"Your internet isn't working"

Few weeks ago I got a call from our office internet operator, informing us that our internet modem had gone down, they couldn't contact it. I wasn't at office, and since we run web service there too, I had of course go to have a look. Fortunately this happened when I wasn't on the other side of globe at least.

At the office I quickly noticed that pretty much all computers have gone down, causing the office to be eerily quiet (I'd love an quiet server that doesn't sound like friggin' 747 taking off on full load!). The mains fuse for critical systems fhad tripped! Switch that fuse back and everything starts waking up.

Our power supply for computers isn't exactly highly redundant. Single mains fuse feeding UPS that can take a load for good a while. Now was first time that it hadn't been enough. So when all the critical computers and services are back up, I get back to what I was doing, which at that time was heading out towards frisbee park with the kid.

Next day at office, I start going through logs and start noticing some remaining issues. One network storage was inaccessible. With a quick glance it indeed was - it was still off. Curious, those should come back up pretty quickly when power is restored.

Some more research and it seems that its internal power supply had died. No sign of life of any kind (specifically +5v standby; without it nothing of course works anyway). Not a first power supply that has gone down on me (in a bad way), and very likely not last one either.

Fortunately this wasn't critical storage, but "only" secondary backup storage that I had just month or so earlier retired from its main storage role and moved to its current role. I don't remember its exact age, but I'd guess it was some 10 years old now. Running pretty much 24/7 of course. I have to say timing was very lucky - few months earlier and I'd be far less happy about the situation.

Now I'm trying to make a decision here. Find a replacement power supply - which might be a bit difficult, due to less than common form factor - or retire storage device and its disks now. At the moment I'm leaning more on the latter option, especially since disks, too, have never been replaced during its lifetime. It's very likely near end of its useful life anyway.

There's no high need to replace it immediately either, as this was secondary backup. My primary one, of course, is off-side on third-party server and updated constantly and automatically... With data encrypted at our end, of course. You don't really think I'd be stupid enough to allow any data out of office unless it's encrypted with keys held only by me?

Let's not block those trackers

Many of you know that just about everyone is tracked in the web. By advertisers, by facebook, by google, by pretty much everyone. And many people don't like it. I certainly don't. And many and seek to actively block any attempts of such tracking.

I have started to feel that such attempts are pretty much for nothing, and while they may obfuscate some of the information, at least temporarily, too much information remains to be gathered.

As long as they can track people, to figure out their interests, they keep doing this.

So here I suggest an alternate approach, difficult as it might be:

Poison the well. Instead of blocking those trackers, I want an add-on that actively lies to them. Send them random, made up (but preferably plausible) tracking cookies.

Even more fun would be tracking cookie exchange. For every session you open, browser would switch personality (of tracking sites you explicitly set to do so) with some completely random person. This wold not be necessary, but it would hurt those data hoarders way more than just completely random identity.

Suddenly much of the information they gather is worthless. They can never be sure the information gathered with tracking is from real person -- or some random person with completely different interests.

Anyone up for some real fun?

Do you remember..?

Memory is a curious thing. The current consensus seems to be that you don't really remember an event, you have markers in your memory that (in programmer speech) encode that event in a lossy way, meaning that every time you recall it it gets corrupted a bit more. Essentially, when you remember something, it's nothing but warped, distorted recollection of events.

Kinda makes one wonder why we place such a high trust on eyewitness testimonies... But once again, I digress.

I've mentioned but me and my wife run the business together. She takes care of most of the deliveries and accounting, I do most of the development, manufacturing (although it's mostly outsourced) and customer contacts.

My phone number is openly listed. I don't really have need to hide it - we seem to not have any hostile customers or enemies - at least at the moment. I still receive only handful of calls on typical day.

I actually encourage my customers to call me whenever they have a problem. Some things - especially social services' drives where there are multiple payers involved - may be difficult to perform in some cases. When in doubt, I instruct to call me the instant they have problems, even if it's late and I'm officially off the clock. Maybe some 95% learn after one (phone-)assisted walkthrough. And it makes people happy to have help when they need it. I like happy customers. They are likely to do business with me again.

Now, sometimes I discuss other things with customers too, you know, kinda small talk-ish thing over the phone. And that drives my wife crazy sometimes.

See, often I say things that might need her attention. Like talking of products, deliveries, replacements and so on. Most of the time it's just talk - prospects, speculations - no need to do anything at the moment. I may instruct customer on some detail, discuss some stuff that is not immediately relevant and end the call.

Somehow I have trained my memory to just drop these calls. They're just business as usual.  No need to remember them at all. So unless something exceptional was discussed, after few minutes of the call I don't even remember what was discussed.

If there was something that needed her attention, I make a note (often during the call) and deliver it to her.

Yet, too often often, there might have been something I said that caught her attention, even if it didn't need any immediate follow-up action. So she asks me of it later and I can't even remember what it was about. Since it was considered non-critical, my brain had already forgotten the discussion, and I really have no idea what she is asking about, aside some vague recollection of some discussion where something might or might have not been mentioned...

And even with this, my memory still constantly brings up some old, long irrelevant crap that would better be stay forgotten.

Memory. Curious thing, indeed.