.com/msg09812.html

What turned out to be the problem? All these systems failed at the same time, exactly one billion seconds before the 32-bit Unix epoch ends in 2038. The timeouts set for database threads caused the software to look ahead, gasp in horror and died.

Ladies and gentlemen I’m in a select club of the first victims of the Year 2038 Bug.

My job is weird.

Myspace

Their “friends” setup is bizarrely broken. You can’t see anything but photo and their chosen “display name,” so you don’t know who some people are after a few months when they change their pic to Woody Woodpecker and start calling themselves Antonin Artaud.

I find myself thinking “Who is Potatoes O’Brien?” or “Not only is this woman not Audrey Hepburn, but I don’t know anyone who lives in Macon, Georgia. WTF?”

Then it gets funnier with email. Today I forwarded something and saw how that works; you get the list of display names from which to choose. Two of my friends chose the same one, it being their first name. So I didn’t know whether I was forwarding to turnip or salome_st_john. Fortunately they have similar senses of humor so I just sent it to both.

It’s strange how many recently-built human artifacts are like ancient fucked-up things that Just Somehow Happened.

THE WORLD OF OBJECTS IS THE DOMAIN OF THE DEMIURGE

  1. CAR: Mysteriously jumping out of gear intermittently going between 2nd and 3rd, or sometimes 3rd and 4th. Today, new behavior consisting of the ever-informative CHECK ENGINE light going on, sometimes accompanied by a nonspecific warning from the VEHICLE STABILITY ASSIST program.
  2. DSL: Intermittently out, then totally out. Diagnostics with nice man from Speakeasy resulted in removing the surge protector from the line: margins went from 13% to 18% and now I’m back to normal… …FOR NOW.
  3. LAPTOP: Power cord now likes to sidle out of its socket, causing power loss, unwanted sleep mode, hilarity.

There’s a peccary jammed in the rotonator

This afternoon when I left for my appointment there was a damp patch outside my bathroom on the carpet. I thought it was related to the handyman visit earlier and paid no attention.

By this evening, there was a small pool there, and soaked carpet extending through three rooms of the house. The plumber was summoned.

Apparently the hot water line that goes from the water heater out has come apart somewhere inside the concrete slab it penetrates on its way out. This has required turning off the hot water until tomorrow, when a couple of guys will show up and run new pipe around said slab to replace it. One could jackhammer the concrete away and fix just the bit of pipe that failed, but this is apparently a stupid thing to do because then the rest of the pipe will die bit by bit anyway. Go go gadget homeowners insurance!

In related but different news, Livejournal is sending me some, but not all of my comments in email. So if I don’t respond to you I am more likely to be ignorant of your response than ignoring you.