thousand meter stare - noun phrase - Watching multiple poorly designed dashboards jam packed with graphs, meters, gauges, and other barely useful metrics, day in and day out. If you imagine the thousand yard stare into multiple displays showing said dashboards, that's it.
Inspiration: Rev. Nikolai Kingsley
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Note: I'm retraining on a new keyboard as I write this, so I apologize for any egregious typos in advance.
Over on birbsite a couple of weeks back a thread was spun up about your worst fuckup on the job and I figured that, because it's been nearly twenty years I'd tell my worst story. However, much to my chagrin and concern I found that I'd bobbled a few of the details. Seeing as how it was one of my career's formative moments this scared me quite a bit. I'd been considering putting some work in on my memoirs anyway …
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Note: The purpose of this post is mostly to document how to reconfigure laptops like my mom's to boot from a flash drive. The actual imaging process is only parenthetically laid out. If you're in a position where this is something you find yourself doing chances are you're already a competant sysadmin and know how to use dd anyway. However, I can't just leave it unfinished.
Due to how many things are now inextricably tied to one's computers these days, from banking to paying bills, it seemed a good idea to back up my mom's laptop while I was in …
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code puce - noun phrase - An IT or ops situation in which the software installed in production is one version and the management system expects a different version. This results in a situation in which everything is running more or less smoothly, and at the same time everything in the monitoring system is going bonkers. Compare with code red, code blue, and so forth.
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tumbleweed mode - noun phrase - The phenomenon in which all official support forums for something are either abandoned (no activity for a protected period of time), or any posts that aren't lowball questions (such as "Where's the FAQ?" or replies to release announcements) are utterly ignored (meaning, actual technical support questions).
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I'm writing this article well before the year 2020.ev starts, mostly due to the fact that Twitter's search function is possibly the worst I've ever seen and this is probably my last chance to find the post in question to refer back to.
Late in November of 2019.ev a meme was going around birbsite, "Please quote this tweet with a thing that everyone in your field knows and nobody in your industry talks about because it would lead to general chaos." Due to the fact that I was really busy at work at the time I didn't have …
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evolving situation - noun phrase - A situation where, if all hell hasn't broken loose yet it's well on its way.
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entropic debugging - noun phrase - The phenomenon in which one can spend weeks on end debugging something using a multitude of techniques, give up in frustration and/or disgust for a couple of days, come back to the project and discover that somehow the bugs have magickally fixed themselves (as verified by diffs and file hashes if one cares to check). The phenomenon is so named due to the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy can never decrease, only increase in an isolated system. In other words, as entropy increases overall in the universe it somehow wiped out the …
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basketball mode - noun phrase - When a service or application crashes and restarts itself over and over, i.e., bouncing like a basketball every few seconds. Considered an outage.
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I haven't actually been on vacation lately, not really. I decided that I needed to go off and do some different stuff for a while. I've been in a rut lately and decided that I needed to shuffle some stuff around. I swapped out the "writing rambling computer nerd blog posts" module for teaching myself a couple of new things and spending some of my downtime offline, curled up with cinnamon tea and a stack of books. Getting away from a screen for a while seems to have done me some good, and I'm almost back up to my old …
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