The Random Comic Strip

The Random Comic Strip

Words to live by...

"How beautiful it is to do nothing, and to rest afterward."

[Spanish Proverb]

Ius luxuriae publice datum est

(The right to looseness has been officially given)

"Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders," wrote Ludwig von Mises, "no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore everyone, in his own interest, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle."

Apparently, the crossword puzzle that disappeared from the blog, came back.


Friday, May 13, 2011

Missing or dumped


Looks like trouble in Blogger space. I had a draft post set for today but couldn't publish. I also had a post yesterday which has disappeared. Well, it didn't disappear, it was "removed" by the technicians at Google Blogger who decided that wiping out the work of the bloggers who depend upon Google was the best way to proceed.

I was a tech once. Sometimes you had to just back up a bit and reboot. Still, before you did, you made sure you could recover everything up to that point. The systems I worked on were not this complex, however.

So we're stuck with what we've got.

Which Wednesday when they first caused the problem. Yeah, I think they caused it trying to fix something. I don't know how many times I had to clean up the "fixes" someone tried before my shift started.

I am reminded of a call I got one late evening to come into work. It seems that when the system went into its nightly diagnostics, it would crash. Repeatedly. So I came in. The first question I asked was "Did you back out the update that was run a few hours ago?" The answer was "No." Then I asked, "Did you back out the overwrites (patches) that were put in place after the update?" Again, the answer was "No."

So I said, "Let's first back out the overwrites and see if that helps." Again, the response was "No" because the support center decided that "wasn't the problem."

And it wasn't. Until I pointed out that one of the patch addresses involved was figuring prominently in the problem, according to the error reports. That patch was backed out and the system stabilized.

Sometimes, the fix is the problem.



4 comments:

MArk Cowell said...

I was in the midst of getting a Friday photo shoot together and had asked a friend of mine to guest it -- pictures of his medical missions in Africa.  He had spent two hours writing captions...lost.  Grrrr.    

Douglas4517 said...

The really nasty part is that, unless you wrote everything and saved it
offline, it is "poof!" gone and unrecoverable. I am ashamed to say I did not
have a backup to re-post.

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Sightings said...

This is my first Blogger "crash." I didn't lose any posts; but Blogger did drop a few comments. I hope I've learned my lesson -- save it, copy it, back it up. Easy to do; hard to remember to do it.

Douglas4517 said...

In a Blogger version of Twilight Zone, May 12th appears to no longer exist.

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