Day 295, Loose change, make sure you budget

The accumulation of coins from my pocket on my desk.

This would be enough money to get you through a week if on the dole.

If you'd had some practice at it that is.

It's easy to look at this and not think of it as a big deal.

There's about 80 odd pence in 1p pieces
£1.56 in 2p
£3.50 in 5p
£4.50 in 10p
£13.20 in 20p

Twenty three-ish quid would be a decent amount if you'd spent up for the fortnight - dole money probably isn't fortnightly any longer is it?

In reality on the dole you'd never get to the point where there was more than a couple of quid in change lying around at best.

According to the government being low paid, unemployed, and in receipt of benefit makes your life a piece of piss[1].

Well it does, in the respect that your choices are severely limited.  Although it makes those choices much more difficult ones.

So not such a piece of piss after all if it's a choice between paying for one essential item at the expense of a set of other essential items.  Day after day.  Until the Government cuts your money again, while giving themselves a 10% pay rise and paying lip-service to say that they shouldn't take their rise.  While everything they do for those on low pay is actually taking the rise, or piss, if you prefer.


[1] You only have to listen to the Government to pick that up.

For official/internal use only:
6777

0-9

Day 294, Plastic family gathering

Who knows what strange confluence of events caused them to arrive but here they are.

The chances of anything coming was a million to one they said.  Although who the mysterious 'they' are we do not know.

But still they, the intergalactic 'they', come - my assumption is that they're intergalactic, based on the firm evidence of my completely made up belief.

Why they choose to gather in nondescript high streets up and down the country is unknown.  Our best brains are on the case but have yet to have come up with any handy soundbite for dispersal to the media.

So, until that handy soundbite has been formulated I propose that we use this Mel Smith song to describe them, with a slight alteration.  I've no idea whether or not they are morons so let's call them coneheads.*


Coneheads, and we come from outer space

Lots of space from ear to ear

And we're on your high street near

A big hole in the ground

Etc.

*Morons From Outer Space and Coneheads, both films about space aliens.

For official/internal use only:
7777

0-9

Day 293, Dear dear Diskies gone, poor Disky

How do we know when one of our dear rotating-rust servants has given up the ghost?

It's much different from how it used to be now we're running what is known as Enterprise Storage.  Keeping everything from the notes about how to best preserve pancake batter mix to stuff that we're not allowed to disclose - plans for world domination, formulae for the gravitational fields generated by the mass of visual data in a fly's eye, a map of the Queen's antimacassar, none of those things.  This has changed from when we used to have data on disks directly attached to servers, now we have vast arrays of disks, presenting a huge mass in a small floor space in our data centres.  Servers that used to fit in a room the size of a couple of basketball courts now fit in the space of a slightly cramped tennis court.

Now if we have a component failure the system alerts us and our maintenance people by mystic powers (email mainly), and assuming no further analysis and diagnostics are required a replacement part is shipped by them immediately.  This is a mostly automatic process.  Once the part has arrived we make our way to the super heavy device and swap the part, all completely silently and transparently, without the knowledge of any of the humans using or depending on the service, and with no loss of data.

How it used to be though was slightly different.

A disk would fail, as shown in the image below where there's a cross through the disk icon.  We would hopefully get an email about the failure.  There's an entire system configured to monitor all our kit, using Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) to probe servers and then to check the response.  The response from the server would be checked against the Management Information Base (MIB) for that type of device.  The MIB would have been configured in advance to determine what to do depending on the response from the device.  If the response matched a particular set of criteria, such as a that triggered by a disk failure as below, then an email would be sent.  The monitoring software would also have a visual representation of the device in a degraded state.  With luck we would spot the problem and, during working hours only, manually raise a call with a maintenance company for a spare to be sent, we'd then swap the component without any impact to users or service, hopefully.

If a lot of things are being monitored, e.g. service types, service status, CPU utilisation, RAM consumption, disk space, network throughput, etc, then it is likely that a lot of things may enter a degraded state at some point even if only temporarily.

If this is scaled up to the point where thousands of servers are being monitored then it becomes unmanageable.  There may be many dozens of temporary status changes per hour.  Nobody responds to these type of alerts any more as there are many hundred a day, every day, and they are rarely due to a failure of a component.  This is the position we are partially in now.

Eventually you will miss a component failure.  Oops.  So things gradually get monitored and managed in other more targeted ways.  All of the really important kit is now monitored in a more modern manner although there are many things still monitored in the older way.  And there still is a slight reliance on humans to recognise what is a larger problem from within all the alerts of printers being turned off, switches being restarted, ducks quacking, etc.  Fortunately those items are not problems for us, and the owners of those services have their own, modern ways of monitoring.

An old server, the like of which we no longer use...

So why do we keep this old monitoring kit running?  It provides some data for statistical analysis and benchmarking, and it has charts and graphs of data throughput that we don't yet have in other as easy to access ways.  However there are new methods coming, and if thee new methods can be easily implemented then the days of the old monitoring could be drawing to an end. 

For official/internal use only:
7777

0-9

Day 292, Top Dystopia, The Three Blokes

Maybe you've been a fan of The Three Blokes.  You know the ones, they've been on our TV screens for years presenting their massive hit show, Top Dystopia.  Maybe you wouldn't call yourself a fan but you enjoyed watching their antics on a Sunday evening.  Well, it's possible to see them outside of the TV.

I had the pleasure of seeing them live recently at one of the non-TV events.  As it turned out they had to change their plans after an unfortunate incident where one of the troupe had a contretemps with an underling.  This meant there had to be a distancing of them from their employer and they had to drop the name Top Dystopia Live.  However, a little tweaking of the title and they arrived with their names intact -The Three Blokes - and there they were doing loads of stuff with expensive cars.

Well, I say they did loads of stuff with expensive cars, but it wasn't quite like that.  There was a lot of video filler, and a key member of the outfit was missing.  This was due to them not owning the rights to various parts of Top Dystopia and so those bits had to be dropped, including the tame bloke in a white suit.  They also talked a lot slower than usual, and seemed to be very keen on repetition, this consumed more time.  The show was 30 minutes shorter than originally advertised, due to the lack of rights ownership.

Obviously there's a bit of cognitive dissonance on my part, one week going to see The Three Blokes, and the next week going to see The Right On Comedian.  But, you know, human beings are complex creatures and have a peculiar habit of not fitting into the boxes that others invent for them.  But hey, maybe I've learned something.

And on it went, slowly.  Very, very slowly.

Eleven expensive cars were produced, now this is where my petrolhead knowledge let me down as I didn't have a clue what most of these vehicles were.  They were driven out and lined up very, very slowly.  This part went on for ages, as if any of the vehicles if moved too quickly would suffer damage - this from vehicles renowned for their 'performance'.

What was that?  Oh sorry, nodded off.

Now I've seen a variation of this show before in Birmingham at the NEC, there had been all sorts of stuff happening, impressive stunts, races round indoor circuits with proper racing drivers, spectacular events of all kinds.  But not this time.  It was all very prolonged, drawn out, extended, repetitious, protracted, stretched, and not very impressive.

Then they talked about the cars, for ages, and the theme of 'very, very slowly' continued.

Then they had some 'banter' about who liked what and why, and why that made each of them a fool.  One of The Three Blokes had recently bought one of the models of very expensive cars, and what's more he'd gone for the optional stripe.  They had more 'banter' about the cost of the stripe, how expensive it was, and what a mug he was for paying the enormous amount of £6500 for what was essentially a 'wide line'.  All the while the immensely wealthy Three Blokes talked as if this was crazy, in the manner of ordinary 'Mondeo man' plebs down the pub who would be pushing the boat out to pay for the dog guard, alloy wheels, and parking sensor extras on a new Ford Zetec.  This didn't really sit with reality as every one of The Three Blokes could have purchased the full set of the eleven supercars many times over given that they are wadded beyond belief.  The prime one of The Three Blokes is said to have a net worth of £30million, which would easily have bought the collected supercars and still left enough change to buy at least one luxury yacht - luxury yachts really put the price of supercars to shame.

And every now and then, while they presented their bogus world view, completely unchallenged, this Bill Hicks line would run through my mind.

You are free, to do as we tell you.
You are free, to do as we tell you.
You are free, to do as we tell you.

Because for any talk of this as "just a bit of fun" there are people that believe the perverse view of the world presented and who accept it in an unquestioning manner as if the burden of thought saved prevents the discomfort of cognitive dissonance on their part.  And the presentation was such that it occasionally felt like some sort of political rally, 'consumption is good', 'environmental weirdos are weirdos', 'consumption is good'...

You are free, to do as we tell you.
You are free, to do as we tell you.
You are free, to do as we tell you.
You are free, to believe what we tell you.
You are free, to choose not to spend your money on this rubbish.

Good, I won't ever again.

For official/internal use only:
7777

0-9

Day 291, Manual Handling - flat or flatter

It's always a good idea to be trained to identify when an action may be hazardous.  Then when you make the decision yourself to do something stupid and it all goes wrong there's perhaps a bit of a get-out for your employer.  You have responsibility for yourself and others, you have been trained.

Here are some private contractor chaps removing a safe from a building.  A bunch of us were observing the activity from some distance away in our office.  The safe had already been dropped down the stairs when they were moving it manually, something that I find hard to believe (that they could move it) having tried moving one of these things myself.  The safe then got stuck and then took some considerable time to get free.

After specialist equipment had been brought in, the window removed, and a great deal of chin and head scratching had taken place, the safe was eventually released from its wedged position on the stairs.

Watching this performance filled me with horror.  There were times when the chaps, armed with no more safety equipment than a hi-viz vest and a woollen hat, were standing under the safe when it was barely supported.  A single strap held under one end by nothing more than goodwill, and the other end balancing on the window ledge, threatened disaster at any moment.

However it all ended well, and these darned fools managed to make it back to their place of work without being squashed to the vertical dimension of a pizza.  Well done.  What happened to them after that is unknown, presumably they've been avoiding incident by the skin of their teeth ever since.  All in a days work for these fellas, health and safety training or not.

Of course even if they had been wearing hard hats and steel toe cap boots and the safe had landed on them they'd still have been rendered pizza-like.  So perhaps it isn't such a big deal...

For official/internal use only:
7777

0-9

Day 290, Old office, cast iron range, Macs, sweepstake

In truly classic style here's a blurry picture of the intended subject with the background in focus.

Much like life, the point is repeatedly missed as we expect the technology to know what we want it do without providing it with the required information.

Well, that's my experience of my expectations.

This is currently being reinforced by the hoops that need to be jumped through with some new software to fulfil actions that took no more than 30 seconds with the previous software.  However, the reality is that the new software does a whole lot more than the old, and there is good reasoning behind the changes.

Moving on.

Imagine having an office in a listed building with a cast-iron range in it.  Well imagine no more as here all can be revealed.

Once upon a time this was my office.  During periods of meteorological activity, e.g. very light wind, a small amount of rain, cloud, etc, things would fall down the chimney and land in the former cooking device.  Mortar, unidentifiable blobs of 'material', parts of pigeons, these were all things which might or might not have arrived via the Father Christmas route into the freezing cold room.

That's it really.  Apart from that it was directly next door to a toilet with inadequate ventilation.

Otherwise it had stacks of character, or was all of that stuff actually the character?

The Macs are there for test purposes and for running monitoring software on.  The method of monitoring is now less useful to us given the hugely expanded environment we manage - things progress, processes always need revisiting, there is infinite change.  Infinite change is good, and repeat.

The sweepstake Netherlands football team here were runners up in the 2014 world cup, winning me a small amount of cash, not long before we moved offices.

Our new office is infinitely superior.  There have been no further sweepstake winnings.

Here's Bob with the weather - just watch out for those blobs of 'material' and pigeon parts.

For official/internal use only:
7777

0-9

Day 289, Walking, talking, towing men

Walking, talking, towing, suited men.

The technology or marketing brief completed.

Now in conversation, not with each other.

Take the opportunity to catch up with their separate worlds.

Moving synchronously, like fatigued commercial panthers.

With pendulum steps to their lodging.

When the trolly bag companion will be unpacked.

And where they'll unroll their comics, Watchmen, Promethea, and Neonomicon.

For official/internal use only:
7676

0-9