today, whilst wasting yet another day in impudent laziness, i discovered that my mighty RAID had lost a disk. it was the newest disk, and it is now labelled as DEAD in the management console. i thought DEAD in all upper case was kind of amusing, though the reality of the RAID being on a precipice of complete failure was not funny, nor was staring at the problem for 3 hours very meaningful or productive. Fucking waste of day. boo hoo. now the Volume is resyncing, or maybe it’s restriping, i don’t remember, but i’ll check in on it later. What a bore. I was, however, starting to question my redundant redundancies and their potential wastes of effort when this happened, and I basically had no disaster to face if the RAID totally died. It would be no fun but nowadays it would be mostly recoverable… i think. who the fuck knows.
it was sort of unnerving to find the error message, and the paragraph of text which attempted to explain the situation. the paragraph of text read like something written by a 4th-grader who spoke little English.
(that should be a version of English. You’ve got Olde English, Middle English, and Little English. haha.)
technical documentation is a hazardous place for the lesser-skilled writers… though great technical writers are not always what would be called great writers in other genres. i think part of the reason so many software developers are loath to share their code is because their comments and english-language portions of the code are not exactly flattering, or even grammatically soluble. the comments hidden in software sometimes go beyond explanatory matter and offer opinion and tongue-lashings aimed at rival software companies and operating systems. it’s a macho thing. the ecosystem of anger and malcontentedness lurking in the unreadably-compiled software might surprise the lowest rungs on the software totem pole: the end users.
…..
all anyone wants to talk about is the heat. the window in my living room was hot to the touch. when UPS arrived today with a second shipment of the monster amazon order of yore i opened the boxes and found that all the items therein were HOT to the touch. this was true yesterday, too, when the a55 camera arrived i was only slightly concerned that it felt like i had just taken it out of an oven. it seems to work well, though i haven’t gotten the GPS to kick in, and haven’t tried the video. i was painfully annoyed to find that i have to blow another $50-60 on batteries for this camera. every single Sony device i get demands a unique suite of accessories, batteries, and peripherals. it must pain that company to produce cameras which accept a range of lenses that fit across all their models. i am sure they would rather produce 50 cameras which each require a custom set of lenses, lenses which fit only each and every camera.
today’s UPS bounty included more books, some white t-shirts, and a replacement light bulb for the reading light that i never use. i might use it tonight, though. it is one of those new-fangled ugly-light lights that will allegedly save the planet, and which i got 3 or 4 years ago. i can’t complain about the longevity of the bulb, though the quality of the light as it ricochets off the pages of a book is sometimes acrid to the eye.
i have noticed (with strange nondescript curlyshaped mental rejoinders) that these curlyshaped light bulbs look conspicuous and the cheaper brand-x versions of those bulbs have a quality of light that looks like something from an up-all-month Guantanamo torture chamber.